Sacrificing Virgins (11 page)

My fixation with her stumps only increased now that both of her legs were shorn, and I began to whip Kerstin not only on her back, but across her thighs and breasts as well, taking care not to hit her on flesh she couldn't cover at work. But I quickly overprinted her lattice of scars. She abandoned her body to my growing sadism. She took to wearing layers of clothing when she left the house, as she was always bleeding and oozing from somewhere.

“Front or back,” I'd ask, as she handed me the cat o nine tails.

“Whatever you want,” she'd always say. Later, I would lick pink scars on the stumps of Alexis's legs before cleaning Kerstin's wetter wounds with my tongue. There were times that I thought I was in the heaven of hell. My daydreams were filled with scars and blood and writhing women who lived for both.

I killed Alexis on Christmas.

I didn't mean to. We were taking her arm off with the saw, and I think we waited too long to bandage her up, after. But Alexis kept screaming in pain at the same time as insisting that I fuck her. The three of us were covered in her blood when Kerstin finished her orgasm with the butt of the saw as I came inside a bloody, screaming Alexis.

The next morning, stitched, bandaged and morphined…Alexis was blue. She did not wake. She had wanted to give me a special Christmas present and I'd elected this year to take it. It was the last gift she would give.

Kerstin and I wept and held her dead body for an hour before we finally left her in the slaughter room.

“We'll bury her in back,” she pronounced later that day.

“Are you serious?” I said.

“We can't very well call an ambulance and report it as an accidental death, can we?”

Good point.

“I can get us a coffin, even,” Kerstin said, her voice paper thin. “I have connections, you know. And he'll think it's just another kink.”

That night, she pulled into the driveway in a rented SUV with its seats removed. A plain brown coffin in the back. I helped her bring it in the house, and together we laid Alexis out in it. A private wake.

“Take her one last time,” Kerstin begged me. “She would want you to.”

It didn't take too much urging for me to lie with our Queen of Scars one last time. And another.

We kept her in the living room for three days before I could let her go.

Things changed after Alexis was gone. She was our center, the perversion we'd revolved around. Kerstin and I started pushing the envelope on each other then. She would threaten to cut me with the saw, its teeth just inches from my neck, before collapsing into a masturbatory fugue on the floor beside the bed.

I started bringing a razor to bed, and I dragged it across her skin deeper and deeper by the night. The flesh of her back and chest was black with scabs and swollen with infection. She oozed foul fluids when I pressed my body against hers. Her eyes took on a strangely haunted look as she continued to taunt me to hurt her more.

The morning I woke up tied to the headboard was the final nail. As my eyes fluttered open, and I realized what was going on, looking from one hand to the other and flexing my fingers, I heard the saw start up.

“I need a piece of you,” Kirstin said in a low, sex voice. She brought the blade up to my chest, and then down the length of my arm.

“No, Kerstin,” I begged. “Please don't do this. I can't live without my arm.”

“Whatever you want,” she whispered sweetly, and then the pain lanced through my little toe.

When I was done crying and she'd bandaged the wound, Kerstin kissed me. Deeply. With more passion than she'd had in weeks.

“So many things to cut.” She grinned, running a finger down my armpit and out to my palm. “But we'll save the best for last,” she said, toying with the root of my cock with her other hand.

“I should be able to get weeks and weeks of use out of it before it's time.”

That time was never going to come. Kerstin was used to dealing with masochists; people who wanted to be cut. She never tied ropes to hold people who didn't want to be held. And I didn't.

It only took a couple days before she tied one of my wrists just a little too loosely before she went to work. I was ready for her when she got home from work. I stayed in bed and feigned bondage. So well, in fact, that she stripped and straddled me before she knew anything was amiss. She bent to kiss me, and the shriveled remains of my severed toe trailed across my chest. She'd threaded it onto a thin chain to create a gruesome pendant.

“I love you,” she breathed. The warmth of her breasts slipped softly across my chest hair. On the surface, it probably looked or sounded romantic. But you could see in her eyes, that Kerstin was lost. Broken. Searching for something to fill in the hole Lex had left in her. In both of us.

I knew there was only one answer for her. She'd been getting closer and closer to it for years. And I was the one who would give it to her. It was something I had been getting closer and closer to for years too.

I flipped the ropes off my wrists and grabbed her around the waist, quickly changing our positions to pin her to the bed.

She was surprised at first, but she didn't really struggle very hard when I twisted the ropes around her wrists.

I looked down at the ugly gashes across her breasts and the bruises on her ribs. At the yellowing stains left by the lashes on her upper arms. At the long ragged pink tracks of pain that crisscrossed her thighs.

“How…” she began to ask, as she tested the ropes. They held.

“You don't tie a very good knot,” I explained. “But I do. Remember that night you asked me what I secretly fantasized about doing? My darkest dirty secret?”

She nodded. And I could see in her eyes a new spark of fear and…I think…the first flash of excitement in a long time.

“I don't know if I could have admitted it to myself back then, not really,” I said. “But you've freed me.”

I walked over to the dresser and picked up the saw.

“I told you I once had a girlfriend who was covered in scars. But I didn't tell you why we broke up.”

“Why?” Kerstin asked. Her voice was very small. She moved so easily from subjugator to slave.

“Because she died,” I answered, stepping closer to the bed with the saw. I revved it once, and I saw the muscles in her thighs clench. Her fingers touched the sheets and trembled.

“Her father worked at a lumberyard, and one day he'd gone to work and left his lunch on the counter. Becky—that was her name—drove it out to him, because her mom didn't want him going hungry that day. She went into the plant and saw her dad working on the big saw down in the pit so she walked over. She couldn't just call to him, because the place was too loud with machinery. Thing was…Becky didn't walk very steady because of the car accident that gave her all those scars. And the day she went to give her dad his lunch…one of her legs decided to just…give out. It happened sometimes. She'd be walking along and she'd just…fall.

“It picked a rotten time to give out this time though; she was on the stairwell just above where her dad was working. He had no idea she was even there—you couldn't hear anything in that place but the sound of the cutting. He had no idea until she fell right there on the big log he was guiding through the saw, and that blade bit right down into the middle of her without slowing speed a hair. I used to wonder if he even knew who it was that he'd helped chop up before her head rolled down the sawdust trough to stare up at him from his feet.”

Kerstin's eyes were bugging out now, fascinated and afraid at the same time. “Oh my God,” she murmured.

“Yeah,” I said. “Can you imagine sawing your own daughter in half? I was pretty broken up at first. But then I started having these dreams about it. Only, it wasn't her dad at the saw when she fell. In my dreams, it was me. I masturbated a lot thinking about how she must have looked there on the floor, sawed in half…”

“Oh God,” Kerstin said, spreading her legs wider. She glistened with excitement, and I put my finger on the saw's trigger again. She visibly responded to the sound, but this time, I didn't relax my finger.

“I never wanted a dead girl the way you thought,” I said, moving the saw closer, finally admitting my darkest fantasy to myself. I don't even know if she would have tried to close her legs if I hadn't tied her ankles. In any event, I had, and she couldn't. But I knew that she was twisted just for this. I was twisted just for her.

“Whatever you want,” I heard her whisper as the whining teeth of the saw moved steadily closer to her most vulnerable parts.

I think she orgasmed as the blade ate into that pink flesh. I know she was moaning the closer I brought it, and the first scream she let go sounded like the big O. After that…the screams sounded a lot less happy. Either way, they didn't last very long.

Some of her ribs were hard to cut, but steel blades and electricity prevailed. In the end, I lay down there on the wet bed with her. In her. Between her. I kissed her blood-spattered lips and felt my own insanity rise fully, freed at last. Her eyes were vacant, but I knew she was happy wherever she was. Violated completely at last. Her lips were still warm. This time, she wouldn't heal.

When I fell asleep that night, I didn't dream at all.

Because all my dreams were real.

Grandma Wanda's Belly Jelly

Even the slogan was inane:

It won't stick to your heart or make your thighs swelly

But it's sweet as the twinkle in the eyes of lil' Nelly

It's Grandma Wanda's great Belly Jelly!

God was I sick of hearing that name.

You'd think old Grandma Wanda had a fifty-percent market share or something.

Not likely. The prune-complexioned granny produced this stuff in the basement of her little suburban house and only released a few hundred jars a year.

Oh, but those jars…

People paid a hundred bucks a pop for them.
Before
the resale scalpers came into the picture. Naturally it wasn't long before the real jelly manufacturers wanted a piece of the action. We could have made her a millionaire overnight. Her face (well, actually, we would have gotten a sweeter-looking granny for the labels) would have smiled from the aisles of supermarkets from Greenwich Village to Key West.

But Grandma Wanda had turned up her mottled, discolored close pin of a nose and grunted. “Uhh-uhhh.”

There were plenty of closed-door meetings about Grandma Wanda. Bet on it. We were not the only bread spreaders who wanted the rights to the recipe. Marketing boys sketched kindly looking aproned matrons and syrupy slogans to present to the old bat in hopes of converting her.

Money didn't talk. “Uhhh-uhh.”

Ad slicks met with crumpling. “Uhhh-uhhh.”

The old warhorse patriotic good-of-your-country speech raised an eyebrow but no salute. “Uhhh-uh.”

“We have to buy her out before Fucker's,” our CEO shouted in his affectionate vernacular for our arch rivals in morning manna.

The offers were made.

The offers were countered.

The counters were topped.

Grandma Wanda spread a slick of translucent crimson jam across the contracts, folded them neatly and shoved them back in the breast pockets of our sales force.

“Uhh-uh,” was the extent of our negotiation effects.

Which put me in my current position: Street corner of Eigel and 5th, powdered sugar stains on my gray trousers, a stale reek of sweat and frustration bouncing from me to the Caprice's upholstery and back again, like some vile game of scented racquetball. I'd been in this car a long time.

Grandma Wanda, however, had been in her house even longer.

I knew she had to come out sooner or later, and I only wished she'd chosen a more interesting neighborhood to set up shop in. At least then I would have had something interesting to look at while I waited for her knob to turn, the car to rev and her 1954 Ford to cough its way onto the street and away from her house. She and the car made a well-matched team: rusted, beat-up, old and indomitable. If she'd driven a tank, I wouldn't have batted an eye. But the Ford was close enough.

I'd been watching the stationary hunk of road armor since last night, and the arches of my eyelids were threatening to give way. Their architect couldn't argue very much against the idea. The suburban street stretched ahead of me like a gray ruler: straight and evenly dotted with houses of similar size and shape and color. Geometrically positioned parkway trees and driveways divided the suburban yardstick. I had waited in vain for that tedious sameness to be interrupted by the salacious stride of a young teenage girl, or even by the aged but titillating sunbathing of a not-too-far-to-pot housewife.

But the neighborhood was as sterile as its construction.

When the choking cloud of blue smoke drifted past my lookout post, I almost missed it. But the backfire startled me into spilling coffee on my crotch, and I looked up just in time to see Grandma Wanda's prune-veined cheeks go chugging past me. Ten seconds later, I was out of the car and heading nonchalantly up her driveway (as nonchalantly as someone can be when wearing a dark stain of coffee and a sticky smear of sugar on one's crotch).

I ducked past the creaking wooden gate and tiptoed up the rotting deck behind Wanda's house. At that moment, one of the obstinately invisible sunbathers of the past twenty-four hours decided to step out into the yard next door.

She waved, brown-freckled breasts bouncing like untethered water balloons back and forth. She was maybe forty-five, false blonde, and a dermatologist's dream: Every inch of her body was tanned a dark leathery brown, and I mean every inch. There were only about three palm's worth of skin on her that she didn't have exposed and she was obviously proud of this fact. She jiggled herself from doorstep to fence in seconds.

“Hiya,” she called, resting forearms on the fence and sticking out her derriere so that I couldn't help but notice her physique. It wasn't bad, but I'd guess from the amount of dark freckles on her face and chest that skin cancer was a bet no bookie would take odds against. I nodded in her direction and smiled, but she didn't take the hint.

“You a friend of Wanda's?” she asked, cocking her head like a bird. Vulture, perhaps.

I nodded.

“Nephew, actually. She told me to stop by and wait for her,” I lied, pulling out my skeleton key and praying the door wouldn't be stubborn. “I'm picking up some jam,” I added.

She grinned and rubbed her stomach invitingly.

“Mmmm, I do love that Belly Jelly! But ya know, any boy of Wanda's is welcome to wait at my place,” she offered, slowly pushing browned breasts over the rail of the fence. “I like a little company now and then.”

“Thanks for the offer, ma'am,” I said, wondering if I should try to slip in a quickie next door after I left Wanda's. “Maybe I'll stop by later, if it's okay.”

She frowned, wide lips drooping like a pornographic clown's.

“Suit yourself,” she said, and slipped the already thin strap of her bikini bottoms into her ass as she walked away from me.

Slowly, for emphasis.

Wow.

I had never believed the tales of bored suburban housewives, but maybe the false symmetry of the streets bred bizarre behavior. Certainly Wanda was no normal granny, from what I'd seen.

My key slid into the lock and sifted through the tumblers with ease. I took a last glance at the bare backside of Wanda's neighbor, now reclined on a plastic cushion, and stepped inside.

I started in the kitchen.

Where else would you look for a jam recipe?

It was a kitchen like any other grandma's: Its white Formica countertops were lined with spices, potholders and jars of flour, sugar and who knew what else. A warm yeasty odor, like fresh-baked bread hung in the air. But there were no dishes in the sink, and no recipe books lying about. The fridge was dotted with those ridiculous magnets shaped like ears of corn and pieces of fruit. I'd never understood why people paid money for a kitschy kitchen. Then again, I'd always had an urge to open fire with a shotgun on those yard ornaments spotlighting people's bent-over backsides.

I didn't spend too long in the kitchen before marking it off as dry. Wanda had to have a larger place for canning her jam anyway, and I'd always sort of figured she used a basement. I know
my
grandma used to keep preserves in the cool damp confines below her kitchen. Maybe Wanda cooked and canned there.

The stairs weren't too hard to find. A door opened right off the kitchen onto a narrow descent of dark wooden steps. I felt around for a light and found a string, loosely tied to a hook in the wall. I pulled it, softly at first, and then with a harder tug. A bare bulb screwed into a rough-wood ceiling flickered on at the bottom of the steps.

My first step creaked so loud my heart turned over like a rusted-out '68 Chevy. I looked behind me and listened hard, paranoid now that as soon as I made it to the basement, the ol' bat would walk in the door behind me.

“You get caught, and we don't know ya',” my boss had told me right out. Just the sort of corporate loyalty I expected. And yet I was here anyway. If I didn't get caught, there was a huge bonus waiting for me in an unmarked envelope in the safe behind the CEO's red leather recliner. I had counted the zeros myself. This was a trip worth the risk. And hell, what could an old lady do against me anyway, aside from calling the police and reporting my license number, if she'd noticed the car? I almost whistled as I descended the rest of the stairs.

Wanda's basement reminded me of a cave I'd once gone through on a tour. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, I shivered with the clammy cold that seeped immediately through my still-damp pants and shirt. I guessed it was good for the jelly to stay in a natural refrigerator, but I couldn't imagine that the old lady spent much time down here. I know I wouldn't. Not by choice, anyway.

The floor of the basement seemed to be natural rock. Lord knows, digging a deep enough hole to put in a basement was difficult around here, with bedrock being about one foot down. But usually when they did dredge one out, they concreted it too. The floor sloped off to the right from the end of the stairs, and I decided that right couldn't be wrong. With a quick look back up the stairs to the cheery light above, I ambled deeper into the darkness. I quickly realized that the other strange thing about this basement was that there were no windows. It was as if the house had been built atop a cave. And as I looked up at the ceiling, I wondered if that was really so far-fetched. The ceiling was not planed out as the floor had been, and instead, outcroppings of smoothed red and tan stone crept along in tides of tension.

So I was in a cave. What would the boys say to this one? Not only does the Granny refuse a cool million for her stupid jelly, but she hides in a dank cave with the recipe. Probably even stirs up the mix in a big black kettle.

I was startled out of my internal amusement by a noise upstairs. A door slamming.

SHIT.

“Hellooooo?”

I dove back for the stairs, crawling up them on all fours to try to spread out my weight and minimize their creaking.

“Wanda's nephew? Are you still here, hon?”

It was the damned nosy neighbor! I considered just hiding down in the basement and hoping she'd go away on her own…but if she came down the stairs, I'd be cornered.

No, I had to get rid of her quickly, and on the ground floor.

Quietly I rose to my feet and slipped through the door back into the kitchen.

“Helloooo?”

She'd moved to the stairs that I assumed led to bedrooms on the second level. I pushed the door slowly shut and stepped into the dining room behind her.

“Looking for me, ma'am?”

“Oh!” She jumped around, hands on her chest, still only marginally covered with a pink-and-yellow day-glo bikini. “You gave me a start. I had just about given up on ya.”

She covered the distance between us before I could think of a response. And then she put her hands boldly on my crotch. My eyes must've bugged.

“Listen, I noticed outside that you'd spilled something on your pants here.” She rubbed the appropriate (or inappropriate) spot. “I thought I could just take these and clean 'em up for you while you're waiting for Wanda. I think she headed into town for some sugar.”

With that she began unbuttoning my pants with one hand, while massaging my coffee stain with the other. I couldn't help but respond, which brought a grin from her.

“I might be able to help you with something else, as well,” she said. Her voice had grown huskier, and rising interest aside, I had to help this sex-starved sweetheart to the door.

“I'd like it if you would, ma'am, but not just now.”

I removed her hands from the waistband of my underwear, which she had dropped to her knees to pull down. She leaned in to breathe heavily on my Jockeys, looking up at me with a mouth ready to swallow Olympus. And I don't mean the camera.

I shook my head once more and readjusted my pants. She pouted and rubbed her chest provocatively as I rebuttoned myself, stubborn tent notwithstanding.

“I've got some business I need to take care of before Grandma Wanda gets home,” I said. It was a lame excuse, but I kept picturing the zeros on the end of that bonus check. Transposed with the second hand of a clock, it made for an inspirational mental lever. Button it up and push her out, my greedy side intoned. I won't repeat what my other side said, but it had to do with finding out natural hair color and connecting light to dark freckles. The zeros won.

“I need to get some phone work done,” I told her, leaning forward to cup her chin. God she had big lips! “But maybe tonight?”

She shook her head. “My husband will be home in a couple hours.”

“How 'bout tomorrow. Lunchtime?”

She brightened somewhat. Shook her head halfheartedly.

“If I'm home, maybe.”

“Good. Let me help you up.”

I took her arm and pulled her to her feet. She made sure to push her chest against me, and I ran a hand appreciatively down her backside. But kept steering her towards the door.

As I opened it for her, I bent to kiss her on the cheek.

“Tomorrow then?”

She turned her cheek away and sucked my lips inside her own. It was a hard, wet kiss. It left me breathless, and wondering if I really needed zeros for anything.

“Sure?” she whispered.

“Yeah.”

The cellar felt even colder this time down, and it didn't help that I had images of Wanda's neighbor spread-eagled underneath me interrupting my concentration. I headed right once more and found that the stairs had apparently ended in a corridor, not a downstairs room. It narrowed as I walked, until it seemed that the ceiling and walls were but inches away from by head and shoulders. The bulb that hung at the bottom of the stairs barely illuminated this area, but I could see that there was a door just ahead. I reached out to open it, and the knob stopped dead.

Locked.

Damnit.

This was taking far more time than I'd planned. How long had the bimbo upstairs kept me? Ten minutes? And I'd been in the house five to ten minutes before that. If Wanda was just picking up sugar, she could be to the store and back in twenty-to-thirty minutes. I didn't have much time.