Sacrificing Virgins (30 page)

I had a girlfriend once who called testicles crotch apples. She didn't last with me long; she was uncouth and wanted to do disgusting things. But that term stuck with me a long time. How could you sully the sweet purity of an apple by comparing it to sweaty hairy balls? I didn't like the way she tried to put mine in her mouth…it felt strange and made me nervous every second that she was going to bite down.

I almost had a wife once. We got very close in college and I wanted her to move in with me. But in the night, when she stayed in my bed, she insisted on sleeping naked, rubbing herself on me and the sheets like some rutting feline. I had to wash my linens after she stayed over every time. She wanted me to put my tongue in places that were obscene. And I don't mean in her mouth—though she eventually said some things that could only have come from the gutter. I realized too late that as sweet as she looked on the outside—the apple of my eye—she was rotten at the core. Just like the apple the witch brought me.

I'm rambling. I'm unnerved. My life was fine until she showed up yesterday. And now everything seems…unsettled. Old memories coming back. Old hurt. I need to get past this and just go to work. When I come home, I'm sure it will all be fine. No apples, no witches, no temptations for things of the flesh that are filled with well…foul mortality. Juices and stench and bitter and sweet and…

I'm rambling again. Just…never mind.

When I got home, she was waiting for me.

“Did you taste my apple?” she asked. It almost sounded like a double entendre.

I shook my head. “No, I chopped it up and found a worm inside. Was that supposed to be a message of some kind?”

“Only if you know how to read it,” she answered. She held out her hand and offered me another apple. This one was green on one side, and brown and soft on the other. There were holes in the skin, and I could feel liquid seeping out of the rotten side to trickle across my fingers. I threw the thing to the ground and wiped my fingers off on my pants.

She smiled. “Do you prefer your rot to be exposed on the outside?”

“Why are you here?”

“Because it's nearly Halloween,” she said. “And this year, since you haven't been able to do it yourself, I thought it was probably time to stop you.”

“Stop me from what?”

She pulled another green apple out of the pocket of her robe. She held it in front of her, staring at the green mirror of its smooth skin as if into a mirror. “There's always one, isn't there?”

I cocked my head, wondering what she was getting at.

“Always one perfect young apple, waiting to be plucked.”

“You're not making any sense.”

“You're not asking the right questions,” she said. Her lips split into a smirk, and the light flickered with humor in her eyes. She didn't blink. “Why don't you come back to my place, and I can explain?”

“I don't even know your name,” I laughed. A little nervously, I might add.

“Beth,” she said. “It's my middle name, but it's what my mom and dad always called me. I don't know why they didn't use the name they gave me. In any case…does that help?”

“A little,” I said. “But I still don't know you.”

“Ahhh…but you have known me,” she laughed, a quiet but tantalizing sound. “You have known me deeply.”

“I don't think so,” I said. “Please leave.”

“Suit yourself,” Beth said. “But you are not going to give out a green apple this year. I'm going to make sure of that.”

She turned and stepped away from my tiny porch. “Come back to the house,” she said. “I think you'll be glad you did.”

I shut the door on her words and her face. And her apple.

Then I sank down in my kitchen chair and tried to figure out just what she meant. It was almost Halloween, and every year, I did give out an apple. To most of the kids, it was your standard candy bars and nickel prizes fare that I tossed into their bags when they came to my door dressed as lions and tigers and zombies, oh my. But there was always one. A beautiful, perhaps haughty little girl with some makeup on her face to augment the princess costume, or the fairy dress. There was only one, but when I saw her, I knew. And I gave her a green apple.

I don't know how it started. I don't know why. But I'd been doing it for as long as I could remember.

And now a witch was going to take issue with it? I shook my head. My private Halloween award was none of her business. But like any female, she somehow supposed she could make it so.

I stood up and decided that this would stop, right here and tonight. A woman would not meddle in my life again. Women were only good for one thing, I'd found.

The hurting.

I slipped on my shoes and walked to the edge of the forest, where there was a path through the brush that led to a witch's home. It was time to peel this particular apple.

The old house looked darker tonight than it had before. More abandoned. More desperate. Perhaps it only reflected the emotion of my own soul. I stepped onto the gray wood of the porch and it creaked loud in the silent night. I stepped forward and the steps echoed in the night. A ghoul creeping towards the door.

When I opened the screen to pound on the heavy wood of the door within, it fell back at my touch. Open. I didn't think, I just moved with it. I stepped inside. The wood creaked shut behind me, but I didn't move.

She was there on the floor just inches from my toes. Naked. Bloody.

I stared at her corpse and willed myself to breathe. Her chest had been stabbed repeatedly; seven deep red rents opened the skin beneath her shoulders and into the swell of her breasts. I couldn't help but look at them; her nipples floated there atop blood-spattered breasts as if they were only waiting for me to suckle and I almost bent to do so before something in the back of my head reminded,
She's dead!

I don't know what I was thinking. But I know that after staring at her for a minute or two, I finally stepped past her and moved farther into the house, stepping slowly down a dark corridor, worried that I would trip and fall headlong through the rotting boards of the floor. The house stank of dead things and mold. Rotting wood and sour animal droppings. This was a crypt and an outhouse, not a home. How could I have even imagined that Beth lived here? Witch or no, she'd been putting me on for reasons she'd apparently taken to the grave. In coming here to wait for me, she'd run afoul of someone more evil than this house.

“I should have guessed that a dead body wouldn't phase you,” a soft voice whispered from behind. I whirled to find Beth standing just inches away, the blood glistening wetly on her skin like the polish on her nails.

“But you're…” I began, and she pressed a finger to my lips. I could feel the dent of her nail on my lips for minutes after she took her finger back.

“I know what will phase you though,” she said, and with that she stepped closer, slipping a long silky arm around my waist, the daggers of her nails trailing up my spine to my neck. Her hand held the back of my head and she pulled my face in close to her own. I could taste her breath, sweet and tart, the cider of apples ripened and soft. She pressed her lips to mine and I gasped. She was so soft. I wanted to lose myself in her mouth, and for a moment I gave in to her and pulled her body close. I could feel the heat of her blood soaking through my shirt as her breasts molded against my chest, and the delta of her thighs rubbed up against the bone of my hip. Another “bone” between us began to grow as I realized that no matter what the cost, I wanted this woman. This seeming witch, whoever, whatever, she was. I wanted her red nails to dig into the flesh of my back as I pounded against her, and in her until…

A spike of ice shot through my heart and my eyes opened to see the glimmer of green in hers. She was smiling even with my tongue in her mouth, and suddenly the taste of her was of vinegar and rot, sour and rancid. You could never trust a woman. I shoved her away, and she laughed, stepping back easily to watch me.

With one hand she rubbed the stab wounds in her chest, and drew the new blood down to smear across her belly and nipples. She painted her flesh in her own blood, and then reached a bloody hand down to cup the thin pink lips of her sex. She held my eye, and made sure that I was watching as she slipped first one bloody finger and then two inside herself, using her own blood as lubricant. And as she performed a dirty sex show for me, her tongue slipped out of her mouth to rest against her teeth, and her eyes rolled back to show their whites as a stream of black began to leak out from between her fingers. The rot of years slipping out from her uterus. The room filled with the stench of decay, as if someone had just upended a wheelbarrow full of week-old roadkill on the floor.

I backed away from her as she climaxed, spilling the liquefied core of her womb to the floor with each groan.

Things on the floor ground and crunched beneath my feet but with my back against the hallway wall I edged away until she was out of sight, and found myself in the kitchen. The light of the moon streamed in just enough to paint the forgotten space a ghostly blue-white, and I looked for something to use against her if she came near me again. I felt around carefully for a drawer. When it opened, I found a coil of thin twine, instead of a drawer full of knives and utensils. And next to it, a short, serrated knife with a wooden handle. I pulled both from the drawer and was about to turn when two hands slipped around my waist.

I jerked around, knife at the ready, but it passed through thin air. Twin green eyes stared up at me from chest level.

“Is this better?” a child's voice asked, whispery and suggestive. “You could never handle a real woman, could you? You always were too stuck on me.”

I stared at the heavy red pout of her lips, too old for her age, and the kinked raven hair that trailed across her shoulders in feathery wisps. Just like Beth, she was naked, with seven stab wounds crossing her chest.

“You're not her, you can't be…” I began. She laughed, and lifted one black-smeared finger and drew it across my cheek. I flinched, but not before her dead blood had marked me.

She changed, and then her face was older, and her nose an inch from mine as she pressed her body against me, pinning me to the counter. “I am her,” she said. “And I am me. And I am the witch who lived here before us all. And I am here for all of the girls you've given green apples to over the years. You could never grow up inside…and you stopped them from having the chance.”

She stepped back a pace and her face looked momentarily sad. “They never did anything to you,” she whispered. A tear slipped down her face, and as it fell, I saw it change from clear to red to black. “I was sorry once,” she said. “But I'm not anymore.”

“Who are you?” I asked, gripping the knife tighter, getting ready to add to her wounds if that was what it took to escape this madhouse.

“I am Allysa Beth Romano,” she said. “And you killed me when I was only seventeen. I never got to grow up and have children. I would look like this now, if I was still alive. But you didn't let me.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said. “Allysa humiliated me so bad I didn't talk to anyone for months in 8th grade. But we went to different high schools. I never saw her again.”

“Not true. You knew where I lived and you followed me all through high school, looking for a way to get your revenge. And one night, as you were spying on me and my friends, you heard them dare me to go into the witch house after dark on Halloween. And you went there yourself and waited for me. You forced me to take my clothes off in the dark, and when I fought back you stabbed me. And when I screamed, you stabbed me again and again until I was quiet. Then when you heard my friends coming you pulled me down into the cellar and hid with me there until they left. I was the first body you buried here. But not the last. Not nearly the last.”

“You're crazy,” I said. My voice choked as somehow visions of everything she said streamed past my eyes like some crazy film reel shot by a drunk.

“Am I?” She smiled but there was no humor in it. With one hand she reached out and grabbed my wrist. With her nails she gouged into the flesh of my wrist until I couldn't resist anymore. “Drop it,” she said, and the knife fell to the floor.

“Come with me.”

The pale moon of her ass shifted in front of me as she held my hand but walked ahead into the dark. She led me to a closet in a back bedroom. “You brought me here, the night you killed me. And when you hid with me in the closet, you found this.” She pulled up a trap door in the floor, and then forced me to walk down a creaking wooden ladder ahead of her.

The basement smelled rank with rot and mold and Beth pushed me forward until we reached a wall. Then she guided my hand to a shovel leaning against the cinderblock wall. She pointed at the dirt floor all around us, and from the faint luminescence that seemed to glow from her bloodied flesh, I could tell that the ground was uneven.

“They are all here,” she said. “Every girl you ever gave a green apple to.”

“No,” I said. “I gave those apples to the girl with the best costume each year. I never…”

“You gave the apple to a girl who was alone, and looked, in your twisted mind, somehow like me,” Beth corrected. “You told them how much you liked their costumes and told them you'd picked the apple fresh from the tree just that day, and encouraged them to taste it. And once they did, the drug you injected worked fast. Oftentimes, they never even left your porch before they went to sleep. And then you brought them here, to strip them naked and do the thing to them that you always wanted to do with me. The thing you could never do with any girl who grew into a woman.”

I protested but the world seemed to spin around me as I saw the faintest memory of a dark-haired girl with the red lips and red nails of a street hooker standing on my porch. She was wearing a nurse outfit, and chewing gum when she said, “Trick or treat.”