Sacrificing Virgins (21 page)

They were at peace.

Clutched together.

Skeletal white.

“I'm sorry,” I remember saying, and reached in to grab his right hand.

I pulled, and the arm lifted, the dust of his decayed, forgotten flesh rising in the air like a cloud. The suit sleeve pulled back, revealing a worm-eaten white—now grayish—shirt, and I pulled hard on the hand, crumpling in my hand like popcorn.

But the hand wouldn't separate from the arm bone.

It lifted and shook and dust clouded the narrow space…but the hand remained connected to the dead man beneath me.

“Damnit, let go,” I cried, and I do mean cried. Tears were streaming down my face but I would not, could not stop. I propped the coffin lid up and held the dead man's dead arm over the edge of the coffin. With my left hand I brought my palm down in a karate chop to sever the hand from the wrist.

There was a snap and a pain in my hand from a sharp stab of bone and it was done. I stood there, in the center of a mausoleum, holding my prize.

The bony hand of a man some sixty years gone. The hand that had once, perhaps, driven spikes to build a railroad, or whipped up a horse to pull a plow, or caressed the breast of a lover and stroked the brows of his children. Now reduced to a $100 prize.

“I'm sorry,” I said again.

The wind howled on cue, and the door behind me slammed shut with a crash.

At the same time, the coffin lid fell.

I was holding the hand of a dead man. In the dark.

Both feet in his grave.

Something outside sounded like laughter. Something in my head screamed and screamed and wouldn't stop.

I fell to the floor and cried out, begging, “Please, please, let me go.”

It was quiet then, in the tomb, and I waited, breath drawn.

There was no sound at all. With the door closed, the wind was silenced; all sound from outside was cut off. It was me, and the hand, and the coffin.

That was all.

I wanted to scream out. But my throat was closed.

And then.

A knock.

Behind me.

On the coffin lid.

And another.

“No,” I whispered. “There's no one here.”

Silence. For a moment. And then a tap on the lid. Inside the lid. I turned to stare at the dead man's box in the faint light that slipped through the small barred window in the door. I watched the dust lift and twine with each tap like swirling spirits in the near-black shadows of the tomb.

Benito wanted his hand back.

“No,” I gasped again, and lunged toward the door.

I flung it open and lunged out into the icy chill of the October wind. The cemetery seemed suddenly angry, watchful, and I dashed through the long grass, stomping hard on the soil of sunken graves until I reached the paved roadway. I looked back at the mausoleum, for a second, and saw that the door swung open in the breeze; it opened wide and then slammed shut in the wind.

I waited at the X Ramondo had marked on the roadway for an hour.

Once, I thought I heard someone cry out. But it was faint, perhaps only the shriek of another night bird. Another moment and I thought I heard the teeth-grinding drag of metal on bone.

And another time, I thought I heard something slam. Probably the door of the crypt I'd plundered, opening and slamming shut in the wind, I told myself.

But when I heard the laughter behind me, the horrible, heavy throat-gasping laughter coming from the road on the left, I ran through those forced cemetery gates, back to the land of the living.

I ran through the open cemetery gates and past the low orange glow of the Excelsior.

I ran past the healthy homes of seductive sleeping suburbia and past the sinking row houses of the wrong side of the tracks slums.

I was crying and wheezing and very, very sober when I reached my home, and once inside threw both locks on the front door immediately behind me. Lightning flashed outside as I mounted the stairs, and shed my clothes. I lay in bed, cowering beneath the covers, every shadow a ghost of coming death.

And soon, very soon, the tapping began.

They were light, at first, the sounds. Branches on the window, I told myself, though that didn't help me sleep.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Hour after hour, all night long. Eventually, when my heart couldn't pump in double time any longer, the steady rhythm of the tapping lulled me to sleep sometime before dawn.

The next day, when I woke and the cleansing rays of the sun washed through my windows, I laughed and told myself we had all been drunken fools. Still, I shivered when I stared at the bony hand lying on my dresser that said I'd won the bet. I showered and dressed quickly, eager to compare stories with my friends on how they had fared the night before. Who had run home first, I wondered. I left home in such a rush, I forgot to take my trophy with me.

But neither Al nor Ramondo showed up that day to work.

The tapping that night on my bedroom window grew louder, though there was no wind or storm in evidence. I pulled the sheets up to my nose and prayed to all the saints for forgiveness. The bony rhythm was not slowed by prayer. I could almost see the whitened digit drumming slowly, persistently against the glass.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

But I dared not throw the curtains to look.

The next day passed and at lunch I called Al. I called Ramondo. Their answering machines gave the ghosts of their voices and a machine gun's report of beeps.

I lay in bed staring at the white knuckles of Benito on my dresser, and shuddered. My eyelids had barely shut when the tapping began again at my bedroom window.

This time, from my dresser, I could have sworn I heard an answering staccato response:

Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

I pulled the covers over my head and hid.

But I couldn't hide from the sound.

In the morning, the skeletal fingers were spread, like a wave, on the floor of my room. I used a towel from the bathroom, and carefully picked it up, depositing it back on top of my dresser with a series of bony clicks.

He's here again tonight. Rap, tap-tapping on my window panes. I can feel the stab of each tap throughout the room, each crack like the sound of his hand snapping against the hard edge of his coffin and I know, I know, the glass will break soon and let him in.

Should I be brave and open the window? Open the front door and let him in? Will he kill me quickly, if I do? Will he thank me if I give him back his hand, and let the door slap shut, safely, behind him?

Tomorrow, if I live through this night, I think I'll finally take Benito's hand and offer it to Maria to shake. It's the only thing left to do. It's why we did this. It's why we all will die. Someone should finish the job.

The irony is, whether she shakes my hand or Benito's, whether Maria realizes it or not, she will be clutching the bones of a dead man. Once disturbed, I don't think he will rest again. Not without my punishment.

Even now, behind me, I can hear him again.

A question. An accusation. A demand.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

The White House

“There is no poetry in death,” Mrs. Tanser said. “Only loss and rot, stink and waste. I never could understand those gothic romantics who celebrate the dark and lust after the cycle of decay.”

The little girl in front of her didn't say a thing, but nodded creamy, unblemished cheeks as if she understood.

“I suppose that doesn't make much sense to you,” Mrs. Tanser continued, running a powder-coated finger up the girl's cheek. “You came here hoping to sell cookies and to visit my nieces, and here I am talking to you about death! But I can't deny death, mind you. Everything has its place. And every place, its thing.”

The older woman laughed, and stood up from the table. Her plate of thinly sliced apples remained untouched, uneaten, the brown creep of time already shadowing the fruit. The girl's plate, however glistened with the juice of apple long gone.

Mrs. Tanser ground a pestle into a tall bucket that squeaked and shifted on the counter as she worked.

“Well, I'm sorry my nieces Genna and Jillie aren't here any longer. They only came for a visit, so I'm glad you got to meet them. Perhaps you'll have the chance to be with them again soon. But I talk too much and time passes. Too fast, too fast. Eat my apples, dear. Waste not, want not.”

The plate slid across the table. Mrs. Tanser raised a silver eyebrow as it did.

“You are afraid of this house, aren't you?”

The child nodded, slowly. Her eyes were blue and wide, and the reflection of the older woman's methodic grinding and pummeling of the substance in the bucket glimmered like a ghost in their mirror.

“I can't say that I'm surprised. Quite the reputation it has. I didn't realize that when I moved in, but now it makes sense what a steal it was. I knew there was something wrong when the Realtor quoted me the price—you could see it in her face. She was afraid, that silly woman was, not that she knew why. A beautiful old mansion like this, perched on the top of the most scenic hill in town? I have to admit, I didn't care what was wrong with it—for that price, I thought, I could fix it. And then I moved in, and started teaching down at Barnard Elementary, and I found out why that girl was scared. You know, she wouldn't even walk into the house past the front foyer?”

Mrs. Tanser laughed. The pestle clinked against the top of the bucket, and a hazy cloud puffed from the opening like blown flour.

“The one warning that woman said to me was, ‘You know, it's a bad place for children.' I didn't even ask why. ‘I don't have any,' I told her. That shut her up. Or maybe it didn't, I didn't care. I walked up those gorgeous oak stairs that wind out of the living room and up to the boudoir. I wanted to see it all, with or without her help. She didn't come with me.”

Mrs. Tanser stopped her grinding then and considered. “Would you like to see the upstairs?” she asked.

The little girl shrugged, and the older woman dropped the pestle.

“That settles it. Genna and Jillie aren't here, but I can still show you the house. Come on upstairs. I'm going to show you the most beautiful four-poster bed your little eyes have ever seen. The girls loved it! It may be the
only
four-poster bed your little eyes have ever seen.”

The girl rose from the table, hands held straight at the sides of her red-and-green-striped skirt. She wanted to leave, felt embarrassed that she'd been coaxed into staying somehow. Her freckles threatened to burst into flame as she waited for Mrs. Tanser to wash her hands in the sink.

“C'mon then,” Mrs. Tanser said at last, and led the girl back towards the front door she'd come in. Her backpack from school still lay abandoned on the floor nearby. Mrs. Tanser put a foot on the first varnished step, and then paused.

“What's your name again then, young lady?”

“Tricia,” the girl answered, in a voice high as a flute song.

“Tricia,” Mrs. Tanser announced, waving at the crystal jewels of the chandelier above, and the burnished curves of the banister on the second-floor landing above.

“Welcome to White House,” she said. “Welcome to the House of Bones.”

At the top of the landing, Mrs. Tanser stopped again. “This house was built in 1878 by Garfield White,” she announced. “I looked it up. He was a railroad man, made his living helping folks move their steel and wood and food and such from one place to the next. Why he settled here, in the middle of nowhere, I'll never know, but there you go. Everything has a place, and every place a thing. He built this place, and put his wife here in it to raise their son. Maybe he thought she'd give the boy a good upbringing here, away from the corruption and sin of the cities.”

Mrs. Tanser motioned the girl to follow her down the hall to the dark-rimmed doorway of a room.

“That woman spent her time in here, so the stories go, day after day after day while her Garfield rode the rails making his fortune. He stayed out on those rails more and more, hoping maybe to gain his son an inheritance.”

The older woman stepped with a click and an echoey clack into the room. The walls were papered in a pattern of whirling pinks and blossomed yellows. But the garish sidelights did little to detract from the majesty of the enormous mahogany bed that dominated the center. Its rich posts rose from lion claw paws on the floor to taper in spears to within inches of the faded ceiling. A translucent gauze of yellowed lace hung between the posts and darkened the space with ghostly light.

“The more her husband stayed lost on the trains, the more his wife stayed lost here, in this very bed,” Mrs. Tanser said.

“Go ahead, sit on it yourself and see why!”

Tricia stepped into the room but stopped at the edge of the mattress, which was nearly as tall as her.

“Use the step,” Mrs. Tanser said, pointing to the dark wooden box near the girl's feet. “In those days, you wanted to sleep as high above the ground as you could. Rats, you know.”

Tricia hopped up on the step with the mention of rodents, and rolled her body onto the heavy down mattress, smiling at the caress of the silken blue comforter that covered it.

“They called it the White House, and not because it was in Washington, D.C.,” Mrs. Tanser said. “But it was anything but white inside. Mrs. White kept all of the drapes pulled shut, and spent more and more time here, in this bed. They say she was trying to make it feel like nighttime inside, so her son would sleep. Had the colic, and cried all day long. But pulling the drapes did nothing to calm the boy, and after a while, Mrs. White went a little bit mad, I think. Day after day, night after night, her baby cried, cried, cried and she paced this floor with him, pounding his tiny back and begging him to burp and then
screaming
at him to burp.”

Mrs. Tanser shook her head.

“That boy never saw that nest egg his father was out putting away. When Mr. White came back from one of his long trips down the rails, he found the house dark, and all the shutters pulled. I probably shouldn't be telling you this, you being a young girl and all—but you've probably seen worse on TV. Oh the things they show on that tube.” Mrs. Tanser shook her head brows creased in dreadful sadness.

“When Mr. White came home that day, he walked up those same stairs you and I just did, and knew right away something was wrong. I won't say more than this, but the smell was in the air, and he was no fool. He rushed to the bedroom and threw open this door and…”

Tricia's eyes widened as the story unfolded.

“…when the light streamed into the pitch-black room, he found his wife and his son, here in the shadows. Only they were in no condition to leave. The poor boy was hung from his tiny neck right off of that pole there,” Mrs. Tanser pointed at the right pole at the foot of the bed. “Mrs. White had tried to quiet him by wrapping a sheet around his head—but when he didn't quiet, she'd finally snapped. She hung him by his tiny neck like a Christmas ornament at the foot of the bed, and when he finally quieted, she lay down on the pillow and went to sleep. When she woke, and realized what she'd done, she took her own life, using her husband's straight razor.

“If I took the sheets off this bed you could still see the marks of her blood. Nobody's ever changed that mattress. She lay down right there, where you are, and cut herself again and again and again until she couldn't cut or scream anymore.”

Tricia leapt from the bed as if it had turned to a stove burner.

Mrs. Tanser grinned, wrinkles catching at the corner of her eyes like broken glass.

“She used that blade so much, they say she had to have a closed casket. Can't imagine cutting your own face with a razorblade myself, but, I can't imagine hanging your own baby, neither!

“There's a reason they started calling this place the House of Bones. But that came later. Mr. White kept this place for almost thirty years after his wife killed their son and herself here. And he never remarried. In fact, he may have been dead for a year or more before the town grew the wiser. He was gone for long periods at a time on the railroad, and it was only when the spring winds brought a tree down on the west wing of the house that someone from the town realized it had been months and months since Mr. White had been seen. When they looked into it, they found out that he hadn't been out on a rail for more than a year, and that's when someone thought to look in the basement.”

Mrs. Tanser looked at the trembling girl and shook her head.

“I'm sorry, I'm scaring you. My home does not have a cheery history, I must admit. But it's fascinating too, don't you think?”

The old woman shook her head. “C'mon downstairs, and I'll buy some of those Girl Scout cookies. A lady needs her vices, huh?”

The doorbell rang. But there was no silhouette showing through the stained purple glass in the front door of White House.

Mrs. Tanser answered the ring, nevertheless, and smiled as she saw the pale features of the girl on the landing, shivering and yet waiting outside. So small, she couldn't even send her shadow through the glass.

“Come in, child,” she insisted. “You'll catch your death of cold. I don't believe your mother lets you go out like that in the fall chill.”

Tricia entered the house again, driven by a feeling she could not have explained. The house scared her to death. Mrs. Tanser was strange. But interesting. A welcome diversion after a boring day at school.

“I didn't think you'd come back after the story of Mr. and Mrs. White,” the teacher exclaimed. “Sometimes I feel like I am just the steward for this house. I have to give its history, no matter how twisted it may be.”

She motioned the girl into the kitchen, a room colored in orange walls and burnished counters.

“You're probably hoping for my nieces, but I'm afraid they're not around to play with you right now. Can I cut you an apple?” Mrs. Tanser asked again, and Tricia nodded.

“Good.”

After a while, the older woman went back to her grinding, pounding work at the counter, and talked to Tricia from across the room.

“Hmmm…where did we leave off last time? How it all began, I think. Yes. I suppose you're wondering, what happened after the Whites lived in White House?”

The girl nodded, and Mrs. Tanser barely waited for that response.

“Mr. White was found in the basement. I won't go into how his disposition was, other than to say that his funeral did not boast an open casket. The house was eventually sold to another family, and life went on—for a time.”

Mrs. Tanser brushed the dust from the lapels of her maroon collar. It smeared like dried milk across her chest.

“You can't hide the past,” she said. “Nor can you hide
from
the past. What is,
is
, and what was,
was
. The next people who bought this house pretended that the Whites hadn't killed themselves here, and as a result…”

Tricia looked up from her slice of apple with a keen gaze of expectation.

“Well, they didn't consider the fact that they might also spend their lives—and deaths—here.

“Sometimes,” Mrs. Tanser said, eyes looking far, far away. “A mother's love is not endless. In fact, it doesn't even really begin.”

The older woman rubbed a tear from the wrinkles at the side of her eye, and forced a grin. “Silly old woman I am,” she said. “You're just a girl and you can't even begin to understand the twists and cul de sacs of a mother's love. I had a tough one, is all, and even now I can hear her scolding me. I've met your mama at the PTA, and she's not like that. Not like that at all. You're a very lucky girl.

“So where was I? Oh yes, the next family. A pastor, the father was, come here all the way from Omaha. Why
here
, again I'll never know. This must be the end of the line for some folks, and they just don't know it. Hell, why would they come here if they did? Something draws them though, because no matter how many young folks try to escape this town after they graduate, the place keeps growing. Back in those days, before the Great War, there were just a couple hundred here, and the Martins moved into this house with a huge welcome from the townsfolk. For a time, Pastor Martin even held services right here in this house—in the sitting room I believe—until a proper parish chapel could be built down in the center of town.

“All that holiness didn't settle things apparently, though, in White House. Because the pastor and his family came to a similar end as the Whites did. Things were happy here for a few years, and the Martins had two children, Becky and Joseph. But, just like Mr. White, Pastor Martin's vocation began to consume him, leaving Mrs. Martin here in the house all alone with the children day after day. The story goes, that Mrs. Martin got bit by the green bug, and started thinking that Pastor Martin was spending far too much time down at the new chapel in town. There's no telling if it's true or not, but she thought the pastor was making time with a pretty little hussy in the back pew, while she was trapped here, in this old, cold house with two screaming kids.