Sacrificing Virgins

Tales beyond the darkness!

If you could bring your daughter back from the dead...should you? If you could forget the worst event in your life...would you?

In this collection of twenty-five dark tales from Bram Stoker Award-winning author John Everson, you'll meet a host of provocative characters. Learn the secrets of the man whose pumpkin carvings look strangely, disturbingly real. Visit a small town where the tavern game isn't about shots, but sharks. Meet the woman who finds an ancient sex toy—and a salacious spirit—entombed beneath her garden. From quiet tales of ghosts and cemeteries to extreme tales of erotic horror,
Sacrificing Virgins
will take you to the bleeding edge...and beyond.

Sacrificing Virgins

John Everson

Dedication

For Geri

Copyright Information

“She Found Spring” © 2011. Originally published on the
Literary Mayhem
website, 2011.

“In Memoryum” © 2009. Originally published in the anthology
Terrible Beauty, Fearful Symmetry
, 2009.

“Bad Day” © 2010. Originally published in the collection
Creeptych
, 2010.

“Nailed” © 2012. Originally published in the anthology
Relics & Remains
, 2012.

“The Eyes” © 2008. Originally published in a
Dark Discoveries
promo chapbook, 2008.

“Sacrificing Virgins” © 2001. Originally published in the anthology
The Dead Inn
, 2001; Reprinted in the collection
Deadly Nightlusts
, 2010 and in the magazine
Tales of Obscenity
, 2013.

“Whatever You Want” © 2011. Originally published in
Dark Discoveries Magazine
#19, 2011.

“Grandma Wanda's Belly Jelly” © 1999. Originally published in
eScape
ezine, 1999. Reprinted in
Red Scream Magazine
, 2005;
New Voices in Fiction
, 2008.

“I Love Her” © 2015.
Previously unpublished.

“Eardrum Buzz” © 2010. Originally published in the collection
Creeptych
, 2010. Reprinted in e-book format by Amazon Storyfront, 2013.

“Field of Flesh” © 2015. Originally published in
Dark Discoveries Magazine
, Jan. 2015.

“Faux” © 2004. Originally published in the charity anthology
Small Bites
, 2004.

“The Pumpkin Man” © 2008. Originally published in
Doorways Magazine #4
, 2008; Reprinted in
All American Horror: The Best of the First Decade of the 21st Century
, Fall 2013.

“The Tapping” © 2011. Originally published in the anthology
Gothic Blue Book
, 2011.

“The White House” © 2006. Originally published in
Candy in the Dumpster
, 2006.

“Star on the Beach” © 2004. Originally published in the anthology
Peepshow Vol. 1
, 2004;
Dark Discoveries #10
, 2007;
Deadly Nightlusts
, 2010.

“My Aim is True” © 2006. Originally published in the anthology
Dark Doorways
, 2006.

“Fish Bait” © 2008. Originally published in the anthology
The Horror Library, Vol. 3;
Reprinted in e-book format by Amazon StoryFront, 2013.

“Camille Smiled” © 2005. Originally published in the anthology
Cold Flesh
, 2005; reprinted in
Best New Zombie Tales Vol. 2,
2010.

“Ligeia's Revenge on the Queen Anne's Resurrection” © 2011. Originally published in the Italian e-zine
Queen Anne's Resurrection
(Italian translation), 2011. English version appeared on the promotional website for the novel
Siren
.

“Green Apples, Red Nails” © 2010. Originally published in the collection
Deadly Nightlusts
, 2010. Recorded for the audio podcast
Tales to Terrify
, 2012.

“To Earn His Love” © 1995. Originally published in
Crossroads Magazine
, 1995; Reprinted in the collection
Deadly Nightlusts
, 2010.

“Still” © 2015.
Previously unpublished.

“Voyeur” © 2014. Originally published in the anthology
Qualia Nous
, August 2014.

“The Hole To China” © 2014. Originally published in
Eulogies III,
May 2015.

Foreword

Legally Yours

Last year marked my 20th anniversary as a published horror and dark fantasy fiction author. I guess that means this year, my stories are officially legal and can finally hunker down on a barstool without a fake ID to talk about the good old days. You know, the days of dot matrix printers and story submissions that required postage stamps.

I spent the first half of my writing career printing out and snail-mailing short fiction to just about any magazine or anthology that published dark tales. I pored over the classified ads, looking for magazines to submit to in the back of
Writer's Digest
, and lived for the day each month when
Scavenger's Newsletter
arrived in the mail—
Scav
was a saddle-stitched 'zine that carried updated listings from all of the tiny magazines and small presses around the country that were looking for submissions. A batch of the more twisted things I created during that period were collected by Delirium Books in 2000 in my very first short fiction collection (and very first book!),
Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions
. A lighter (both in weight and tone) collection from Chicago's Twilight Tales followed,
Vigilantes of Love
, in 2003. And then in 2007, one of my favorite small presses, Necro Publications, issued my
Needles & Sins
collection. There was a time that I looked at that third book as my last word in the short form. I had begun publishing novels by then, and that collection held much of what I thought were my best short stories. For a while, I didn't think I had another short story in me. Nothing more to say. I was done here.

But…of course…I did, and I wasn't.

It's been eight years since that last collection, and there have been a half dozen new novels since then. But there have also been shorter tales. Twice as many as would fit into this book, in all honesty. I've always felt the short story can pack the best horror punch; it's the perfect conduit for capturing strong feelings and emotions. And so, now and then, instead of writing a novel chapter…I spend the day working on a short story idea that catches my imagination.

In reading through these pieces, I was instantly transported back to where I was when I wrote some of them. I remembered why. And often, they left me feeling the same way I did on the day that I finished writing them. These stories speak to me of different things. Hopefully they'll speak to you too…though the colors they leave in your head will be a little different than what they painted…or were painted from…in mine. And that's the beauty of fiction. They'll be different for you than they are for me. And that will make them yours.

There's a story here that I wrote after reconnecting with some old friends in a shot-and-a-beer bar in Denver (“Fish Bait”) and a story I wrote after a brush with tinnitus after a really loud SXSW show (thanks for “Eardrum Buzz” Nashville Pussy!) There are creepy stories here that I wrote specifically to read for all-ages audiences on Halloween (“The Tapping” and “The Pumpkin Man”). And there are stories that I wrote because I wanted to go really over-the-top, like “Whatever You Want” and “The Eyes” and “Sacrificing Virgins”. The latter two I read at Gross Out fiction contests many years ago at World Horror Conventions.

There are quiet ghost stories and erotic horror tales. A touch of humor and a touch of melancholy. There are also offshoots here from three of my novels. “Ligeia's Revenge”, using the title character from my novel
Siren
, was originally written for an Italian webzine and was only officially published prior to now in Italian translation. “The Pumpkin Man” originated the mythology that was used a couple years later to write my novel of the same name. And “Field of Flesh” offers a different entrée into the world of my novel
NightWhere
. They all stand on their own as stories, but fans of those novels will (hopefully) enjoy another glimpse into those worlds.

There is a short bit of flash fiction that I wrote for a benefit anthology (“Faux”) and a vaguely Lovecraftian piece that I wrote partly on a pad of paper on Miami Beach at night, after building sand castles that afternoon with a boy who didn't speak English (“Star on the Beach”). I am very fond of all of these stories, for different reasons. They take me back to Miami Beach and The Stars Our Destination Bookstore in Chicago, and Austin, Texas, and Resurrection Cemetery and World Horror Conventions in Seattle and Kansas City and San Francisco. One story takes me back to when I was just six or seven years old, and used to dig clay out of the earth behind the shed of my parents' first house to fashion homemade dinosaurs.

These stories all have moments that resonate with very specific, special feelings for me.

I hope that after you read them, they'll mean something special to you, too.

—John Everson

February, 2015

She Found Spring

It took a long time before Eric grasped the connection.

The first time it happened, he was exhausted from cleaning the backyard. It was still March, but an unseasonable fifty-five degrees outside, so he'd spent the day raking leaves away from the fence and trimming shrubs and willow branches so that a month from now, when it all bloomed out, the yard would look neat.

He'd collapsed on the couch in the family room with a beer, and the next thing he knew, it was dark. The lights in the house were all out and the moon colored the brown back lawn in fairy light; ethereal.

Or maybe it wasn't the moon that did that.

Maybe it was the woman, who walked through his garden, glowing as if from her own inner light. Her blue-white feet were bare, and her face beamed with both light and pleasure. The garden was yards away from the back sliding glass door, but Eric could make out nearly all of her features from where he sat. She walked around the old willow tree, trailing her hands through the spray of its branches, and then hugging its center in an odd show of seeming affection.

Then she pulled away from the tree and walked towards the house. Towards the glass doors that Eric watched her through.

The closer she got to the house, the more nervous he felt. At first, it had simply been a joy to watch this phosphorescent creature dance under the moon. But now, she clearly had him pegged as a destination.

What did she want? Eric wasn't sure he wanted to know. He got up and walked to the sliding glass door and reached a hand out to check the lock. It was set. She was only a few feet away, so close that he could see the faint dark hairs that wisped away from the rest and brushed across her face in a fan. So close that he could see the glint of moisture against the dark when she licked her lips, and he could see the wrinkles of the white gauzy dress as it clung and shifted across her tummy and showed the flesh ripple there with every step. She seemed to almost walk naked in the night, but then the gauzy dress shifted again and she was hidden…just a woman moving closer and closer to his house in the night.

Eric reached for the switch that flicked on the outside lights. The twin spotlights on the opposite sides of the house suddenly filled the yard with hard yellow light, and the lantern light next to the sliding door on the outside did the same.

Instead of illuminating the woman though, they seemed to tear her apart. As the lights beamed on, the woman lifted her arms at Eric, as if begging for an embrace, or salvation. And then just as he registered her dismay, she was gone, and all he could see was the dead brown grass of winter outside his door, speckled faintly with the new green of spring.

He didn't sleep easily that night, but in the light of morning, he convinced himself that the woman had been the figment of the overactive imagination of an overworked lonely guy. He soon forgot the woman in white, and the spring disappeared into summer and then fall until winter killed the year again.

Winter seemed as if it were there to stay. This March was much different than last year—the grass had been buried beneath a foot of snow now for two weeks, and Eric cringed at the TV report on Saturday night that said more snow was due to fall throughout the day on Sunday. He had to travel on Monday morning, and worried about either getting snowed into his house, or having the airport close once he got there.

Neither was a good option.

He went out late Sunday afternoon, as dusk began to fall, to clear the driveway once more, hopefully making it easier for him to get out in the morning. The snow had not shown any sign of stopping, the driveway easily had three or four inches since he'd cleared it after lunch.

Sometimes it sucked to live in the Midwest.

Eric pushed the shovel and staggered back when it hit a crack in the asphalt beneath the snow. He tossed that load of white onto the tall bank already at the edge of the drive and then pushed the shovel again across the drive. Slowly he scooped the uncharacteristically late snowfall off of his driveway onto the also uncharacteristically high bank of snow that still sat on the edge of his drive. It had been a really cold, long winter.

He was nearly to the foot of the drive when he happened to look up from what he'd been doing. He could see the backyard from here, and his garden. He wondered if anything would manage to return from root or seed in a few weeks when spring finally came, given the harshness of this winter.

That was what he was thinking when he saw the sparkle of something more than snow in the air near the garden plot. Something that looked like
nothing
at first—a flutter of icy crystals on the breeze. Then, with every swirl, it became a
something
. A glimmering, real person…

Eric rested the shovel on the icy drive and stared at the woman walking towards him, clad in only a moonlight dress, all sparkles and vagaries…he could see the flow of her milky calves as they stepped through the snow atop his garden. He could see the press of her chest through the top of the dress, which seemed thin as tissue to his eye.

A woman dressed in tissue was walking barefoot across the snow to him.

Eric didn't know whether to run to the house or to run to her. He did neither. Instead, he stood and watched her approach. The darkness felt heavier all around them and as she stepped through the snow at the side of his house, Eric realized that this was the same woman he had insisted was just a figment of his exhausted imagination a year before.

She walked closer, and he could make out the dark brown pools of her wide-open eyes, and the wavy mane of brown hair that flowed over her shoulders as she came faster across the snow, blue-white flesh ready for embrace…

A car rounded the corner of 88th Street and its beams bore hard across the snow around his house and up the drifts of snow to kiss the feet of the garden woman. As they did, the woman in white seemed to dissolve, her face a surprised mask of anger and frustration.

For a few seconds, she'd been just feet from where Eric stood, and then, with a wavering double flash of light, she was gone.

The moment left him with a cold in his chest that wouldn't thaw…he kept thinking about that split second when she reached out for him…and then she'd come back with zero.

Cold. Gone.

She'd disappeared like the flakes of snow that shimmered and held there a moment, and then fell to the ground.

It hadn't been his imagination
this
time…or was it?

The questions kept him awake that night, and on the way to the airport the next morning, he found himself still thinking about the look of angered surprise on her face when the car lights had driven her away. But soon his attention was refocused on the business of his business trip. And then with the busy coming of spring, the strange vision again disappeared to the back of his memory.

He thought fleetingly about the ghostly woman a few weeks later as he turned over the still-hard soil of his garden. Both times he'd seen her, she'd appeared from this general area of the yard, it seemed. He'd picked the spot for the garden when he moved in because it was just out of the range of the tree roots of the old willow, and one of the only spots in the yard where the sun shone full enough through the trees to let the tomatoes grow. He had brought in bags of peat and manure the past three seasons to try to soften the ground, but it still remained difficult to turn over. He looked at the willow and wondered if the tree had something to do with the manifestation. Eric didn't remember his mythology, but it seemed like he remembered the willow as some kind of spirit-friendly tree?

He made a mental note to look it up on the Internet, but by the time he'd finished planting the bean and squash seeds and tomato and pepper plants, dusk was falling and his neighbor hung over the fence and invited him out for a beer. Eric cleaned up, went next door and didn't think again for a long while about the ghost and the willow tree. Life had a way of always moving quickly on…

Dusk brought the faint reflection of stars to the frost on the ground of Eric's backyard. It was another cold snap in March, and his breath instantly fogged the cold glass as he stood staring out at the shadowy landscape of frozen grass and bare, twisted tree limbs. The winter had flown by as his day job sent him to bed exhausted and beat-up from the days, night after night. Nevertheless, he was more than ready for spring. In his heart, he felt worn out and constantly tired. He blamed it on the season, and prayed that with the return of spring, he might feel better. But he feared that in reality, he was just growing old. Used up.

The tea in his mug (brewed from dried peppermint sprigs that grew behind the willow) was lukewarm, and Eric began to turn away from the window to take it to the microwave. But a flash of something caught his eye. He turned his attention back to the yard, and for a third time, he saw her.

She moved quickly across the frost, and Eric backed away from the glass. He remembered that the glow of headlights and the flash of his backdoor spotlight had driven her away the past two times he'd seen her. Not wanting her to disappear instantly, he reached behind him and clicked off the table lamp near the couch. He was curious to know what she would do…what she wanted.

And then she stood outside of his sliding glass door, long brown hair rimmed in moonlight, white dress clinging to her like fairy gauze. Her eyes stared at him, as if questioning. She lifted one blue-white calf and then her bare foot was through Eric's window, and in a heartbeat, the rest of her followed.

Eric dropped the mug to the carpet.

“Who are you?” he whispered. She didn't answer, but instead flew towards him, moving across the room in seconds to stand silent within reach of his embrace.

His heart beat like a hammer and his arms were paralyzed as he stared into the faintly liquid eyes of the ghost. He could vaguely make out the outline of his sliding glass door through the pale glow of her skin. Part of him wanted to reach back and flick the light back on…but he couldn't move. From his throat, he managed a tortured whisper of “Why…?” But the room remained completely otherwise silent. The ticking of the kitchen clock was painfully audible as the woman slowly raised a hand and put a finger to Eric's lips. And then she placed the same hand flat on his chest.

He looked down and saw the shine of his belt through her thin luminescent arm. What did she want, why did she touch him? He could feel the strangest tingle beneath her hand, but no pressure of flesh. Was she sucking the blood from his heart?

She only paused there a second, and then removed her hand from him and began walking down the hallway. She paused once and looked back over her shoulder, as if waiting for him to follow. Eric found that his panic had relaxed, at least enough so that he could move again, and after a moment's hesitation, he began to follow. As soon as he did, she turned and continued walking deeper into his house, through the hall and around the corner and into his bedroom. As he rounded the doorway, he saw that she crouched next to his bed. One translucent arm pointed to the dark beneath.

What did she want? For him to crawl under the bed? Eric stood at the entrance to the room and watched her point repeatedly towards the space beneath his bed. Her eyes flashed with anxious need, as if it was a matter of life and death that he follow the clue of her ghostly fingers.

Eric shrugged and decided to play along and move the bed to see what she was pointing at. Absently he reached to the wall to flick the light on, so he could see what he was doing and…

…in a heartbeat, she was gone.

“You stupid shit,” he cursed himself out loud. “How could you be such an idiot!” He turned the light off and waited in the empty room for a few minutes, hoping that she would reappear before walking back to the family room and looking outside towards the garden and the willow. He waited, but in his heart, he knew that she was gone for the night. She hadn't reappeared after the light had taken her the past two times, and so he supposed she wouldn't this time either.

Finally, he turned the lights in the house back on, and cleaned up the tea from where he'd spilled it on the carpet. Then he went back to his bedroom and moved the bed away from the wall. Dust bunnies rolled along the back wall, but it was the discolored wood a couple feet away from the wall that he stared at. Part of the reason he'd placed the bed where he had when he'd first moved in was because he'd noticed that spot in the floor. It looked as if someone had cut into the hardwood at some point, pulled out a square, and then replaced it with not-quite-the-same wood. He'd assumed that someone had needed to dig through the floor to fix a utility line at some point in the home's past, and had ruined the original flooring doing so.

Now he wasn't so sure.

Eric went and got a crowbar from the garage. He slipped the edge in the groove between the new square of flooring and the rest.

He pushed back on the other end of the tool, and the square shifted. Eric rocked the metal bar just a bit, and then pushed again, and the entire square of five strips of hardwood lifted as one. It clattered to the floor upside down, and he saw the flooring had been nailed together with two other thin boards. It was a doorway into the ground without handle or hinges. And beneath where it had lain, was a dark hole.

Eric peered inside. Six or eight inches below the flooring, a number of things rested on a small blue-and-green-checked blanket. He lifted them out, one by one, and then pulled the blanket from where it rested on the concrete of his foundation as well.

Then he sat back and looked more carefully at what he'd found.

A stack of faded black-and-white photographs, taken in a wide variety of locales. He recognized the Grand Canyon and Times Square amid many other less obvious locations. The common element of them all was a smiling woman with dark eyes and hair. She looked like the kind of girl who laughed easily and hugged hello. She looked a lot like the woman who had pointed to the space beneath his bed.