Bleed

by Ed Kurtz

  And, had it not been for Ophelia, that monster Blackmore would surely have chopped poor, young Alice to bits of flesh and bone.

  Of course he was the next to slide down the ravishing redhead’s gullet, piece by raw, bloody piece. And as of that morning, according to the elder woman’s report, nothing edible was left of the late lunatic killer.

  “He is dead and gone, lady,” Ophelia recited with dramatic lourish. “He is dead and gone; at his head a grass-green turf, at his heels a stone.”

  Alice smiled in spite of her troubling thoughts; she even gave a little laugh.

  “Now that’s Ophelia,” she said as she stepped under the hot spray.

  ***

  The afternoon was spent doing chores around and outside the farmhouse. Alice cut the grass and painted the front door and fed their one remaining pig. Soon she would slaughter it just as she had the other one. Like Ophelia, she too had to eat.

  For her part, Ophelia changed the linens on the bed and flipped the mattress, since the blood had leaked through to stain it. After that, when a tired and sweaty Alice came back into the house, she prepared a sumptuous hot lunch of pork loin with garlic for Alice and pan-seared flank of Walt Blackmore for herself. It was what remained of her breakfast and, indeed, of Walt.

  Alice dug into her lunch with gusto; the yard work had built up a mighty appetite in her. Only twice did she glance up at her companion as the tall, buxom woman poked a sliver of pink, rare meat into her mouth with her fork. Once, not long after Alice first began to accept Ophelia for who and what she was, Alice gave in and sampled a bite of the anthropophagus’ meal. In that instance, it was the woman from the attic, Walt’s sister Sarah, from whom the meat was cut. A thick slice of what Ophelia dubbed “back bacon,” it was sweet and not at all unpleasant to Alice’s palate. Which was precisely why she never dined on human meat again—the last thing she wanted was to turn herself into a cannibal, craving the succulent taste of her fellow man.

  Ophelia swallowed the sliver and dabbed at her mouth with the cloth napkin from her naked lap.

  “Empty now,” she said matter-of-factly, gesturing toward the icebox in the corner of the kitchen.

  Alice gazed at the large, humming box. It was the last item they had taken from Walt’s house before Alice lit the match that ignited the blaze. All that night and into the following morning, the old Gablefront cottage burned tangerine orange and schoolhouse red until at last it was finally reduced to ashes. Alice even had a pretty good story ready for when the fire marshal and investigating police came knocking on the farmhouse door asking questions. But they never came. It was the last they ever had anything to do with the legacy of Walt Blackmore. Except, of course, for his meat.

  Alice sped up her chewing and swallowed a mouthful of pork, trying like hell not to think about the sight of that very pig feasting on the remains of the house’s prior occupants.

  “What do you suppose we should do?” she asked.

  “I think you know,” Ophelia answered gravely.

  Even though her mouth was now empty, Alice swallowed again. Her throat bobbed and gurgled. She was not happy about where this was going.

  “Not that, Ophelia,” she said glumly. “Not yet. I—I can’t.”

  “You’ve said that before.”

  “It’s too awful. I don’t even want to think about it.”

  “All you have to do is make a phone call. I will deal with everything after that.”

  “Where? In the barn?”

  “It is as good a place as any.”

  Alice heaved a weighty sigh. She looked down at her plate and her stomach did a flip. Her appetite was dead and gone.

  “And what then? After that, I mean. Who will be next? And then after that?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  “Before it was all…circumstantial. Now you want us to start…”

  She could not make herself pronounce the word. Killing.

  Ophelia dropped her eyelids halfway down over her pale, glinting eyes and rose from her chair. She rounded the kitchen table to where Alice sat, squatted beside her and placed a cool, gentle hand on the girl’s bare knee. An involuntary tremble worked its way throughout Alice’s body. It was the same every time. Ophelia’s touch thrilled her.

  “I watched you slaughter the pig. That one right there.” She pointed at the half-eaten pork loin on Alice’s plate. “You swung the axe, severed the jugular. You never even flinched at all the blood.”

  Alice sulked childishly. “I’d had practice,” she said ominously.

  “You have to when you’re self-sufficient like we are. We have no one upon whom to depend but each other. And we have to eat, both of us. I never asked to be this way, darling...”

  Darling. Ophelia was bringing out the big guns.

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “I was dead. I was nothing. Then I came back. And I came back…like this.”

  Alice knew all of this. Ophelia told her the whole sordid story after the fire, how she was cut to ribbons by her own kin and left to bleed to death in that very same Gablefront cottage, long ago. A horrible time and a horrible life. Why she returned she could not tell because she did not know herself. She simply did, gradually, and she would have died a second time had it not been for a steady diet of the very stuff she was made of. It kept her together, she said. It made her whole. Alice couldn’t argue with that. Not when it meant life or death for the other half of her own heart.

  “I know,” she whispered. “I know.”

  Tears formed in her eyes, blurring her vision before spilling over her eyelids and dribbling down her round, pink cheeks.

  Ophelia wiped them away with her thumb on one side and kissed them away on the other. That only made Alice cry harder.

  “Shh, darling,” Ophelia cooed. “Shhhh.”

  56

  After she hung up the phone, Alice realized she was holding her breath. She let it out slowly, like a balloon leaking out of a pinprick. Then she waited.

  A little more than an hour later, as the horizon turned a bruised purple and the sun disappeared behind the woods, the rumble of an oil-deprived engine grew steadily louder outside the house. He was coming, and her knowledge of that fact made Alice’s chest feel tight.

  She had to let her breath out again when she heard the knocking at the door. Ophelia slipped into the satin robe slung over the back of the kitchen chair, a sacrifice Alice insisted upon. As Ophelia tied the belt around her ample waist, Alice crept cautiously toward the door.

  The deadbolt clacked noisily as she turned the knob. The door squealed on its hinges when she opened it.

  The tall, gangly man at the door glowered at her with steely eyes and said, “So here you are, you goddamned stupid little bitch.”

  The words assaulted her as though she’d been punched in the nose. She flinched and stepped aside.

  “Come in, Harold.”

  He sauntered into the house like he had been there a dozen times before.

  “Whose fucking place is this, anyway?”

  “It’s mine.”

  Harold snorted derisively as he noticed Ophelia for the first time. He raised his eyebrows at the beautiful woman and made an O with his mouth.

  “Mine and hers,” Alice corrected herself.

  “That so?”

  His face melted back into a scowl.

  “You know this bitch is a minor, don’t you?” he growled at Ophelia.

  The redhead smiled thinly.

  “The only bitch I see here is a pathetic old man,” she seethed.

  “I could call the police, you know. I could press fucking charges.”

  “Go right ahead,” Ophelia said. “The telephone is on the counter.”

  Harold erupted into a peal of laughter.

  “I’d bet you’d like that, you goddamn dyke. Here you only got one broad to play finger-fuck with, but in prison? Hoo boy, that’d be a fucking buffet for a cunt like you.”

  Alice lunged forward. “Don’t talk to
her like that, Harold,” she snarled.

  Harold spun around to face her. His mirth having gone as quickly as it came, he resumed his furious gaze.

  “First off, don’t you ever tell me what to do. Get that? And second, you call me Dad, or Father, or Sir. You’ve disrespected your elders long enough, you dumb little bit—”

  The raging man fell silent the moment he felt the sharp, ripping pain in his abdomen. Without moving his head, he turned his glistening eyes downward to see his stepdaughter’s fist up against his belly. Jutting from the back of the fist was a rounded wooden handle. Harold could see nothing of the blade, but he knew it was buried deep in his guts.

  “I’ll call you whatever I want,” Alice said. “Now Ophelia—that gorgeous redhead over there—I reckon she’ll just call you meat.”

  Harold mouthed the word meat, but no sound passed his lips.

  “And for the life of me,” Alice continued, “I don’t see why I won’t, too.”

  In her mind she flashed on every terrible, hateful thing the man had ever said and ever done. His appalling physical abuse of her mother that lasted until her death at forty-six. The times he’d get stewed and make passes at the few friends she ever made in all her years at school. The morning she woke up with him in her bed, naked as Adam and snoring drunk.

  Tightening her fist even more, Alice jerked the knife up, dragging the blade through soft innards until it jammed against Harold’s sternum.

  She also thought back to every indignity she had ever suffered at the hands of others. The busy hands and bragging mouth of Kyle Casey. The terrible, dirty roll in the sheets with Clem Lundeen, and his buddy Jarod’s never ceasing smirk, denoting his familiarity with her most private intimacies. Every classmate who called her names, and every boy or girl to whom she’d given her misplaced trust. All of them monsters, none of them human at all. Not like her. Not like Ophelia. No, indeed—the ones like them, they were just flesh and blood and bone with no soul to speak of. They were nothing more than meat.

  Out came the blade, and with it, a spouting fountain of blood. Harold squealed as he staggered to one side and clutched at his abdomen with desperate, useless hands. He could do nothing to prevent the agony burning up his open torso, nor the pulsing spray of his lifeblood pumping out of him, spurt by viscous spurt. Then, with only the quickest of swipes, Alice slashed the gleaming blade across her stepfather’s neck, carving the flesh apart in the blink of an eye. Three rapid bursts of blood flew out of the severed arteries on either side of Harold’s neck, then slowed to a steady dribble. He faltered, lost control of his ankles and knees and everything all at once. Finally, he crumpled like a pile of dirty laundry. The floor was awash in the dead man’s draining fluids; the white and tan design of the tiles vanished in the sticky red deluge.

  Alice’s chest heaved with every massive breath. She gulped at the air, dragging it into her lungs. Her mouth hung open in an animalistic snarl, and her eyes looked hooded and far away.

  Ophelia untied the silk belt and shrugged out of the robe. She walked around the widening wine-colored pool on the floor and stepped close to Alice.

  “My darling,” she said softly, seductively. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” Alice said between guzzling breaths. “I’m just fine.”

  ***

  They hung him by his feet in the barn, Alice and Ophelia, with the same rope with which the latter had tried to hang Walt Blackmore. By that point there was precious little blood left to drain from the corpse, so Alice tended to the stripping and washing of the body. Once that was done, she made a long incision down the middle of the back, from nape to crack. She then set to sawing the flesh from the bone and cartilage, flaying the meat and exposing the glistening vertebrae. These she expected to be excellent cuts. The first of many for at least two weeks of very fine eating.

  Ophelia had done well reminding Alice of all those grim hunting experiences she’d had with her real dad in years long gone by. She’d hated it then—the killing, the evisceration—but this…

  This was different.

  Of course, two weeks was not a particularly long time. It would be over before either of them knew it. Then they would be hungry again.

  But the world was their abattoir. Their sex would be the snare. Blood would flow and flesh would be rent from the bones of those they butchered. They would feed then, and it would begin again.

  Alice was never happier. She was in love.

  And that love was the most beautiful thing on earth.

  1923

  Papa was mine, Agnes shrieks, he was mine and you took him away. Mine, mine, mine.

  The girl cannot comprehend the ghastly insinuations or at the very least she must not; it is too horrendous, too sinful to ponder. She clambers to her feet and scrambles to escape but Agnes stands between her and the square hole in the floor where the ladder is. Agnes rumbles and roars like a mad-dog and breaks into a clawing dash after the girl, who runs screaming for the open edge, the end of the never completed addition—a dead end into open air and a drop twelve feet down. She can make it, she knows she can and anyway it has to be better than what crazy Agnes has in store for her.

  She bends at the knees, ready to leap, but Agnes has her again, tight in her grasp. The child flies back as though she is being sucked into a whirlpool, and in an instant Agnes is on top of her, slapping her face raw with one hand. The other holds up Papa’s hand plane. Little more than a brown block with a strap for the carpenter’s hand but it’s got teeth; nasty, serrated metal teeth that bite and tear and flay.

  Another sound slap rattles her brains as Agnes lifts up the girl’s nightdress and slaps the plane down on her thigh. She screams for leniency, for mercy and sanity and peace. For it all to go away and to start over afresh like it always was between them when Papa was gone for days and it was just they two. Sisters and soulmates and the best friends in the world. But nothing comes out of her.

  The planer’s jagged blade bites down into the flesh of the child’s thigh and Agnes drags it along the bare, trembling leg.

  Flaying her sister alive.

  Now she screams. All the world can hear it. Even the moon that does nothing but perversely leer at the bloody goings-on can hear the agonized shrieks of the tortured young girl it passively watches.

  Agnes strips her flesh away and grunts with rage and mania, and all the child can do is flail her one free arm against the sawdusty boards, making the loose nails dance and the steel square bounce closer to her pain-curled fingers. She feels the cold metal at her fingertips and the sharp right angle of its cruel corner. Then the square is in her fist.

  When the corner pushes into Agnes’ eye, the girl can only vaguely understand what she is doing. Agnes roars and the child drives the steel square into her face and neck again and again and again. Like chopping down a tree, she hacks at the stalk, the trunk Agnes’ neck, until the skin has been all but sheared off and Agnes is reduced to a pulpy, gurgling parody of a person. But not really a person at all. From where the girl stands, her sister looks more like slaughtered game.

  She continues to hack until the gurgling is no more and the eyes stop looking at her.

  And then she hacks some more.

  Eventually, after the helpless moon has gone to its hiding place and the sun is peeking over the treetops, she even manages to get Agnes’ head off and with just the steel square and nothing else. She is hot and sweaty, and the salty perspiration pours into the open meat of her freshly skinned leg and it burns worse than Mama’s stove. But instead of crying out, she laughs.

  The girl laughs for all she is worth at the red stump between Agnes’ shoulders and at Papa’s pudding mushed head downstairs—she laughs and laughs and does not believe for a second that she will ever stop laughing because Agnes was a bad girl, the worst, but now she is dead. And the dead don’t come back. They just can’t; everybody knows that.

  The dead never come back.

  Ed Kurtz is the author of Bleed, The Rib From Which I Rem
ake the World, Nausea, The Forty-Two, and other novels. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories and Best Gay Stories. Ed resides in Minneapolis.