Sacrificing Virgins (24 page)

I could almost feel the slippery lubrication of excitement from her, as I entered her, missionary style. And how appropriate that was. Wasn't I bringing satisfaction to the dead? A true vocation of the saintly.

Yeah right.

This wasn't religion, except in the sense that I worshipped her perfect body.

Perfect
dead
body.

At some point in my plumbing of her soft, clinging depths, it did occur to me that I was knee-deep in necrophilia, with a minor as an accomplice/victim.

Try getting out of the charges
that
could bring.

No matter how the courts looked at him, he was an anchor on my neck. As I came, violently, in an intense and satisfying series of shudders and groans (the boy giggled), I determined that no matter how he'd found me today, he would not see me tomorrow.

When I came here.

Double entendre intended.

“Much fun,” he enthused, as I slipped my sloppy, half-flagged dick out from the beach babe. Beached babe. Babe of the beach.

No matter how you cut it…

I edged back as the boy edged down his trunks. He was going to have a go, too?

Given the stretching I'd given her, I severely doubted whether the kid was going to feel much grip on his drill. Though, of course, he was willing to try.

It didn't take him long. Fast hips, boys have.

Then junior was asking me to help him rebury her.

We scooped in silence, and when the mound was complete, he grinned at me once more.

“Star. Much fun!”

He nodded politely at me then, and I think I bowed. Then we separated, him slipping through the dunes to climb his way back to the road, me heading back towards the line of the tide. I had a half mile or more to go, and the sun was already just a red glow on the horizon. I would follow the waves back to my hotel.

The next afternoon, I considered my attack. I didn't want the boy to beat me to the mound. Nor did I want him to join me. There are some things a man likes to do without an audience. At least, I do. I figured, the night before, I'd probably walked past the boy playing on the beach and he'd seen and followed me. This time around, I wanted no spectators.

Instead of following the surf, I walked down Ocean View until I reached the crab shack. Only then did I venture out onto the sand. I knew the buildings where she lay were right there, at the end of the island. I didn't expect to have any problem locating them, even though I came at them from another angle.

And, as it turned out, I was right. As soon as I got near the surf at the south end of the island and began following its line north, I spotted the buildings. Hell, I spotted our footsteps from the night before. Apparently, the boy and I were the only ones who knew of the girl beneath the sand.

Well, tonight, she was mine.

I hurried up the beach (as fast as one can hurry when scuffing through powder-thin sand) and found the mound we'd built the night before. I thought briefly of my wife and kids back home.

Briefly.

Then I began to uncover her.

There are some things in life you simply have to go for. And this was one of them. An average guy like me will never have a South Beach girl. Shit, we're barely able to even look at one, let alone ever score. And right now, I had my own babe of the beach lying right here, willing and open for my lovin'.

Okay, so she was dead.

She was still perfect.

Dead
.

The thought
did
register. Don't think it didn't. I'm not that kind of freak or perve. But…she'd felt like a live woman. And she hadn't smelled. And…damn, but her boobs were everything I'd ever wanted. I knew if she'd opened her eyes, she would have laughed out loud at what was “taking” her. But, as long as her eyes were closed…my dreams were made flesh. Her flesh.

I dug fast.

I wanted her again.

Once more.

I had to leave in the morning. I'd jet back to my sweet, if sometimes naggy, wife, and my lovable yet loathable kids. I'd find my shag carpet still musty, and my aging German Shepherd still uncontrollable.

They loved me, the lot of them. And I loved them. But there are some dreams a man should get to live, once or twice in his life.

This was one of them.

Dead
.

Minor detail.

That made her willing, right?

I laughed, a little nervously, and scooped sand faster. My suit already displayed a painful tent of anticipation, and I wanted to set the main pole free.

The waves crashed nearby, a lulling, relaxing sound. From far away, I could hear voices, cajoling and laughing shouts. The revelrie of early drunken fun.

My fun was here.

And my time was now.

I pushed away a length of sand with my entire arm, and found the lower length of her leg.

The bone lifted with the force of my scoop.

The bone and a putrid soup of blackened, reeking flesh.

I gasped and fell back, staring at the white long bone, replete with gooey strings of tendons still clinging to it like wisps of gum. There it lay unearthed atop the white sand, and from the hollow I'd lifted it flowed a dark, stinking mess of liquid flesh.

The stench was ungodly. Puke mixed with rotten hamburger. Fresh sewage blended with old fish. I rolled away from the smell and felt my lunch struggling to escape. When I dared to peek back at the pit I'd dug, I saw dozens of black leeches climbing the lip of the pit to escape towards the surf.

Yesterday, I'd fucked her like a virgin, today she was a flowing mass of rot.

Was I at the wrong tomb?

I looked around, and saw the mounds of what could have been a dozen other burials. Scattered around between the abandoned buildings were other mounds, but there was only one trail of human evidence. The footprints of one pair of small feet and one large led from the beach and ended here, at this coffin of sand. The trail of the boy and me.

Was this some sick joke? Had he buried a woman here before bringing me to the spot and later replaced the body with…no. That was even more ridiculous than fucking a perfect (
dead
) woman lying beneath the beach.

I thought of his insistence over the placement of the shell and realized that today, I hadn't set it at the head of the mound.

Reaching into my pocket, I found it still there in my suit.

Was it really the “key” that allowed one to unlock the hidden beauty within the sand? If so, had I “killed” her?

Was I losing my mind?

I moved to the head of the mound and held the shell in my hand. If it had worked before, would it again? The sea breeze was spreading the stench of the rot I'd uncovered and I coughed, hard. I forced a swallow to keep from adding my own spew to the smell in the sand, and without another thought pressed the shell to the ground.

The sand shook beneath my hand.

Something pushed upwards under me and I fell backwards. From far away I heard a keening, a hellish wail like sharp nails dragged across a slate and the throat of a pig at the same time. From the pit I'd dug, a spray of black ichor erupted, and the sand we'd so carefully piled yesterday began to shift and sift away from the center of the mound.

The sound grew louder and then with a puff of expelled sand, exploded from a muffled wail to a clear siren at my face. She was alive again, but she wasn't remotely human. Her tentacles drew her from beneath the sand like wriggling, slapping snakes.

I rolled away from the mound as the first gray octopus-like tentacle lifted from where I'd expected her gorgeously tan arm to be, and slapped against the sliding sand. Then another snaked to the surface, then three more, and five.

She screamed and screamed from five purpled beaks set below dozens of spider-black eyes as she came to ground, and I could see the reason. Below her enraged mouths was a blackened, shriveled stump, and from it, in sync with her screams, pumped the stinking black blood, staining the sand.

Tears came to my eyes, as I watched her writhe in pain, jabbering and screeching from all of her mouths and using several of her arms to try to stem the flow of her blood. As she fully emerged from the pit, I saw that her skin was a delicate gray sheath that looked as if it would barely be able to hold in the long coils of intestinal tubes and shuddering organs within. But as she tumbled across the sand in horrible, audible agony, the vellum-thin skin cracked and blistered quickly in the Miami sun, and her elastic arms brushed and beat at her segmented body. One of her sucker-pod fingers split off as she slapped the top of her bulbous head and in seconds another stream of runny tar stained the sand from the broken appendage.

I had injured her before, by not using the shell. Now I had sealed her death by forcing her to ground half-formed. She was burning away.

“I'm sorry,” I whispered. “God, I'm so sorry.”

She screamed again, an elephantine bellow, stepped up in pitch, and swiveled towards me as I spoke. She bled from all her arms now, and the skin on her head seemed to be sinking inward. But still she moved towards my voice, dragging her disintegrating body at me with definite unfriendly intent.

I rolled as a tentacle slapped the sand where I'd been seconds before. It broke off and lay there on the ground, a bubbling, fishy mass of gray and black. I didn't stick around to watch, but rolled out of the way of another grasping sucker pod and then half-ran, half-crawled out of her reach.

Her cries had been deafening, but as I turned back from what seemed a safe distance, I realized they were lessening. She no longer moved forward, and not all of her beaks were opening to cry. Only three of her arms were raising and falling, trying to drag her bulk forward. Then only two. As I began to move back towards her, the last arm fell to the sand, and one mouth feebly keened, a thin, heart-wrenching wail.

I knelt nearby, and staring into several of her lidless, black marble eyes, I apologized again.

“I never meant to hurt you,” I said.

She cried.

As did I. She was burning away in the sun, and sorry or not, it was my fault. I had betrayed her, betrayed my wife with her…

“I'm sorry.”

It wasn't enough.

“
Starrrr!
”

I heard the cry behind me and knew its owner.

The boy grabbed my shoulder and shook me.

“Star?
Must
use star! No, no no!”

He was crying now, and threw himself down in front of the creature.

She seemed to respond to him, her tea-kettle cry settling to a quieter hiss.

The boy reached out and touched one of her beaks, and then turned to shoot me a black stare.

“All gone,” he said, and pointed at the other mounds. “No more much fun.”

The creature went quiet as he stroked its mouth, and settled farther into the earth.

He stood up and walked over to the demolished mound that she'd exploded out of. In a second, he'd found the shell and shook it at me.

“No more star. No more change. No more.”

He shoved it in my face and then stuffed it back into his own pocket.

The creature was now little more than a black bubbling stain on the sand. I tried to put my hand on the boy's shoulder, but he shook me off.

“Go,” he said, choking on his grief. “Find your own.”

I backed away, thinking of the beauty beneath the sand, of the boy I'd shared her with. Of the boy I'd stolen her from.

Forever.

Thinking of how I'd found perfection, and then ruined it. Thinking of how I would feel if someone had done that to me. I stared at the pale band of skin on my left hand. The cruelest part was, I already had my own. I didn't need to find it.

I didn't know what she was, or how he'd found her or what the shell was. But as the boy dwindled to a brown speck in the distance, my feet began moving faster and faster. I had to get home. Before someone or something else got there and ruined it for me. I already had found my own.

I began to run. I hoped I wasn't too late.

My Aim is True

Alone, he watches. Every morning, his eyes stare out through that wide pane of glass, waiting for me.

Fearing me.

Wanting me.

His vigilance seems never-ending. Every day, every night, he stares out from the soft cushions and artificial warmth of his living room, trying unsuccessfully to fathom the hidden places from his protected vantage. Once he did catch a glimpse of me, and as his heart triple-knocked in unwound tremors, his coffee slopped in rich oily stains on the back of his couch. He shivered, and swore, and settled back to staring through the window. Since then, I've been more careful.

We have spent a lifetime watching for the other.

Every day, the hours slip by and his eyes search the trees across the road, peer suspiciously at the cars coasting past. Has that Chevrolet been down this road before? Has it been down once too often? Is the dark shadow of that driver me?

He stretches across the back of the couch at noon like a cat in the sun, letting the heat seep into his skin day after day. He sleeps there in the shadows of midnight, letting the chilly light of the moon steal that heat back, degree by blue degree. He rarely leaves the safety of his haven. He rarely tastes the winter in the breeze, or the summer in the rain.

Today is different.

Today he lets his guard down, and steps away from the glass. He takes a walk through the hidden path just outside his tiny house. It's overgrown from disuse with aging thistles and white-dotted stalks of Queen Anne's Lace, but I slip from my place in the forest across the rutted road from his couch, and push through the brush to follow.

Something snaps and rattles loudly and I stop, furious that my cover may have slipped, that the noise may have alerted him and he may have seen me. But through the brown leaves of last year's uncut grass, I see he is walking still, down the long, thin stretch of unkempt lawn.

I stoop to find the cause of the alert, and find it crushed beneath my foot. Orange and faded, handle snapped and missing. A child's rattle. The inner beads have rolled and scattered in the dirt.

I move on, past the rusted tricycle and the muddy, single shoe of a roller skate missing its back wheel. The tattered pages of yellowed magazines cling to the bushes on the side of the yard, but despite the holes and rips and weathered fading, I can still make out the alluring contour of a bare breast on one page, a seductively curved thigh on another. A pile of broken beer bottles glitters in the dirt nearby.

I've lost him now, and step up my pace, leaving the weeded path near the house and stepping into the open expanse of his backyard. The ground is littered with broken glass, dented hubcaps, rusty nails and faded wrappers between the hoary tufts of sickly broadleaf. Dandelions sprout in proud distain between stretched and twisted condoms; ants scuttle over cigarette butts, leaving sticky wads of long—lost gum to feast on mounds of gray, matted fur. I stop at one shapeless mound momentarily to consider, but can't tell from the remains whether it was dog or cat. In the end, I suppose, it doesn't matter.

I press on, and pass the graying wood shed where he spent many hours at tool craft in his middle years. A two-legged table leans against its wall, and I wonder which holds which up—the shed, or the table. A paint can is tipped over on the ground just beyond, spatters of grayed tint leaking in a hardened mold on the ground.

Just beyond the shed, I see that he has strayed from the narrow confines of the yard. A ripped shred of his T-shirt hangs from the bramble bush that borders his lot. A hank of graying hair shivers faintly, like a spider's web from the twist of another barbed branch. I follow his leavings into the scrub, and something glitters on the ground in a shaft of late-afternoon sun. A gold band. His wedding ring. I slip it into my pocket; he'll want it back.

Through the thorns and treacherous bog land I follow, weaving in and out of sun and dark like a prayer. And then I see him at last, far ahead and getting farther. He's running now. He must know I'm here.

Somehow he's slipped back onto that thankless plot of earth he's called home for most of his life, and I follow, never losing sight of the glint of dying sun on his balding pate. I can hear him breathing hard now, and just steps away, he sinks to the earth at the bank of the river. He falls on all fours and stares at his reflection in the water. His eyes are dark pits in the folds of age that have turned his once hard, tanned brow to hoary ravines. His tears slip into the river's current like a rain of broken promises and lost dreams. He doesn't even stir when my reflection joins his in the chocolate murk of the river.

“Already?” he asks quietly, and I nod.

“I should have done more,” he whispers, rolling an old, well-chewed bone between his fingers. “Explored. Tried. Gone outside.”

Again, I nod, and bend to kiss him.

He shivers in surprise, but accepts my solace. I slip the ring back on his finger, and he begins to cry.

“It's time,” I say.

It's all I ever say.

This time he nods, and hangs his head in offering.

Pushing back my cowl to ensure my aim is true, I raise the ancient scythe high enough to touch the moon and then bring it crashing back to earth, sending his wrinkled head rolling to the edge of the river. The boatman will be by soon, but I don't wait.

Our paths always lead to this, but rarely cross. I have many more barren yards to walk.