Velveteen (25 page)

Velvet had watched the horror of Stanley Kubrick’s film unfold in stunned silence. Alex and his “droogs” tore up a totally dystopian future Britain with bats and their fists and used weird slang that began to make some sort of sense the longer she listened. There were rapes and murders and all number of horrible things in the film. But when the main character was finally convicted of his crimes and prescribed an aversion therapy, it was just as horrendous as his crimes. And it didn’t work.

It was terrible.

And brilliant.

Afterward, her mother treated her to an espresso at the Café des Artistes and they discussed satire and violence like grown-ups, eating tortes with long names and watching sweat drip from the windows.

Later, as Velvet had sat outside the principal’s office, dressed as Kubrick’s Alex DeLarge in a white shirt and pants, bowler hat, codpiece, and one eye done up with impossibly long fake eyelashes, she’d listened to the man berate her mother for “parentifying” Velvet.

Whatever that meant.

The principal couldn’t have been more wrong.

If anything, just knowing other children made Velvet not want to be a parent. Kids could be horrible, too. Her costume had been a satire. No one had seemed to get that. Except maybe Stanley Kubrick.

But he was dead.

And Velvet wished she had a bat.

“Time for a little ultraviolence,” she muttered through a grim smile, and trekked the remaining half mile up the road, hoping Bonesaw hadn’t left for work. She was certain she could find a two-by-four or a piece of old pipe to break his kneecap or something … or maybe, if she could conjure the courage, she’d possess the freak and drive the stupid minivan off a cliff.

The thought made her wistful and moony.

But then it occurred to her that the girl might have already been cut, that the killer had changed his pattern in some small way, turning up the volume, skipping crucial steps. The bloody raised welts might already be there, like mementos on her forearms and thighs.

The thought of it made her run faster and faster.

The house stood at the top of a small hill, the roof of Bonesaw’s nearest neighbor just barely visible behind the
overgrown grass swaying in the adjacent field. Velvet noted the absence of Bonesaw’s van.

“Well,” she sighed. “That changes things. Ron Simanski lives to see another day.”

Pushing her disappointment aside, Velvet padded across the lawn and peeked her head inside the door to the outbuilding. The girl sat bolt upright, tied to the chair where she’d left her. Her eyes were weak but open, and her lips were slack like she’d just had a big shot of Novocain and was feeling a little droopy in the jaw. Velvet scanned the girl’s arms and sighed in relief. Her pants were still on her legs, too. Once those were off, there’d be no question she’d be marked. The more he cut, the more he wanted to, and then there was no stopping him.

But there was nothing yet.

Nothing but the soft dew of pale blond hairs and tiny port-wine stain on her right hand, a beauty mark, Velvet’s mother would have said.

“That’s a relief, isn’t it?” she whispered. “I’d untie you, sweetheart. But I can’t manage the knots in the fishing line. Ghosts just don’t have that kind of dexterity.”

She glanced around the workbench, scanning for something suitable.

“I’ll need a knife. Something big enough, where I can really whack at those ropes and stuff. Sawing is not really in my repertoire.”

It was hard enough to manage throwing stuff with precision, let alone gripping a handle and cutting through something using all those intricate little movements. Ghosts
just weren’t built for that, and the one time she’d commandeered a body for the purpose, things had not gone well for the body.

Not. At. All.

Velvet didn’t want to think about that. Though, to be clear, he’d been completely closed off from his pain receptors—she always made sure of that, whenever she possessed—and she had helped secure a very cushy job and residence for the man’s dearly departed soul. So. There was that.

The times she had tried to untie the girls with her fingers, they’d always struggled and made the knots tighter as soon as they’d realized that something invisible was touching them and creating little indents in their loosening skin. Screaming, fainting, that kind of thing was usually what came next.

Hacking was the only viable solution.

“Oh, Ron. Where do you keep your cleavers?”

Drawn onto the black Peg-Board that formed the wall behind the workbench were chalk outlines of various cutlery—butcher knives, paring knives, deboning knives, et cetera. And usually, inside of each one was its shiny metallic match. But today, the outlines were as vacant and empty as an old crime scene. There were none on the table or floor.

Nowhere.

“Seriously, Ron?” she shouted. “What kind of serial killer doesn’t have any knives?”

Her eyes wandered over the outlines, and she remembered that he took all the sharps, as he called them, inside at night so they wouldn’t get damp. His victims could grow mossy
and mildewed, but not his precious knives. It did bring a smile to her face that he must’ve been so busy with the kitchen flooding that he’d forgotten to bring them back out and arrange them with crazed meticulousness.

Velvet remembered something else, too. She couldn’t help it. Staring at the workbench for too long always triggered the memories.

She hadn’t been nearly as late for the bus as she could have been, but when she’d arrived at the stop, Velvet could just see the tail of the big silver metro bus taking the corner.

“Dammit!” she’d yelled, and tossed her book bag onto the bench in the little bus carrel. If she hadn’t been on texting restriction, she never would have gone into the Round Up Grocery asking to use the phone.

That was where she met Bonesaw, and she’d suspected nothing. How could she have? He was a pleasant guy with a big broad smile and a goofy expression on his face that had actually been kind of endearing to a girl like Velvet, who’d been used to people judging her about the way she kept her hair or the fact that she wore all black and listened to mopey music and stuff.

“You wanna use the employee phone?” he’d asked.

“Sure, sir. Thanks.”

He’d taken her behind the meat counter and shown her the black phone hanging on the wall—one of those older ones with a coil of cord connecting the receiver to a big plastic box. If her mother had answered the phone, it probably would have ended there.

If. If. If. Woulda. Shoulda. Didn’t.

“You need a ride home or something?” Bonesaw had asked.

And despite everything she’d ever learned about strangers, despite her natural instinct to be suspicious of just about everyone around her—due to the fact that she’d found most people were assholes—and particularly people who were nice to her, Velvet had nodded.

“Well, lucky for you, I’m just about ready to clock out.” He’d taken off his blood-smudged white coat and hung it on a hook next to a puffy winter jacket, which he’d thrown over his shoulder. “You ready, then?”

Velvet had nodded again.

Moments later they’d been in his van.

Moments after that, she’d been unconscious.

Velvet didn’t want to think about it anymore; she had serious haunting business to take care of. She marched out of the shed and across the lawn to the back door of the farmhouse. She would have gone inside eventually anyway. The pull of the kitchen’s devastation was just too strong.

A Shop-Vac sat in the middle of the dry linoleum like a sentinel. The kitchen door was propped open with a box fan that whirred and clanked intermittently, pointed at a wet patch of carpet that she was certain was almost dry. Even the molding around the floor seemed fine.

“Bastard!” she screamed, kicking over the fan. It fell with a loud clunk and sputtered to a stop. She slouched over and picked up the empty vacuum and tossed it at the bistro set.
The cheap plastic tub bounced ineffectually off the wrought-iron table, crashed back down onto its wheels, and rolled quietly to a stop by the fridge.

Velvet stared at the lack of damage with a combination of shock and mild appreciation. Ron Simanski clearly had an angel looking after him. A dark demented angel with a boner for cutlery and pasty white jackasses who loved condiments. And likewise, someone or something—God, whoever—wanted her to fail.

“Dammit!” she yelled, stomping to the sink.

She suddenly wanted to be anywhere but there.

Bonesaw’s knives lay lined up in the bottom, steel against porcelain, both gleaming like a showroom. She picked up the cleaver and managed to tote it almost to the door before it slipped through her hands and impaled the plastic flooring, quivering. She snatched it up and threw it at the window in the back door. Unbelievably, the cleaver clinked against the window sharply and cracked it rather than breaking through, and then it dropped to the floor with a
bonk
.

“Come on!”

She knelt to try again, the fury of the situation blistering through her. Velvet snatched at the cleaver’s handle, and her fingers barely moved it an inch across the slick sheen of the linoleum. Her next try was even more infuriating. She was on her knees at that point, but at least she was able to send the damn thing skittering.

“What the crap?”

She had to calm down; in her anger, she’d forgotten to focus. And that did the trick. But when she stood, the
cleaver held tightly in her phantom fist, the first thing she saw was Ron Simanski’s face framed in the cracked pane of glass in the door.

He wore a fresh scowl, and his eyes were intent and focused on the cleaver. To him, it must have appeared to be floating.

To Velvet, the cleaver needed to find a new spot to dwell.

She aimed for Bonesaw’s forehead and flung it with every ounce of energy she had.

It banked off the opening door and clattered loudly as it sailed across the counter and fell back into the sink. By the time Simanski had crossed the threshold, nearly everything was back in its place, except the fan. The killer’s mouth crept open, a question dangling there, before he shook his head, crossed to the refrigerator, and withdrew a paper lunch sack. He peered down into the sink, his lips moving soundlessly as though counting. Satisfied, he shrugged, gave the room a final odd look, and walked back out. He hadn’t even noticed the fan lying on its side.

Velvet shook her head. The whole trip had been a complete waste of time. She hadn’t freed the girl, and she’d missed her chance to bludgeon a psycho. What good was she?

Then she heard the minivan engine spark to life.

Velvet didn’t stop to think about it; she sprinted through the door and across the grass toward the moving vehicle, and then leapt at the driver’s side door, already focusing on a takeover.

Darkness surrounded her, and a low hum—the muffled sound of the van engine—vibrated the space inside him.
Velvet set off to corral Ron Simanski’s mind, but his thoughts were so vulgar, so hateful, she couldn’t help but look, to witness his madness. He imagined himself as red as a cartoon devil, fresh blood painting his skin a dark crimson. His tongue darted for the corners of his lips, blotting them back to pink. Fire danced about him like an aura. He was the god of his world.

And batshit crazy.

Velvet reined in her terror and refocused on forcing the blazing image of Bonesaw into the little box she conjured for it. The act took a little more meditation than another body. Images, like postcards of the man’s insanity, fluttered around her: Meat extruding from grinders. Girls walking on sidewalks. Bonesaw’s desire. She heard a low, steady moan. Letting her anger build the box’s wall helped to distract her from the horrors. But once it was formed and Velvet looked inside, she gasped.

The box, her carefully designed jail for Bonesaw’s mind, was already full.

A body lay curled up inside, tight and fetal and so red.

A girl. Her hands covered her face protectively. Wounds stabbed clean through her palms into her cheeks.

Velvet didn’t want to know who the girl was. It wasn’t her intention to explore the freak’s psyche, just kill him quickly. But the girl’s hands were already falling. It was too late to look away.

Velvet saw the girl’s face and it was her own. A glassy-eyed version of Velvet stared back at her, dead lips parted, tongue as gray and dry as cigarette ash. Then the rest of Bonesaw’s
victims spilled into the box, dropping in dull thuds. His dark proclivities were so strong that she couldn’t keep his twisted obsessions out of her construction. The box bowed and bulged, then collapsed.

She lost her grip and fell from Bonesaw’s body, through the undercarriage of the moving minivan, and landed painlessly on the dirt farm road. The van disappeared in a cloud of dust that trailed it until the cloud disappeared around the forest bend.

“Oh, my God,” Velvet said, shaking and hugging her knees to her chest.

She rocked like that, trying to forget what she’d seen. She blamed her curiosity. If only she hadn’t wondered about his thoughts. If she could only take the last few minutes back, she’d still be able to hang on to the idea that Bonesaw could be forced to kill himself. That she could kill him.

If only the girl’s face hadn’t been her own.

Pull yourself together. You’re projecting. There was nothing in that box but your fear
.

After uncoiling herself slowly, Velvet made her shambling way back to the copse with the oak tree. It wouldn’t do any good to let the moment destroy her plans. They just needed revising, she told herself. Tightening up. Streamlining.

“Focus on that,” she muttered. “You just need to focus.”

Getting back to work would help.

A
vine of little paper bells, shellacked and clacking, shook from the doorknob as Velvet pushed into the Paper Aviary. It was quiet inside, the monk parakeets perfectly still and no sound of Mr. Fassbinder’s busy, sometimes frantic, humming. Tempted to change that, Velvet approached the globe of spikes, eager to hear the funny chirping sound from the tiny bellows.

She reached out to touch one of the sharp spines, but stopped.