Sacrifice (13 page)

His hand slid around her ribs and as she slumped back against him, his hand ended up cupping her right breast.

“Look, Mother,” Alex said, a hint of laughter in her voice. “He’s not so holy. He stripped me so that he could look at me. And touch me.”

Her father grabbed her hair and pulled her upright with it, slapping her in the face with his other hand.

“Serpent,” he spit. “Sowing the seeds of evil even as you are led to your punishment. I feel no remorse at this, now. You are not my child. You are a witch.”

“And you are a self-righteous asshole pig,” she answered, only to catch another crack to the mouth. She could taste the iron in her mouth and feel the lips begin to swell, but she didn’t care.

“Can’t handle the truth to be spoken out loud?” she asked, and this time he didn’t answer, only dragged her by hair and arm to the stairs. There, he grabbed her around the waist and lifted her up as he mounted the stairs. Alex’s mother followed behind.

“Proud of the man you married?” Alex called down to her mother. “A Bible-thumping man who can touch his daughter’s breasts and then burn her alive. He’s a real catch, Mom.”

“You will burn,” he said, gritting his teeth as he shoved her through the doorway and into the kitchen. “You will burn to ash here in our backyard, and then you will burn in hell forever.”

He pulled her through the kitchen, and Alex tried to struggle, but couldn’t move either of her arms, and her legs were so weak she could barely stand on them, let alone try to kick or resist with them. She saw a cleaver lying on the counter near the old wooden cutting board and tried to throw her body in that direction, but her father only yanked her by the hair and dragged her through the screen door and into the backyard.

Half walking, half dragged, he brought her to the clothesline post, where a pile of freshly cut logs lay scattered. An axe extended from a cutting stump, where its blade had embedded an inch into the wood.

“Let me go,” she said.

“And let you spread more evil in the world?” he said. “You are our responsibility, and I am going to take care of it.”

“Let me go now,” Alex insisted, the anger burning visibly in her eyes. “You have whipped me, and chained me like an animal. Now you have brought me naked outside, in front of you and my mother. You have done your best to humiliate and hurt me. Your job is done. Let me go. I won’t be any trouble again.”

“Damn right,” he said, and dragged her to the post.

Michael, Sarah, Gertrude,
she cried.
Agnes, Bill, Charles and Chad. Bertha and Madge and Eileen. Arnold, Terry and Betty-Sue. Help me now! I beg you and any friends you may have in this world. Please.

Gertrude shimmered into wavery form before her, the sunlight making it difficult to see her clearly.

Be careful, child. Watch what you do.

Help me now!
Alex screamed in her mind.
I have played with some of you and talked with you and traded secrets with you. We have passed the long nights together. And I need you now. Please help me!

The air seemed to gust, and Alex’s father pulled her hands around the post until her back was touching the weathered wood and her wrists were tight together. He called for the rope, and Alex’s mother walked to him with a ball of brown twine, her hair lifting and covering her eyes in the breeze.

The backyard was suddenly alive with smoky faces, and the murmuring awareness of the dead.

Malachai?
Alex called, not having heard his voice yet amid the growing clamor. Her parents didn’t seem to notice the crackling sparks of blue fire, or the unseasonal whip of the wind.

What would you have us do?
Gertrude asked.

A tall man in a black, old-fashioned suit with dark, deep-set eyes and brows, separated from the mass of spirits gathering around the stake and stood before Alex and next to Gertrude as the rope began to wind around Alex’s wrists.

What would you have me do?
he asked.

Malachai?
Alex said, instantly recognizing his voice. He bowed, and Gertrude eyed him with distrust.

Watch your alliances,
the old woman warned.

Make them stop tying me,
Alex begged.

How?
Gertrude asked.
You must direct us if you would have us do your will.

Can you push or blow them backwards or something?
she asked. The old woman nodded, and stepped back to call the other spirits to action. In seconds, the air around them became a blur of blue-white spirits, racing faster and faster around the post. They drew the wind in a growing hurricane with them.

“The wind is really picking up!” Alex heard her mother complain. Her father was nonplussed.

“It’s her,” he said. “We have been harboring a powerful witch under our roof all this time.”

The wind gusted and grew, the old elm near the house beginning to twist and creak in the howl of the wind.

“What’s happening?” her mother asked, holding on to the post to keep from blowing away.

“Stop this now!” he demanded, abandoning his efforts to tie Alex’s wrists behind the post and stepping in front of her. “You are only delaying the inevitable,” he screamed through the wind. “You will suffer the penalty for this witchcraft.”

I can’t move my arms,
Alex told Malachai.
Can you help me move them?

Would you have me inside your body?
he asked.
I can take over your body, for a moment, if you would have me do so.

Yes,
she said.

They will say you are possessed,
he warned.

It’s that or be dead,
she responded, and then called out to the horde of spirits.

“Gertrude, everyone, help untie my ropes,” Alex cried out loud, forgetting herself. “Malachai, possess me!”

Her father’s eyes opened wide at her command, and the wind swirled sharply around his legs, making him stumble as he turned to see his wife fall to the ground from the same gust.

“Devil child,” he cried out. “Serpent in girl’s flesh!”

The half knot of twine around Alex’s wrists suddenly undid itself and her arms fell to her sides, just as a voice slipped into her brain closer than any voice had ever been before.

What would you like to do?
Malachai asked. At the closeness of his touch, Alex felt something inside her shift. Her soul grew hard and sharp, deadly as a razor. The last dregs of unconditional love she’d once felt for her parents dissolved like fog in the desert. They had treated her worse than a dog, and tortured her without cause for most of her life. And she had sat still for it. As Malachai’s serpentine spirit slipped into her bones and helped her find new strength, Alex became something more than human. And something less.

Fury filled her steely heart as she looked with pure hatred on her parents.

I want the axe,
she said.

Hold them to the ground if you can,
she asked of the screaming blue film of spirits that clouded the air, and her father suddenly fell to his knees. With Malachai’s control, she walked to the stump, reached out and rocked the axe free.

Then she walked to her father, still twitching and struggling against the arms of a hundred ghosts all pushing with eternal strength at his chest to hold him pinned to the earth.

“The Bible talks about things other than punishment, Daddy,” she said, standing over him with the axe held high. “It talks about mercy. But you don’t understand that, so I guess I won’t give you any more than you planned to give me.”

With that, she swung the blade down, catching his forearm just below the elbow.

The stroke cut clean, and her father screamed an awful cry of terror as his hand gripped and released air, while the biceps that once drove it twitched. Blood sprayed from the arm and dripped down Alex’s shins, but she did not stop.

“I’ll tell you where the evil is in this house, Daddy,” she said, bringing the axe down again, this time against his shin. The bone cracked, white splinters sticking up and out of the gore as she wiggled the axe back out. This time it hadn’t cut clean through.

“The evil is in your head,” she concluded, and brought the axe down again, severing his other leg.

His screams had turned to hissing gasps, as his eyes bugged out and he hyperventilated, unable to move anything but his head as his daughter dismembered him, one limb at a time.

“Honey, God no,” her mother screamed nearby, her cries growing in volume as her husband died.

Alex brought the axe down on his other arm, and then stood over him as his heart pumped spurts of life out onto the grass and his eyes began to roll back in his head.

“You were an asshole, Dad,” she said, and brought the axe down on his chest, crushing his ribs and sending a fountain of blood into the air to speckle her face. She brought the axe down again and again, hacking off pieces of his chest and freeing his intestines to slide like gory snakes to the ground. At last, when his eyes shone white against the blood that ran like grape juice tears down his cheeks, Alex walked to her mother, who still screamed in short, hard squeaks.

“Thanks a lot, Mom,” Alex said. “You never even tried to stop him.”

She killed her mother with one blow, severing her head with a solid stroke. She raised the axe once more, and brought it down to lodge in between the dead woman’s ribs.

Enough?
a voice whispered inside her mind.

Yeah,
Alex said, and she fell to the ground as the spirit released his hold on her.

The buzz of spirits around them was already decreasing, as the dead saw that the crisis was over. Some slipped across the ground to stop briefly in front of Alex, nodding or smiling sadly before winking out of sight. Alex looked for Gertrude, but couldn’t find her in the dwindling mob of blue-smoke forms.

She lay on the ground, staring back and forth from the clothesline pole to the mangled bodies of her parents, blood still spreading in pools around the remains of their bodies. From far away, she felt a cold scratching against her skull, as if someone was tickling her with a thorn-tipped feather.

They felt the focus,
Malachai said.
Get your things. You can’t stay here anymore.

Who’s they?
she asked, and he gave a mental shrug.

Later,
he said.
Clean yourself up and gather a few things. There isn’t much time. You need to hit the highway.

And do what?
she asked, the enormity of her actions settling in. Her stomach felt sick, and she coughed. Bile rose in her throat.

Not now,
he insisted.
I’m not far away now. If you hurry, a man will stop to pick you up on the highway. I’ll be there. This is your time,
he said.

It’s begun.

“So you were going to be a nun?” Jeremy said again in disbelief. “What could possibly have turned you from a Bible thumper to a killer? What was this Curburide?”

“You want me to tell you that my father raped me from the time I was five,” she said, staring without blinking at his confused look. “You want me to tell you that he brought his friends over to gangbang on me when I was twelve, and that he made me go down on my uncle when he lost a bet in a game of poker? You want me to tell you I grew up in a crack house and worked the streets until I hated every living soul?”

Jeremy shrugged.

“Well, I’m not going to tell you that. My parents were jerks, but they had a lot of money. So I got what I wanted. But I was kind of a fat kid, and used to get picked on a lot. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I started to fill out into a decent shape, and suddenly the boys all wanted to go out with me. Especially when I tried on makeup and hip-huggers. Pissed me off. Guys who’d pulled my hair and called me all kinds of names suddenly slip their grimy hands into my pan ties. For awhile I had fun teasing them…but, I don’t know. It disgusted me to let them touch my body after what they’d done all through grammar school. Sex felt good, but afterwards, I used to fantasize about cutting their dicks off and giving a little back, ya know?”

Jeremy nodded, but said nothing.

“So I was eighteen, and pretty much fed up with people in general. They were all shallow and…users. They only wanted one thing, and only if you looked good,” Ariana said, rubbing the side of her jaw as she spoke. The damage of Jeremy’s beating a few hours before was really revealing itself the more she talked. “I’d gone to Catholic high school and it seemed to me like the nuns had the right deal—they got a decent house, they had built-in jobs and they didn’t have to worry about dating these pathetic losers. And I really thought I believed in God and the importance of someone carrying on the work. Maybe some people could be saved, I told myself. Though I’m not sure when I really think about it, that I ever totally believed it. When I looked at the other kids in my class, I imagined them all naked, and burning in a pit of fire. Sometimes I’d daydream about the cheerleaders and the jocks during class and laugh out loud. The teachers would ask me what was so funny, but I never told them I’d just imagined Bobby and Buffy bent over the mouth of a smoking Weber grill, being sodomized by ten-foot-tall red demons with giant schlongs!”

Jeremy laughed. “Some imagination.”

“It passed the time. Anyway, in my senior year, I started to talk to one of the sisters who taught my religion class about entering the convent. She coached me, and helped me get in. She never realized that I was more interested in seeing my fellow man burn in hell, than finding the kingdom of heaven. I didn’t really want to save mankind, I thought it should be punished.”

“Tell me about it,” Jeremy said, pulling a pack of Camels from his jacket and lighting up. He leaned the chair back on two legs and rested his feet on the bed as he smoked. Over the next hour, her story slowly unfolded…

Ariana tried to walk quieter, but it was no use. Her steps, even in soft street shoes, echoed through the massive marble halls of the Lady of the Angels monastery. She’d been here a month now, and still hadn’t gotten used to its immensity. The sisters all seemed nice, if sometimes stern. Every morning they woke to the sound of church bells, ringing low and sonorous throughout the giant enclave, and assembled in the dining room for breakfast. She ate with the two other initiates, Carla and Anne, but she didn’t feel any connection to them. They were just like the girls in high school, concerned with looks and whispering back and forth about George Clooney and Brad Pitt and their favorite lipsticks. Ariana cared about none of that. She wondered how they could be set on joining the order if they were so concerned with such worldly, shallow things.

If she hadn’t yet gotten used to living in a building that felt like a museum, Ariana had instantly adapted to the lifestyle. She appreciated the quiet meditation hours and the prayer times. She folded her hands and earnestly called upon God to save her soul and the souls of countless millions outside these doors. She devoured the books they were given to read, and spent her nights writing reports on those volumes, determined to fully understand and appreciate all of the subtleties of Thomas Aquinas and Coran, Pope Pius X and Father Ramone.

And now, she was walking through the guest foyer between the rooms (barracks, she thought of them) and the schooling section of the convent. Here there were classrooms (mostly unused, as girls just weren’t entering the order these days like they used to) and a vast library of religious texts. It was late. The sound of snoring initiates echoed like distant foghorns through the halls. Ariana was restless. She’d finished a slim volume on the
Ethics of Corporeal Punishment
, and it had left her uncomfortable, and filled with dreams of men jerking and gasping in the electric chair, and dangling with bugged eyes and purple tongues from the noose. It filled her with a strange excitement.

The library was dark, but Ariana eased open the door and flipped on the lights. She stared across the rows and rows of shelves. Her heart leapt. It was all hers. She could spend her entire life here, reading and learning, studying the follies and furies of man in his pursuit of God. She’d given up on man and his pursuit of women. Well…not women per se. More his pursuit of pussy. He didn’t care what the warm, pink hole was attached to as long as he could get his dick into it. She walked down a row of theological tomes, bound in red and burgundy leather, all of them worn and old, their pages yellowing.

The next bookcase was packed with biographies, lives of the saints. She pulled out a volume about Joan of Arc, then replaced it. There would be plenty of time to read about martyrs, but not to night.

She wound her way through the already familiar room, making mental notes on books and sections she wanted to look at further. The library wound around corners in a U shape, and where the bookshelves ended, a pile of boxes began. The nuns had turned the hidden corner of the library into a storage area for old papers and equipment. A transparency projector stood forgotten to one side, the pole of its light source bent and flecked with rust. A clock radio with giant plastic dials lay upside down on the floor, its brown cord wrapped around it like a strangling rope.

Ariana wound her way through the piles of boxes and forgotten appliances until she came to the back wall of the library. The light barely reached back here; the fluorescent bulbs hadn’t been replaced when they’d burnt out in the farthest couple of fixtures, and there were no windows in this part of the building. There
was
a door. A heavy, mahogany-stained wooden door hid behind the detritus of a century of prayer and missionary spirit. Curious, she stepped over a box of brochures about Catholicism and birth control and tried the knob.

Locked.

Figures,
she thought, looking around the door for some indication of where it might lead. But like most things in the convent, it didn’t advertise its use. Nuns, she had found, dealt with things on a need-to-know basis, and if you didn’t know, well, that meant you didn’t need to. It was all about faith, after all. Knowledge wasn’t really important.

Shrugging, Ariana threaded her way back through the library, stopping in the Philosophical Discussions section to snag an old, frayed copy of
The Myth of Grace
, and then turned the lights out and headed back to her room.

Back in bed, with the musty smell of her latest find tickling her nose, Ariana couldn’t shake the thought of the locked door. It was probably just another storage closet, she told herself, imagining shelves of yellowing paper and boxes of old rubber-banded piles of index cards inside. After trying unsuccessfully to delve into
The Myth of Grace
, she put the book down and turned her reading light off for the night. It was long after midnight, and the prayer bells would start ringing in just a few hours. She beat an indentation in her pillow and settled her head there, willing her mind to settle, to sleep.

But she kept seeing the door…

The next day, Ariana found herself wandering through the library again. Mother Martha was in the aisle of the saints, and Ariana smiled and nodded as she sidled by. A moment later, Mother Martha stuck her head out into the aisle.

“How are you, child?” she asked. “Enjoying Our Lady of the Angels so far?”

“Yes, Sister,” Ariana replied. “I especially love this library. I just love books.”

The older nun nodded and smiled, a stray wisp of white hair peeking from beneath her black veil.

“That’s good to hear,” she said. “So few new initiates want to read and study. But you know what they say, if you don’t learn from the past…”

“…you’ll be doomed to repeat it,” Ariana finished. The old woman walked to Ariana’s side, and the two moved down the center aisle.

“Here’s one of my favorite sections,” Mother Martha said, pointing to an aisle marked “Sisters in Stories.”

“What’s in there?” Ariana asked.

“A guilty pleasure,” the older nun said. “Books and stories that have nuns as characters. One needs to read something other than theological discussions and histories sometimes, so one of the sisters a long time ago began collecting books that featured nuns as protagonists, or even minor characters. It was a study, of sorts, on how the regular world sees us, but it also meant a little ‘dessert’ reading, too.”

“This library just seems to go on and on,” Ariana noted, pointing at the shelves that curved around the wall and opened into a whole other section.

The older woman laughed.

“Well, when you don’t get out much, you tend to read a lot!”

“What’s all the stuff back here?” the girl asked, as they rounded the last bend and the boxes and abandoned equipment came into view.

“Just what it looks like,” the old woman said. “All of the things that we should have thrown away but couldn’t quite bring ourselves to. Sisters are packrats! So instead they pile up back here. One of these days we’ll have to back a truck up and dump it all.”

Ariana stepped into the maze of precariously stacked boxes and lifted an old, black manual Corona typewriter. The keys were black with white inlaid lettering, and one metal spoke stuck out from the lower left without a letter. It was missing the Z. She pushed the handle of the carriage return and turned to the older sister.

“I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid!”

Mother Martha laughed. “Child, I was still using that typewriter a couple years ago!”

“What’s back there?” Ariana finally braved, pointing at the wooden door in the back wall.

“The door?” Mother Martha asked. “That’s our rare books room. Lots of old texts that some of the sisters brought over from trips to Europe and the Vatican and such. Many of them are irreplaceable, so we keep them locked up back there. Wouldn’t want one of the older sisters tucking one under the mattress and forgetting about it, now would we?”

“Can you show me?” Ariana asked.

The older woman reached into the creases and folds of her habit and came out with a gold key on a chain. She raised an eyebrow and revealed a mouthful of yellowed and graying teeth.

“Ask and you shall receive,” she said, and led the way through the boxes to the door. She unlocked and pulled it open, ushering Ariana inside after flipping a light switch just inside the door. A bare bulb glowed yellow-white in the center of the ceiling.

This “mini-library” was much smaller, just three bookcases tucked inside a room not much bigger than a closet.
That was probably its original intent when it was built,
Ariana thought.

“Some of these are in Latin,” Mother Martha explained, “which most of our initiates don’t read anymore. These over here,” she said, pointing at a row of faded green leather tomes, “are a collection of the lives of the saints that Padre Pio once had in his own collection.”

She moved to the second bookcase and pointed at the top shelf. “This was Sister Augustina’s collection. She studied a lot of obscure religions and ancient cults, and some of these books come from as far away as Africa. Others are nearly as old as the Church itself. We really should donate them to a special library, now that she’s gone.”

“What happened to her?”

“Same as will happen to all of us.” Mother Martha shook her head. “Old age. She passed last year. She was ninety-one. She was still teaching world religions down at the university until she was in her eighties. Nothing ever slowed her down. She brought most of these books back herself from Belgium and Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Italy and the like. She was an amazing sister.”

“Would it be okay if I looked at some of her collection?” Ariana asked.

Mother Martha nodded, her eyes visibly glossy. Her voice cracked a little when she spoke.

“I think Sister Augustina would be honored to have another student take an interest,” she said. “But you must promise to be careful with these texts. Many of them are irreplaceable, I’m sure.”

“I will,” Ariana promised. “I’ll return whatever I take directly to you, if you want.”

“Yes,” the older nun said. “I think that would be a good idea. Some of the other sisters might be a little apprehensive about letting a new initiate take things from this room. But I think Augustina would have wanted you to see these books. She was always, always teaching and encouraging students.”

Ariana stepped up to the bookcase and began to peruse the titles.

“I’ll be out in the general stacks,” Mother Martha said, turning the inner lock on the door. She dabbed a tear from her cheek with the edge of her veil. “Just pull the door shut behind you when you’re done browsing.”

Ariana thanked the older woman and pulled out a dusty black volume with Greek lettering on the spine. When she leafed through its pages, she found the whole book was in foreign text, but it also included a series of inserts—colored artists’ renderings. One depicted demons rising from the earth, and angels descending from heaven with glowing gold spears in hand.