Sacrificing Virgins (33 page)

What if she bled on him as he…

Ron shook Fran's folds (and the image of her crimson folds) from his mind and concentrated on descending the rope again into the black space below. This time he had brought not only sledge and chisel, but a full-sized pickaxe. He
would
see what had been buried/installed here.

He started slowly, worried about missing with the sledge and destroying whatever the device was that lay hidden behind the rock. An hour later, he wasn't being so careful any longer. None of his misses had appeared to damage the dark metal structure ensconced behind the rock. And so his excavation work had grown increasingly bold. The rock floor around him was now covered in shards of broken stone, and he no longer worried that he'd break the machine.

Now he just hoped he could dig it out.

His arms felt swollen and his back twinged threateningly when he bent, but still he kept slamming the sledge into the rock.

Volcanic. It was darker than limestone, and almost glasslike in the way it smashed.

This thing in the wall, had been covered by a volcanic eruption, he decided.

When was the last time a volcano had erupted in Northern California?

Ron shook his head. The idea was impossible. The last one was almost one hundred years ago, and that was nowhere near here. That would mean that this machine had been in the ground long before there even was a machine age…

No. He couldn't consider that. Ron shook his head.

As he did, the red eye moved.

Well, the light from it did, anyway.

“The fuck?” he whispered, and stepped away from the device, sweat streaming down his cheeks and neck and back. Ron wasn't used to physical labor…he was going to pay dearly for the past few hours.

He gasped and bent to rest with his hands on his knees, drawing in air as if he'd been holding his breath. Fast and hard. But even as he struggled to calm his breathing, he didn't take his eyes off the machine. A weird, black steel cylinder that seemed impermeable to his axe. Or, apparently, molten rock. Ron eased himself down to sit and kicked his legs out on the ground.

The light of the red eye seemed to shift, and follow him. The beam of its gaze was like a sniper's laser sight on his chest. It made him nervous. More than just nervous. And that laser slowly moved upwards, slipped across his neck and chin until he blinked as it hit him in the eye.

“Knock it off,” he yelped, as if the thing could understand him.

But…weirdly, as he said it, the red light winked out, leaving his eye streaming.

“Um…okay…” he said, once he'd blinked away the tears and focused on the thing again. He'd chopped out a hole in the stone wall about two feet wide and four feet high, and he hadn't found its edges yet. But he had held its constant attention.

This was the first time its “light” had turned off.

Ron moved closer to the machine, and brushed away some of the debris that shielded its rounded face. He couldn't tell how much more of it was buried in there, held fast by the freeze of molten rock, but he guessed it was a lot.

When he leaned in to stare at the strange dormant glass eye—the only thing that marred its face—he was rewarded with a sudden light. A red beam that caught him once again straight in the eye. He felt himself falling.

But…

He did not move. His body was locked in place, though he felt as if he were in freefall.

As the red light slipped around and through his vision, permeating and coloring his sight, he began to relive every moment of his evening with A.A. It felt like watching a film unwinding in slow motion, yet, it was over in a heartbeat. His memories were a film fed through the wheel in fast forward. A contradiction; slow motion in light speed.

The vertigo was intense.

And bizarre…

And then
gone
.

That's when he did fall. Flat on his ass.

He swore. And stared at the silent, lightless, metal canister half-unburied in the wall.

“You did that on purpose, didn't you?” he whispered. “You intentionally made me fall.”

Ron had nothing to help him deal with this. His liberal arts degree hadn't addressed the issue of finding intelligent artifacts in cave walls while disposing of murder victims.

The machine was definitely there. But what did he need to do with it, that was the question.

In his head, he had a new vision.

He saw himself touching A.A. He stroked her chest and bent in to kiss her full, rich lips. He'd watched her for so long, given up so many nights to be with her, yet always distant.

And then she was close. A cold, bloody doll in his arms.

Ron shook that image away. He'd enjoyed the blood, he had to admit that. But he never wanted her to die. If they were dead, they were hard to watch…

He stood up, and shook away the vision.

The device stood silent, inside the wall. The light remained on, still looking at him. Ron didn't attempt to change that.

He had realized that this was not some security device that someone had secreted underground. This wasn't connected to some government secret probe. The rock he had excavated said this thing had been here for a thousand years… Maybe more. The rock had not been rubble, but had been molded around the device like concrete. It had to have been trapped by some volcanic eruption…long before anything on Earth had had eyes or metal skins.

Ron looked at the device again, and shook his head.

“You're an alien, aren't you?”

The red light winked on again, and swiveled about the room, until it connected with his face. And then, oddly, it settled, and slipped up across his cheekbones until it beamed directly into his eyes.

Ron realized that its strange gaze didn't hurt. Instead, it seemed to bring on memories in his head. Images of girls he'd long ago seen buried crossed his eyes. He smiled at the images, remembering times that he'd spent outside their windows, watching. Touching himself. Lost in his solitary ways. Lost in their beauty… He forced the pictures back, and picked up his tools.

“I'll see you later,” he promised.

And with that, Ron grabbed the rope and climbed out of the pit—both metaphorical and real. But as most people know, in the end, all that matters is what's real.

What was real to Ron was Erin.

She lived a few blocks away from him, and after the last twenty-four hours, he needed the comfort that only a familiar girl could provide tonight. A girl he knew, and trusted. He'd watched her try on five pairs of earrings some nights. He'd watched her paint her toenails other nights. But the best nights were when she'd pull on a light silk robe and then reach into the bureau next to her bed…

It felt right to him when he thought about watching her.

Ron stepped across her lawn in the darkness and felt for the familiar handle of her garage door. She had never seemed to realize that the back side door was unlocked. And for the past year he had used that door to slip, unseen, into her house. Once he was in the garage, it was a game of silence to slip his way into the kitchen. And from there, through the rest of the house…including her bedroom. Especially her bedroom.

While it was always nice to get into position in a closet or bathroom before the woman he was peeping on might enjoy slipping out of her clothes, thinking she was alone…he'd always ended up following Erin into her bedroom, which made his visits to her more challenging. She got home early…he had to keep an eye through the window to see when she might be headed into the back room.

Tonight was different. Instead of watching, he strived to be waiting. He realized on his way to her house that for him…overnight, the game had changed.

When she dropped all of her clothes to the floor and walked down the hall to the bath and reached an arm past the curtains to turn on the shower…he was waiting. She shrieked when he grabbed her arm, and pulled her in with him.

She only cried for a minute.

And then his blade found her skin, and crying wasn't in the cards.

She opened her mouth to scream, but all that came out was a whisper. And a gurgling hiss.

“I've been watching you so long,” he whispered. She tried to claw out his eyes, as if that might obscure all of those past peeps.

He slapped her away, and then showed her his knife.

Well, really, the blade of a pruning shears. Better than a knife really. Certainly longer. He smiled to himself as he considered that they could prune both bushes
and
bones.

“What do you want?” she whispered through dying lips. Every time she spoke bubbles escaped from the wound he'd made in her throat.

He ignored her wild eyes and rapidly unintelligible pleas. Suddenly he didn't want to watch anymore. He wanted to punish. He wanted to hurt her, make her pay for all those nights that he'd gone home alone. As if his social ineptitude was somehow Erin's fault. Suddenly that beauty he'd enjoyed spying on for so long brought up a torrent of fury. On the spur of the moment, he decided to remove her ears with a couple swift, bloody swipes of the shears.

When the pink curls of her earlobes lay bleeding on the floor, Ron began poking the blade between her lips to address the tongue. He maybe should have taken care of that first, in hindsight. She kept trying to make noise… He couldn't get both ends of the shears in her mouth at the same time, though he'd definitely stabbed something while he was trying…blood was pouring past her lips now in a river. He abandoned trying to snip her tongue and instead decided to trim her fingers. And then her toes. No more earrings or rings or painted nails for her. Erin's struggles quieted after they had both slipped a couple times and fallen hard against the tiles. She'd struck her head, and his blade had pierced her breast, and then her belly as they went down. The blood was dark and steady as it passed the steel ring of the drain.

When the tub was littered with pieces of the girl he'd once lusted for, he pulled Erin's body to him, and turned off the water. She was still warm, even though an hour had passed. When he pressed his nakedness against her, and she bled out the memory of who she had been all over him; as he bathed in the lifeblood of a woman he had watched for years, Ron experienced a moment that could be explained as nothing less than euphoria.

“Only God could give me this,” he breathed, pressing himself into the secret places of a woman who once had been beautiful. He thought this end was oddly appropriate; she had always enjoyed getting off in the shower. He of all people knew that.

He pressed the blade of the shears into her neck and then drew it lower, pulling hard until she was opened in a way he had never imagined a knife could do.

Her blood quickly coated the bathtub floor. Ron closed the drain and lay down in it, and held her body to him, enjoying its weight and subservience. And its warmth. She was finally his, after what felt like a lifetime of watching.

He knew that she would never leave him. Couldn't leave him…

Later, when he woke with the stickiness of her blood congealed and cold on him, he rolled her off and looked around at the evidence that could expose him. He realized that the room was full of his conviction. Fingerprints. Bits of her skin. Smears of her blood. He stopped feeling sexually excited and instead worried about collecting all of the pieces of toes and fingers and skin. He showered and rinsed the bath as good as he could, and then gathered her body, and its loose bits in a sheet he found in the towel closet.

It was probably long past time to leave.

When Ron dropped her body into the pit ahead of him, he saw the red light of the eye below follow the corpse. After he climbed down and rolled the body down into a deeper crevasse, the same pit he'd sent A.A.'s body into, he stepped over to the thing in the wall and let it stare him deep in the eye.

“You're just a watcher, like me, aren't you?” he whispered.

The thing didn't answer. But suddenly Ron felt as if he was falling again. And the images of his moments with Erin passed before his mind's eye in that same weird duality of speed and crazy slow, slow, slow motion.

Snap.

Every pore on her neck was clear. Blood bubbled out from the slit he'd made there. The fear streamed from her blue eyes, the realization that this was absolutely going to be the last time she got in…or out of the shower. She had never been more beautiful to him…

He saw it all clearer now than he had a few hours before, when it happened.

He'd never wanted Erin to fear him. He'd only wanted to enjoy watching her. But watching suddenly wasn't enough for him anymore.

“You've been watching a lot longer than I have,” he said, retrieving the pickaxe that he'd left leaning against the wall. “And you haven't had much to see. I bet you're ready to do something more.”

He swung the pick and brought down several chunks of rock. It felt good to slam the thing into the wall, and Ron soon moved in a steady rhythm, as sweat streamed down his back and legs. After a while, there was a good pile lying in front of the machine, and Ron lay the pick down on the ground, breathing hard.

“Huh,” he murmured, when he finally looked up. For the first time, he could see the entire side of the “watcher” in the wall. He'd cleared the right side of the cylinder, and could actually see the top of the thing as well.

There were markings on its side, and he squinted hard to make out what they said. They weren't regular characters…more like telegraph signs. Blips and jags. It looked like CZAVN`M.

“Is that supposed to be your name? I'll just call you Zav, if that's all right,” Ron said. The light of the red eye shifted until it was locked with his own.

For a moment, Ron felt himself suspended in a darkness that was blacker than black. A darkness that was palpable, heavy, and eternal.

And then he saw something else. Something very familiar.

He saw himself stabbing at the rocks with the pickaxe.