Deathmark

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Where I Got the Crazy Idea for Deathmark and Other Tidbits

For this book, I can't tell you where or how I got the idea for the story because it would give too much of it away. Mario and I were walking in the woods, talking about all kinds of things, and I started talking about this idea. At first it was a short story. A few years later, I expanded it into this novel. (Sorry!)

Wholly Inadequate Descriptions of This Book

The One Sentence Pitch
Some people are born with a birthmark, but everyone has a deathmark, eventually.

Cover Blurb
16-year-old Michael and his mother have been running from the Shadow Woman for as long as Michael can remember. Every time they begin to settle in somewhere, the Shadow Woman shows up and people start to die. Now Michael and his mother are hiding out in Portland, Oregon, and he doesn't want to leave. He has made friends his own age, Bobbie and Jules. And then there's young Sam, who has a dirty yellow glow around his body that no one can see except Michael. He's seen this glow before: around the man who died in the alley outside their home in Phoenix and around Melissa, as a truck came barreling toward her. Michael had been able to save her, and she was convinced he was some kind of angel. Now people around him are beginning to die again, and he wonders if he's a mark of death for everything and everyone he loves.

Chapter One
If you think the world is a good and decent place, you haven’t been paying attention. Either that or you’re a moron.

And I’d know. About the world I mean. I’ve seen a lot of it. At least those cities served by that greying hound of hell called the bus line. Onward and downward. Mom usually in the seat next to me, snoring, sleeping off a drunk or the ’mares. Always on the lookout for a place to settle, to call home.

We’d been doing this for my whole sixteen years as far as I could remember. Me and Mom. We hardly ever stayed in a place for longer than a few months. Once we got settled, the Shadow Woman always showed up and then we went on the run again.

One year I got to stay in the same school for almost nine months. Ann Arbor, I think. They’ve got a university, right? And a Natural History Museum. I spent hours inside that museum, mostly staring at the skeleton of a T. Rex, wondering what it would be like to be that big, to be able to kick ass. I was a kid then. Ten maybe.

This last time, we were in Phoenix for six months. At least I want you to think it was Phoenix. Let’s get this straight right from the outset. I’m changing the names, places, and facts about everything. Well, almost everything. The truth as I know it will remain the same. So we were in Phoenix. We lived in this huge house that looked like it was out in the desert but it was right in the city. It had a long driveway with cacti and desert-looking shrubs on either side it. The driveway was brick. Melissa swore that one day when her parents weren’t home she was going to paint the driveway yellow. The house was so big I kept getting lost in it when we first moved in.

Melissa’s parents owned the house. Mom and I lived in the back in the maid’s quarters—because that’s what my mom was. Their maid. Or housekeeper. What’s the difference anyway? She cleaned up after them, answered the door, and sometimes cooked for them. It was a full-time job, believe you me. I don’t know how these three people—yep, three people in that big old house—ever got along before they hired my mom. I helped out, too. When they weren’t around, I folded the laundry, vacuumed, stuff like that.

I was never sure how Mom scored that gig, but it was one of the best places we had ever lived. No dregs of society. No great unwashed, as my mom liked to call our compatriot travelers. Just rich people with their measly problems. Plenty of food. A clean house. And Melissa.

The daughter Melissa. Every once in a while we went up to her room and hung out. I liked being in her room. She was nice, but she was a little too cheerful—or something. Like she had never had a bad day in her life. I think taking me up to her room was the worst thing she had ever done. Maybe she was nasty at school. I didn’t know since she went to a private school. I went up to her room because I liked her smell. I liked the smell of her room. Kind of flowery and sweaty. It smelled like home. Like how I imagined home should smell. A real home.

But none of this has even the tinge of importance on it. Because we don’t live in the big fancy house with the big fancy dumb rich people any more. Not that I think all rich people are dumb, but sometimes they don’t seem all there, you know what I mean? Same with street people. A lot of them aren’t all there either. The rich and the street should get together and have a party. Wouldn’t that be something to see? A gathering of zombies, some better dressed than others.

I won’t tell you which I thought was the better dressed, the rich or the street. Or which had their own personal style. After moving from city to city, town to town, my whole life, I learned never to try to dress like someone else or be like someone else. Never try to blend. Never try to stand out just to stand out. Decide who you are and be that person. That was the way to survive and thrive.

My mom told me we needed to be like everyone else; we had to remain unnoticed. Otherwise she would find us. But it was never me who caused a stir or a stink or made someone look twice at me. Mom could not help but call attention to herself. She studied a place, watched how people talked, walked, dressed, ate. Then she recreated herself to be like that conglomeration of people in her brain. And she never succeeded. Something was always a little off. The black nail polish in one town, strange pink lipstick in other, or her fake accent in another.

Not that it was her fault we had to leave. No. Mom was the one who saved us. Who saved me. Every day. It was the other woman, the woman who had been chasing us since forever, the woman who was trying to kill me, to kill us, she was the reason we had to run. You thought there were no crazy people in the world? Wake up and smell the psychos. I’ve had one on my tail for fourteen years. Maybe sixteen. I’m not sure. I remember a time when I was little, when life was fuzzy cozy, when Mom held me in her arms and sang to me, called me “my little angel.” I don’t think we were running then.

Hard to see her doing that now. Mom was not what you would call a hands-on mom. She made sure I had the basics though, one way or another. And the basics included breathing room. Actual full on breathing room: life. She kept me alive by keeping us away from the crazy woman. The Shadow Woman. That was what I called her. I didn’t know her real name.

I was feeling almost comfy in Phoenix. And then one day, I was walking home from school on one of the service roads that runs behind these big old houses. I liked it there because some trees and the fences made it almost shady. Hardly anyone went down this road except for maids, landscapers, or garbage trucks. Which was fine with me. I was by myself. I was always by myself. Not that kids at school didn’t try to be my friend. They did. I never had trouble in that department. But I figured: Why get attached? That led to no good.

So I was walking and thinking about stupid stuff, like how my mom had promised me years ago that we would be able to settle down. She was going to find us a nice little house with a backyard where I could have a dog and a tree big enough for a cat to climb up and get stuck in and then I could climb the tree to get the cat while the dog barked below me, and I’d get stuck and Mom would come up to get me, and the three of us—me, Mom, and the cat—would sit in the tree looking over the neighborhood and be completely happy because we knew we were home.

The house would be yellow. With blue trim. Or blue with gray trim. The color varied, depending upon where we were. When we lived in Albuquerque, Mom decided all the doors would be blue because blue meant good luck and we could use us some of that. I was thinking all this when I saw a man on the ground with a woman kneeling over him. I stopped. I knew that man. He was a homeless guy I’d seen wandering around the ’hood the last couple of weeks. The woman was looking through his pockets. It was kind of a frozen picture, like when you see something you don’t want to see and you know you should run but you can’t or you don’t want to.

The woman looked over at me. Her eyes were black or hollow, and I felt cold right to my heart, as though I was starting to be dead but my mind didn’t want to face it. I knew the woman. It was her. It was the Shadow Woman. I had never seen her so clearly before. But I was certain. She seemed frozen in place too. I knew I had to run. I knew it. I didn’t want to. I wanted to have the strength and energy and guts to stand up to her, to tell her that she had ruined our lives and that I was stronger than she was now. I could protect myself.

I was going to do that. I was. But I remembered what my mother had told me about this woman. She was different. She wasn’t like other women. Or other men. No matter how big or how old I got, this woman would always be stronger than I was. And if she got me, she’d come after my mother next. I had to run if I saw her, my mom had told me again and again; I had to run.

So I ran.