Velveteen (2 page)

“Have a nice supper, Ron,” she said, and laughed.

Her eyes lit on the sink stopper—the reason she’d bothered to come in the first place. She dropped it into the drain and flipped on the faucet. Water gurgled and spat into the metal sink, slowly rising. He was going to be pissed, she thought. With any luck, he’d have an aneurysm and die when he saw the flood. After snatching a few hand towels, Velvet crouched and shoved them around the base of the back door, a makeshift sandbagging in reverse.

She lounged on one of the bistro chairs, crossed her arms, and appraised her work. The water coursed over the lip of the sink, spreading across the counters and waterfalling onto the linoleum. It was almost pretty.

Several minutes passed, and the water grew from a puddle to a nice destructive lake, spreading under the kitchen door to soak the dining room carpet in a big soppy half-moon.

Velvet wished she had a latte—it was definitely a latte moment.

Instead, she glanced out the window and gasped.

In the backyard sat a silver minivan, perfect for hauling groceries from the supermarket, grass-stained kids to and from soccer practice, and several teen girls to a shed in the back of an isolated farmhouse for some not-so-wholesome slicing and dicing.

Velvet’s eyes snapped past it to a tin-roofed outbuilding sitting squat in the thin slice of pasture. A dense forest
towered behind it like a castle battlement. She shook off the heavy weight of dread that always fell on her at the sight of the shed and replaced it with hate. If Velvet could count on anything, it was access to that particular emotion, especially when it came to Ron Simanski.

That was his real name.

As far as Velvet could tell, the guy seemed to lead a perfect existence—for a complete nut-job with a meat obsession. He worked all day at the local Round Up Grocery, packing away meats in white paper or those Styrofoam trays that pop and break like communion wafers. Clearly it was only training for the big leagues.

“What are you doin’ home, Ron?” she muttered to herself.

Velvet bolted from her chair. It slid out behind her and banged against the wall as she passed into the backyard. Dewy weeds and grass, weeks overdue for a mowing, barely registered her movement. She peered through the van windows, which were clean, of course, just as spotless as the kitchen.

A glint of sunlight sparked off the shed’s tin roof.

“Don’t be back there,” Velvet said aloud, the words swallowed up in the late-afternoon mist.

She tried to tell herself that there was a possibility that the killer had merely gone shopping—presumably for more meat … or condiments—and that he’d for some reason felt the need to circle around the front of the house and enter that way, despite the route being completely inconvenient and ridiculous.
It could happen
, she thought.
Right?

As if in reply, curls of dead leaves from the autumn maple
skittered across the weedy yard like rats. They piled against the tiny outbuilding, rustling as though trying to speak. The sounds of metal grating against metal echoed across the yard. Without even looking in the smoky window in the back of the shed, she knew what the killer was doing—sharpening his tools, scraping his big thumb over the blades.

Knives. Cleavers. Those little curved paring instruments with loops on the end.

A shiver ran through her, and she nearly backed away, considered running.

What good will that do?
she thought.
Bastard will just keep on doing it
.

Velvet stepped into the shed.

Bonesaw was resting against his workbench, relaxed and confident, his white uniform coat spattered with blood as dry as clay, and open to his bare chest. His tattoo was clearly visible, a heart with a ribbon coiled around it, inscribed with the words
And now for something completely different
.

The phrase crept up Velvet’s spine like a freshly spawned brood of baby spiders. If Bonesaw had been able to see her, it would have appeared that she shimmered in the air like ice crystals in a fog. But he couldn’t, of course.

The last time he’d seen her was the day he’d killed her.

A tallish guy and absolutely, positively too normal-looking, Ron wore his standard brown hair cropped close to his skull, and he had bland metal-framed glasses that cast only the slightest shadow across the apples of his cheeks. He was neither good-looking nor ugly, not tall or short. He was a little doughy around the waist, and his nose had a point
to it that poked its way into Velvet’s dreams some nights. But other than that, Ron Simanski was so average that you’d never even notice him until he was on you.

Velvet hadn’t.

He coughed then, a phlegmy rattle that bounced off the walls, interrupting her trip down memory lane, just as she’d begun to relive the miserable day he’d abducted her. Velvet hoped the cough was a symptom of something incapacitating, the beginnings of tuberculosis or lung cancer. Ebola. A disease that’d knock Bonesaw on his ass.

When she glanced up at him again, a chill blew straight through her. His eyes bored into her, black with something—lust, she suspected—and the fear coursed through her veins like fever.

“Uh …” The sound escaped her mouth like air leaking from a tire.

A sinister grin played at the corners of his lips, twitched there like an electrocution. The smile was all too familiar to Velvet, and she felt the inevitable freak-out coming. A train ready to derail.

News at eleven.

He wasn’t looking at her. How could he be? It’s not like she was visible. Her heart sank, and her carefully cultivated anger disappeared, replaced by a quaking dread. Velvet knew what she was about to see before she spun to look at the old-fashioned school desk bolted into the floor in the corner.

A girl.

Younger than Velvet had been when Simanski had taken her, maybe fourteen or fifteen. She was tied to the desk with
fishing line; the line ringed her, making her entire outfit (and skin) look like wide-wale corduroy. Her hair hung limply around her placid, pasty face.

“Holy shit, Ron! Another one?” The alarm was gone in an instant, replaced with comfortable fury. Velvet started to run the numbers.

Bonesaw never kept a girl longer than a week.

Misha Kohl. Sandra Barry. Hanna Johannsen.

Velveteen Monroe.

One week. Every time.

As dependable as a monthly period.

Velvet circled the girl, scanning her exposed skin for bruising, for marks. The only thing she could find was a milky crust dried at the corners of the girl’s lips like a cold sore—the residue of whatever it was he drugged them with.

This one was new.

Brand-new. Fresh. Velvet was sure that was how Bonesaw saw her, just like the packs of hamburger floating in Lake Kitchen, complete with an expiration date. Just like the others Velvet had happened upon since her death. Over the next week there’d be no food, only a little water, and zero bathroom breaks. The abrading would start soon—Ron loved his cruel nutmeg grater.

Then the cutting.

Dammit!

Velvet paced the room, stabbing the killer with furious glares. If she’d only been able to haunt Simanski the day before, given him something to tweak out about other than his psychotic urges, maybe she could have stopped this one. She was sure she’d managed to derail a few of his abductions
simply by providing him with vandalism to clean up. He certainly wouldn’t have found the time to stalk and abduct the poor girl if he’d been busy bailing out his house like a sinking rowboat.

But that didn’t matter now. She was on deadline.

Velvet crouched beside the girl and ran her fingers carefully over her hair, making sure not to displace any and freak her out or draw the attention of Bonesaw’s obsessive gaze. “I’ll take care of you, whoever you are,” she whispered. “I’m going to get you out of here and away from this son of a bitch. Don’t worry.”

Those last words were ridiculous, she knew. How could the girl do anything but worry? Even now, as subdued as his victim was, her jaw was clenched, her knuckles white in their death grip on the edges of the old wooden school desk. Tensing up for the battle.

“That’s good,” she whispered into the girl’s ear. “You’re smart to prepare yourself for the worst.”

And then, even though she was certain the girl couldn’t hear her, Velvet murmured to herself, “Especially if I screw this up.”

She turned and glowered into Ron’s eyes. Madness floated there like stray lashes. The same evil she’d witnessed for one hellish week, all those months ago, still lingered there, fevered, septic. “And you!” she spat, her voice escalating to a scream. “I’ll have you know I don’t have time for this bullshit. I’ll sort you out, Bonesaw. This is the last girl you get to bring to this pit, and I guarantee you, you won’t get any satisfaction from her! None!”

Velvet’s fingers curled into claws. She wanted to tear into
him, dig his eyes out, make him feel every ounce of pain he’d meted out on Hanna and Sandra and Misha Kohl. Make him hurt.

Make him know he hadn’t won.

She knew it would be a battle. She’d tried to put an end to it all before, to end Bonesaw. To kill him. Make him kill himself. Those attempts had been a mixed bag of successes and failures. She’d saved his last one, the redheaded girl—Alexa, she believed her name was—and the blond with the broken glasses, and the one who hummed constantly. But the closest Velvet had come to offing the monster himself had been a small fire she’d managed to set outside Ron Simanski’s bedroom door. The man’s overly efficient smoke detectors had alerted him to the danger almost immediately, leaving her sour and screaming obscenities.

Velvet gave one last glance toward this new girl and was satisfied that she had a little time left before the bad stuff happened. With the flood in his house, she’d done enough to keep the maniac busy for a while, enough to keep him off his victim.

It was time to go back.

“It might take a while,” she said, turning back to the slumped figure. “Just a little bit. But I promise you. I promise …”

Her voice trailed off.

In Velvet’s mind, there was no question she’d be able to save the girl’s life. Help her escape, at the very least. She’d saved three now. If there was one thing she was better at than vandalism, it was extraction. Of course, living people were more difficult to deal with than their spirits. Trickier.

Things had gotten messy. But that wasn’t the point. Bonesaw didn’t get to play his games. Not while she was around.

She pushed back the memories of how quickly the cutting would start. The slow gouging that would leave tunnels in the girl’s flesh. She wouldn’t think about that.

She couldn’t.

“There’s a surprise waiting for you in the house, you sick fuck,” she finally said. “And one of these days—” She drew a make-believe blade up her wrist to her elbow. “Local butcher commits suicide. Too bad. So sad.”

Velvet passed through the shed wall and into the twilight, mumbling, “He was such a quiet man. Polite. We never suspected a thing.”

V
elvet lingered in the burgeoning night long enough to watch Bonesaw complete his ritual padlocking of the shed. He pressed his body up against the metal door, as close as a lover. Listening—as if any abductee in their right mind would start maneuvering out of their bindings the
second
their abductor left the room. Then, glancing around suspiciously, he stomped back to the farmhouse. Once inside, he began to bellow. The sounds of plates clattered against walls, shattering, then splashing. All of it was muffled but oddly comforting.

He’d found her mess.

She wished she could manage a smile, but the weight of her duty to Ron’s new victim really messed with her vandalism high. So she trudged across the pasture, past wooden fences and cows that shivered as she passed through their
hulking bodies—far enough that she could no longer hear the killer’s screams. Beyond the boundaries of Simanski’s property, a dying giant towered over the rest of the forest, an oak tree, bark gray and branches bare, ribboned in dense tentacles of ivy. Velvet stood before it and huffed, ankles deep in spiky ferns with fronds like crooked emerald fingers. She braced herself against the tree, trying to compose herself, trying to shake off the anger and horror she’d picked up in the shed.

She needed to calm down.

Way down.

When Velvet passed from the daylight back into purgatory, there was more than a little finesse involved. She needed to concentrate and construct the image of the other side. The alley. From there, she’d need to move quickly, blend into the crowd before they noticed that she’d just appeared. She didn’t want anyone to ask questions about where she’d come from. People asked too many questions. In fact, most of them never shut up.

Velvet had to play it cool.

If anyone had reason to accuse her of haunting, they’d do it without hesitation. Petty, nosy souls, the lot of them. If the travel did not benefit purgatory, it would be seen as frivolous, dangerous, and, worst of all, traitorous in the eyes of the powers that be.

Velvet couldn’t have that.

A blackened crack ran up the length of the big oak, the scar of a lightning strike that had done more than kill the tree. In this case, it had torn straight through the veil
between the world of the living and the dead. It had paved a road—a secret one, sure, but a road nonetheless—from the glen to a neighborhood in purgatory. A road, Velvet hoped, that would never be found by anyone else.

She gave her arms and legs a little shake, trying to work out the kinks from the tension foisted upon her by Bonesaw’s addiction to awfulness. She needed to be calm, centered. Velvet sought out the imagery necessary to divine what was called a pull-focus—kind of like dropping a digital pin on a GPS—a triangulation of visuals from the other side. First, she imagined the tight gray walls of the alley. Then, the small box she kept there with its tattered sticker—the words worn to shadows, meaningless, yet for some reason intriguing—her wadded-up clothes blossoming from inside. The final image was distant but key: a thin sliver of the main street flickering in the gaslight.