Sacrifice (11 page)

“Stand still or it will hurt worse,” he promised, and brought the whip down again on her back, lighting the skin from her left shoulder blade to the tender top of her ass on fire.

“Dad, please, stop!” she cried.

“Punishment is never easy,” he answered, and brought the whip down again. It cracked like the slap of a ruler against a wooden table, and Alex screamed.

He cuffed her across the mouth.

“Make that noise again, and I’ll gag you,” he said, stepping back to deliver the fifth stroke. Her skin was already red and welted in crisscrosses up and down her back, but her father brought the whip up and down five more times, until thin trails of bloody perspiration striped her back. Alex had choked back her screams, but not her sobs. Her face was wet and her breath came in loud, choked gasps.

When the beating stopped, her father stepped away to the fruit cellar and returned to drape the rough, scratchy burlap of a potato sack around her. He pinned the ends together so that it would stay on, covering her nakedness, but providing little warmth or comfort.

“Ouch!” she complained. “It hurts my back, Dad.”

“Good,” he said. “Think about that for now. Focus on the pain. On how awful it feels. Think about how Jesus suffered worse than this, for your sins.”

Alex listened to her father’s footsteps echo on the concrete floor as he walked away. The wooden plank stairs creaked as he mounted the first two steps, and then the sound stopped.

“I want you to repent, Alexandra,” he said. “I want you to think about God.”

The stairs creaked again, and she heard the door shut.

She cried until her eyes were almost swollen shut. Gradually, she lost the energy to cry, and began to consider her situation, testing the strength of her chains (they wouldn’t budge) and speculating about how she might slip her wrists out of the cuffs snapped to them (she couldn’t). She had never really paid much attention to the cellar before. As a child, she’d been afraid to come down here at all, and later, the only time she did was to help her mom retrieve the laundry. Looking around, it almost felt like a foreign prison. The washer and dryer were familiar, but everything else seemed different, surreal.

After awhile, Alex simply stood and stared at the pockmarks in the concrete foundation walls in front of her. The only light in the cellar came from the small two-foot-tall windows that were at the bottom of window wells outside, but it was enough that she could read the Idaho Potatoes stamp across the brown scratchy cloth that hid her nakedness, and she could trace the black cracks and holes in the concrete wall. She wished Gertrude or someone was there to talk to.

Isn’t that how you got into this mess in the first place?
a low masculine voice whispered in her ear.

Alex jerked around, gasping at the pain from one of the whip cuts as she did so. There didn’t seem to be anyone around.

Don’t look, listen,
he said.
It’s time you started to learn to use your gift. And what better time than when you’re all tied up with nowhere to go but the cellar?

“Who are you?” she whispered.

Have you learned nothing after all this time?
His voice sounded vexed.
Talk with your inner mouth. Stop announcing your vision to the world. They don’t understand. They will only hurt you for it. Look at what your own father has done to you.

Her eyes welled up instantly at the reminder.

Talk to me in your mind. In silence.

Who are you?
she thought, without speaking.
Can you really hear my thoughts? Why can’t I see you?

I can hear your thoughts if you want me to,
he said.
You can’t see me because I’m far away now. But we’ll meet soon. Especially if you keep your mouth shut and practice talking with me.

The pain in her back seemed to roll over her in a wave all of a sudden, and her breath caught fast in her throat.

It hurts,
she complained.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better,
he promised.
But how long you put up with it is up to you. I would suggest that you don’t for too long. This sort of thing can be dangerous to your health.

What can I do?
she asked.
I’m tied up. I can’t get out of this on my own.

There is more to you than arms and legs,
he said.
You should know that by now.

She didn’t answer, and he could feel her puzzlement through the ether.

Think about it for to night. Call me, if you need to talk.

“Wait a minute,” she whispered, but he didn’t answer. A smile crossed her face and she formed the words again, only this time not aloud but within her mind.

Wait a minute.

I’m here.

I don’t know your name to call you.

Malachai,
he said.
If you need anything, just call for Malachai.

The light slowly faded in the cellar, and Alex could hear her mom in the kitchen, moving about and clanking pots and glassware as she prepared dinner.

Would they feed her? she wondered. Or would they make her fast, as well as suffer beatings?

After awhile, she dozed on her feet, the darkness providing a cool, velvet black blanket to warm her. It was soothing, a respite from the stinging, throbbing ache of her back. She let the darkness cover the pain in waves, and slipped away inside it. There were no fathers in her darkness, no mothers, no whips and no ghosts.

And then she jerked to full consciousness with a start. Something was touching her.

“It’s me, honey,” her mom’s voice said. “Daddy said I could give you a little bread to chew and water to drink.”

With that, the crust of a roll slipped past her lips and Alex bit into it greedily, nearly pulling it out of her mother’s hand.

“I told you to stop playing with those spirits, honey,” her mom said as Alex chewed. She nearly choked the bread back up.

“Mom, it’s not my fault they come around. And they’re not evil. They’re just people, like you and Dad.”

“They’re dead,” her mom pronounced. “And if they’re not in heaven, then they’re evil.”

Alex drank from the offered cup and then looked hard at her mother. The woman was aging poorly, lines creased her forehead and the corners of her eyes, and her short black hair was run through with strands of silver and white. Her eyes refused to meet her daughter’s.

“I have to pee,” Alex announced. “Can you let me down to go to the bathroom?”

Her mother shook her head, no. “Go where you stand, child. There’s a drain right over there. Your father says you must marinade in your sin and blood and filth, and only then can you cast it off and be cleansed of evil.”

“So you agree with what Daddy is doing?” Alex asked, her voice getting higher and louder. “You think it’s just fine that he stripped me naked and whipped me? You think it’s just fine that my father looked at me
naked,
Mother? Isn’t
that
sinful?”

Her mother didn’t answer, but instead backed away from her, shaking her head.

As the older woman hurried back up the creaking wooden stairs, Alex’s voice trailed her.

“So you think it’s just fine that he looks at my boobs and whips my back ‘til I bleed and then dresses me in a potato sack,
Mother
?”

In her heart, Alex felt the fire of her anger grow with every word. How dare he do this to her? How dare he treat her like some kind of criminal? In that moment, any love that was left for her parents fled, and Alex swore that she would have her vengeance. Not just on her pigheaded, self-righteous, sadistic father, but on her meek mother, who allowed this not only to happen, but to continue. She would escape from these bindings. And they would pay.

Gertrude shimmered into being before her.

Anger, child. It’s a magnet. And you’re turning the juice on strong. I could hear you from miles away. You’ve got to learn some control.

“Well damnit, I’m angry,” Alex hissed out loud.

In your mind,
Gertrude reminded.

I’m angry. And I have a right to be! My back is killing me, I can’t even feel my arms, and I’m chained up in a basement just because I see things that other people don’t see.

You do have a right to be angry. But you have to learn to channel it. You have to learn not to broadcast it to the world. There is a time and a place for that—someday you may want to call on the spirit realm for help. But there’s no need to advertise yourself to the cosmos every hour of every day.

Gertrude pressed a ghostly finger to Alex’s wet cheek and shook her head sadly.

Oh child. If I had only discovered you earlier, perhaps you could have avoided all of this. If you’d been trained when you were young, you could have learned control. And learned that most people are not ready to hear that you can see us. Your father is not the only man who would hurt you for what you see.

So how can I hide my anger?
Alex asked, forcing herself to calm down.

You just did it, to some extent,
the ghost said.
You are angry, but you pulled back from letting your mind rant and rave and scream about it. You put the anger on your mental shelf. It’s there, but it’s not sending out fireworks. There is a difference in the way you think. If you are just thinking, I cannot necessarily hear you. But when you try to send your thoughts out, or when you just let them stream out like a firehose, that’s when the dead can hear you. It’s like the difference between thinking a thought and opening your mouth and speaking it out loud. Your inner mouth is always open—everything you think is just streaming out for anyone to hear. You need to learn to close it a bit. Let’s try this. Think about something you love, but try to think “quietly.” Then try to talk to me about it with your mind.

Alex thought about her dog, Prudence, a brown Lab who’d been hit by a car back when she was in eighth grade. She thought about playing Frisbee in the backyard with Prudence as a pup, the two of them running and stumbling and rolling down the long sloping hill of grass that led from their back door to the start of the cornfields.

Then she “spoke” in her mind to Gertrude, describing the memory.

Good,
Gertrude said, nodding.
I really couldn’t hear much of what you were thinking until you intentionally framed it, and tried to tell it to me. Could you feel the difference in your head between those two states of thinking?

Alex nodded, a small glimmer of warmth gathering again in her heart. She could do this!

Let’s try again with something else,
Gertrude said.
Think about something for a bit, and then address me with your mind and tell me about it. I want you to feel the gap between the two states. I want you to understand the difference implicitly.

For the next hour, Alex and Gertrude practiced, sending thoughts and then intentionally trying to hide thoughts from whoever might be out there, listening. The aches and pains in Alex’s wounded body faded as she focused her attention on learning this new skill. Then she yawned, and Gertrude called a halt.

Time for sleep,
she pronounced.

Okay,
Alex agreed, yawning again, even wider.
But, all this practice—am I going to have to be aware of my thoughts all the time? It’ll be like, I’m always on guard or something.

It will get to be second nature,
Gertrude promised.
You have a sense that most people don’t have. After you learn how to use and control it better, you won’t even know that you’re doing it after awhile. It will be as natural as the difference between thinking and speaking out loud.

Thanks, Gertrude,
Alex said, and the ghost leaned forward to plant a silvery kiss on her cheek.

Get some sleep, child.

And she was gone.

Alex’s bladder was now screaming about its discomfort up her spine, and with a sigh of resignation, Alex spread her feet apart as far as she could and released it, feeling the warm stream spray against her inner thighs and spatter warmly on her feet. She watched the yellow pool collect beneath her, and then begin to run forward, following the subtle slant of the concrete toward the drain by the washer and dryer. She cringed when she brought her feet back together, and felt the cooling wetness under her feet and dripping from her legs.

All the aches and stings and pain filtered back and Alex let a tear or two trickle down her cheek. Why her? All her life, she’d been different, and everyone let her know about it. Her parents punished her, the kids at school shunned her. Maybe she should just let her father burn her at the stake. She imagined the scene in her head, her father, eyes still smoldering with anger, piling log after log of firewood up around her feet. He’d complain about how this was going to cost him precious wood for the fireplace this winter, making her feel guilty even for the effort it took him to kill her. Then he would sprinkle gasoline across the logs and strike a match. He’d hold it in front of his face and shake his head at her. “If only you would have learned from your mother,” he would say. Then he’d toss the match on the pile, standing there with arms crossed, as the flames licked their way up the wood, ascending in a blistering blaze to burn her potato sack clothes away and melt her flesh like soft wax from her bones. Her mother would be there, standing behind her father, weeping, but saying nothing. Alex could almost taste the charcoal in her mouth as she imagined the skin on her face blistering and bubbling and then, at long last, blackening as her mouth stretched open in a perpetual scream.

It would hurt, for awhile, but then it would be over, and she could roam free like Gertrude, and all the other spirits she’d spoken with over the years. She hung her head and let the feeling wash over her.
Just burn me,
she thought.
Burn me and get it over with.

Self-pity is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?
a male voice whispered.
Wouldn’t you love to just hang there forever and let your father have his way with you each and every night? Don’t you deserve that?

The voice was cold, serpentine. He was disgusted with her.