33 - Ink Poisoning

"She survived," Latoya said, as she uncoiled herself from her brother, and rose to pick up another candle. "Though not unscathed. This is a story I like to call...

INK POISONING

Her head ached. The doctor had assured her that was normal. Warned her to be careful, since her skull wasn't as structurally sound as before. Benji had nodded, temples pounding, counting the minutes until she could take another pill.

The pills helped with the pain. Not with the visions. Every time she closed her eyes, the memories overwhelmed her, so vivid as if they had just happened. The hot, oppressive heat of his balls pressed against her eyes. The Inquisitors asking their stupid questions, with hot pokers and knives, unable to understand the answers screamed from cracked and bleeding lips.

Dagon's Hollow looked different now. Benji flinched as she saw a woman in a black dress and black veil walk down the street, a sight that was both familiar and normally comforting. The Lady of the House out on her business. She shivered as a dog carried something in its mouth across the street, heading from the direction of one cemetery to another.

There were some people in the town who just looked wrong. Arms too long. Skin too tight on their faces. In her mind, fantasies rolled, of things that went around that looked human but really weren't.

The library book was overdue. Benji tried to read the crabbed, faded script. It spoke of the Black Man. A Goddess. The letters swam in her vision, and the insistent throb of her skull and the marred symbol on it was painful in its insistency.

Over the weeks and months, the symptoms grew worse. There was a sense of terrible pressure, slowly building. The visions grew more intense, especially when she slept. In her dreams, Benji found herself recast in the roles of women of past ages. Captured in a raid, strips of reindeer hide tying her to stakes, a man wearing antlers held a flint dagger against her throat as he roughly entered her. Benji could feel every stroke, every thrust. The bite of the sharp stone at it broke the skin. The young woman who knelt before her to catch the blood in a shallow wooden bowl.

Then she would wake up, swallow a pill, and go through another day of pain.

The shrine to the goddess in her room was torn down, piece by piece. In its place were drawings from the diary. The symbols, the words. When she could focus for a while, Benji would search the internet, hunt through the library, looking for similar symbols to those in the book, and in her dreams.

She learned more of witchcraft in those months than in the years before. Her study became an obsession. The visions and dreams more intense. There were days she would wake up, body convulsing, her skull feeling like it was two sizes too small, sheets drenched. Sexual excitement became almost constant. Dark, morbid sexual rites haunted her waking and dreaming. She kept a vibrator buzzing inside of her during work, the control taped to her leg.

Every day, she shaved her head, staring at the sigil that haunted her waking and sleeping. At the veins around it, which seemed to be getting darker, beneath her pale skin. The way the puckered scar from the surgery looked so much like something else.

Benji had begun to see that symbol elsewhere. On a brick in the library. On a gravestone in the Eastside cemetery. Scrawled on a wall in the alley behind the theater.

It was summer, July, when Benji awoke to a pain too intense. She pressed her hands to her temples, rolling on her head, crying, bucking her hips. A rip tore in the skin, something thick and warm splashed over her face. The neighbors heard the scream, and could not say later whether it was a soul-searing expression of ultimate pain or pleasure.

The wellness check found her body on the bed. Bits and pieces of skull scattered about. A sticky, clear fluid covered the floor. The forensics lab would declare that the sample was either contaminated or mixed up with another. After all, why would amniotic fluid be dripping out of Benji's cranial cavity?

Her brain was never found. The thought was that perhaps a cat had gotten in and eaten it. There were some black hairs found on the floor around the body, but the police did not bother to sample these. The coroner's verdict was, ultimately, ink poisoning. The tattoo had been reinfected, the compromised skull had given away to some sudden blow, perhaps a fall.

Of course, the coroner never noted whether the **** that broke the skull came from the outside or the inside.

The patrol officer recognized the library stamp on the book by her bed. He returned it to the library, where it was returned to its place in the Eternal Collection. Where, perhaps, it remains to this day.

Latoya gave a thin-lipped smile. One finger toyed with the flame, as if inviting it to burn her. "And if you don't believe me, go to the tattoo artist's shop. They took a picture of Benji's head, after the symbol had been inked into her skin. It's on the wall."

Her hand smothered the candle. Latoya's face showed no grimace of pain.