“There’s wounds and blood and scars and pus, but she’s still beautiful—to me at least.”
They are the first words he speaks to me, the first words he’s spoken to anyone since we’ve arrested the son of a bitch. The man sitting in front of me, chained up, wrists-bound, fits the bill almost to the tee. Dirt smears his face, skin clings to bone, and desperation oozes from his eyes.
But there’s something about the way he looks at me. He reminds me of a mangy stray, kicked around a little too much by the neighborhood kids. The look’s pleading. The look’s begging.
He doesn’t think he’s killed her, that I believe.
“You’ve decided to talk,” I say to him, fingering a candy bar with my right hand. I know he’s hungry. And I know he has a sweet tooth.
He laughs. Those pearly yellows match the lights flickering above our heads.
“She was out of this world, detective. Finest girl you’d ever lay your eyes on.” His eyes shift to the clock, to the one-way mirror, then back to me. His voice goes low. “I gotta see her again. Please”
I lean back in my chair. “That’s going to be a little difficult, Joseph.” The smarter ones tend to narrow their eyes when I address them by name. This one does not. “Considering the state that her body’s in.”
His fists clench. “If you guys have done anything to her, I swear I will—”
“Woah there, slow your roll. We haven’t done anything. As for you…you were the last one seen with her. And you were the one we found with her body, face beaten in.”
It was a mild understatement. Calling her face just “beaten in” was like calling a drug overdose having a little too much fun.
No, her face was fucked beyond all recognition.
He laughs again, almost chitters this time, and he sends spit flying in my face.
“You wanna know why I decided to talk to you?” Joseph Jones leans forward as far as he can, and now those wild, desperate eyes are right in my face. “You understand me, officer. I can see it in your eyes, in your talk, in the way you carry yourself. You’re just like me.”
“Now hold on—”
“Have you ever loved, Detective—” he glances at my nameplate—“Davis?”
I look at him.
“Just as I suspected. You and me, we’re cut from the same raggedy cloth. Never got enough attention with the ladies in high school, huh?”
“Watch it.”
“Maybe that’s why you became a cop. Maybe you thought they’d think you were oh, so manly, or maybe you just wanted to bust the parties you were never invited to as a kid.”
I can feel the chocolate bar squelch in my hands. It’s hot in here, hot enough to make even me sweat, but this guy, our perp, he doesn’t seem bothered by it. In fact, he seems to relish it, like he can sense my discomfort the same way a dog senses fear.
“But it’s okay detective, I’m much the same.” A smile crawls up his face. “Until recently, that is. Until I met her.” He sits back now, seemingly satisfied with his little speech. His little mind game. He thinks he’s telling the truth. And that makes him just that much more unpredictable.
“This her you’re talking about, do you mean Laura Jones?” Laura’s his wife. The woman we think he’s killed.
“That ugly bitch?” His eyes seem to bulge from their sockets. “I only wedded her cuz’ I knocked her up. Funny thing is, she miscarried a week after the wedding bells rang.”
His wife had been missing for weeks. It was her brother that’d reported it. They were supposed to go out for lunch, to catch up, but she’d never shown. Apparently Laura and Joseph had been having problems for a while now. According to her brother, Laura complained that Joseph had grown more distant than usual. And in hushed tones he’d said he’d suspected Joseph had grown more violent as well.
“A lil’ lady on the side, that it?”
“She wasn’t just some lady on the side,” he scoffs. “She was beautiful. Perfect. Even amidst that fleshy face, I could still see the true her. And she could see the true me.” Joseph closed his eyes, a blissful smile creeping up across his face.
So the man was into big girls, nothing wrong with that.
“What was her name?”
Joseph looks back at me, then at the clock. Then his eyes narrow. “Ain’t I supposed to get some kind of phone call?”
“Oh yes,” I say. “All you, buddy, just tell me the numbers you want and I’ll punch them into the cell personally.”
He stares me down.
“Or if you don’t know off the top of your head, we could always wait until after this meeting and get you a phonebook?”
“Bullshit,” he mutters.
I’m thankful he hasn’t asked for a lawyer yet. The phone call, we could play off, but a lawyer? A lawyer might throw off the whole investigation.
“So now tell me about your lady love.”
Joseph cracks a knuckle. “I called her Sweets.”
“Then that’s not her real name?”
“Sweets didn’t have no real name. Or if she did, she ain’t remember it. But it don’t matter, Sweets still the love of my life.”
“And is she the one who made you kill your wife?”
He rolls his eyes. “This ain’t about my wife.
I pause. I’d never admit it, but just then something in his eyes scared, no, terrified me. I’ve interviewed my fair share of criminals, bastards, scum. I’ve seen the ones that like them young. I’ve seen the looks they give,—innocence, outrage, I could never! But this look, I’ve only ever seen it once before.
We called him the Marionette.
A few girls go missing, all of them at around the same time, but none of them friends. The only similarity we see is they’re all middle schoolers. And they all have the same family counselor.
We get a warrant to search his house and we bust down his door. He’s a fat motherfucker, and he tries his very best to stop us from getting down into the basement.
But there’s a smell. I’ll never forget the fucking smell that’s emanating from the basement door. It smells sweet, like candied peaches, like the ones from my childhood, but they’re…they’re violated somehow. They’re candied peaches bobbing in piss and sweat and shit and all left out to fester in the sun. Even if he wasn’t acting so fucking suspicious that smell would’ve given him right away.
The girls are down there, alright, but they’re no longer girls anymore. No more organs and no more eyes. Their faces have buttons carefully threaded through the sockets and their bodies are stuffed with cotton. Stitches run across the arms. They’re all hanging. Hanging like puppets from boards on the basement ceiling.
The man was sick—I mean, he kept the eyes suspended in mason jars, for fuck’s sake—but interviewing him, I could see so much love in his eyes. Sure, it was sick, deranged love, but it was love in the purest form I’d ever seen.
With grease soaking through his shirt the Marionette tells me about how he loved these girls. About how he loved them and wanted to preserve them in all their innocence and beauty before this terrible world could get to them first.
The man sitting in front of me, Joseph Jones, has that same purest love behind his eyes. Sickly sweet love that reminds me of candied peaches and piss.
“And where’d you meet…Sweets?” I try my best not to shudder.
“In the forest,” he says. And I believe he’s talking about the same forest we found the body of Laura Jones in, buried and stuck under dirt and leaves.
I scoot in real close to him. I think I know what happened. “I’ll make you a deal, Joseph. You tell me what happened, and I’ll let you see your Sweets one last time.”
His ears perk up.
“Deal.”
*
I wouldn’t expect for you to understand, officer, but talking about a loved one is a tender, fragile affair. Any interruptions and I’ll stop. Any interruptions and you get zip, nada, you hear me?
Good.
I had gotten in a fight with Laura that afternoon. About what, I don’t remember. Those silly, small, inconsequential things seem so puny now in the face of what’d happened next.
Behind the house we have these sprawling woods, nothing like the ones you see in the suburbs. These woods are unmarked by markers and trails, any path you want to make you gotta blaze yourself.
Anyway, it’s a place I go when I’m angry and I’m afraid I might lose my temper. So I was walking through this forest, and it’s silent. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, but in retrospect, that silence seemed so unnatural. It was like the birds and the bugs and the squirrels had quieted for a performance. A daytime sonata. And a performance they got.
It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard in my life. A girl’s windpipes pierced through the forest outta nowhere, breaking me outta my thoughts and entrancing me like some kinda siren. She sang in a language I’d never heard before, but it wasn’t so much the words she was singin’ that enamored me, no, the words weren’t important. It was her melody. Such beauty I never knew could come from a human. A mesh of frequencies and pitches and highs and lows—I felt like I was being hypnotized. I felt like one of them flies attracted to a bug light. Or maybe a venus flytrap. You know those flytraps secrete some kinda sweetest aroma to attract them bugs?
How’s that relevant, you ask? I think I recall someone agreeing that there’d be no interruptions.
So there I was, drawn to her stunning song like a fly to Venus, but when I got close, she stopped, and I damn near started crying right then and there. I looked all around me, trying to trace myself to the source of the music, when all of a sudden, I hear that same beautiful voice, except this time I can understand what it’s saying.
“Relationship troubles?” She said to me, and I spun around, eyes darting all across the forest. “Down here, handsome.” The sound came from somewhere below, and I almost passed out when I saw her.
I didn’t never believe in love at first sight, you hear. I thought it was some kinda hack-jobbed way of you saying you found a girl you’d really like to fuck. But it was love at first sight, and I can prove it.
You remember what I said she said earlier? How she asked me about my relationship troubles? Maybe you could see it on my face when I first entered the forest, but by the time I heard her singing, Laura had slipped completely outta my mind. So how then did she know?
Don’t answer that, detective. I’ll answer it for you.
You heard of soulmates? They’re people whose souls are linked, people who were always meant to be together. I think when she saw me she didn’t even have to talk to me to know who I was. You ever so close to someone you almost know what they thinking without them even having to say anything? That’s what happened, detective. She’d just laid her eyes on me but already it was like we’d known each other for years.
She was my soulmate, and a stunning one at that. She had this supple, soft, porcelain quality skin and this wide, lopsided mouth that fit her face just right. She had this strange, crooked little smile that made her lips go thin when she used it. Her eyes, deep ivy green. Damn near hypnotized me.
Oh, and she was completely naked.
But, don’t worry, I covered my eyes. I’m a gentleman, you know?
“Darling, what are you doing out here all exposed like that?” I asked her. And then she giggled. She had this incredible giggle, a type of laugh that made you crave more and more of it. It was a laugh that made you hope you were some kind of damn comedian, because you never wanted it to stop.
“You can uncover your eyes, you know? I’m used to it.”
And I know I said I’m a gentleman, but I’m not some kinda monk. So I opened my eyes and I looked at her, and I almost wanted to scream. You ever seen one of those pictures made up of a bunch of smaller pictures? At first glance, you see the whole thing, the wide view, but then you look closer and you see all the finer details. It was kind of like that, and I don’t know how I missed something so blatantly obvious the first time I saw her, but she was covered in cuts.
Someone had gone to town on her poor, beautiful face and her poor, beautiful body. There were knife wounds and deep gashes cutting slits across her cheeks and across her chest. Her face looked like some kind of depraved tic-tac-toe board, the gashes were fresh and bloody and squares of flesh between the cuts starting to swell and puff up.
“Who did this to you, miss?” I nearly screamed. I wanted to kill the son of a bitch.
“Quiet down,” she said. “He might still be here.”
“He better hope he ain’t!” I wanted to look across the forest for him, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her face. You know when you see an accident and it’s so brutal you just can’t turn away? This was like that times ten. Her face was dazzling all on its own, but those gashes…Those gashes made her damn near impossible to look away from.
“I know you can handle him, you big, strong man, but I don’t wanna see him! I don’t wanna see him ever again!”
“Lady, you know I can take care of that for you. I’d do it for you.” And it was true. I’d do anything for her.
“No! Don’t leave me alone! I can’t be alone out here!”
There was hate and rage coursing through my blood but I couldn’t leave her. I had to put her needs above my own.
“Then at least let me get you to a hospital,” I tried.
“No, I’m terribly afraid of needles. I’m okay, trust me. I just want you to sit here and have a little talk.”
“If we don’t get you there soon, those wounds might leave scars—”
“So you don’t think I’m pretty?”
Those words got my blood boiling. Of course I thought she was pretty! How could I not? How could anyone not? In a way, those gashes brought out her beauty. I couldn’t look away.
“You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever had the privilege to lay my eyes on,” I said to her. And then I heard her giggle. That beautiful, mesmeric giggle.
“Aw, you’re gonna make me blush.”
The hospital could wait, I supposed. I could get to know this little lady a little longer.
“Your name?” I blurted out.
She hesitated. “My name? It’s, let’s see, why don’t you call me Sweets?”
“Sweets,” I said. “That man is no good for you, you need someone who’ll treat you right.” Sweets eyed me up and down, those emerald eyes scanning my body, and she gave me her tight, closed-mouth smile. The lips seemed to stretch on horizontally to the outskirts of her cheeks instead of vertically up to her eyes.
“I think I’ve found a contender,” she said. And no other words have ever made me happier.
*
There’s a knock on the door. Officer Dodgeson sticks his head in the room.
“Detective Davis? Could we have a word outside?”
I look over to Joseph, his eyes are far away. He waves a hand at me, and I step out the room.
“This better be fucking important,” I growl at the officer.
“It is, sir, trust me. But you’re not gonna like it.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Well then, get on with it.”
“There was, um, a slight issue with the body we found. The thing is, it’s—ah—it’s disappeared.”
“It’s disappeared?” I roar at him. “How could you dumbasses let it disappear? Police tape, four officers on guard, three officers on call, how the fuck could someone have stolen the body?”
“I—uh—I don’t know, sir.”
“Well I need some kind of fucking answer or your ass is on the line!”
He swallowed. “Sir, Hodges had his eyes on the body and the three others were scouting the perimeter. Hodges said he thought he’d heard some sort of scuffle to the left of himself and he turned to look, but when he turned back, the body was gone.”
“So you’re telling me we lost a whole body in just under a couple of seconds?”
“That is, uh, what they tell me, sir.”
“Well how the fuck does that happen?”
Dodgeson looks around the room but I stare him down, pinning his eyes with my glare. “Maybe it…fell into the earth? Like a sinkhole?”
“A sinkhole?” I take a step closer to him. “Are you fucking kidding me? Find that body.” He stands there dumbly and looks at me a moment longer, as if he’s waiting for me to say something. “Dismissed.”
I walk back into the room, Joseph’s smirking at me.
“What’re you smiling at?”
He leans back in his chair. “You weren’t exactly using your indoor voice out there, sir.”
“Just get on with the story.”
“That’s not my wife you found, you know. The girl with the beaten in face. That’s Sweets, and she’s not dead.”
“Nice try,” I grumble. If I get this confession outta him I’m gonna honor my promise. I’m gonna show him the body of “Sweets” and he’s gonna be forced to see that it is his wife. That “Sweets” was just some kind of fucked up delusion he made to live with himself.
We found the pipe in his cellar and the bloody rock next to her body. All we need to get this conviction iron-clad is some kind of confession.
“I can tell you don’t believe me, officer. But I want you to think, to really think, are you sure that figure belongs to Laura? Laura was an awfully skinny thing, no meat on her frame. That girl who’s missing her face? She had an incredible set of tits. Maybe if you try hard you can remember it. Or maybe, a sick and lonely man like you, that’s the first thing you noticed when you saw that body. Her tits.”
“Just get on with the story.”
*
Within two days of meeting her I told her I loved her. And she said it back to me. I was ecstatic. I ain’t even care that she refused to leave her place in the woods.
“Do you think I’m beautiful?” She asked the same day we professed our love.
“Of course, darling.”
“More beautiful than Venus?”
“That little planet? Of course I think you’re more beautiful than some damn space rock.”
She laughed. A gorgeous, sticky laugh. “No, silly, the roman goddess. Venus, goddess of beauty, lust, sex, fertility.”
I looked at her. I looked at her cuts and scars and bruises and tic-tac-toe face. “Hell, I think you could even be Venus.”
“I love you so, so much, baby. You don’t know how much that means to me.” Then she got this strange, wary look in her eyes. “You really do love me, don’t you?”
“I do, you know I do.”
“Then I’m going to ask you to do something for me. And if you love me, you’ll do it.”
“Anything.” I said it without hesitation.
To our left, I heard a sort of shifting. There was a rock sliding slowly, slowly towards us.
“I need you to bash my face in.”
“Darling!” I yelled. “I would never!”
“Why not?” She pouted. “You don’t think I’d look beautiful?”
“No! It’s not that! You’d look beautiful either way, but I’d kill you. You know that right?”
And then there was that elusive giggle. “Baby, you know I can’t die.”
Anyone else and I’d have thought it was a joke. But there was something in her eyes. Playful, piercing, knowing. A look that said she was older beyond her years, that she wasn’t who she said she was and that she was in on some cruel, cosmic joke that none of the rest of us had yet gotten privy to.
That along with the fact that she’d been in these woods for two days straight, bleeding profusely out of her face and with nothing to eat, I knew this girl wasn’t just a girl.
“The earth will take care of me, baby.”
I looked over at the rock.
“Pick it up, baby. Pick it up and bash my beautiful face in. Show the world my true beauty, the gunk on the inside.” Her voice slithered into my ear like a seductress. It pushed my hands towards the stone. It was big. I needed both hands to pick it up.
“C’mon baby. Do it.”
My hands hovered over her face and my arms trembled under its weight. The whole time her green emerald eyes stayed locked onto mine.
“Do it if you love me.”
I brought my hands down with all my strength. I felt something crack under its weight and when I looked down I saw that she no longer had a nose.
She was beautiful.
I brought it down again and again and again, carried by the rhythm and beat of rock against scalp. I was Michaelangelo, sculpting perfection out of a slab of boney flesh. Everytime I glanced at her face it looked like it was getting closer and closer to her true form.
Crunch
Her forehead caved in.
Crunch
Her cheekbone split
Crunch
Shards of bone flew from every direction.
Crunch
She looked like a pulp. A bloody and beautiful pulp. There was a crater where her face should’ve been, and there were no distinguishable eyes, mouth, or nose. Blood leapt up in thin squirts and I thought I could see her brain, thumping and beating and pounding as it leaked out blood.
I stood there, entranced by her beauty. This was the real her. She was no longer bound by her superficial features. No more high cheekbones, pretty eyes, wide smile—now it was only raw beauty, beauty in its purest form.
We don’t appreciate true beauty in our society anymore. Men look at a girl, and they see some fucked-up, skewed form of pretty. They see makeup and tits, they see a slab of meat and a vagina. From the moment we’re born, the media tells us what beauty should be.
White girl, long legs, blonde hair, big tits. Movies, books, television, the hero always gets the girl, and the girl’s always some blonde bitch. That’s the American Dream right there.
But we don’t appreciate real beauty, true beauty. If you can look at the ugliest girl in the world and still see her for who she is, I applaud you. But most of us can’t.
I couldn’t. But then I met Sweets. And Sweets gave me the gift of real love and real, unadulterated beauty. She didn’t need that pretty face to be beautiful.
“Baby,” she rasped, purplish tongue lolling out from a hole where her jaw should’ve been. “Love…love.”
I understood what she meant. I don’t mean to get too obscene for you, detective, but right then and there, I looked at that crushed face and her juicy, red meat and her exposed brain—and I got hard. So fucking hard I felt like my pants were about to burst. I smelled her blood and her carrion and her fleshy face and I just couldn’t control myself.
I undressed as quickly as I could, I brushed the leaves off her body, I took her gagging tongue into my mouth, and we made love.
*
“We did it multiple times, detective. Over and over throughout the week. I gotta say, I’m glad it wasn’t happening when you guys found me. That would’ve been just a tad embarrassing.”
What the fuck was wrong with him? I gulp down my fear. Men like him could smell fear. They lived, no, thrived on it.
“You’re sick, you know?”
He ignores me.
“I had a feeling that she wasn’t human, detective. But I didn’t know for sure until I’d finally seen her naked. I didn’t notice the first time, or the second, no, I was too busy getting down to business, but the next time I saw her, I saw it. There were roots wrapping across her legs, officer. And it wasn’t like they’d just grown around her, no, they were a part of her. They wrapped and clung and thumped like blood vessels. They were encased in her flesh and they connected her to the earth, officer. She was being fed and kept alive by these roots, by the forest. Maybe she was the forest.”
For some reason, I’m starting to believe him. Not about Sweets but about the roots. There seemed to be something sticking out from underneath Laura’s skin. We had to keep her body the way we found it for the time being, but I made sure to make a note for the coroner. Could the earth have started to grow into her?
But that’s not how it works. I flunked bio and I still know that’s not how it works. Besides, they didn’t look at all like the way Joseph described them, either. From his view, these were huge, throbbing roots, but all I saw were thin protrusions.
“A picture made of pictures, Detective Davis.” It’s almost as if he can read my mind. “Maybe you didn’t see them because she didn’t show you.”
I’m done with this conversation. I got his confession. Not about the bloody pipe, but I have Joseph telling me he hit her over the head with the stone, and repeatedly, and that’s enough for me.
I look at the mirror. “That’s a wrap. Take him away.”
An officer walks through the door and unchains Joseph from the table.
“I can get you that phonebook now, if you want.”
He smiles at me. “That won’t be necessary, detective, but let’s talk soon. Real soon. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
The officer holding Joseph looks at me uncertainly. I give him a nod. He takes Joseph away and I lean back in my chair, rubbing my temples.
It’s over, it’s got to be. But if that’s the case then why do I feel so fucking scared? Why does something feel off?
And how did that body just up and disappear?