Killing a Southern Belle is all you know how to do
Dagger Doll is a character who has lived in my sketchbook for quite some time. She's had quite a few iterations from punk-rock queen to psychic vampire to Equilibrium styled heroine v. future society.
This is almost a love letter to Caitlin Kiernan, as Dagger rips copiously from Kiernan's Deacon Silvey, and the story came to me while reading "The Thing at the End of the Hallway." This in no way rises to meet Deacon and Sadie and the Thing at the end of the hallway, but it isn't supposed to. If anything, it gives Dagger a backstory to springboard from.
It was good to just spend a few hours writing.
---
Dagger Doll is picking at her cuticles with a Bic pen cap, quietly mouthing along to Elliot Smith’s “The Biggest Lie”, chewing on her black lower lip between verses. She occasionally glances up from her nest, the dirty recliner in the motel lobby, and watches the obsidian rain cut its rhythmic lash across the window with each gust of March wind; mainly she watches the policemen moving in and out of the hallway, and fighting sleep.
The song ends, randomizes to “Coming Up Roses”, and she loses interest in her manicure and picks up her tattered Lovecraft anthology, halfway through the Strange Music of Erich Zann, when a police officer approaches, taps her on the shoulder. She unfolds herself from the seat and follows him down the hallway.
“Goddamn, man!” and Dagger wretches and pulls her coat sleeve to her mouth. “Goddamn.”
She’s standing in a cordoned off motel room, all yellow police tape, white masking tape, and scarlet stains. There are unrecognizable shapes under light blue sheets, and all too recognizable shapes outlined on the floor. Daniel Reardon, the homicide detective in charge, and the one who called her down in the middle of the night, is drinking coffee from a Thermos in the corner kitchenette.
“Are you all right? Do you need water, or…”
“No, just…damn…can’t you open a window or something, Jesus, the smell.”
“Windows are painted shut,” and Reardon swishes coffee around his mouth, swallows, then, “We have a witness this time, it should be easier, I just wanted you around to maybe confirm what we’ve got.”
Dagger nods, fishes into her black pants for a cigarette; doesn’t light it, just chews on the filter and sweeps her eyes across the room. It’s not like television or comic books - no séances or hands to her temples, she just lets her mind un-focus, and there it is in grainy mental 8mm film. Easy this time, the violence is fresh, scarring the flow of the room. She’s watching the flashback now, tracing the timeline, senses the lust, the excitement, the fear…the adrenaline and the blood.
Dagger shakes herself out of the daze. “Christ, you think I’d be numb to that by now. Just like the others, is that what you’ve got? Because that’s what I’m getting.”
Reardon takes a slow, thoughtful sip from his Thermos, stares over Dagger’s shoulder at the mess behind her, the mess being meticulously photographed and examined.
“Kind of like the others,” and he swishes the coffee again. “Never used to leave them in, uh, this much disrepair. We got a witness who sees a guy pick up a girl in a bar,” and he jabs his pen vaguely in the air, “Takes her in here, guy registers as a John Smith, pays cash money, and this being a Don’t Tell Motel, no one thinks anything.”
Another slow sip of coffee, and Dagger really could care less, just wants to be back home, not like she can do anything beyond what she’s done. Reardon suddenly makes eye contact with her, the first sincere eye contact he’s made since he acknowledged her entrance.
“So then, no one is thinking anything, until the screaming and sounds of struggle…”
Dagger tucks her chewed cigarette into her coat pocket and interrupts, “So then, the cops come, find another dead hooker, and you call me down in the middle of the night to take a psychic imprint, and no one finds this guy, and the dance begins anew, as it has all year.”
Reardon looks at her pointedly, and she tucks a strand of ink-black hair behind her ear, and wipes her hands on the thigh of her jeans. “Look, detective, I appreciate the opportunities and flex you give me, I understand the services I am required to do in order to maintain that flex, but I’m tired and spent. Did you really need me? Am I done?”
Another long pull of coffee and finally, “Ok, Doll,” and walks her down the hall, slips her a worn fifty dollar bill in the lobby. “I’ll be in touch.”
“I never doubt it, detective,” and Dagger gives one long dance down the hallway, before pulling her jacket over her head and dodging out into the rainy night.
*
Dagger is asleep on her couch, still in t-shirt and jeans, when her cell phone vibrates violently on the end table. She groggily gropes upwards, and the phone skitters around the table like a crazed trilobite, finally colliding with her fingers. She grunts into the receiver, and as she sits up, knocks over a glass of tea on the floor from the night before.
“(Shit.) ‘Lo?”
“How are you holding up after last night?”
She sighs out of the side of her mouth, “Oh, it’s you.”
Reardon lets out gruff exhalation, his sarcastic laugh, “You think somebody else would actually call?”
Dagger’s eyes aren’t even open, and she leans back into her couch. “I figure the guy at the record store might get wise to my femininity one day. What do you need now?”
“We need to talk more about last night. I didn’t…there’s more to it still. How about the usual meeting place?”
She looks at her watch, “My television shows aren’t over until eight. How about nine?”
“You don’t have a television, and this is important. Eight thirty.”
“Eight thirty,” and she clicks the phone shut and falls back onto her pillow.
*
It’s a quarter to nine, and Dagger has finished two rum and cokes and a shot of vodka, and she’s ready to leave the dirty bar when Reardon walks in, nods to one or two familiar faces, then sits down with her at the bar. To anyone else it looks like a parole officer grudgingly checking with his junkie assignment; the reality is a homicide detective bursting with information to feed his little psychic secret weapon.
Dagger is all leather and buckles and fishnets, and she enjoys watching Reardon shift uncomfortably in his seat. He thumps a manila envelope on the counter, careful to place it between the sticky stains on the oak counter. For a moment, Dagger’s eyes light up: she’ll glance at some photos, maybe a personal artifact, work her perception, and make a quick fifty or so.
“There’s a twist I didn’t tell you about last night, but you were in a hurry to go,” Reardon says in a low tone, then in a louder voice he hails the young girl behind the counter and orders a beer.
Dagger’s face falls into her typical sullen look, sighs, and keeps her eyes on the manila envelope.
Reardon picks it up, pulls the metal tab up, and reaches a hand inside. “The, uh, the victim last night.”
“The girl. Murdered just like all the other girls,” she’s reciting it as if a teacher had asked her to name the date of the American Revolution. But then she pauses, and her black lips twist. “Except for the fact that last night wasn’t so much a murder as a…”
“Butchering,” Reardon finished. “Right, we didn’t have a body to pull a sheet over last night, we had pieces all over.”
“A different MO. Different enough to not be tied to the others?” Dagger buries her hands in her choppy dark-as-sin hair and stares at the watermarks on the counter. Reardon pulls a picture, tosses it in her field of view.
“Different enough that the victim is a guy,” and Reardon takes a moment to sip his beer. The barkeep comes up, young buxom blonde, arches her back just enough and leans forward.
“Are we doing alright over here?” and she’s looking at Reardon, wolfish grin, and Dagger folds the photo out of the barkeeps view and nods. The barkeep shrugs and walks down to the other end of the bar.
Dagger looks at the crime-scene photo, a white male, no, just white mail from the torso up. Reardon hands her several more 4x7 glossies. Torso. Legs. And arm here, legs there. She swallows hard and pauses, to make sure she doesn’t vomit.
“Oh my god.”
“It gets better. Oh, it gets so much better. I get to close the book on these young girl murders. Because this, this is the guy.”
“This is the…?”
“We got handwriting from the various motel ledgers all year. We got fingerprints from several scenes - fingerprints from corpses, fingerprints from the motel rooms and cars…forensics is having a fucking field day, you’d think it was Christmas and Chanukah all rolled into St. Patties,” Reardon finishes his beer. “With everything on the house. On one hand, this corpse is the best thing to happen to me all year. All year.”
The bartender approaches again, “Can I get you two anything yet?” and Reardon makes a V with his fingers, and she pulls two bottles from beneath the counter. She leans forward again, holds Reardon’s hand for a moment, “If you need anything else, my name is Serena.”
Reardon smiles and Dagger hands him the photos back to break the trance. “Focus. What else is in your magic bag?” She’s handed an autopsy report and autopsy photos. “You don’t need to look at the photos, if you don’t want,” the detective says, “It just reinforces the weirdness of the report.”
Dagger scans it, reads it again, and it’s just like Los Angeles again, though Reardon wouldn’t know it, and she tries to feign the incredulity, “’Bite marks?’…‘Pieces chewed off…digits missing...’…’Animal attack?’” She wants to say “You’re shitting me,” but she’s known the underside of things too long, and she’s only thinking, “I’ve been here too long. I’ve been off the grid and I’ve really just been a screaming beacon for it.”
And so she says, because it’s the only lie she can come up with, “You’re shitting me.”
“So what do you make of it? Honestly,” and Reardon is tucking everything back into the envelope.
“I think…I think if a bear or other animal broke into a motel and mauled your serial rapist/killer, that that’s a good thing,” and she drains her beer. “I need to go,” and her eyes cut into his.
“Well, can’t you come to the morgue, or we can go back to the scene, maybe you can read something, throw me a bone?”
She tosses her coat on, “Maybe tomorrow. I’m still not…recovered…from the last reading,” and she’s surprised how fast the lies are coming. Self preservation, she tells herself.
And she’s faced this before, with the LAPD, and it’s why she ran to the Midwest in the first place.
“Call me tomorrow, we can…do the morgue thing, maybe go back to the scene after,” and Reardon can’t really do anything to stop her, and Serena has come around to flirt some more, so Dagger leaves him with the barmaid.
*
Dagger Doll faced the terrors of the night once, the things unseen down the hall or down the stairs. Until L.A.
She’s half-packed her duffel bag and still thinking about the similarities between the motel mutilation and Los Angeles.
“No,” she tells no one in particular. “I’m not going back to it.”
She’s drowsing on the cab ride to the airport, to run away again, and as she fades in an out of unconsciousness, her mind is filtering to 8mm flashbacks again, sepia slaughters in her head, and as she fights to shut them down, to just sleep, one last warning goes off in her head, one last image of a pretty young blonde girl behind a bar.
*
The urine-yellow streetlight is prying its way into the blinds, and Serena stretches across her red sheets, kicking the quilt to the foot of the bed. Rain is slapping against the window, and she lies on her side, watching the shadows of the raindrops lazily move across the carpet. It’s not until the blurriness fades from her eyes, and the cotton clears from her mouth that she realizes she has a migraine, the kind of migraine that travels from the head, down the throat, and explodes inside the stomach.
She’s hung over and the rain beating the window is clouding her thoughts. Did she take a man home from the bar again? Or did she just work and go home? How did she get home?
She belches, the haze of cheap late-night diner food and tequila coating the back of her tongue, and that’s enough to set the nausea off. Off the bed and into the bathroom as fast as her legs can spring her, and it’s not enough; she trips over something warm and wet in the middle of the floor, sticks the landing, and makes it to late to the bathroom - trickle of bile and spit on the toilet seat before she unloads a torrent of vomit into the bowl.
Her eyes are closed, but the toilet bowl only amplifies the auditory experience of vomiting, that rush of liquid and chunks crashing into more liquid, and the sound and the smell only make her more nauseous.
She flushes and leans against the bathtub, shivering in her underwear; her head is clear at least, the steel cobwebs finally relieving the pressure in her head.
And then Serena sees the bit that didn’t land in the bowl and get flushed, the little bits of finger, nail to knuckle, and she dry heaves into the toilet.
“Jesus,” she half-chokes into the bowl. “Not again.”
*
This is almost a love letter to Caitlin Kiernan, as Dagger rips copiously from Kiernan's Deacon Silvey, and the story came to me while reading "The Thing at the End of the Hallway." This in no way rises to meet Deacon and Sadie and the Thing at the end of the hallway, but it isn't supposed to. If anything, it gives Dagger a backstory to springboard from.
It was good to just spend a few hours writing.
---
Dagger Doll is picking at her cuticles with a Bic pen cap, quietly mouthing along to Elliot Smith’s “The Biggest Lie”, chewing on her black lower lip between verses. She occasionally glances up from her nest, the dirty recliner in the motel lobby, and watches the obsidian rain cut its rhythmic lash across the window with each gust of March wind; mainly she watches the policemen moving in and out of the hallway, and fighting sleep.
The song ends, randomizes to “Coming Up Roses”, and she loses interest in her manicure and picks up her tattered Lovecraft anthology, halfway through the Strange Music of Erich Zann, when a police officer approaches, taps her on the shoulder. She unfolds herself from the seat and follows him down the hallway.
“Goddamn, man!” and Dagger wretches and pulls her coat sleeve to her mouth. “Goddamn.”
She’s standing in a cordoned off motel room, all yellow police tape, white masking tape, and scarlet stains. There are unrecognizable shapes under light blue sheets, and all too recognizable shapes outlined on the floor. Daniel Reardon, the homicide detective in charge, and the one who called her down in the middle of the night, is drinking coffee from a Thermos in the corner kitchenette.
“Are you all right? Do you need water, or…”
“No, just…damn…can’t you open a window or something, Jesus, the smell.”
“Windows are painted shut,” and Reardon swishes coffee around his mouth, swallows, then, “We have a witness this time, it should be easier, I just wanted you around to maybe confirm what we’ve got.”
Dagger nods, fishes into her black pants for a cigarette; doesn’t light it, just chews on the filter and sweeps her eyes across the room. It’s not like television or comic books - no séances or hands to her temples, she just lets her mind un-focus, and there it is in grainy mental 8mm film. Easy this time, the violence is fresh, scarring the flow of the room. She’s watching the flashback now, tracing the timeline, senses the lust, the excitement, the fear…the adrenaline and the blood.
Dagger shakes herself out of the daze. “Christ, you think I’d be numb to that by now. Just like the others, is that what you’ve got? Because that’s what I’m getting.”
Reardon takes a slow, thoughtful sip from his Thermos, stares over Dagger’s shoulder at the mess behind her, the mess being meticulously photographed and examined.
“Kind of like the others,” and he swishes the coffee again. “Never used to leave them in, uh, this much disrepair. We got a witness who sees a guy pick up a girl in a bar,” and he jabs his pen vaguely in the air, “Takes her in here, guy registers as a John Smith, pays cash money, and this being a Don’t Tell Motel, no one thinks anything.”
Another slow sip of coffee, and Dagger really could care less, just wants to be back home, not like she can do anything beyond what she’s done. Reardon suddenly makes eye contact with her, the first sincere eye contact he’s made since he acknowledged her entrance.
“So then, no one is thinking anything, until the screaming and sounds of struggle…”
Dagger tucks her chewed cigarette into her coat pocket and interrupts, “So then, the cops come, find another dead hooker, and you call me down in the middle of the night to take a psychic imprint, and no one finds this guy, and the dance begins anew, as it has all year.”
Reardon looks at her pointedly, and she tucks a strand of ink-black hair behind her ear, and wipes her hands on the thigh of her jeans. “Look, detective, I appreciate the opportunities and flex you give me, I understand the services I am required to do in order to maintain that flex, but I’m tired and spent. Did you really need me? Am I done?”
Another long pull of coffee and finally, “Ok, Doll,” and walks her down the hall, slips her a worn fifty dollar bill in the lobby. “I’ll be in touch.”
“I never doubt it, detective,” and Dagger gives one long dance down the hallway, before pulling her jacket over her head and dodging out into the rainy night.
*
Dagger is asleep on her couch, still in t-shirt and jeans, when her cell phone vibrates violently on the end table. She groggily gropes upwards, and the phone skitters around the table like a crazed trilobite, finally colliding with her fingers. She grunts into the receiver, and as she sits up, knocks over a glass of tea on the floor from the night before.
“(Shit.) ‘Lo?”
“How are you holding up after last night?”
She sighs out of the side of her mouth, “Oh, it’s you.”
Reardon lets out gruff exhalation, his sarcastic laugh, “You think somebody else would actually call?”
Dagger’s eyes aren’t even open, and she leans back into her couch. “I figure the guy at the record store might get wise to my femininity one day. What do you need now?”
“We need to talk more about last night. I didn’t…there’s more to it still. How about the usual meeting place?”
She looks at her watch, “My television shows aren’t over until eight. How about nine?”
“You don’t have a television, and this is important. Eight thirty.”
“Eight thirty,” and she clicks the phone shut and falls back onto her pillow.
*
It’s a quarter to nine, and Dagger has finished two rum and cokes and a shot of vodka, and she’s ready to leave the dirty bar when Reardon walks in, nods to one or two familiar faces, then sits down with her at the bar. To anyone else it looks like a parole officer grudgingly checking with his junkie assignment; the reality is a homicide detective bursting with information to feed his little psychic secret weapon.
Dagger is all leather and buckles and fishnets, and she enjoys watching Reardon shift uncomfortably in his seat. He thumps a manila envelope on the counter, careful to place it between the sticky stains on the oak counter. For a moment, Dagger’s eyes light up: she’ll glance at some photos, maybe a personal artifact, work her perception, and make a quick fifty or so.
“There’s a twist I didn’t tell you about last night, but you were in a hurry to go,” Reardon says in a low tone, then in a louder voice he hails the young girl behind the counter and orders a beer.
Dagger’s face falls into her typical sullen look, sighs, and keeps her eyes on the manila envelope.
Reardon picks it up, pulls the metal tab up, and reaches a hand inside. “The, uh, the victim last night.”
“The girl. Murdered just like all the other girls,” she’s reciting it as if a teacher had asked her to name the date of the American Revolution. But then she pauses, and her black lips twist. “Except for the fact that last night wasn’t so much a murder as a…”
“Butchering,” Reardon finished. “Right, we didn’t have a body to pull a sheet over last night, we had pieces all over.”
“A different MO. Different enough to not be tied to the others?” Dagger buries her hands in her choppy dark-as-sin hair and stares at the watermarks on the counter. Reardon pulls a picture, tosses it in her field of view.
“Different enough that the victim is a guy,” and Reardon takes a moment to sip his beer. The barkeep comes up, young buxom blonde, arches her back just enough and leans forward.
“Are we doing alright over here?” and she’s looking at Reardon, wolfish grin, and Dagger folds the photo out of the barkeeps view and nods. The barkeep shrugs and walks down to the other end of the bar.
Dagger looks at the crime-scene photo, a white male, no, just white mail from the torso up. Reardon hands her several more 4x7 glossies. Torso. Legs. And arm here, legs there. She swallows hard and pauses, to make sure she doesn’t vomit.
“Oh my god.”
“It gets better. Oh, it gets so much better. I get to close the book on these young girl murders. Because this, this is the guy.”
“This is the…?”
“We got handwriting from the various motel ledgers all year. We got fingerprints from several scenes - fingerprints from corpses, fingerprints from the motel rooms and cars…forensics is having a fucking field day, you’d think it was Christmas and Chanukah all rolled into St. Patties,” Reardon finishes his beer. “With everything on the house. On one hand, this corpse is the best thing to happen to me all year. All year.”
The bartender approaches again, “Can I get you two anything yet?” and Reardon makes a V with his fingers, and she pulls two bottles from beneath the counter. She leans forward again, holds Reardon’s hand for a moment, “If you need anything else, my name is Serena.”
Reardon smiles and Dagger hands him the photos back to break the trance. “Focus. What else is in your magic bag?” She’s handed an autopsy report and autopsy photos. “You don’t need to look at the photos, if you don’t want,” the detective says, “It just reinforces the weirdness of the report.”
Dagger scans it, reads it again, and it’s just like Los Angeles again, though Reardon wouldn’t know it, and she tries to feign the incredulity, “’Bite marks?’…‘Pieces chewed off…digits missing...’…’Animal attack?’” She wants to say “You’re shitting me,” but she’s known the underside of things too long, and she’s only thinking, “I’ve been here too long. I’ve been off the grid and I’ve really just been a screaming beacon for it.”
And so she says, because it’s the only lie she can come up with, “You’re shitting me.”
“So what do you make of it? Honestly,” and Reardon is tucking everything back into the envelope.
“I think…I think if a bear or other animal broke into a motel and mauled your serial rapist/killer, that that’s a good thing,” and she drains her beer. “I need to go,” and her eyes cut into his.
“Well, can’t you come to the morgue, or we can go back to the scene, maybe you can read something, throw me a bone?”
She tosses her coat on, “Maybe tomorrow. I’m still not…recovered…from the last reading,” and she’s surprised how fast the lies are coming. Self preservation, she tells herself.
And she’s faced this before, with the LAPD, and it’s why she ran to the Midwest in the first place.
“Call me tomorrow, we can…do the morgue thing, maybe go back to the scene after,” and Reardon can’t really do anything to stop her, and Serena has come around to flirt some more, so Dagger leaves him with the barmaid.
*
Dagger Doll faced the terrors of the night once, the things unseen down the hall or down the stairs. Until L.A.
She’s half-packed her duffel bag and still thinking about the similarities between the motel mutilation and Los Angeles.
“No,” she tells no one in particular. “I’m not going back to it.”
She’s drowsing on the cab ride to the airport, to run away again, and as she fades in an out of unconsciousness, her mind is filtering to 8mm flashbacks again, sepia slaughters in her head, and as she fights to shut them down, to just sleep, one last warning goes off in her head, one last image of a pretty young blonde girl behind a bar.
*
The urine-yellow streetlight is prying its way into the blinds, and Serena stretches across her red sheets, kicking the quilt to the foot of the bed. Rain is slapping against the window, and she lies on her side, watching the shadows of the raindrops lazily move across the carpet. It’s not until the blurriness fades from her eyes, and the cotton clears from her mouth that she realizes she has a migraine, the kind of migraine that travels from the head, down the throat, and explodes inside the stomach.
She’s hung over and the rain beating the window is clouding her thoughts. Did she take a man home from the bar again? Or did she just work and go home? How did she get home?
She belches, the haze of cheap late-night diner food and tequila coating the back of her tongue, and that’s enough to set the nausea off. Off the bed and into the bathroom as fast as her legs can spring her, and it’s not enough; she trips over something warm and wet in the middle of the floor, sticks the landing, and makes it to late to the bathroom - trickle of bile and spit on the toilet seat before she unloads a torrent of vomit into the bowl.
Her eyes are closed, but the toilet bowl only amplifies the auditory experience of vomiting, that rush of liquid and chunks crashing into more liquid, and the sound and the smell only make her more nauseous.
She flushes and leans against the bathtub, shivering in her underwear; her head is clear at least, the steel cobwebs finally relieving the pressure in her head.
And then Serena sees the bit that didn’t land in the bowl and get flushed, the little bits of finger, nail to knuckle, and she dry heaves into the toilet.
“Jesus,” she half-chokes into the bowl. “Not again.”
*