Lambs

by Michael Louis Calvillo

  Thunderous, “Cleansing spirit, cleansing soul!”

  Charles Pickett helped Melanie onto a little step stool besides the tub. Once she was standing comfortably she gave him a nod. He nodded back and then his hands went to her shoulders and he pulled the robe off. As Melanie raised her chin a bit and held her arms out in the requisite pose, Pickett dipped into the shadows and found his place within the group.

  Booming, “A new priestess for the fold! A new priestess for the fold!”

  She stood alone, exposed, in all her glory and tried to maintain the regality of a priestess-in-training. Torchlight played over her skin and cast it in a warm sumptuous glow. Melanie’s thoughts raced. She was beautiful, a near-goddess and she knew this, she knew it standing before her bedroom mirror practicing this very pose, she knew it they way the male members of the church shifted and swallowed hard between their chanted syllables, she knew it, but she was having a tough time believing it as the cool, damp chamber air kissed her naked body and vulnerable embarrassment prickled her skin. The sooner she could submerge herself in the blood the better, but she had to endure and hold the pose until the chant was over.

  Bits and pieces of her body felt as if they were twitching. Six hundred and twelve eyeballs bore through her. Tiny rivulets of sweat began to collect about her hairline and jointed junctures.

  The chamber as pure sound, “Commit the flesh!”

  The pose strained. Arms burned. Knees shook.

  The world as pure sound, “Commit the soul!”

  The voices of the midnight choir reached crescendo.

  Melanie hit her cue perfectly, “I am one with the blood of lambs!”

  The room fell silent as she stepped into the tub with the grace of an exotic bird—one delicate foot breaching the blood bath, rippling the crimson, followed by a smooth leg, followed by a lithe, controlled body.

  She had practiced the submersion hundreds of times in her own bathtub. It was important to not just clunk in or splash about like an oaf. She had to carry her body, arching and contracting muscles groups in such way as to not reveal unsightly folds or fat. The Cleansing, a ritual reserved for women (men were baptized in more traditional fashion—blood smeared on the forehead) was an art. It wasn’t savage like extracting a pig’s heart or cold like Sunday’s sacrifice or bestial and dirty like next year’s orgy, it was an act of beauty. Melanie had watched in awe over the years at the procession of beauties, their skin glowing, their bodies poised like sculpture, their faces masks of serenity, and had dreamed of this moment for most of her life. It was her coming out, her arrival as a woman.

  The blood waved around her as she carefully lowered herself in. She was familiar with the strain, the ache, the forced tranquility that threatened to erupt into a clumsy fall. Practicing had prepared her well, but her trial runs had been performed in warm water. The blood felt dramatically different. She felt her face shift a little. Her mouth tensed. Her eyebrows dipped. But only for a fraction of a second. She endured and forced the discomfort inside.

  The blood was thicker than she had expected. And colder. Acolytes warmed it before the ceremony to keep an even consistency, but the heat didn’t hold. It smelled a million times worse than she expected. Melanie practiced by keeping a small Tupperware container full of pig’s blood in the refrigerator. Every day she spent a few minutes removing the lid and taking huge whiffs. The tub of blood was way different. The pungent odor made her want to retch.

  Melanie bent at the knees. The blood breached her waist. In a well-rehearsed maneuver she arched her back, waved her arms just right and dropped to her knees. The blood rose to her neckline.

  The viscous, foul stuff held her in its coppery embrace. She could feel it seeping through orifices and infiltrating her insides.

  On the internal count of three—one, two, three—she held her breath and went all the way under.

  The world became salt and death, sacrifice and misspent plasma. The blood filled her ears, it pushed at her closed eyelids and clenched lips. Melanie fought off the invasion. She counted again—five, four, three, two, one—and then concentrating on exact choreography, grace and beauty to the max, she rose out of the crimson pool, a priestess born of blood.

  4. THE FINE ART OF SELF-SABOTAGE

  When Arthur woke from uneasy, fitful sleep on Friday morning, as expected, as feared, there were large bloodstains on his pillow. The blood always leaked from his temples and the stains always spread oblong, deep crimson, half-drying throughout the night. Though he anticipated the stains, fright still got the best of him and made his heart leap when he groggily awoke from the restless slumber he had half-managed.

  Dread flittered.

  Tomorrow he would wake to find his neck mangled, rubbed raw and bloody by a phantom rope.

  Then the murders would begin.

  Sitting up he kicked off his blanket, swung his legs over, touched them down to the ground and then held his face in his hands. Like clockwork, this shit happened every three years. It happened at age four, at age seven, at age ten, at age thirteen, and now, a few months after his birthday, apparently at age sixteen.

  Yesterday he refused to think about much in hopes he was just having a bad day, an episode of some sort, a psychotic hallucination. But this morning’s bleeding temples brought everything kicking and screaming into the light. It had been happening ever since he could remember and Arthur figured he would have gotten used to it by now, developed some sort of familiar tolerance, but no, his mutilated wrists, the dark shapes on his pillow and tomorrow’s imminent rope burns still freaked him out and made it near impossible to get through the days as a functioning human being.

  The wounds didn’t hurt, nor did they incapacitate him in any physical way, but they constantly fought for his attention with their glistening abnormality and bloody eruptions.

  It was too bad no one else could see them. Or was it?

  Damn haunting.

  Damn phantom injuries.

  It was too bad, because not only did he have to keep such horrors to himself, not only did he have to avoid mirrors and train his eyesight and mumble grounding mantras under his breath when things got too intense, he also had to keep using his soiled bed sheets and that disgusting, blood stained pillow.

  If Arthur learned anything early on it was that people thought you were crazy when you saw things that they couldn’t, but they thought you were even crazier if you kept requesting a new pillow on a daily basis.

  Shaking off the icky-icky, Arthur pulled his long sleeves down into his palms, left the stained pillow to seep and then rushed out of the bedroom and across the hall to the bathroom where he frantically struggled to keep his wrists covered while washing away the blood from his ears and his cheeks. Again, nobody could see the blood and it probably didn’t make a lick of difference whether he let it be or scrubbed like a madman, but it looked real enough to Arthur as it flaked and washed from his skin, swirling down the drain in a clear-crimson whirlpool.

  After drying his face he dropped the pseudo-bloodstained towel into the sink and then returned to bed. Before he climbed back in a light bulb went off and he returned to the bathroom, grabbed the towel out of the sink and put it into the laundry bin.

  Rules.

  He had to keep following the rules. It was crucial that he drew zero attention to himself.

  That’s why he endured school yesterday and that’s why he would have to try to follow procedure no matter how bad things got.

  The rules of his current group home were strict, much stricter than any of his previous placements and for the past two years Arthur followed protocol to a T—the perfect prisoner. But now that the shit was starting up again, some of those rules might be tough to uphold. Over the next few days the manifestations would deepen, the wounds fully realized, their corresponding ghosts running the show, and Arthur would have very little control.

  Crawling back into bed, pseudo-blood running rivers down his cheeks, splashing about his shoulders, pooling in the hollows of
his neck, worry overtook him.

  He couldn’t go to school.

  Not like this.

  Not torrentially bleeding away.

  But he couldn’t break the rules either.

  But it didn’t fucking matter much did it?

  So what if it went on record that he was sick in bed the day before the murders started up?

  Would that factor against him?

  Would a day under the covers draw suspicion?

  If every thing played out as it had the last time (age thirteen) and the time before that (age ten) and memory mostly fuzzy, the time before that (age seven), conditions like bed times and meal times and school and therapy were bound to be compromised. The staff was going to flip out and try to punish him for insubordination.

  But what could he do?

  Their draconian rules meant shit when people were going to die. Chaos was going to supplant order. Until then (and after), no matter what he did, go to school or stay home sick, refuse to leave his bed or fake his way through the daily grind, he had to hold it together and project ignorance. These tri-annual massacres were beginning to look less and less coincidental. His presence at each bloodbath was beginning to look more and more instrumental. Red tape and bureaucracy and general tumult had always saved him before. If he kept tight-lipped about the crap going on in his head there was no reason not to expect the same—after a bit of time in a holding center he would be shipped off to another group home in another city.

  If the system somehow grew a brain and figured things out, combing over his psych records and taking his four-year-old, seven-year-old and (mostly mute, traumatized into near silence) ten-year-old ramblings/statements/evaluations about ghosts and murder into account (by age thirteen he had learned to play dumb) would they actually put him in jail?

  Could they put him in jail?

  He never killed anyone, but could they find a way to nail him over the actions of his ghosts?

  Could they prove his involvement?

  Arthur had no idea about legalities, but he didn’t want to go to prison. He’d seen Scared Straight and that shit wasn’t for him.

  Not that it was terribly likely. He was a minor. He was nuts. He was made for the loony bin.

  What Arthur really hoped to accomplish by playing it straight and feigning ambivalence was forgoing another round of torturous psych testing. Man, oh man, the shit they dug up. If he could just keep it cool they might leave him alone (he hopelessly hoped) this time. The fallout would be rough enough, his mind burning with ghostly residue, his joints aching with stress, and the last thing he needed was the endless barrage of counselors and therapists and their probing, idiotic questions.

  Arthur didn’t know if he could handle another one of those horrendously invasive, post-murder, psychological evaluations. He feared his mind would crack under the pressure and he would be left broken, devolved, a raving lunatic.

  Tossing and turning, he clenched his eyes shut tight, but couldn’t seem to fall in for a few more precious minutes of morning sleep.

  His mind continued on.

  If he could just keep it together for the next few days and then play naive in the wake of the murders, he would be safe and a semblance of normality would eventually return. More importantly, once the killing was done, his wrists would close, the blood would stop leaking from his ears and his neck would look like a normal neck, not ground hamburger. He could breathe easy (for the next three years at least).

  But could he keep it together while the world around him ran red?

  And when they finally moved him to another group home would he be happy with his new placement? Would he miss Melanie (definitely) and Connor (definitely) and even George the Destroyer (probably not)?

  And ever since his wrists opened yesterday the biggest concern: who was going to die this time?

  As if on cue Connor snorted and shifted and gave a tiny scream from the bed across the room. Nightmares. Constant nightmares. The kid was always thrashing in his sleep, running from a past (and future) he couldn’t escape. Poor thing. Life had dealt him a pretty shitty hand.

  Of all the fast friendships he had forged, thus far the maximum shelf life not to exceed two years, Arthur liked Connor the best. The constant shifting and shuffling throughout the system forced rooming with a wide range of basket cases. There were the depressed, the deranged and the dumb. Connor was as batshit crazy as all the rest, plagued with abandonment issues and broken by loss, but beneath the madness there was something different about him, something genuine and almost normal that Arthur could relate to.

  It wasn’t evident right off. At first Arthur hated the hyper little fucker.

  He was kinetic and wild and always running around the room at a million miles an hour.

  He stole things and lied about it.

  His mouth was always open and his breath stunk like ass.

  There was a frenetic quality to him, like he was composed of jittery jags, his hair always messy, his clothes always wrinkled, his mind a flurry of lightning-like fragments and half thoughts.

  In his presence, patience was strained to the breaking point. Nerves were frayed. Tolerance challenged.

  Outsiders, meaning anyone that wasn’t his roommate, meaning anyone other than Arthur, could only take his spastic nature for so long. They never gave him a chance or invested the time to dig deeper and try to understand him. These general dismissals compounded the problem, fueling Connor’s awkwardness, his distrust of his fellow man, his frustration, and Arthur hated watching any potential erode away beneath the aversions and annoyances of common human selfishness. It was a sad, sad thing. Connor struggled so hard only to sink because people didn’t want to take the time.

  He often told Arthur how much he hated the way he was and that he wished he could calm down, but he couldn’t help it. There was something inside, something volatile and unstable and uncontrollable and it pushed him on and forced him to act before he thought.

  He seethed to Arthur that he wished that he had never been born and the reason he was here, locked away in a level fourteen with the rest of the crazies was because nobody understood him.

  He wanted to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills.

  He wanted to burn things.

  These confessions began spilling out of Connor’s stutter-stop mouth a few months into their stay as roommates. A trust of sorts had developed between them, a bond born of proximity, cemented with many, many late night talks, tears usually welling in Connor’s eyes, his fists pounding on the bed while he told Arthur that he couldn’t help who he was because his mom was a “fucking bitch” and he was her “fucked up crack baby.”

  Arthur felt bad for him and tried his hardest to tolerate his quirks and be patient. He joked with him and tried to build his confidence. He took an interest in his likes and dislikes. Even though he was short and the exact opposite of athletic he loved basketball. He loved Michael Jordan and had been wearing the same pair of Salvation Army donated Jordan sneakers for the past two years. And though Connor was driven by impulse and could be annoying as all get out, there was something more to him than fire and bluster and mania.

  Immediately after his parents died Arthur was fed into the system. There was nobody else to take him, no immediate family, no extended family (his parents were of the star-crossed lovers variety and had written everybody off sometime before his birth) so after a few weeks in holding while papers were processed and non-existent relatives contacted, it was into the kiddy grinder with him.

  Beyond a flittering memory here or a pleasant dream there he couldn’t really remember too much about normal life or what it was like before holding centers and foster care and group homes and the barrage of psychological testing, but he had managed to hang on to a picture of his real family, a bright, sunny snapshot with his real mom and his real dad as they huddled around a smiling, pre-haunted version of a real him at about three years old. This single remnant was all he had left of the life he used to have, the life he could’ve had, and
when he took a few seconds (he couldn’t stomach much more—broken images littered his mind with horrible stills of their deaths) to look at the fading memory he kind of felt what it must feel like to be normal.

  Words didn’t really work, but if he had to call the feeling something he supposed warmth would do.

  At each placement the picture sat on Arthur’s nightstand in a beat up little frame. Over the years, residents or staff or social workers commented on it, be it an expression of kindness, concern or hostility, but nobody really cared about the picture. Nobody gave it more than a cursory glance and a cursory remark and nobody was the least bit interested in a snapshot of a screwed up kid’s screwed up family. It was almost as if everybody distanced themselves from the picture purposely, as if his parents’ murder was contagious and this little 5x7 still life was bad, bad luck.

  It was strange, but somehow Connor didn’t feel that negative vibe. He knew about the murders. He knew that the two adults smiling alongside their child were brutally killed, but regardless, he genuinely liked to look at the picture. It seemed to mean something more to him and that he understood, or at least understood in his own oddball way, or at least took the time to understand in his own oddball way, somehow made Arthur feel…good…less crazy…appreciated.

  At first he was defensive. He didn’t like the way Connor kept walking up to his nightstand and staring at his picture. It was creepy. Arthur took it as an invasion of privacy and told him to “Fuck off” on a number of occasions.

  Once they were friends, a month’s worth of personal conversation under their belts, he eased up. “Why are you always looking at that?”

  “I-I-I d-don’t kn-kn-know.” Connor was embarrassed and quickly danced away from the picture back to his side of the room. On his way over he said something that Arthur didn’t expect. As rapid fire as everything else, he blurted, “I-I-I g-g-guess I j-j-just l-l-like to pr-pr-pretend that’s m-m-me.”