Sacrificing Virgins (19 page)

They were.

And in moments, I stood at the place where that glowing tattoo had lured me. I was afraid to open my eyes.

But I did. I was standing before a man.

It was Lucas.

And now I saw why the tattoo was glowing. Someone had carefully used a knife or a razor to trace the lines of his body art. They had painstakingly carved the tattoo into his skin. The flesh behind each link of the tattoo chains had been removed, turning the chains around his heart into three-dimensional weeping wound. A chain of broken flesh and blood.

Lucas's eyes were already wide when I opened mine, and the ghostly vision of all the abominations around us turned undeniably real. How I had been seeing him with my eyes closed…I didn't want to know. I'd never really believed in dark magic until the past hour. But in a room filled with bleeding people who clearly should be dead but seemed very much alive—and even happy with—their fate…I knew that something was at work here that I did not really want to understand.

“Were you looking for me?” Lucas asked. His eyes were piercingly blue, and his voice low. Soft with a hint of gravel. He would have made a good country music singer, I thought.

“Word on the street is you want to break those chains,” I said.

He smiled. Slightly. “I think my chains have already been broken,” he said. “But I would like to see my wife again. Is Patricia here?”

I shook my head. “She's outside. I'm supposed to call her now that I've found you—she sent me in to rescue you…she said they'd never let her past the door.”

“Hmmm,” the other man said. “They might have let her in, but probably not out again.”

“I didn't know if I was really going to find you,” I said. “The rows seem to go on forever.”

Lucas shook his head. “Not forever. There are 216 rows.”

My eyes popped wide. “How did you know that?”

He smiled. “It's a special number. Six times six times six. There are never more and never fewer voyeurs watching here. The Field must always have exactly that number of people in it.”

“What happens if too many die?”

“Nobody dies here.”

“But I've seen them—there are people bleeding to death all around us.”

“We bleed so that NightWhere lives,” Lucas said. “So long as we are connected, we will not die.”

“That's insane.”

Lucas smiled, grimly. His face grew distant. “It is beautiful. The things I see every time I close my eyes…”

I heard murmuring coming from behind me. As if the field was growing agitated suddenly. “Let's just get you out of here,” I said, bending to look behind him, to see what chain or rope tethered him to the wooden pole.

There was nothing there. His naked back pressed against the wood, but there appeared to be nothing keeping him in place.

“You can walk away from this at any time!” I yelled. “Why are you just standing there?”

“No,” he said. “There are things you do not see. Run your hand down the outside of the pole.”

“And doing that will release you?” I now imagined that he was held by a line of hooks on the inside back of the pole, fastened deep inside his skin. Maybe by tripping a switch that he couldn't reach, those invisible bindings would be released?

I didn't see any such button or switch, but I grasped the pole and slid my hand down it. As I did, I heard laughter from one of the bodies beside me. I ignored it, as Lucas fell away from the pole, his body collapsing with a grunt on the stone next to me.

“Damn,” he breathed. “My legs don't want to work. It's been a long time.”

I pulled my hand from the pole to help him up, but found my hand wouldn't budge. I yanked it again, and then pulled my arm so hard I could feel my wrist bones threatening to crack.

“Help,” I called to Lucas. “Now I can't get my hand free.”

“No,” Lucas agreed. “You can't.”

He was slowly bending his legs at the knees, stretching and unstretching them as he kneaded the muscles with his hands. “There are many ways into the field, but only one way out. There must always be 216 times 216 bodies to bleed. Forty-six thousand, six hundred and fifty-six pairs of eyes to watch.”

“Please help me,” I said. “You can't get out of here anyway. The door I came through is locked.”

Lucas shook his head. “It's a one-way door,” he said. “If you come in through it, you cannot go back out through it. You have to find a different way.”

I suddenly realized why Mrs. D had hired me. It wasn't to find Lucas, it was to trade places with him. Now that I'd walked in…Lucas could presumably walk out.

“I can't stay here like this,” I complained. “My hand is glued to the bottom of the pole!”

Lucas laughed. “Don't worry,” he said. “The Harvester will be along soon. He'll get you up. With his blade he'll strip those clothes away, and set your blood free. You are lucky—you will be able to see things here you've never even dreamed of. You will watch the most beautiful, horrible things…”

The air seemed slowly to be filled with whispers. At the same time, Lucas's face grew fuzzy and my vision instead filled with the images of men and women bound to iron racks with chains. They writhed and bled and groaned in obscene orgasm as a handful of young nude women with some of the most perfect breasts and bellies I had ever seen proceeded to flog them steadily. Bloodily. Mercilessly.

I blinked to try to clear my vision, and vaguely I could see Lucas leaning over me, rifling my pockets for my phone. I saw his grin when he found it and held it up in front of his face.

“Thanks, man,” he said. “I enjoyed it here for a while, but I really wanted to still do more than watch. This is something of an unorthodox way of leaving the Field, but it plays by the rules. An eye for an eye, your blood for mine. One voyeur in, one voyeur out.”

The whispers in my head grew louder, a growing wind of moaning voices, all saying what sounded like the same thing. Lucas limped down the path, and just as he faded from view, I saw a dark shadow turn the corner, moving towards me. A tall man in a black cape and hood. Carrying a scythe.

I put my feet against the pole and pushed, trying to rip my hand from its grasp, but it was as if my flesh had grown into the wood. I felt my shoulder pop, but the hand would not rip free.

The visions Lucas had promised filled my head then, marvelous visions of blood and breasts and sex and pain that turned orgasmic.

I almost didn't feel it when the grim Harvester's blade descended.

At the same time, I finally realized what I had been hearing at the edges of my perception. It had been a fuzzy but persistent chant. And now its words were clear.

That drone in the back of my head had been the sound of forty-six thousand people whispering and moaning one word:

“Welcome.”

I knew without a doubt that I wasn't going to be leaving, and so I closed my eyes, and thought about what I wanted to see.

What I
really
wanted to see.

Faux

Aaron Stec visits the zoo every Friday at lunch. I've watched his routine for weeks. He stops at the eco-friendly fast food stand around the bend (“Soyburgers save lives!”) and chews his meal thoughtfully while peering over the lion pen. It's a fine simulation of Africa. If you can ignore that the verdant fields are painted on rough concrete, and the endless vistas of hunting ground are cut short by false ravines, electric fencing and a concrete path of gawkers. In my mind, I see his blood spurt with his every careless bite.

Barriers won't stop me. I thirst for Aaron's blood. I've yearned to slash razor claws across that soft pale neck for too long.

He stands here again today, gazing at the lazing pride in the pen, and doesn't notice my advance, four-footed and quiet between the faux rocks of the enclosure. Why would he, a deceitful king of human industry who credits no foe with intelligence, ever consider that a lion, a cunning king of beasts, could have the brains to slip across that deep ravine of its prison, scale the concave concrete wall and leap the electrified wire? He is a man who fears no man, and certainly no beast. Yet something draws him here, every week, to stare.

His Achilles' heel.

I can almost hear his blood sluicing in arrogant pumps through each vein as I pad quietly on the hidden path meant for zoo attendants until I can smell his unsuspecting, cologne-primped, pinstriped body.

The lion pen is not the main attraction at lunchtime. The pride is lazy, hiding in cool shadows. I wait until the other visitors, a mother and toddler, retreat from the rails. Then he's alone, chewing his faux beef, lost in treacherous thoughts, staring at this faux Africa.

I steel myself and spring. The distant cheers from the dolphin show drown out his cry of surprise. I claw buttery jowls and neck; Aaron's life blooms, free at last on the pale concrete walk. I waste no time soaking in its warmth. Clutching the collar of his pretentious suit, I drag him out of sight before finishing the job, slashing ebon razor claws again and again across his pompous throat and face, until those pale, sightless eyes are glazed in crimson.

Overkill.

When I'm through, there's little to identify Aaron Stec. My paws ooze blood, the fur of my throat glistens. I rise from his savaged body and roar.

With a flick, I hook claws in the hidden zipper and exit my disguise, kicking bloodied fake fur to the ravine.

Aaron Stec was more than a mark. He was my ticket out of America, the land of the faux free. A hit these days is hard, with cameras recording every corner, security systems tracking every mosquito. But Aaron's ambitious protégé wanted him dead at any cost and paid up front. I'll fly to the unfettered skies of Africa in the morning.

A shame I can't free the slumbering lions below with me.

The Pumpkin Man

When the lively summer breeze turns deathly chill and the lush emerald leaves of August crumble with autumn age, the Pumpkin Man comes to town. It happens every year. One day, the gravel lot on the corner of 5th and Maple is bare, littered only with broken glass and tufts of dandelions and thistle. The next, and the lot is full, covered in gourds of all shapes and sizes. Piles of warty yellow squash tumble next to row after row of well-creased pumpkins, most of them fiery orange, but some still betraying the green veins of a fruit that had been picked just before prime.

When word filtered through the school that the Pumpkin Man had arrived, we got on our bikes and rode straight from school to see. We went there every day for a month, until one day, right after Halloween, we'd turn our bikes around that corner and find the lot was vacant again, littered only with the husks and leavings of gourds gone by.

The year I turned thirteen, we had been anticipating his return for weeks when it finally happened. On the very first day of school, Steve Traskle had said, “The Pumpkin Man will be here soon.”

One day, early in October, the day finally came.

The word whispered its way across the school like fire in a field of browning wheat. I heard it first from Dave in English class, and then from Belle in History. By lunch I'd heard it a dozen times, “He's here. The Pumpkin Man is back!”

The school day took a month to pass. I watched the minute hand on the homeroom clock move from notch to notch, each minute taking an hour to tick by. When the 3 o'clock bell rang to announce the day's dismissal, I was already half out of my seat, anticipating its clamor. Billy and Carl were right behind me, and the three of us pushed our way down the crowded hall and out to the bike rack in record time.

“Goin' to Maple?” Steve asked, racing up behind our little gang.

“Yeah,” I said, not looking up from the combination of my bike lock.

“Can I go with you guys?”

“If you can keep up,” Carl said. He yanked his ten-speed around and stomped the pedal as if he were jumpstarting the engine on a motorcycle.

“Let's go, girls!”

We were off.

The thing about the Pumpkin Man wasn't that he appeared and disappeared each year with equal mystery and stealth. Nor was it that he brought a thousand globes of orange and yellow for us to take home and carve. You could get a pumpkin at the Save-All if you just wanted something to draw a face on.

“Oh man,” Billy whispered, as we skidded our back tires around as one, and stopped to stare, a gang of four, at this year's display.

The thing about the Pumpkin Man wasn't the pumpkins he brought to town, but the faces he
carved
on his pumpkins. In the midst of the sea of fire-bright globes that covered the white gravel of the lot at 5th and Maple was a long wooden stand. It stood as tall as a man, and as long as a house. And lining the half dozen shelves within its overhang were special pumpkins.

Carved pumpkins.

Pumpkins with the most evil grins and scowls you've ever seen scored into a gourd. At night, he put candles in all of them, and the darkness at the edge of our little town was broken with a hoard of devilish teeth and slanted, glimmering eyes. It was as if the very door to hell had been opened, and the armies of Lucifer were poised to feast upon our innocent souls.

“Damn,” Carl said as we stared at the offering for this year. Even in the daylight, the jagged orange-rind teeth gave me a shiver. Somewhere, someone was whistling a strangely discordant tune.

“Twisted as hell,” Steve agreed.

We stashed our bikes on the side of the lot and stalked forward, eager to get closer to the frightful carvings that seemed to have blown in overnight with the brittle oak leaves. If the days of a stifling sun and cool blue pools were past, than this was a fine substitute, we thought.

I moved past a row of grinning, leering faces, stopping finally at a particularly evil-looking gourd. Its eyes were almond-shaped, narrow but long, and its teeth leered like daggers waiting to strike. It was a pumpkin with the soul of a rabid rat.

“Help you, boys?”

Steve pulled his fingers back from touching one of the scowling gourds as if he'd been bit.

“Just looking,” Carl said, answering for all of us. His voice shook a little, and I could understand why. The Pumpkin Man's creations weren't the only creepy thing in this newly filled lot. The Pumpkin Man himself was a frightening sight to behold. Wisps of ice-white hair curled out from his ears like mist, and his eyes, piercing blue, looked too tight together, as if someone had rolled two blue marbles as close as they could. His lips were pale and long, and his neck was thin as a turkey's. But it was his hands that made you look twice. The Pumpkin Man strode slowly between us and the pumpkins, and as he did, he trailed one long finger across the green stubs at the top of each gourd. That finger seemed white as a bone, its nail dark as snails.

“See something you like? Ten dollars for any of my babies.”

He grinned at us then, showing teeth brown as candied molasses.

I shook my head and moved away from the display. In years past, I'd never come face-to-face with the Pumpkin Man when I'd perused his lot, and now, I found, he gave me the creeps more than his carvings.

Steve, Carl and Billy caught up with me a few minutes later, as I wandered around a four-foot pyramid of orange globes.

“'S matter, man?” Carl asked. “We were talking to the Pumpkin Man back there after you split. He told us some cool shit. Like how he models his carvings on animal teeth, and people too. Why'd you leave?”

“Just felt like it,” I dodged, and soon we were talking again about how cool the carvings were, and about which of the hundreds of pumpkins we'd get our moms to come buy in the next week. Carl had already picked out one on the edge of the lot, based on its “totally cool warts”. The thing was basically flat on one side, and half yellow, but it didn't have a smooth patch of skin on it anywhere. “It's a mutant,” he boasted.

Behind us, the Pumpkin Man stood, arms folded across his chest, smiling.

A mutant,
I thought.

I didn't go back to the no-longer-vacant lot at 5th and Maple for a few days after that. I'm not sure why; everyone at school was a-buzz with the cool faces the Pumpkin Man had brought for us to see this year. And there were always new ones. Each day, he chose a gourd to create another feral face to replace whatever pumpkins had been purchased from his display. And each new fearsome face was different, unique. He didn't carve from a mold, that was for sure. His imagination was apparently full of haunting, harrowing teeth and eyes.

It was probably the second week in October; the nights had come early, full of thick gray clouds, and the trees already seemed skeletal, their leaves fled with fright at the onset of an early winter. I was bicycling home from Carl's after dinner. It was only 7 o'clock or so, but the sky was already devil blue, and I pulled my jacket close as I pedaled around the bend at 4th and Maple. Ahead, I could see the glow of candles, and the leer of a hundred hungry faces.

The twisted patch of the Pumpkin Man was waiting.

I pedaled faster, past houses wreathed in corn stalks and fake spider webs, windows aglow in orange lights.

As I reached the lot, I slowed. The row upon row of glowing, fiery gourds lit the darkening fall of night, but did so in stillness. There were no shoppers perusing the Pumpkin Man's lot, nor a Pumpkin Man to be seen.

I'm not sure what possessed me, but I braked my bike and laid it quietly on the rocks at the front of the lot. Then I walked in between the rows of uncarved, unborn pumpkin faces until I stood again at display of carved pumpkins, staring at the gourd I'd honed in on the week before. The rat-faced pumpkin. Its teeth still made my skin crawl as I stared into its flickering eyes.

Something about it drew me, and despite the goose bumps on my skin, I stood there, alone in the dark, and returned its hellfire gaze. That's when it happened.

“Eeeeerrreeeeech!”

I jumped five feet in the air. The screech had come from just behind the pumpkin trailer, and it raised every hair on my head. It sounded like something had died.

In front of me, a hundred flickering faces leered. But they stared quietly, unmoving. I looked behind and to the side, and saw only the shadows of pumpkin piles. A haze of cloud slid past the moon and even the shadows grew darker.

My heart pounded so loud I thought the neighbors must surely hear me from down the street, but I forced myself to creep down the aisle of candle grins to the edge of the makeshift shed. There was a dim light coming from behind the display stand, and I quickly saw why.

The Pumpkin Man was carving.

On a makeshift table, his hands moved from side to side. A flash of silver cut the air and then the sound came again.

“Eeeeerrreeech!”

The pumpkin was screaming!

His blade cut the skin and with deft motions he carved a sliver from the gourd, tossing it to the ground.

Again and again he plunged the blade into the pumpkin and each time I heard the noise, though the cries grew weaker. I was rooted to the ground, watching him from behind, his shoulders pumping and swiveling, his body alive with the fury of his work. He dug a long thin furrow in his creation's mouth, and gave a soft cry himself when the knife caught.

“Rrreeeaaahhh” cried the pumpkin as he brought the knife out, and flicked another shard of shiny pulp over his shoulder. A piece bounced across the gravel near my feet. I don't know why, but I couldn't resist; I bent to pick it up.

The Pumpkin Man whistled something then, some off-key tune, as I turned the slick skin of the filleted gourd between my fingers. It was gross, sticky, and I dropped it back to the ground and carefully retraced my steps around the corner of the pumpkin display stand. In the light of the flickering, evil pumpkin faces I held up my sticky fingers and gasped.

They were coated in red.

Blood.

I turned and ran as hard as I could from the place. I didn't even stop for my bike.

Nobody could understand why I wouldn't go on the daily forays to the Pumpkin Man's displays. The next day, I stopped by the lot just fast enough to retrieve my abandoned bike, and then went out with Steve to look for Rusty, his German Shepherd. The dog had gotten out the day before, and while that wasn't unusual, this time it hadn't come back. Steve tried not to show it, but he was near tears. We combed the woods on the west side of our subdivision for hours, going up one dirt trail and coming down the next, yelling “Rusty? Here, boy!”

Looking for the dog kept my mind off the pumpkin display, but only for a while. The talk of the Pumpkin Man was ever-present at school.

“He's got a real cool one today,” Carl told me just a couple days after I'd heard the pumpkin cry. “It's creepy—like a werewolf or something. It really looks like it has a snout full of nasty teeth.”

“Try sticking your hand in 'em,” I suggested, brushing past.

“I'm serious, man. You should see this one…it's one of his best.”

A week passed, and the October rains hit hard. The trees lost their leaves all at once, and the ground was a mess of brown, soggy piles. Nobody visited the Pumpkin Man for a couple days as the rains kept us dodging from car to school and back again. When it all passed, and the days grew dry, the winds picked up and the days grew ever darker. Winter was just around the corner, and we pulled out our heaviest, ugliest coats to hide from the chill. My bike hadn't been out of the garage in almost two weeks.

“Let's go see what the Pumpkin Man's been up to,” Billy said one day after class. It was just before Halloween, and everyone eagerly assented. Except for Steve, and me. Steve's dog had never turned up, and he hadn't talked much once it became clear that Rusty wasn't coming back. And I hadn't been to the corner of 5th and Maple since the day after I'd held the shard of a bleeding pumpkin in my hand.

But it was a rare sunny day, and Billy and Carl and Dan were almost running for the bike rack. Steve and I followed, but didn't say much.

We pedaled past the towering piles of soggy leaves, and the wind shifted, blowing a crisp reminder of early winter across our necks. I shivered and pumped my feet harder to keep up.

“Good to see you, boys,” the Pumpkin Man said in a voice sharp as cat claws as we walked up to the display of carved gourds. “Which of my little beauties would you like to take home today?”

Despite the light of the waning afternoon sun, I thought the pumpkins seemed unusually grim. There was a darkness behind all of those razor-shorn eyes, and a hunger in their ragged, sharp-edged teeth. Their hollowness called out to be filled. Called out for blood. A chill shivered my spine at the thought.

“Got any vampire pumpkins?” Carl said, and the man laughed.

“Can't say that I've killed me any of those.”

“Have you ever tried to carve a Freddy Krueger pumpkin?” Billy ventured.

The Pumpkin Man shook his head, and clouds of wispy hair flickered at his temples.

“I only carve from real life,” he said. “See this one?” He pointed at a rat-faced pumpkin much like the one I'd noticed almost three weeks before. This one was a recent creation, but still aging fast. Its teeth curved inward, and a faint scum of mold covered the dark spots on the surface of its skin. Soon it would cave in on itself in decay.

“I used a squirrel for this one,” he said. “Note the teeth.”

We nodded at his ingenuity, and stepped away. Maybe we all felt a little creeped out by a man who dedicated his life to carving pumpkins. And then Steve stopped at one of the newer creations. The one that, despite its round, veined surface, seemed to have long canine teeth, and a snout.

“It's just like Rusty,” he breathed. I saw the wetness in his gaze, and punched him in the shoulder.

“It's a pumpkin.”