Sacrificing Virgins (31 page)

I saw the girl dressed as Princess Leia, dark hair pulled in ram's horn buns up on the side of her head, and I wondered what she would feel like when I…

I saw the girl wearing a brown paper bag; she called herself the bag lady…I saw the girl wearing so much Saran Wrap that you couldn't really tell there was nothing but skin beneath it…and then I remembered how that plastic wrap had looked when it had been pulled tight across her face, smearing her wet features into a garish mask of silent screams as I laid myself on top of her and pretended that we were married…

“You can dig them up now,” Beth said. “If you don't believe me.”

“What do you want from me?” I said. I kept looking at the ladder, trying to gauge how many steps of a head start I'd need to vault up in without her having the chance to pull me back down.

“It's not what I want,” she said. “It's what
they
want.”

She pointed at the floor of the cellar and I saw the dirt shifting in a dozen different spots around the room. Dirt was lifting and rolling and dust rose on its own into the shadowed air and then a skeletal hand appeared from beneath the earth just past my feet. I gasped and stepped back, but there were now several hands protruding from the floor, and then they were scooping at the earth, white bones on black earth, shoving aside their graves until all around me the cellar filled with the forms of dusty skeletal girls. Before my eyes their bones filled with blue-white flesh, and all as one they looked at me with unblinking serious eyes. Eyes that didn't bleed with anger so much as finality.

“You know they call this the House of the Lost,” Beth said, still the only ghoul who spoke, though from the faces of the girls who were stepping towards me, there was no need for any other words. “You picked a strange place to bury your dead,” she said. “A witch did live here once back when we were kids…and the ground still bears the power of her curses.”

A hand reached inside my shirt and another slipped between my jeans and my belly. Their fingers were cold and hard. My belt began to loosen and I pushed them away, but only for a moment. Four icy hands gripped each of my arms and pinned me to the wall.

I tried to struggle and kick, and for a moment, I actually pulled one fist off the wall and connected with the face of a girl with buckteeth. She bit me and I screamed just as someone else kneed me in the groin. It didn't take long before I was stripped naked and the ghostly flesh of all of my girls pressed me to the wall.

Beth laughed, and reached out to finger the thing that had betrayed me all of my life. “It never did grow up, did it?”

And then she was the Allysa I remembered again, the sparkle in her green eyes still full of both humor and the cruelty that only children can display, before the pain of life has taught them the real weight of the hurting.

She guided my hands down from the wall and back to the shovel and flanked by naked ghosts, she pointed at a spot in the earth that seemed relatively level. “Dig,” she said. “And make it deep and wide. You're going to have a lot of company.”

I dug. The cellar earth moved easily, but my hands were quickly raw. The sweat poured off my head but I didn't feel hot. Every time I looked up from the earth I saw the empty eyes of all the girls I'd buried here on Halloween nights past. All the girls I'd loved. In my own way.

Under their silent eyes I stepped the shovel down again and again and dug the grave deep. I didn't protest when Allysa put her hand on my head and told me lie down in it. I knew there was no point; they were not going to let me leave, and honestly, I'm not sure I wanted to. After a time, maybe that hollow place inside you just grows so much that the shell left around it simply doesn't care to move anymore.

“Do you know what day it is?” Allysa asked, as I crouched down in the damp earth. I shook my head, momentarily confused.

“It's Halloween,” Allysa said. “Your day of green apples.”

I lay down and waited for the girls to join me. I figured when Allysa had promised company that they planned to torment me even beneath the earth for my crimes.

But then something hard hit me in the head. And something else bounced off my chest. I reached out and found the smooth skin of an apple. I held it up and saw the glowing eyes of the girls peering back down at me from the edge of my grave.

“Take a bite,” one of the girls said. And then another said the same. And another.

“Take a bite,” the whispered in unison, over and over again, as more and more apples rained down on me, painfully bouncing off my knees and hip and ribs and face. I held the apple to my mouth as the grave began to fill with the fruit. It was cool and hard against my skin, and soon I could feel nothing but the weight of green apples against my chest.

I bit into the apple in my hand, and the taste was sour and sweet, both at the same time.

Just like a woman.

I looked up and saw the girls above me growing into women, their pert breasts and boyish waists filling out and curving and their eyes lengthening into organs both sultry and feral. The apples continued to rain down on me until I could no longer see the beautiful dead nudes above me who were stoning me in fruit that should have still been maturing on the branch.

“All wasted,” Beth's adult voice came from somewhere far away. “All of it wasted like apples gone wrinkled and brown, left to rot on the ground untasted.”

All around me the immature fruit began to change, growing older, ripening. The smell of vinegar filled my nose and then I was drowning in the scent and drip of bitter age, covering and crushing me until I cried out again and again that I was sorry.

But there was nobody left to hear or care. They were all dead.

To Earn His Love

What better way to spend Halloween night than to watch a witch in action?

I shivered as the cinnamon-sharp autumn wind cut through my denim jacket, but the thought of the coming night made me warm…and a little scared. Marshall had asked me to sneak in and watch before and I had, thinking the whole while that it was all just a put-on, that my older buddy was ditching me in a draughty shack for kicks. But I'd gone along with it, hiding behind the wooden crates for an hour, and sure enough, she had shown up.
She
turned out to be Miss Carny from 4th period English! What the heck was going on here, I'd wondered, but Marshall showed up right after and the two had begun their strange erotic magic without a word.

Marshall never called her Miss Carny. He just said “the witch”. She'd called him to her a couple other times since that night, but Marshall hadn't invited me to watch again. Understandable, really. I don't think I could do what Marshall did with the witch while anyone else was watching. The time I had watched, my heart had nearly stopped as I saw my
teacher
savagely strip her clothes and then buck and shriek beneath Marshall on the floor. As soon as he had been spent, she had pushed Marshall off of her. Then she'd reached between her legs with a flat hand, and scooped a sticky mixture of their lovemaking out. She'd walked, boldly naked, across the shack and used a wooden spoon to scrape the goo from her hand and mixed the junk into a mason jar with other, dark and fuzzy things. After a few minutes of concentration, she'd turned back to Marshall, still lying on the floor, and smiled.

“Se-magic,” she whispered. “Your semen seed will draw his interest. You will bring him to me.” She'd groaned as if in orgasm at her own words then, a deep, throaty sound that made me cringe.

Marshall thought the “he” was a wizard, but I was sure it was the devil. Marshall thought their trysts were, in his words, “awesome”, but when I watched them together, my heart shriveled up in my chest. It was evil.

But exciting.

So I was going back tonight. Marshall said she had promised him something special tonight, the culmination of all their heaving magic. As his silent partner, he wanted me to see what the witch would create. It would be easier for me to get out of the house this time—I'd just say I was going trick or treating. Ma would say I'm too old for that, but she'd let me out anyway.

It was dusk when I set out across the graveyard and ducked into the foliage beyond. I hoped I could find the trail again. The wind had calmed, but the night felt colder than ever. Leaves rustled slightly overhead, and their fallen brethren crunched loudly beneath my feet. I'd started out early, not wanting to risk the witch getting there before me.

At last I found the trail. It was recognizable only because it stood as a narrow lane in the woods without trees. Something had cut out the forest, but hadn't stripped away the grass and weeds. I waded through the chest-high stand of brush, all the while moving farther away from the edge of town. And then, as the last deep red of the sunset slipped away from the sky, I was there. At the shack.

The witch's shack.

It was made all of wood; old wood bleached gray by the years and leaning slightly to one side. A chimney slanted from one side, and branches and rotting leaves all but covered the roof. The glass of the windows was spider-webbed and splintered from the sport of young explorers. I wondered if any of them had blundered into this decrepit cabin after dark. When the witch was here.

I pushed the squeaking door open and stepped inside, waiting precious minutes before moving. When my eyes had adjusted enough to tell my thudding heart that no one was there yet, I walked across the spongy, sagging floor and secreted myself behind the topsy-turvy stack of wooden crate boxes, as I had last time. It wasn't long before I was shivering, both from cold and, I think, fear. Why had I come here? I knew this was wrong. Miss Carny was evil. The evidence was all around me. Bottles of magic-stuff lined a shelf on the far side of the one-room shack near the fireplace. The floor was scuffed, not only with wear, but with circles and triangles and strange symbols. Miss Carny was more than some child molester (though the molesting was mutually enjoyed). She was a witch. I'd seen it in her eyes over the past couple months in school. They seemed slanted, slightly. And a weird gleam seemed to focus from them on certain students, when they were causing trouble. That look always silenced the room. I suspected it wasn't a natural thing.

The door slammed open, and I jumped, almost giving myself away at the start. But the protest of the hinges safely masked any noise I made, and it swung closed again. She was here.

Her arms were piled high with tree branches, which she dumped into the fireplace across the room.
Thank God!
I praised silently at the thought of heat, and then bit my tongue as I thought of the inappropriateness of that calling. The witch, I thought, would be calling on a different deity tonight.

As she bent over the fire, nursing the kindling to hellish life, I squinted at my watch. It looked like another half hour or so until Marshall was supposed to get here. I was starting to wonder if I could hold out that long. My butt was going to sleep on the cold floor, and the spider webs stretching from the boxes to the half-boarded up window over my head were giving me the creeps.

Soon the fire was crackling, throwing red-and-orange shadows at the walls behind me, if not any heat yet. The witch was busy. I watched as she got down on the floor, on her hands and knees and darkened the symbols already carved there with a marker. It occurred to me that she didn't look like any witch I'd ever read about. Her face was young (for a teacher), and her eyes were…stunning. They flashed a piercing aqua blue that was, literally, spellbinding. I had had a crush on her last year, when I started at Pierson High. After I'd seen her naked with Marshall, and watched her strange mixing and magicking after, I'd become afraid, but yet, still drawn by her. She wasn't much taller than me (maybe five six or seven, I'd guess) and she still had a thin, high school girl figure. And her hair… God, it trailed in kinky black ringlets down her shoulders and down her back. In school she wore it tied up and pony-tailed, but now, it hung from her shoulders to the floor, masking the characters she drew from my sight.

I couldn't believe that she didn't somehow sense my presence, so close to her, but she worked diligently just a few feet away from me. I could see most of her through a crack of space between two of the crates, and had to keep reminding myself to breathe as I stared at her. The heat was starting to seep into my corner of the room, and I was starting to relax a little, when she stood up and surveyed the floor.

Don't come here
, I begged, but she walked over near the fireplace and opened a cabinet set on the floor. She gathered some things and then walked back to the largest circle in the floor. There was a pentagram inside it, and outside of it, squaring it off, were four smaller circles with strange geometrics inside each. Then I saw what it was she had gathered.

Knives!

With practiced ease, she threw one at the floor, and it stuck, at just a slight angle, right inside one of the smaller circles. She missed the second circle, but levered it out of the floor and threw again, this time hitting her mark. When she was finished, four gleaming silver daggers ringed the large circle. She grabbed a bag from near the door, and then knelt in the circle again. She took a tape measure from the bag, and adjusted it to what looked like about two feet. Then she set a candle at the tip of the internal pentagram on the perimeter line of the center circle. Measuring an exact length each time, she proceeded to space out twenty or thirty other candles, all the color of burnt cherries. When she was finished, she clicked a lighter, lit a spare candle, and used it to light the others in the circle. Now the center of the cabin was bright, and the place was beginning to reek of the tangy wood smoke mixed with the flowery, sweetly musky fragrance of the candles.

What was she doing?
I wondered, starting to become afraid for my blithely horny friend. The last time I'd been here, they had done it about where the circle was, but there no candles or knives were involved.

She walked over to the row of jars then, and pulled one down. I thought, from its place on the shelf, that it was the one I had seen her mix before. It looked the same, anyway, when she walked back to the circle and began spreading its dark, muddy contents with her finger on the floor. She traced the triangular patterns within the candle-lit circle, mumbling something to herself the whole time. Then she stood up and stared at the door.

Just stared.

Unmoving.

What the hell, I thought. My legs were cramping up, but I didn't dare move. And she was really creeping me out now, staring blankly at the door like the walking dead or something. And then she spoke in a language I could understand.

“Hurry, my darling,” she murmured.

Marshall knocked on the door; unnecessary civility, I thought, but the witch strode from her circle to answer it.

“Trick or treat,” I heard him say, and the witch laughed.

“Both,” she said, and a spike went through my stomach. I was becoming very afraid of her promised surprise.

Not Marshall. He stepped inside, and the breeze from the door told me how warm the cabin had quietly gotten. I shivered, and hugged the corner close as he walked into the room just a few yards away.

“You won't need the mask tonight, Marshall,” the witch laughed. I peered through the crack at that, and saw her pull a rubber Frankenstein face from his head. He
really
didn't get it. He called her a witch, but I realized then that he was only humoring her. He took the sex, but didn't believe she was anything more than a kinky teacher.

I did. More than ever, at that moment.

“Tonight we shall call up a real monster,” she said, wrapping one long, slender arm around his shoulder.

“Good spread for Halloween,” Marshall observed, walking to the candle circle.

“Yes. My book says it must be on Halloween. The other times were to get his attention, but the night of calling must be Halloween. If we are lucky, we have gotten his eye, and he will hear
our
call tonight.”

“What book?” Marshall asked, playing along. I could hear in his voice that he didn't care. He just wanted to get her undressed.

“This one,” she answered, picking up a small, dark-bound book from inside the canvas bag that had held the candles. “This is where I learned how to call him. I found it last year when I cleaned out my grandmother's attic, after she'd died.”

“So that's like your spell book?”

“And more,” she said. “Grandma had it hidden in a locked safe. I wouldn't have even found the safe if I hadn't needed to have the roof redone before I could sell the house. When the builders removed some rotted wood, they found the safe sealed up in a wall. And I found this,” she held up the book, “in the safe.”

“Cool,” Marshall said. “So are we gonna do it in the circle tonight?”

“Yes. Take off your clothes and lie down.”

As Marshall tossed jacket and flannel shirt to the side, Miss Carny also began to remove her clothes. Her own long coat hit the floor by Marshall's. She wore nothing, I soon saw, beneath a sheer black blouse. Her breasts were breathtaking; deliciously pendulous and darkly nippled. I could see the gooseflesh on her white skin in the dancing arcs of firelight. She kicked off her shoes and shimmied out of her jeans. Her naked thighs and buttocks created an uncomfortable stirring in my pants. They both stood naked in the circle now, and she ran a fingernail from his chin to his already pointed penis.

“Hmmmm,” she smiled. “Lie down now. I'm going to paint you before we begin.”

Marshall didn't even flinch. If he got sex out of it, she could probably tattoo him and it would be the same.

He stretched out on the floor, and she straddled him, using her finger to trace circles and squiggles on his chest and belly, periodically dipping her finger in the same black mixture she'd used on the pentagram. When his body was a mess of black hieroglyphics, she placed the black book above his head.

“Don't move,” she cautioned. “Don't say a word.”

Marshall grinned, obviously thinking this another part of her kinkiness that he could take advantage of. So, spread-eagled and naked, in the center of a pentagram, Marshall was mounted by a witch. Her foreplay amounted to a brush of lips against his, and then she was slowly rocking atop his crotch. My pants suddenly seemed incredibly restrictive as I watched her breasts jiggling faster and faster above Marshall's muddied chest.

Suddenly, she dropped her hands to pin his wrists at the edge of the circle. Her hips never stopped bucking, but her face lost some of its look of pleasure. She began to read from the book above Marshall's head. Strange, tough-tongued stuff. It was no language I'd ever heard.

“
Gutta, hruth sreighvit ciccilis tor
,” she growled.

Marshall eyed the breasts bouncing just out of reach of his mouth, and chased them unsuccessfully with his tongue.

Her guttural reading continued, her voice gaining in volume as her hips' motion grew wilder. As she read, I began to feel strange, almost dizzy. I thought it was the scent from the candles, or maybe just the combination of autumn cold and fire. But as her voice rose to a scream, her figure swam out of focus. I steadied myself on the floor with my hands, praying that I wouldn't fall into the boxes in a faint.

Which is exactly when it happened.

As I swayed, and she screamed, the witch suddenly reached above and ripped a blade from the floor.

“I love you,” she cried out, and then brought the blade down straight into Marshall's amazed and open mouth.

His screams were horrible. He started thrashing, but the knife had gone all the way through the back of his throat. He was now pinned grotesquely to the floor, with blood spurting and bubbling down his cheeks. I was frozen by the horror of the scene. It was really too late to help, I realized. Marshall would be dead in minutes. There was no way out.