Vigilantes of Love (11 page)

Dad – who still had all his clothes on – lay next to them with a silver gun in his hand. All three of them had blood leaking from their heads. It bloomed in bright crimson petals on the pale carpet.

Part of her was relieved; they wouldn’t hurt her anymore. But part of her was scared, too. Bellinda didn’t know what to do; the only adult she knew in this town other than her teacher was Penelope. As soon as the thought of the older woman crept into her head, she smiled. Penelope would know what to do.

“Back so soon?” the old woman asked.

Bellinda nodded, tears streaking her freckled cheeks.

“Mommy and Daddy are dead,” she declared. “And the mailman.”

Penelope nodded. “The seeds of lust can work strange things on a couple,” she said. “And with the aftereffects of the seeds of pride and greed still in the air… well, I must say I’m not surprised. Did you collect the seeds?”

Bellinda shook her head no, and Penelope patted her on the head.

“Well, then we’d best go do that, and while we’re at it, we’ll see if we can’t clean up the mess they’ve made. They did stain the carpeting, I bet, didn’t they?”

Bellinda thought of the pools of blood surrounding her parents heads and nodded, one tear trickling down her left cheek.

“I thought I’d heard gunshots earlier. Well, come on then.”

Together the two descended the cellar stairs and plucked each fat red seed from the cone-shaped sprouts of the velvety plants. There were only a couple dozen of them, but they looked thick, bloodfilled and healthy.

Then they went upstairs.

“Stay back,” Penelope cautioned, and ventured alone into the living room.

Bellinda sat at the kitchen table as Penelope reached into her black satchel for a vial of something dark. She opened the stopper, blew across its mouth and mumbled some guttural phrases that sounded like nonsense.

When she was done, Bellinda smiled at her and took her hand. It was cold but firm.

“They weren’t very nice,” she said and followed the witch upstairs. When she did, Bellinda noticed that the bodies were gone from the living room.

In the upstairs office, Penelope used one arm to brush the row of Dad’s brightly colored books from the shelf onto the floor. Then, one by one, the old woman began to replace them with her herbal and occult books – some bound in crusty leather – from the dust pile in the corner of the room. Finally, they were back on the shelf where they had been before Brian’s brief ownership of the room.

On the lower shelves, she set the dark old canisters.

She opened an empty one, and poured the blood red seeds and closed the lid tightly.

“Are those things all yours?” Bellinda asked.

“Yes,” Penelope said. “I’ve been waiting to get them back. But first I had to leave this house so that a new family would move in and bring me an assistant.”

Penelope held up a canister and Bellinda could see within it a handful of grey seeds that looked almost like garden slugs. They were different from the ones she’d planted in the cellar.

“I planted some of these, my own magic seeds, before you moved in,” the older woman said. “Thanks to them, your family moved into the house. I think your parents brought me a good harvest.”

“You used to live here?” Bellinda asked.

“Oh yes,” Penelope smiled, cupping the girl’s chin. “When I first came here, I was a little girl just like you. And I met an old woman who gave me seeds to plant in the cellar, too. After they grew, and my parents went away, the old woman moved in and took care of me. She taught me all about growing all sorts of special seeds, and other things.”

“She was a witch, too?”

Penelope nodded. “Would you like to learn magic?”

“Will we plant the rest of the seeds?” Bellinda asked. “If I could plant them by the kids at school, I bet they’d grow really fast.”

“Not here or now,” Penelope said. “I think we’ve grown just about enough deadlies for this week.”

The girl’s mouth puckered slightly, but then she brightened.

“Are you gonna stay here with me? Will I get to become a witch like you?”

Penelope gave her a crooked smile. “If you like.”

Bellinda nodded once and then disappeared from the room for a moment. When she returned, she was wearing a long black sweater of her mother’s. It dragged on the ground like a dress and bunched in comical thick folds at her wrists. But when she stood next to Penelope, the light from the room seemed to fade into cold shadows.

“I’m ready,” the girl said.

“I don’t kill, I preserve.”            

He smiled reassuringly.

I knew I had come to the right man.

The man was Arthur. He put the art in Art’s Taxidermy, a tiny little shop around the corner from Main Street. You’d miss it if you didn’t know it was there. The shop squatted in one of those old white Victorians converted to businesses when people grew more inclined to shop, rather than live, downtown. Like most of the converted homes in the area, the only clue to there being a business, instead of a family, inside was the shingle hung near the sidewalk: Art’s Taxidermy.

I’d heard the rumors that Arthur did more than stuff nine-pound bass and mount deer heads for the overly proud hunter’s den. They said he’d embalm a man – if the price was right. The only problem was in getting the body. I intended to make that part easy.

“My life savings,” I said, holding out a bank envelope containing a not inconsiderable sum. I had withdrawn it less than an hour before. “It’s yours; I won’t need it.”

He shook his head slowly. A silver cowlick bobbed with the motion. For the second time he insisted, “I don’t kill, I preserve.”

He hesitated a moment. I could see worry lines wrinkle near his eyes. “Let me show you.”

Arthur stepped out from behind the glass counter he’d been working at when I came in. He was slender, bi-focaled, sixty-ish, about my height – five-foot-nine. He locked the entrance door and turned around the sign in the window.

Now the
Open
sign faced us. I was hoping he’d be amenable to
open
ing a vein. The menagerie of stiff squirrels, beavers – even a skunk in one corner – demonstrated his prowess with filling veins.

I expected the baby deer that stood poised to jump on the far side of the room to do so at any second. They all seemed so… alive. As if he and I existed outside of a second in time – while they were trapped inside.

It reminded me of Caitlin.
I really didn’t mean it,
I said to myself for the millionth time.

“This way.”

I broke my reverie and turned to follow Arthur, who was waiting in the hallway for me to follow.

He walked stiffly through a 1950s style black and white tiled kitchen, pausing to open a door next to an old refrigerator. A pile of fresh rabbits’ feet were staining the white formica snack table a dark red. I must have frowned when I saw them.

“Disgusting, isn’t it? To dismember an animal – for luck! But people bring them in and people come to buy them.” He shook his head. “I would rather preserve the animal in its full form. As beautiful in death as in life.”

He motioned for me to follow and disappeared through the door. Twelve creaky steps and I was standing in an old stone basement, murkily lit by one bare bulb. A cord ran from the light to the top of the handrail upstairs. The walls appeared to have been chipped out of solid bedrock. I shivered from the icy damp air. Arthur headed to a door in the south wall to what seemed to be a fruit cellar. My grandmother had had one like that in her basement. He slid back the oak door and we both stepped through.

It was a dollhouse.

A dollhouse on a real-life scale. The floor, ceiling and walls were rough hewn wood, elegantly decorated with persian rugs and ornate tapestries. A scarlet shaded hurricane lamp lit up part of the room, which extended much farther than any fruit cellar should have. But fruit was not what Arthur was keeping. Arthur’s dolls were people. Had been people. They were everywhere – on divans, leaning against the walls, lying seductively on the floor… It looked like a snapshot of a nudist convention in a 19th century sitting room.

“What do you think of my friends?” Arthur asked.

“How…”

“They came to me, as you have,” he said softly. “They begged me for death. I promised to preserve them. I kept my promise.”

His steps thudded on the planks as he crossed to a shiny mahogany victrola. Cranking the arm of the machine like he was winding up a Model A, he continued talking to me over his shoulder. “Jeanine loved the big bands.” He set the needle down on a thick black platter, and the scratchy clarinets of Benny Goodman’s orchestra echoed through the room.

“This is Marshall,” Arthur announced, patting the shoulder of a youngish man propped up at a small table on his elbows. His naked, fishbelly white and nearly hairless legs were delicately crossed beneath the table. Arthur turned the page of a Bible resting between Marshall ’s arms.

“ Marshall said he’d never been able to read the Bible cover to cover,” Arthur said quietly. “Now perhaps, he can.”

I didn’t think Marshall was in much of a state to read anything. But his eyes seemed to glint as Arthur crossed behind him and bent over to adjust a knob on a machine beneath the hurricane lamp. It hummed a bit louder after his touch, and I noticed tiny tubes ran from it to each of Arthur’s “friends.”

“This is what keeps everyone looking so nice,” Arthur explained. “If you could see the skins under the pelts of the animals upstairs, you’d see how it gets sunken, wrinkled, discolored. Everything settles in. So with humans, if we don’t want them to look like mummies, we pump them up with this solution here.”

He walked over to a blond woman arranged seductively on a purple velvet couch. If her skin hadn’t had a disturbingly bone-white caste, she could have been a
Playboy
centerfold brought to life.

Her eyes were half open, her lips – painted with bright red lipstick – were parted. I felt like a necrophiliac looking at her. She excited me.

“Touch her breast,” Arthur commanded.

Why not,
I thought.
Pretty soon it won’t matter anyway.
Still, my arm shook as I gingerly fingered a rouged nipple. It was cool, dry – and seemed to ripple as I took my hand away. Arthur reached between her legs for a moment and his face took on the relaxed aspect of a man stroking his pet cat.

“She could never get enough,” he said. “That’s why she came to me. There wasn’t anything that could satisfy her.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver vibrator.

“Still, I try for her,” he whispered. A low hum filled the room and I turned away.

“Why do you want to die?” he asked.

“I just can’t stand to live anymore,” I answered. In my mind I was picturing Caitlin’s frozen look of surprise as she fell backwards from the landing. I’d been violently angry, we’d been punching and screaming at each other, but I’d never meant to kill her.

“Certainly that will pass,” Arthur murmured.

“No.” I said, equally quiet. “It certainly will not.”

“Why not take your own life, if you cannot stand it so much?”

My hands grew damp instantly at the suggestion. I thought of the thin blade jutting crookedly from Caitlin’s side, and the amazing spray of blood. In the heat of the moment, after she’d kicked me in the thigh, I had grabbed the steak knife off the counter to force her to back off. But she was already in motion, and the knife slid into the new scabbard of her flesh with almost no resistance. She might have survived the wound if she hadn’t jerked away and stumbled backwards over the low banister. I could still hear her neck snap when she hit the tile foyer below.

“I just… can’t.”

Benny Goodman had ended; the needle was rubbing against the record label in a comforting, rhythmic fuzz. The humming abruptly stopped, and Arthur turned off the Victrola.

“Come with me,” he said, and we left the dollhouse behind.

He took me to a long steel table on the other side of the basement and switched on a fluorescent ceiling lamp.

“Take off your clothes and lie down.”

My stomach twisted at the thought of getting naked in front of this man, but I chided myself once more.
It’s like dropping your pants for the physical,
I thought. And it certainly didn’t matter at this point.

“How will you do it?” I asked, stepping out of my jeans.

Arthur pulled a machine out from a cabinet. It resembled the one in the dollhouse.

“Well, we need to drain your blood, but we don’t want anything to clot up and sink, do we? We also don’t want any unsightly gashes to mar the body. So, I’ll just pop this IV tube into your arm like so…”

I winced as the needle pricked into my skin.

He nodded. “It will be uncomfortable at first, but soon you’ll just get sleepy. Don’t fight it.”

Holding the end of the tube shut with his thumb, he walked over to a sink behind me. I heard something flop inside, and felt a tugging sensation as my blood started to gush through the tube.