Sketched Read online

  Adam grabbed the latch on the door. His face still burning he began to pull it shut, slicing the waning afternoon light off as he did so.

  “It’s explainable by science,” Adam said, pausing before sealing the studio shut once more. “And it does hurt. It hurts Piper quite a lot.”

  The click of the lock as he turned it was the most satisfying noise he’d heard all day. Relief causing momentary weakness, Adam leaned against the warm wood of the door and placed his face in his hands.

  “Fucking predator,” he mumbled.

  She would have her dead, just like the legions of rich sociopaths she called Piper’s fans. She would have her dead and buried and raking in the cash as every picture she ever painted became priceless. Who knows, Piper’s death might even rocket her work to coffee mug and umbrella status. She was already the world’s first successful medium painter, wasn’t she? Why not throw a nice suicide in there to really raise her to deity status? Adam felt sick. His stomach grumbled and he allowed himself to rest for a bit longer, his face in his hands. He realized suddenly that he hadn’t eaten today either. Sympathy starvation, he supposed.

  He’d go upstairs and drag Piper down for dinner. He’d sit her at the kitchen table with a cup of hot tea and he wouldn’t leave until she’d eaten something green. Night was on the way and over the last few weeks, that meant the ramp up to evening drama. If the way she had been shivering when he helped her from the lake was any indication, he was starting to doubt whether her body could take another night of lucid dreaming and self-torture.

  Adam began to walk up the stairs to retrieve Piper, flicking light switches and turning down air conditioning as he went.

  “Complete bullshit,” he mumbled.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  Dixon City

  There was a stranger staring back at him in the rear-view mirror.

  The first time Kingston had seen him was when he had ‘woken up’ a few months ago. Although waking up was not the best way to describe it. Coming back to life was much more suitable. Stumbling into the bathroom, his genitals still aching from pulling out the catheter, he had screamed when he saw his reflection in the glass above the sink.

  He had never seen anything more horrifying. This stranger, the man in the mirror had all of his features. All of his parts had been there, from the aquiline Entler nose and sloping brow to the perfect rows of square teeth. But it hadn’t been him. This was a man with flesh on his bones. This was a lazy, disgusting lout. This was some well-fed fool with a hideous haircut.

  It was only when the man in the mirror had copied his gestures exactly that Kingston’s poison addled mind had made the connection. This basic pile of trash with the raggedy bowl cut was he.

  His heart thudding in his chest, he had stood on the scale and screamed again.

  One hundred and twenty-five pounds. What the hell had his mother been putting in the IV? Lard? She had done this on purpose. The bitch. She didn’t have the guts to kill him, so she punished him by doing the next best thing in her eyes. She had tried to make him fat.

  Sitting in his car, feeling every extra inch of his body pressing against the polyester of his pants and shirt, Kingston turned the rearview away from him. His body ached with irritability. That bitch had destroyed so much of his hard work. All those years she had demanded perfection and all those years he had practically died for it. The dental work to compensate for his daily purging had cost thousands, but it was never enough. For Brynn Entler, no one was ever thin enough.

  He gripped the steering wheel of the van, feeling his skin pull across his knuckles so tightly he imagined it might split. A sharp pain radiated down from his jaw joint to his shoulder. He was clenching again. Initially, he had thought it was a side effect from the low-grade poisoning he’d experienced but he was really starting to think it was stress. Another thing to blame his mother for.

  Maybe she had been right, maybe he really was losing control. When she had started to poison him, he had been at a total count of twenty-four. If the chubby ginger girl hadn’t escaped, it would’ve been a nice round twenty-five. Not bad for ten years of work.

  “Sloppy,” he hissed to himself, adjusting his sunglasses. “Hardly.”

  He remembered every single one of them. He never forgot a face, a smell, a scream nor all the pedestrian little plea bargains they tried to make with him. There wasn’t one that he had forgotten. How was that in any way sloppy? How could she have thought he was losing control?

  Despite the pain, Kingston set his jaw again, his muscles working beneath the surface of his greyish skin. Losing control of what? It was just him now. He would be the judge of that from now on.

  His thoughts were interrupted when an eleven-year-old boy broke from the crowd he was walking with. His friends, boys like this always had friends, continued without him. Their heads were bowed over their phones, moving like a swarm led blindly by instinct away from the gates of the school.

  The boy squinted at the van, ducking his head slightly as he approached to look at the license plate.

  Kingston’s heartbeat was suddenly audible, a quickened thumping that made him nervous. Silly. How would this be any different than the ones before? He took a deep breath, steadying his nerves and waiting for his heart to slow.

  One of the boy’s friends called out to him as the flock prepared to turn the corner and disappear. Frowning, the boy looked up at them and waved them onward. He yelled something that included enough profanities to generate a few loud laughs from the crowd before they carried on.

  Kingston watched from behind the double security of the tinted window and his sunglasses. The boy, ‘PhatAss92’ on email and Matthew Wallace IRL (as the kids say), flicked a long swath of hair out of his face and continued staring at the license plate.

  He was deciding.

  His friends now gone, the after school pick up line now long since dispersed, he was summoning courage.

  “Come on, come on…” Kingston whispered shakily. His jaw protested, throbbing in beat to his quickening heart. He had to remember to breathe. Seeing Matthew this close was an astounding thing. Like a hunter in a blind, finally close enough to smell his trophy, he found himself frozen, unwilling to even breathe lest he frighten the creature away.

  He needed control. He needed to pace himself. He was capable of it, he knew that. He had just never done it on his own. Mother had always been there to pace him, a cold presence in what always threatened to turn into a whirling, catastrophic mess.

  Matthew had begun walking again, taking tentative steps across the road where the van was parked. Kingston licked his lips and grabbed the moisture beaded cups from the holders beside him. Shit. He should’ve been drinking his before. He didn’t want to chance setting off any alarm bells. Emerging from a windowless van with two untouched slushes and a sweaty upper lip wasn’t going cut it. He swiped the sweat off his face and drank deeply from one of the drinks. The cold ice pellets slid down his throat, filling his stomach with a strong, impossible flavor. Ignoring the sudden sharp pain between his eyes, Kingston fumbled with the lock on the driver’s side door.

  Calm, he told himself. Calm and in control.

  Taking another deep breath, he opened the van door and stepped out.

  “Hey,” he said. He had practiced warmth for hours the other day. Projecting it through voice and expression was one of his biggest challenges but if the man in the mirror was any indication, he had managed to dust off his old skills fairly well. “I picked us up some slushes. It’s something called…hang on.” He turned the untouched slush toward him, rolling the condensation off the logo on the cup with his thumb. “Epic Freeze. They’re supposed to be a big thing.”

  Matthew had stopped in the shadow of the van. Kingston calculated him to be about an arm’s length from him. He tossed his hair again. Now closer, Kingston could see the remaining green tips of a blue dye job long ago faded. He wanted to frown with disapproval but didn’t. Such a shame to mess with natural th
ings. Instead he smiled even broader with his best movie star squint. He liked to think of it as number two in what he called the approachable series. “I hope Epic Freeze is a good flavor. I thought the name was lame.”

  Kingston held out the slush toward the boy. Matthew hesitated, sizing up Kingston in the kind of calloused way he’d noticed was common in kids these days. Five years was a long time to be unconscious. Apparently, the only thing that impressed kids now was videos of people hurting themselves and the undead. Not that he blamed them.

  Kingston remembered his sunglasses and quickly took them off.

  “It’s Matthew, right? You still interested in the console?”

  The boy seemed to relax at the mention at his name. He finally reached out with his slim arms to take the slushy that Kingston held like bait between them.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he mumbled. He took a cautious sip from the straw. Kingston watched, his breath caught in his chest as the blue ice shot up the plastic tube and passed the boy’s lips. “Nice van, by the way. Didn’t Entler’s Department Store shut down years ago? My dad lost his job.”

  The kid spoke through a mouthful of Epic Freeze. He scoffed at the rusted van behind him, pointing at the logo with the dripping cup. “That’s so ghetto, bro.”

  Kingston’s breath released louder than he liked. Shit. He had forgotten about the van logo. It wasn’t easy finding a new vehicle for every time. This time he hadn’t bothered to make the effort and had simply taken one of the old vans from storage. Why he hadn’t thought of the logo was beyond him.

  Because you’re a careless idiot and you’re too stupid to do any of this without getting caught. Mother’s voice was so clear that in his panic he almost believed he could hear it coming from the back of the van.

  “What is that supposed to be anyway, a ball sack?” Matthew chuckled at his own joke. His tongue jutted out and he licked some of the beads of water from the side of the cup.

  He smiled again.

  “It’s a thistle. But you’re right. It does look like a,” he stumbled, willing his cheeks not to glow as he fought to say the words, “a pair of testicles.”

  Matthew scoffed again.

  “Testicles. Funny. That store is wrecked, bro. There’s supposed to be ghosts there or something. Homeless men use it as a toilet. I haven’t been there since I was a kid.”

  “You are a kid,” Kingston said, taking a chance on a bit of teasing. He should’ve removed the logo. Distraction from it was the next tactic. “How old are you, twelve?” He drank his own slush, hoping the accompanying head rush would clear up the urgency that was starting to roar inside of him. He did need to get him into the van though. Even though the street was empty, he needed to limit exposure as much as he could.

  “Fuck off, I’m fourteen, bro. Fifteen in three weeks. So, really, like…fourteen and three quarters or something.”

  “Right. My bad. You’re practically a man then.” The boy’s smooth face contorted slightly.

  “Rude, man. Don’t be a creep. I know ju jitsu, so you don’t want to fuck with me.”

  There was no sense of alarm in the boy’s eyes yet. His warning was casual and sounded more like something he had practiced in front of a mirror as often as Kingston had practiced his ‘faces’. It was a line he probably used all the time throughout his short little life. It was hard to imagine anyone taking him seriously. His lean, willowy body was about as threatening as a garter snake.

  “I won’t fuck with you.” Kingston smiled. This time he didn’t have time to choose the right one and it crept across his lean face like oil warming in a hot pan. “You wanna see the console?”

  “Yeah. And the VR, right? You brought the VR helmet?”

  “You betcha. That’s the most important part, what kind of freak would forget that? It’s just in the back.” Kingston fished in the back pocket of his jeans for the cluster of car keys. He felt the denim slip down his hips as he struggled to pull them out of his back pocket. His hands were going to shake. Kids were more observant than people thought, he knew that only too well. One little tremble and it might be all over for him.

  “Here, hold this and I’ll get it open.” He handed Matthew his slush cup. The boy dropped his board onto the curb and took the cup willingly. When he obediently followed at his heels to the back of the Van, Kingston had to work extra hard to extinguish that oily smile. It threatened to take over his entire face.

  “Did you really steal it? They’re like, sold out everywhere. Even if you order them online, they cost like, eight hundred dollars. You must have a shit heap of them if you can charge fifty bucks a pop.”

  “The phrase is ‘shit load’,” Kingston said. This kid had obviously not been swearing long.

  “Whatever.” Matthew shrugged. He watched, slurping his epic blue sugar water into his stomach as Kingston flipped through the keys calmly. “Did you just like, jump the truck driver and take them all or what? You must’ve had shitloads of freaks blowing up your phone after you posted the ad.”

  “Oh yeah. Tons of psychos.” Kingston held up the proper key. “Got it,” he said.

  He took a quick look around over the boy’s head. No one. Like most of Dixon, the streets were barren. Half of the houses in the neighborhood were boarded up and the only other cars on the streets were left abandoned with police markers scrawled across their windshields. The sky was the same color grey as the concrete that surrounded them. Kingston’s eyes were a darker, colder version of the same shade as he smiled down at the diminutive boy beneath him.

  “You’ve got the money?” he said. “We agreed on fifty, right?”

  Matthew bit the lip of his slush cup, his gapped teeth sinking into the waxy plastic. Holding one of the cups in his mouth, he dug into the front pocket of his faded hoodie. He pulled out a wad of dirty bills. He handed it to Kingston, grunting through the cup in his mouth.

  “Looks good to me,” he said. “I’m not going to get an email from your mom saying you robbed her purse though, am I?”

  The boy scoffed but dropped his eyes, nonetheless. Kingston could see tiny veins pulsing in his paper-thin temples.

  “Fuck no. She doesn’t know I’m here. Like I’d tell her anything.”

  Kingston smiled over his bony shoulder as he unlocked the back.

  “You guys don’t get along, I gather?”

  “She’s a fucking bitch,” Matthew mumbled. If he was trying to sound tough, he failed. He sounded more like sulky baby denied a treat more than anything else. “I told her I wanted the stupid console and VR helmet before they even came out. She wouldn’t get it. Too expensive. Like we need money for food or some shit. I told her she should just stop smoking and then we could get one for real.”

  Kingston paused before he swung open the back doors. He wanted to suspend time, just for a second. He could’ve listened to this terrible child drone on for hours but as it was, there was a whole new reality waiting for the kid behind the door of the Entler Department Store Delivery van and it wasn’t virtual.

  “You shouldn’t steal from your mother,” he said, looking back at the boy again. “Whatever she does, whatever she says, she loves you. You know you’ll miss her when she’s gone, right?”

  The kid’s lips were stained blue, the dye creeping up from the soft inner flesh of his mouth.

  “Like shit I will, dude,” he said, his chest puffed with all the intimidation of a bantam rooster. He looked at Kingston, his eyes so large and rimmed with black lashes that they looked feminine. “You got the console, right? Let’s get this over with. I gotta be home for dinner.”

  “Right.” Kingston looked up to where a bank of dark clouds was beginning to roll over the bleak skyline. “It is getting late, isn’t it?”

  He swung open the doors and stepped into the back. His heart began to rapidly trill in his throat. Trying to maintain the neutral expression he had been working on, Kingston gave the boy an encouraging smile and kicked the short metal folding step down toward him.

  Matt
hew looked up, confused and becoming irritable at this anorexic looking stranger in front of him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “It’s under some of the other boxes in the back, come give me a hand and we’ll get you back before that ‘fucking bitch’ causes you any more trouble.”

  The boy hesitated, looking up at Kingston.

  This was it. This was when his work was either going to pay off or fall short. Humans based so much of their interactions on body language and instinct. They were just animals after all. He needed to keep his face still, his smile warm and his shoulders down. He needed to make his eyes twinkle until they burned in their sockets.

  “She’d hand me my ass.” Matthew smiled and took a single step up into the van.

  Now inside the van, Matthew made a sudden face and brought both slushy laden hands to his mouth instinctively. “Holy Shit, bro…what is that smell? Have you got meat in here or something?”