Blood Sacrifice

by By Rick R. Reed

  “No,” she whimpers, hands fluttering up like birds to slap, to stop him.

  He pulls out a gun, a little snub-nosed revolver.

  “You just keep still if you know what’s good for you. I ain’t afraid to use this thing.”

  Elise knows from her time on the street that it’s futile to fight back against a firearm; you always lose. Even though she knows he might kill her no matter what she does, her only hope for escape lies in cooperation.

  “Okay, okay,” she whimpers. Her tongue is already thickening. “Just don’t hurt me. Please.”

  With one hand, he rummages through her clothes. She’s sorry, terribly sorry, she hasn’t worn underwear. His hands linger over her nipples, pinching. He slips a finger inside her, dry, and she winces and yelps with the sudden, sharp pain.

  “Nice.”

  “Please, please don’t.” She pauses for a moment. “I…I have HIV.”

  “Yeah? Well so do I. Bitch.”

  “Come on. I’m for real. You can get AIDS. Just let me go and we can both forget this ever happened.”

  Elise knows no amount of pleading is going to change anything. She tries to go somewhere else in her mind as he rips the clothes from her, tearing them and flinging them off into a dirty corner. She looks desperately for a place that will take her in, that will at least allow a psychic escape. She shuts her eyes tightly as she feels him on top of her, struggling with the zipper of his jeans. Her thoughts race, going anywhere but here. Thinking of her girlhood home in Cleveland; thinking of a beach in Cozumel where she once walked with a college boyfriend; thinking of the house on Sheridan Road where Maria lives, and the art there. Each place slams the door in her face. In the end, there’s only the throbbing pain in the back of her head; the cold concrete against her skin; and the taste of blood in her mouth. She is beyond tears. She goes limp.

  And then he’s ramming himself inside her and Elise shrieks. His hand quickly covers her mouth as he continues to thrust, each movement sending white-hot jolts of pain through her. She whimpers beneath his sour-smelling palm, afraid she will vomit into his flesh, that he will not remove his hand and she will drown.

  Mercifully, it’s all over in a few seconds. He pulls out of her and she looks down to see his cock covered in blood. “Shit,” he whispers, reaching for her shirt to wipe himself off on. He flings the shirt over her face. “Thanks, bitch. Have a nice day.”

  And then he is gone. And then she really is sick, turning her head to go on and on, into the dry heaves. But no amount of vomiting can ever rid his memory from her.

  Weakly, she gets to her knees. The pain throbs within her. She wonders if she has been ripped, if she needs a hospital. Of course, she does. But she knows she won’t go. Sobbing, she struggles into her torn and bloody clothing and manages to stand, to hobble home, hoping no one will see her.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  2004

  She wonders when these hot jets of water will turn cold. Elise has been standing under the showerhead now for what seems like hours, unable to ever get clean again. Rubbing her body nearly raw, first using soap, then shampoo, then defoliating scrub, she’s made her skin tingle and discovers abraded places, small patches of blood and torn skin exposed. And yet she continues to scrub, almost oblivious to the pain and damage she is causing, whimpering as the water sluices over her, slightly pink from her torn and bleeding skin.

  She turns her face up to the spray, opening her mouth and gulping the almost scalding flow down her throat.

  Finally she turns the water off and sits on the porcelain bottom of the tub, near the drain, shivering. A trickle of blood seeps from between her legs.

  Mercifully, she has no memory of what happened to her, but it must have been something horrible—she’d never been one to shrink away from trauma. Hell, she'd seen her lover—or whatever Maria was to her—with blood on her face…Blood. She's bleeding! She looks down at herself, at her torn and battered body, and the sight nearly makes her faint. She knows only that what happened to her was something horrible, painful, and damaging, but when she tries to grasp the particulars, they scatter away like dream images.

  “Maybe that’s for the best,” she whimpers, sliding forward until her face rests against the rapidly cooling tub bottom.

  She lies in the tub for more than an hour. She gets up only when the chill and the shock cause her to shake so badly she isn’t sure she can get herself to stop. Staggering to her bed with just enough strength to crawl in under the covers, she pulls them over her head.

  Every light in her apartment is on, even though the sun has risen.

  Her tongue is thick. It feels like she is under a blanket of needles; even the soft, brushed fleece of her blanket feels rough and chafing.

  She closes her eyes and in seconds, slides into a deep, dreamless sleep, almost a coma.

  When she awakens, sunlight floods the apartment, usurping the power of the electric bulbs, which are almost humming. She pokes her head out from under the blankets, breathing easier, the air cooling her sweat-slicked skin.

  With re-awakening, Elise remembers the rape and the horror and pain of it. She realizes that shock had granted her a few hours of oblivion, but that has worn off. Now, reality sits squarely in front of her, and its knowing grin is hideous. She wishes she could turn back and continue to live in the kind of numbed ignorance she experienced before she fell asleep. By degrees, she manages to get up on her elbows, and eventually to a sitting position. Her breath is ragged and she hurts all over, especially her cunt, which is throbbing and cramping; the flow of blood has slowed to a trickle, but still not stopped. She wonders if she will ever heal.

  In spite of the pain causing her to her wince and cry out, Elise stands and moves like an old woman across the expanse of her studio apartment to the kitchen sink, where she turns the tap on (cold this time), splashing the water over her face and gulping it down, letting it run until it gets colder, colder. She holds her head under the stream until the cold causes her head to hurt, until the water sluices down her front and starts the shivering all over again. She pulls away, dons a T-shirt and shorts that were on a chair. She sits down near the window, hands in her damp hair.

  “Why did this happen to me?” she wonders aloud to the empty apartment. But she’s already learned this lesson: that there is little reason to the world, a place where the evil are victorious and the good cast aside, where the evil are squelched and the good were rewarded. It is all a random pattern and trying to figure it out is useless.

  Outside, children’s voices. School must have let out; she always notices how the noise levels rise in her neighborhood around three in the afternoon. They shout to one another. There’s lots of laughter. How can they laugh? Elise wonders. How can anyone ever laugh again?

  The flow of traffic outside her window grows louder as the late afternoon traffic increases. Cars pull up, double-park, honk their horns, engines idling just below Elise’s window.

  How does the world go on? It seems surreal.

  She moves to the edge of her bed, icy water dripping from her forehead down her face, and has one thought: Surreal or real, this is a world I want no part of. She looks to her drawings and paintings, lined up along the floor, leaning against the walls.

  If that’s the price I have to pay…

  She sits, quiet and as composed as she can be in her discomfort, hands folded in her lap and waits for the voices outside to lessen. She sits and waits for the darkness to fall. When twilight erases the bright yellow sun, she will call Maria. She will not use the telephone (which was shut off for non-payment two weeks ago anyway). She will use only her mind, only her heart. How could she have doubted being with someone where communication between minds is so certain, so secure? The fact they can sync this way foretells a relationship of honesty and togetherness. She thinks of a man, his voice scarred. “Can I ask you a question?” Her stomach turns and she gets half up off the bed, afraid she will be sick, but the moment passes.

  Take me. Tak
e me away and love me. She can’t help sending the message out to Maria, even though the sun is bright. Who knows what messages penetrate her sleep?

  She stands, makes a short circuit of her drab room, and shuts off all the lights. What will she really be losing anyway? She understands the love of darkness and feels like its shadow has been in the wings all along, even before she met Maria, waiting to claim her.

  I’m ready now. Ready to come to you. Elise feels like she’s walked down a road that ends in blackness. Not in shadow or darkness, but simply ends, as if nothing more exists at its edge. The thought is like what people believed before they accepted the reality the earth was round; that it was possible to fall off its edge and be consumed by monsters.

  Take all of me. Consume me.

  She returns to her bed and lies on her back, eyes focused on the ceiling, patient for it to get lost in shadows. Like her. Soon.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  2004

  Maria stirs beneath the deep red blanket, its heavy damask over her head; it’s like someone has lain a rug or tapestry overtop her. Heavy. But she’s used to it. It blocks out all light, and that’s what she was looking for when she bought it many, many years ago, from a vendor in an open-air marketplace in Venice. How things have changed since then.

  She has a vague, uncomfortable feeling, as if someone is pounding on the front door downstairs. It makes her twist and turn in her half-sleep, cursing her handicap, cursing being unable to move when she needs freedom. But to move from outside the darkness would mean death.

  It’s not really knocking anyway that’s making her anxious. The metaphor, though, is apt. Someone is trying to get in touch with her and she thinks it’s Elise. Her senses will be more attuned once darkness falls, once she can bring a pipe to her lips, inhale, and transfer the fog in her brain to her lungs, leaving her alert and open.

  But she feels vague distress. She is unable to pinpoint the particulars, and this inability makes it impossible for her to rest. She senses there has been harm. She senses a need.

  She turns over on her back, then her side. Terence is next to her, still and unmoving. She wants to strike him. She needs someone to share in this agony of not knowing.

  After what seems like days, the room darkens. The shadows move under the damask coverlet and penetrate it, much as sunlight penetrates the mornings of mortals. Maria gets out of her bed, not waiting for the familiar stirring of Terence and Edward. She hurries to the window, where the traffic is rushing by like a river of neon-eyed monsters.

  She doesn’t really get messages, not in verbal form anyway. This kind of communication is beyond words. But if she had to do a crude translation, what she would hear are these bald phrases:

  I made a mistake.

  I need you.

  I have been hurt badly.

  Come to me.

  I want to be with you for all time.

  Maria hurries to dress, her clothing practical tonight, with no nods to the romantic. A black blouse, Levis, black boots. She pulls her hair back into a chignon and pauses only to take a deep breath of smoke just before she exits. There is a pipe and a bag on a small table near the front door for precisely this purpose.

  She walks into the chill, damp night air, sending comfort.

  I will be with you soon.

  I will take care of everything.

  I will give you the love and nurturing you need.

  I rejoice that you will be with me.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  2004

  Idly, Elise sits at her drawing board, a piece of Vellum Bristol taped to its surface. She is trying to stop herself from sketching, but she can’t. Every time she tries to pull her hand back, in which she holds a charcoal pencil, it’s almost as though an invisible force puts it back.

  The drawing is detailed. In it, she is lying on the floor of the parking garage, one hand held up in mute defense. Her attacker stands over her, shadowy save for enormous arms and penis, both drawn with quick, hard, and deep strokes, almost cutting through to the surface of the board below. The drawing ignites the horrible memory, which is playing on endless loop in her mind, despite her best efforts to block it out.

  She has listened to music: the entire score of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet. She has sorted through piles of whore clothes, stuffing the skirts, the bustiers, the short shorts, the leather pants, the fishnet stockings, spike-heeled shoes, crotchless panties, push-up bras into bags, all headed for the Dumpster outside. She has even run in place until she pants for breath and her body is slick with sweat. None of it makes the memory go away.

  She has the idea that confronting it might make it vanish, hence the drawing. But the painstakingly rendered drawing at her fingertips only makes the memory more real, so real she trembles, and feels sick. But something will not let her stop.

  As her room grows darker, she senses reassuring messages coming from Maria. The messages wrap her in a kind of warmth and make the memory disappear for an instant at a time. Not enough. She wonders how much will be enough.

  She senses Maria is on her way, knows that soon, her life (death?) will be changing.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch on the paper: his face is clear, the jaundiced eyes with their brown irises so black the pupils are lost in them, the wide nose, bent slightly to the left, the full lips and the front teeth with the gap. The drawing would be an excellent resource for police detectives, if she had the nerve or desire to contact the CPD.

  Why can’t she stop drawing?

  Why can’t she simply wait at her window, intent on the comforting vision of Maria pulling up in front of her building, come to claim her, come to rescue her from a life that is suddenly filled with only pain and degradation.

  She sketches her mouth in an O, à la Munch. She takes care to draw her eyes, wide and almost bulging in terror, in anticipation of the pain she knows is on its way.

  Why can’t she simply put the pencil down? Is it because she knows she may never be able to draw like this again? Is it because, even though it’s painful, this creation is the only thing keeping her alive?

  She draws shadows. A gallery of rats in the corner of the garage, their tiny eyes glowing out of the darkness, bearing gleeful witness to her torment. In one corner a bat hangs down, its fangs dripping something dark and clotted. Snakes slither along the floor.

  Monsters, all monsters. Except for her, at the center of things, the damsel in distress.

  The symbolism tears at her. She tears the drawing up and scatters it on the floor, tearful and panting. Maria will be here any second, to take her away, to bring her down into a darkness that’s safe and nurturing.

  Is that possible?

  Is what she’s contemplating just another way to kill herself? A wild, romantic alternative to slitting her wrists and crawling in a warm bathtub, where her blood will seep out, turning the water crimson?

  Of course not, she cannot believe that.

  I am almost there.

  Elise moves to the window and peers out at the night. A homeless woman pushes a shopping cart down the street, its wheel squeaking, almost drowning out her on-key rendition of “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” Her voice is surprisingly clear, a whispered soprano, not suited for the song at all, but makes the song’s message—about obsessive love—all the more poignant. Elise watches her hobble down the street; the music fades, and finally disappears when the woman vanishes into an alley, probably to discover what edible treats the Dumpsters there hold for her.

  Her head aches. Maybe I should give this more time.

  The memory assaults her, twisting her gut.

  I have to go.

  She sits down suddenly in front of her stereo receiver and tunes it to a news station. Voices. She hasn’t yet tried voices to block out the rapid-fire imagery with which her brain seems intent on torturing her.

  Is it providence that makes the weather report end and the next news item to come up just as Elise tunes in? Normally, a grisly story like the
one that follows the weather (fog, 70% chance of rain through the night) would cause her to snap the radio off. But the report makes her listen closer with a mounting sense of dread.

  The story concerns Alicia Majors, a fourteen-year-old Senn High School honor roll student whose parents had reported her missing. Elise cringes when she hears the girl’s body had to be identified through dental records, because “the teenage girl’s skin had been flayed, leaving only muscle and bone exposed.” Elise stuffs a fist to her mouth when she hears “nearly all of the girl’s blood had been drained from her body.” She stares out the window desolate, as the story winds up with phrases like, “evidence of sexual assault” and “the last to have seen Alicia alive.” Elise closes her eyes and stops breathing when the announcer finally says, “authorities are looking for a tall, Caucasian male on a motorcycle. Classmates report seeing Alicia leave with this man. Anyone having further information should—”

  Elise snaps the radio off, doing it quickly, then rushes to the bathroom to throw up what little she had in her stomach, mostly yellow bile.

  After she rides out the heaves, she stands to look at her face in the mirror above the sink. Her eyes are bloodshot (she wonders if the force of her vomiting has caused blood vessels to rupture) and tearing. Her skin is flushed.

  All of this due to being alive. Due to blood.

  Blood that not even the dead Alicia Majors possessed any longer.

  It is then the knock at her door comes. Soft, almost a tapping. It is then she feels the force of Maria, her monstrously beautiful face rising up in her mind’s eye, her delicate, near skeletal limbs outstretched to embrace her.

  Elise sinks down onto the cool of the tile floor, her eyes no longer wet from being sick, but wet from tears. She sobs as the knocking grows louder and more insistent. How long does she listen? Is it hours? She feels like a betrayer, but she cannot bring herself to get up and answer her door, not even to stop the knocking that makes her jump and start sobbing harder with each set of poundings.