please pardon the fact that there are no italics. i copied and pasted this and am too lazy to fix it :P
anyways, it sorta dies at the end but it's a start...
black ink
2:43 P.M.
Two people in a bright red convertible with worn gray seating.
Mike, age 22. Driver.
Julie, age 20. Passenger.
The road is dusty and parched, and the desert landscape around them shows its scars obtained from the abusive, beating sun. The convertible rolls along at seventy-six, under the intense sun.
Mike, who is wearing a sweat-soaked white undershirt, sits in the driver’s seat with one hand lying carelessly on the wheel and the other hand groping Julie’s leg.
Julie sits in the passenger seat, dressed similarly to Mike. The sun beats down on her, and she sits leaning uncomfortably to the right, wishing that Mike’s hand would move.
It doesn’t.
“How much longer?” Julie shouts in her squeaky voice, over the roar of the wind around them.
“Not long,” Mike grunts loudly.
“Where the hell are we, anyway? In the middle of nowhere?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Well, why don’t we just go anywhere in town?”
“There’s no place to do it in town. I only know one place, way out here.”
“Fine,” Julie mutters, inaudibly.
Julie leans further to the right, the wind rushing past at seventy-seven miles per hour and whipping her light brown hair around her face. Despite the intense wind, it is still extremely hot outside. Julie hopes that there’s air conditioning when they get there. She doubts it, though.
For fifteen minutes they sit like this, mere wax statues in a model car, the only part of them moving the cloth on their bodies and the hair on their heads. The wax statues come to life then, and Mike moves his hand off of Julie’s leg. She relaxes in her seat a bit as he grips the wheel with both hands.
Seventy-four, seventy-three, seventy-two, seventy-one…
The speedometer drops slowly, and Mike takes a turn when a fork comes in the road, right as the speedometer drops to forty miles per hour. The bright red convertible smoothly rolls down the dusty road, and some vague form of civilization comes into view. There are wooden and brick buildings that look decrepit and worn-down, with nobody outside. There is a rusty pickup truck parked on the side of the road, but otherwise it looks like an old ghost town. Mike steers the car past the rusty truck and parks in front of a dirty old building fronted with a wooden sign:
“SAM’S TATTOO”
“Original name,” Julie says wryly, shifting further away from the sweaty radiator of a man next to her.
“Look, it’s the best place I know of,” Mike says as he parks the car and leaps over the side of the car.
He walks over to Julie’s side of the car and opens her unlocked door. She reluctantly gets out of the car, and is relieved to be out of the burning seat.
“Here, follow me inside,” Mike says, closing her door and not bothering to lock it.
Julie follows Mike into the badly-lit building, and glances back at the dead-looking town behind them. When she enters the first room of the building, she is greeted by a gray, rotting interior. A metal fan spins weakly in the corner. There are a few chairs in the room, but nothing else. It’s hotter on the inside than it is outside.
“Hey, Sam!” Mike booms out, “You here?”
Mike and Julie stand there in the poorly-cooled room until they hear some fumbling around in the room beyond the gray door.
“Be right there!” a man Julie decides is Sam exclaims.
Exactly twenty-seven seconds later, a man in his late-thirties-or-early-forties with a goatee and premature baldness steps out from the back room. He is wearing a pair of jeans that is obviously a few sizes too large and a gray undershirt that is obviously a few sizes too small, and wet sweat marks line his armpits and collar. He is somewhere between being average and overweight, and his skin is an irritated red color, as if he had passed out in the sun.
“Hey, Mike,” he grunts in a gruff voice, “Long time no see. In for another, I see?”
“Yeah, not for me,” he says, putting his sweaty-but-muscular arm with a skull tattoo around Julie’s shoulder. She turns a degree away from him and crosses her own arms. “This is Julie.”
“Nice to meet ya, Jewel. Here, come with me.”
Julie can’t help but notice that the only time Sam looked at her, his eyes were focused about a head’s-height too low. Sam turns and walks back to where he came from, Mike with his arm around the reluctant Julie following.
Something is strange about the place, something sends chills down Julie’s spine. Sure, she is sure that it was painful and sure, her parents would go mental, but there is some deeper fear creeping around her mind that she can’t quite rationalize. If Mike was at all intimidated, he shows no fear.
“Now,” Sam said, “I’m an artist of the skin. I can draw anything.”
The way Sam said it made Julie shiver, but she hides the traces of paralyzing fear from her face. She doesn’t want that repulsive… thing on her back. But what would Mike do if she didn’t comply?
“Here’s the design,” Mike said, pulling a sweat-soaked piece of paper from his pocket. Sam’s face first squints to look more clearly, and then his face flashes with his delight.
“It’s an interesting design. It would make a nice tattoo. Where do you want it?”
“She wants it on her back,” Mike said, pushing Julie forwards before she can reply. She gulps, and opens her mouth to speak. “We came all the way here, and I’m paying. Now, you really want this. Don’t you?”
Julie knows that it isn’t a question. She glances at the paper in Sam’s hand and shivers at the sight. It is an upside-down five-pointed star… an inverted pentagram. Surrounding it are twin black serpents with deep crimson apples in their mouths, and below it is written in scrawled letters: “AVE SATANAS.”
It’s some kind of Satanist symbol, she thinks. However, she shows nothing but disgust as she is seated in front of Sam.
Sam holds out his sweaty hand expectantly, and Mike places three crumpled Andrew Jacksons in it.
Julie looks up at Mike, who is observing her with a strangely insane glint in his eyes…
5:16 P.M.
The same two people sitting in the same bright red convertible, dustier than it was three hours ago.
Mike, age 22. Driver.
Julie, age 20. Passenger.
Julie leans forwards at a slight angle, and Mike has a triumphant look on her face. Julie’s face is the opposite, a scowl of disgust. Merely inches away from the shadowed grey seat’s back is Julie’s skin, the tattoo of the pentagram and the snakes darkly set into her red flesh, as if she had just been branded by a demon.
The air is still hot, but the sun is sinking over the horizon, and it will be cooler in a half hour or so. They’re a half hour from home, though, and Julie isn’t looking forward to having to change into something without any of her back showing… not only because she wants to hide the satanic thing, but because it burned on contact with anything else.
“Not so bad, eh?” Mike asks, flexing his bicep with the skull drawn on it. Julie only looks at him and scowls. “Hey, hey, you agreed with it! I think it’s pretty badass.”
Julie shakes her head in disgust and looks away.
“Okay. Fine. Be like that, then, bitch.”
“Don’t you—”
“Don’t… what? What are you going to do?”
Julie shrieks in anger and spins around.
They ride home in silence. Mike, prepared to threaten Julie, who sits beside him angrily wondering why she even got involved in this in the first place.
1:32 A.M.
A man is sitting on a cheap couch that looks like it was picked out of the garbage, shredded and beaten.
Sam, in his late-thirties-or-early-forties.
His naturally puffy and red hands are submerged in a bowl of an equal mixture of ice and water, even more puffy and red than usual.
Why the hell do they sting so much? Sam thinks with a grunt. He has never had such an experience caused by giving someone a tattoo, and he doubts that the few he gave earlier that day caused it. None of them were particularly difficult patterns, either, so he wonders if there is something wrong with his hands or if they actually involved the tattoos.
He leans back in the couch, his puffy and red hands dripping the quickly-melting ice water all over the floor and couch. He wipes one hand on his sweaty forehead and the other on his bare stomach. He leans back and closes his eyes, trying to sleep despite the pain aching in his fingers and palms.
2:26 A.M.
Julie can’t sleep.
Not only had she barely escaped her parents noticing the massive tattoo on her upper back, not only had she been angry at Mike for getting her involved in the first place and then calling her a bitch, but her back burns worse than ever.
She sits up on the mattress, the sheets wrinkled and tossed about, and peels the perspiration-soaked sweatshirt over her head. She pants in the heat, and lays back down, staring up at her white ceiling. The fan in the room that spins with a dull humming noise provides her some cool, but she is still overheated and out of breath.
Ow, she thinks, the place where she had been tattooed aching even more, is it supposed to hurt this much?
3:43 A.M.
Mike’s arm hurts.
He doesn’t know why, but the inside of his muscular right arm is red and inflamed, as if there was some kind of rash there. How did that happen? Did he burn himself… somehow? He wonders whether he had set the inside of his arm on his hot car’s hood and possibly burned on contact with that, but can’t recall anything like that happening.
Maybe it’s some sort of allergic reaction, he wonders, and lays down on his bed, greeted by his blank white ceiling above.
12:34 P.M.
Next day.
Saturday, July 6.
“Well, I have to get going now,” Julie says, backing away from her father at an awkward angle, making sure that he can’t see her back.
“Where to?” he asks, craning his neck to peek around her.
“Oh, nowhere in particular,” she says, “just going to go see… Mike.”
“You’re not going to stay and eat anything? You haven’t had a bite all day.”
“I’m all right. I’ll get something while I’m out.”
“All right then,” Julie’s father grunts resignedly as Julie backs up and goes out the screen door. “Hold on.”
Julie pauses cautiously.
“Is something wrong with… your back?”
“It’s just sunburn. I was outside too long. It hurts to turn around,” Julie lies.
“Here, let me look—”
“I’ll be fine, Dad. Bye,” Julie says and backs up out of the house, leaving her father confused in the kitchen, the metal fan lazily rotating in the corner and the checkered curtains swaying in the artificial breeze but everything else motionless.
Julie doesn’t have her own car, and isn’t about to ask her father to borrow his, and walking all the way back to Sam’s is impossible. She wants to know why the pain is still there and has intensified tenfold since the day before, but she knows that it’s hopeless. She has to see Mike or live with the pain. And she wasn’t about to see Mike.
Was the pain normal? Or was it infected? Could a tattoo get infected?
Julie started walking idly with nothing to do but concentrate on the Arizona heat rather than the piercing pain in her upper back.
1:45 P.M.
A guy in a car.
Mike turns the wheel right, the inner part of his right arm aching as he rotates the wheel.
He is driving towards Julie’s house, but stops when he notices the slender girl walking along the side of the dusty road, heavy with sweat.
“Hey, Jewel. Want to come along with me?” Mike calls out.
Julie shoots Mike a glare, and he is tempted to malevolently laugh.
“How’s the tattoo?” he says, grinning.
“It’s killing me, you dick,” she shoots back.
“Whoa, now,” he says with a hint of sarcasm, “You were just as enthusiastic about the idea at first. Then you pussied out at the last minute. So whose fault is it you don’t like it? Not mine.” He adds on, “I paid for it.”
“You’re such a joke,” she mutters.
Mike swerves the car and stops less than a foot beside her. She nervously takes a step back.
“What was that?” he chuckles, hopping over to the passenger side of the car and leaning out, face inches from Julie’s.
“I’m not playing trophy for you anymore.”
“Whoa!” Mike exclaims, raising both hands in the air sarcastically, “Whoa!”
He grimaces as he bends his arms back and places them on the sides of the car. “Keep on telling yourself I’m the bad guy,” Mike laughs, and jumps back over to the driver’s side, promptly flooring the accelerator and leaving a trail of tan dust in his path.
5:55 P.M.
Pordinfeereeorum.
Or something like that.
There’s some word caught on the tip of Sam’s tongue that he remembers vaguely from somewhere in the past—pordin-firiorum? Something like that.
That’s been bothering him all day, and it would have distracted him from his skin art had his aching hands not preoccupied all of his concentration. One customer had already come, wishing to have a cross tattooed onto their bicep. Merely touching the guy’s skin had made needles of pain shoot through Sam’s hand. And that’s when the word came into his head. Porda? Fear? Orum? Pordinfeereeorum. He thinks it’s the title to some song or poem or something like that he’s heard, but he isn’t sure why the words had popped into his head like that.
Sam decides to take the rest of the day off, doubting he’ll get any more customers anyways. I should really see a doctor or something like that, he thinks, wincing as he tries to pick up the remote to his T.V. but drops it when the pain comes again. Pordinfeereeorum. Porden fear E orum.
7:36 P.M.
Oh my god.
That’s what Julie thinks when she looks at the reflection on her back. Her flesh is raw and looks like the slightest touch will cause it to bleed. The red of the skin underneath makes the inverted pentagram look even more malevolent, and the apples of Sin look even redder. There’s something creepy about the tattoo, creepier than how it had looked when she had just gotten it. It seems as if the ink is smearing into her skin but growing larger. The blurring text that reads “AVE SATANAS” looks like a ghost among the image of the snakes and the Satanist symbol.
She is about to mutter “what the hell,” but the thing that escapes her lips is much different. “Inferior,” she mutters.
What? she wonders, Where did that come from?
9:21 P.M.
Mike is laying face-down in his own sweat in his bed when something lands on his back. There’s a buzzing sound accompanying it. Probably a bee, judging by the sound. How had that gotten into his room? He just wants to sleep; he wants the intense burn on his arm to wear off.
He doesn’t attempt to move the insect, but lets it crawl up his muscular back.
It pauses between his shoulder blades and is greeted with a prick of pain as the bug’s stinger tears through his skin.
He curses and leaps backwards, landing on the wood floor face-down. Groaning, Mike stands up, head spinning, and walks to his door. He stumbles down the hallway and into his bathroom. Upon entering, he notices his bad condition in the bathroom mirror. His face is crimson like a tomato, and he has violet circles under his bloodshot eyes. There is a drop of drool running out of the left side of his moth, between his chapped, white lips.
“Damn,” he’s about to mutter, but the words “portal in” come out instead. Mike shakes his head, and remembers the beesting on his back. He turns around and cranes his neck to look at his reflection, but doesn’t see an insect or a stinger wedged in. Instead, he sees a tiny, black dot. It wasn’t a beesting at all, he’s never seen anything of the sort. It’s just a dot, black as midnight, smaller than the tip of his little finger.
Portal in.
5:21 A.M.
Next morning.
Tattoos just didn’t draw themselves.
That’s what Sam thinks as he looks at the palms of both of his aching hands. It looks like he’s tattooed a small star into each of them. How did that happen? He’s freaking out now. What’s going on? His hands hurt even more now, and he has to leave the “closed” sign up again. Something’s obviously up, but Sam can’t quite tell what…
“Porta inferior,” Sam mutters, remembering more of the phrase he had been trying to recall the past day. That’s it.
He doesn’t care about the words. What he is worried about are the stars tattooed carefully into the palms of his hands and the aching all across his body…
7:24 A.M.
Julie wakes up naked with scarlet blood coating her hands and splashed across her arms and body, smelling of death.
“Oh my—oh my—porta inferiorum! Porta inferiorum!” she cries when the scene sinks into her slowly awakening mind.
She tries to wipe her hands on her white sheets, but the blood only smears across but doesn’t wash off. What’s happening?
She hisses in pain as she shifts her back. The aching has gotten much, much worse.
Where did all this blood come from? What does “porta inferiorum” mean? She racks her brain with the thoughts.
She stands up, noticing the bloody prints of bare feet all over her carpet.
Julie shrieks in fear.
7:25 A.M.
Mike is blind.
He wakes up and opens his eyes, but no sight comes through. He frantically feels around his bed, wondering whether he had just woken up in the middle of the night—that can’t be. It’s totally pitch-black. He’d never seen anything so dark before. He frantically rubs his eyes, the process of moving his right arm causing him to cry out in agony.
Had he not been completely blind, he would have noticed the text that blazed in black ink on the inside of his right arm: “AVE SATANAS. PORTA INFERIORUM.”
7:25 A.M.
Blood everywhere. Julie only screams more when she sees the blood streaked across the hallway walls and floor and ceiling. The stench of death is everywhere now.
It’s the tattoo it has to be the tattoo it can’t be anything else, Julie thinks. She staggers across the hallway and pushes open the door to her parents’ room. And promptly is sick.
The smell is ten times worse, but that’s not what makes Julie sick. It’s the headless goat hanging from a rope anchored to the ceiling by a rusty and blood-saturated hook. Its head lies across the room in a pool of blood.
“PORTA INFERIORUM! PORTA INFERIORUM!” is scrawled on all the walls in crimson blood, all in capitals and varying sizes. She looks down at her bloody hands. Her eyes widen and she screams.
7:33 A.M.
The man named Victor who had gotten a tattoo of a dark gray cross on his upper left arm the night before is sitting in a chair.
He stares in disbelief at the new symbol that has strangely appeared. It’s a red, malevolent face with goat’s horns and slits for pupils in its piercing lime green snake eyes. Even worse, “AVE SATANAS” is scrawled all over his arm in black text. How did the image of Satan end up where his perfectly religious tattoo had been?
The only logical explanation is that he’s dreaming, but Victor knows that’s not true. Something evil is going on. He tries to blurt out the Lord’s prayer but immediately spews out words in rapid-fire Latin, words he does not recognize. At the end of the block of speech, he screams “Porta inferiorum! Porta inferiorum!”
Victor tries to control his speech, but continues to scream the words over and over again.
7:33 A.M.
There’s a twelve-year-old girl named Megan in her room, instantly awoken by her father’s screaming of “porta inferiorum” downstairs. She joins in on the screaming when she sees the same words scrawled in black ink all over her arms and legs.
7:41 A.M.
Another twelve-year-old girl in another room, this one named Sarah, another house, wakes up about to complain because of her sunburned skin. But rather than complaints comes screams when she sees the words “porta inferiorum” written all over her arms.
7:41 A.M.
Downstairs.
Mr. and Mrs. “Sarah” are sleeping peacefully and quite normally in their air-conditioned Arizona home when they awaken to the young Sarah screaming upstairs.
Mr. Sarah is the first to awaken, and he joins in screaming when he awakens to his wife’s face. “Porta inferiorum” is written all over it.
7:50 A.M.
Mrs. Sarah wasn’t completely loyal to Mr. Sarah.
A certain Mr. Jones who had spent the entire previous night with her wakes up. At first he thinks he’s sunburned. With a glance at his arms, he realizes it’s not sunburn making his skin burn.
8:00 A.M.
“Ave satanas,” Julie laughs, looming over the bloody, decapitated body of Mike, “And porta inferiorum.”
She’s not really Julie, but something else.
Something entirely different, indeed.
It’s not Julie, but rather whatever the red, goat-horned face that has appeared on Julie’s back is.
The gates of hell are opened.
Adam is dead.
And all the Sams and the Megans and the Mr. Joneses and everyone else in this world would soon find out what It truly is.
