Special Place in Hell

The Dream

As I drifted off to sleep, my subconscious tried to figure out where I had seen those marks before and who could be so evil to kill children and what Tandy could be talking about. When I do this I picture myself swimming out into the middle of a lake and taking a deep breath as I slide below the surface. While under the water I become a mermaid and can easily breath and swim for as long as I need to explore my mind. This is where I came to the realization that the mind is like a body of water where your consciousness is the surface and when you dream it dives below, sometimes very far down where all of those memories you would like to forget are stored. They are waiting for the time when you visit them and they become needed and again rise to the surface with you. This is where I found the cave. The one where the symbols memory was stored. The entrance was almost covered over by rocks and weeds. I had to look hard to find it. I tentatively went in, afraid of what I would find. Obviously my mind didn’t want me to relive this memory. I was completely inside the cave now and before me unfolded a memory that I had long forgotten but at the time had scared me for weeks. I was four and I had begged Daddy to take me to the French Quarter for a ride on the streetcars and lunch at Lafeete’s Pirates Den. Daddy was reluctant to take me, but Mommy said she would go along and we would make a special day of it. We didn’t have many of those since Shaila had come. She was old enough now to be left with a babysitter for a few hours. So the three of us ventured out together. I couldn’t have been happier! The day was warm and wonderful and I thought I might never stop smiling. Then, as we were getting ready to go home a man appeared out of the shadows and grabbed my arm. He spoke of impending doom and sadness. I was so scared and Daddy snatched me up in his arms and we raced away. I cried all the way home and had nightmares for weeks following the incident. Every night Mommy would tell me everything would be okay and she was always with me. As I think about it, I wonder if she knew she was sick. It was six months later that Mommy had died. Every night she would smile down at me and tell me that she would always be in my heart and my memories so I would never be truly alone. The interesting thing about this memory is the tattoos the man had. He had been sitting outside the Voodoo Museum not doing anything until we came along. It was as if he was waiting for us. As I froze the memory on this man, I could see he wasn’t so scary after all. He was what appeared to be in his forties, mulatto coloring and had dreads. He wore old clothes, but they were clean so he wasn’t homeless. The scariest thing about him was the tattoos. They were all over him including his face. They seemed to be of a homemade nature because they weren’t polished like a professional would have done. They had that prison look to them, as if he had either been in prison or had them done at home using a needle and Indian Ink. As I rotated around him, I took note of each one. It seemed that they told a story. The ones on his arms were of a tragic scene that depicted a young girl drowning and a man desperately reaching for her. It appeared that when you put the arms together they would finally reach each other and the girl would be saved; however, the arms never went together. I wondered if this was a story from his life, if he had lost his daughter this way. I moved on to his face and neck. They were odd marks, like the ones each of the pictures in the file showed. I’ll have to research what each one means, but it appears that I found where I needed to start. It was a good thing I was meeting Tandy tomorrow. She would be able to tell me what they meant. I quickly looked at the rest of him to see if I missed anything and when I was confident I hadn’t, I swam out of the cave and back up to the surface. Once I broke the surface, I woke up. I immediately looked at Bells, who was snoring contently, slipped out of bed and went to my desk. I switched on the light and pulled out my sketchbook and began to draw. The next thing I knew, the sunlight was coming into my window and it was time to get up for the day. I didn’t realize it, but I had been drawing the tattoos for three hours. I had to get them just right because so many were so close to others that the meaning could be completely different if I got them wrong.

Once I was done drawing, I fed Bella and made a phone call to Bill. I asked him if I could get a copy of the pictures from the markings for a meeting I had later that day. He agreed to email me the markings and told me to be careful. I found that odd since yesterday was my first day and we had just met. I decided it was just his age and nature. I was young and he was older and more jaded than many. He must feel a certain obligation to say things such as this. I made a mental note to ask him about it at a later time. This would come back to bite me in the ass later on because when I finally did get around to asking him, I was shocked.