We found the Ink God propped up with a pint of Guinness at the end of the bar, the drawstrings of his hoodie pulled tight around his face. His attempts at concealment only served to accentuate the decorative blemishes beetling across his nose and chin and forehead. I sensed Esther stiffen as we approached him, her breath quickening with every step. In the dim light of the pub he resembled a statue, an icon carved from mottled marble and obsidian; or, perhaps, a messenger from ancient prophecy, pausing for refreshment in some celestial transit from Heaven to Earth.
We introduced ourselves. He displayed no interest when we told him we were researchers from a Faith Fellowship, here to test the efficacy of his claims for ourselves. I don’t think even we believed that was the real reason for our visit. He told us that yes, he could predict our futures, or disclose our life’s purpose—for a price, naturally.
Esther, recovering her poise admirably, had that dubious look on her face I knew so well. She turned to me and said, “Can’t say I’m too impressed, Paul.” This was her usual tactic. Even now she was face to face with him she couldn’t break the habit. If the Ink God wanted to make an impression on her he’d have to work for it. I hoped he understood that.
“You will be,” was all he said.
Esther looked him up and down. “Let’s see you better then.”
He was only too happy to oblige. He beckoned us to follow him. I caught the barman watching us in the mirror as we left, the leer on his face stretching into a grimace as he turned away. I wondered how many more had been here before us, hearing the same tales, the same patter.
The Ink God led us out to the beer garden, divesting himself of his outer garments as he went. It was one of those typical early-winter northern Kent nights—chilly, damp, fundamentally windswept. He halted beneath the glare of a sodium lamp and kicked his trainers off. With studied insouciance he began to unbutton the shirt he wore beneath his hoodie. His facial markings had seemed like crude tattoos in the shadows of the bar. Now we could see them for what they were, his true nature revealed in pitiless, naked clarity.
He slipped the shirt off and posed before us, his expression both proud and distrustful. Between sporadic pale outbreaks of skin his face and body were coated in a dark, tightly packed covering of images, a gallery of the insane. You couldn’t have said what they represented. They weren’t portraits, or likenesses of anything on this Earth. Around his right nipple was a helical roil of interlocking lines, spiraling upwards and over his shoulder with a grandiose flourish. On his thighs, cauldrons erupted with shimmering flames. Along his calves, evenly spaced blocks of the deepest black drew the gaze towards them, until you realized you’d been staring for minutes and still not dissected their significance.
None of which sounds as impressive as the reality. But some things can’t be explained. Not in words.
“Religious, yeah?” the Ink God said. “Half the ones I get are. It’s like you all want proof of something. So where does that leave faith then, eh?” He barked out a laugh.
“When did they finish growing?” The air seemed to suck out from my lungs as I spoke, absorbed into the substance of his skin.
“Still going, mate. Just slower than when I was a kid. Started slackening off when I was about sixteen. Weird age for everyone, right?”
“You’re what, twenty-six?”
Even through the thickets of images I could sense the jeering smirk. “You know how old I am. You’ve looked it all up on the internet or wherever. Wifey here knows too.” He jabbed a thumb at Esther. “Anyway. Your fate, yeah?”
We’d studied all the pictures we could find, of course. Esther knew his age all too well; she was born on the same day. The Day of Stigmata, they’d called it. A worldwide outbreak of birth defects that ended almost as soon as it began, there had never been a satisfactory explanation for the events that anyone could agree on. She’d spent her entire life believing the wrong person had received the sacrosanct gift. All she had for her troubles was a case of eczema that ebbed and flowed with the change of the seasons. Others suffered from conditions that developed into vitiligo, rosacea, psoriasis, lupus…A poor brood indeed, as Esther’s mother enjoyed telling her.
But only the Ink God had the tattoos. When he was born his skin resembled leaves, or ferns. In all the panic of that day he hardly stood out. But by the time his parents were allowed to take him home the markings had begun to transform. No one saw it happen, as such. But they slowly took on new forms, configurations that some called aspects of the divine, and others a manifestation of evil.
The papers had a field day when they got wind of it. His birth name soon forgotten, he became the Ink God to all and sundry. By school age he was shedding his skin every few months, a permanent renewal of monochrome pigmentations that baffled the experts and lured the obsessed. The dermatologists were all over him. But no one ever found anything significant in the subdermal layers, any hidden tricks or cosmic deceptions. His parents would sell access to him with exaggerated claims of the mysterious powers you might receive merely from being in his presence. I guess that was one particular habit he’d never discarded.
A muffled burst of laughter boomed out from the pub. The Ink God was waiting. “What can you tell me?” Esther asked him. I could see her struggling with what she was seeing. There was something almost purposeful about the way the pictures flowed into each other. It was as if their previous iterations, the ones we’d only seen photos of, were a series of experiments, discarded when a superior pattern burst out from within.
The Ink God rubbed his fingers together. Reluctantly, I pulled a crisp fifty out of my wallet and pressed it into his palm. He waited. Another. Then another.
“Good.” He pulled down his underwear and turned around. A tableau of eye-like shapes on the back of his neck stared at me, eternally unblinking. “Look there. No, down.” Esther leaned in towards his buttocks. They were as thickly illustrated as the rest of him. “See the pointed part?”
Esther frowned. I gestured towards a section of his right buttock. “There? Beneath the…tree, is that?”
“If you like.” The Ink God curled his lip at me over his shoulder and turned his attention back to Esther. “Touch it.”
“I…” She looked to me for support. I couldn’t give her any. The sight of him was making me nauseous. Now we were here I was beginning to wish we’d stayed away.
“No? Your choice. You’ve paid for it, missy.” He made as if to re-clothe himself. Esther reached out a tentative finger and touched it lightly to his skin. “Firmer,” the Ink God said. “That’s what they tell me. That way you can receive the messages better.”
I snorted, despite my best efforts to suppress the outburst. It was Esther who glared at me this time. She pressed her fingers onto the spot he’d indicated. The tattoo there reminded me of a shoal of fish, drifting through a cosmic brine. As the flesh indented, its aspect changed. Now it was a vortex, a whirlpool of blackened worms sucking Esther’s fingernails out of her body and into its maw.
“Now somewhere else. Wherever you like.” He reached behind him and patted her hand. She laid her palm onto a spot midway along his spine. The patterns, at first a mandala-like mesh of reticulated lines, shifted as she applied more pressure, scrolling through form after form in a manic, restless sequence of impressionistic canvases. She jerked her hand away and hissed in air through her teeth. Next, she touched a point along his flank. He half-squirmed when her fingertips made contact, his rippling flesh causing the motifs to undulate like palm fronds in a gentle breeze.
In jerky movements Esther probed other locations—his ankle, his collarbone, along his hamstrings. The markings altered in tandem, their messages—if that’s what they were—increasingly obscure. What my mind had interpreted as familiar now appeared as representations of hidden realities, covert truths I had no permission to see. An uneasiness itched at the edges of my mind. The feeling persisted even after she pulled her hand away at last. It was like he’d taken something from her, some crux of her essence she’d never get back.
Esther just stood there, slack-jawed. The Ink God took hold of her hand and guided it round to his crotch. “So how about here?”
That snapped her out of it. She snatched her hand away and made as if to slap him. He just laughed. I took a step towards him. He rummaged around in the pile of clothing at his feet and emerged with a short-bladed knife.
“Fine, fine.” I held my hands up in mock surrender.
He brandished the weapon at me anyway. “Tell you what, chief,” he said. I was so close to him I could smell the beer on his breath. The images covering his cheeks effloresced, a series of crystal pillars emerging from a desert floor, tubular polyps crowned with fronds of precious metals. “You want me to, I can copy them out on you.”
I said nothing. Esther, behind us, let out a quiet sob. The Ink God put the blade away and dressed himself in silence. “Mate,” he said when he was re-clothed, “you know what the last bloke that came here reckoned?”
“Should I care?”
“Smart-arse, is it?” He grinned, his teeth salt-white within the gallery of his face. “He said I was put here on this planet to deliver a message to mankind. Funny, innit? Never seen the guy before and he says that to me. So I asked him what the message might be, just for a laugh. You know what he said?”
“What?” Esther’s voice was tight, coiled. She scratched absentmindedly at herself. I could see red horizontal lines on her neck where the skin had cracked.
“He said, my darling, that I wouldn’t understand it even if I were told. Only he had decoded it all. He had some website or other with it all on.”
“I’ve seen it, I think,” I said. “Or others like it. They’re all as nonsensical as each other.”
“Maybe so. Some guy on TV was talking about me, says you can read into it what you want. He called me a faith healer. Like I’m some con artist or whatever. Thing is, though…” He leaned forward and tapped me on the chest. “Thing is, I couldn’t give a flying one what people say. No one’s ever going to see something they don’t want to. Like you, yeah?” He cupped Esther’s chin with scabby fingers. “Bet you saw God, right? Or some vision of Jesus.”
Esther batted his hand away in an unconvincing gesture. “I couldn’t put it into words,” she said in a small voice. “I wouldn’t want to.”
“See?” It was the Ink God’s turn to snort. “You lot keep on kidding yourselves, I’ll keep on taking the cash. Seems like a fair exchange, yeah?”
He turned and stalked back into the pub without a backward glance. The last I saw of him was the cluster of eyes that strafed the back of his neck quivering in the emergency light of the fire exit. I envisioned them momentarily as eggs, now fertilized with some aspect of Esther’s material being.
We left in silence. Back in the car park Esther sat behind the wheel without starting the ignition, picking at the wounds on her neck as if she were trying to uncover some cipher hidden beneath them. I placed a hand onto her elbow. She shrugged me away and said, “Do you remember what you told me the first day we met? You said that a faith that can’t be challenged is like a cathedral carved from ice. At the first sign of any true illumination it just melts away.”
“Well, I was a barrel of laughs back then.” She didn’t reply. Light raindrops spattered onto the windscreen. “So maybe we are better off fooling ourselves. Shall we go?”
“Don’t you see, Paul?” She turned away, her eyes fixed on the wooden gables of the pub. “I challenged my faith, didn’t I? And I found emptiness. All tonight proves is that God has nothing to tell us after all.”
“I told you not to go and see him.”
“I had to know.” Her voice trembled. “You believe in things you can’t see. Miracles. I can never do that again.”
Her voice broke on the last syllable. She made as if to turn the key. Instead, a low groan escaped her lips. Without a word she opened the door and got out. Hunched against the wind, she crunched across the gravel and disappeared inside. I didn’t follow.
The rain fell harder for a while. A faint swell of music drifted out from the pub, something Irish. Drunken voices sang along. Twenty minutes later she reappeared, the Ink God in tow. He steered her towards a battered Vauxhall Corsa and ushered her into the passenger seat. Before he opened the driver’s door he took a furtive look around. His eyes alighted on where I was sat, twin beams glittering in the half-light spilling through the pub windows.
When he started the engine only one headlight was working. He almost sideswiped me when he steered his car past, driving far too fast for the confined space. Esther stared straight ahead, not even glancing my way as he screeched out onto the road. The engine noise faded into the rain. Not a sound came from the pub now.
I waited for an hour, but they didn’t return. On the lonely journey back to London I kept the radio turned down low on a call-in station, the murmur of voices my only companion. Within the halos of light emanating from the headlamps of my fellow drivers I saw visions; unresolved dioramas hinting at writhing demons, sturdy sea-vessels, blasted landscapes peopled by stumbling, despairing figures.
The next day I tried to call her, but the number came up as dead. I kept her in my contacts list anyway. Eventually I couldn’t stand seeing her name there any longer and deleted the entry. The shelves of religious tomes she had acquired over the years of our marriage moldered on our shelves, until I threw them out too.
I did my best to keep myself from seeking out information about the Ink God, but there were sites and sites dedicated to unravelling his mysteries, and weakness would get the better of me. Photographic evidence didn’t do him justice, though. The pictures I’d see when I closed my eyes were enough to trigger memories of that night—the speckles of rain on the windscreen, the stale beer stench, the muffled sounds of celebration from the pub. And overlaid on top, the squirming, reconstituting horde of pictograms, the veil lifted to reveal a desperate, terrible reality that followed my gaze wherever I turned.
I never did find out what Esther experienced when she placed her hands onto him. I didn’t want to know, in truth. After she moved in with him a semi-cult grew up around them—her doing, no doubt. Adepts would lacerate themselves in clumsy imitation, desperately clawing through the outer layers of their skin in quasi-religious terror. From what I saw of them their tattoos were mere daubings, shallow pastiches that offended the eye with their crudity. In those static canvases you could see nothing but their own superficial natures, their callow ignorance. Esther must have held them in contempt, although she wouldn’t have admitted it even to herself. And soon enough they were gone again, flotsam drifting in his wake until all memory of them had evaporated.
It didn’t last. Esther moved on, as I’d known she would, her search for meaning insatiable, eternal. I heard, some months later, that the Ink God had suffered a breakdown, a catatonic withdrawal triggered by the dissolution of their fledgling relationship. His markings, from the day she left him forward, took on a grotesque cast, a vile parody of beauty that had the power to induce acute anxiety in anyone who laid eyes on them—himself included. He was last heard of residing in a psychiatric clinic in the West Country, his skin a turmoil of scar tissue where he’d attempted to scrape the symbols away, his muteness conclusive, irrevocable.
| Matt Thompson is an experimental musician and writer of strange fictions. In addition to previous appearances at Kaleidotrope, his work has been published at Interzone, Black Static, PseudoPod, Best of British SF anthology series and many more worthy venues. You can find him online at matt-thompson.com. |  |