Blood Sacrifice

by By Rick R. Reed

  She knows Maria will not come inside. Elise knows she has to invite her…and she isn’t so sure that decision would be so wise, after all.

  *

  Maria knocks one final time, even though she knows it’s useless. Her knuckles are raw. What has it been? Twenty minutes? It seems longer.

  Maria slides down to the floor outside Elise’s apartment and sits on the dirty floor, covered in carpeting so filthy no color can describe it. What should she do? She knows Elise is inside. Her warmth and her scent filter out. She smells the soap, the flesh, and even the blood pulsing underneath. She lowers her head between her knees and stares at the floor.

  Of course, she’s concerned. She knows Elise is alive, but wonders what kind of shape she’s in, considering the pained and panicked tenor of the thoughts she sent out earlier. She is afraid Elise can’t come to the door. What she fears more, though, is that she won’t.

  What really scares her is that she’s lost Elise. What really scares her is that she won’t answer twenty minutes of insistent pounding. And what terrifies her is that there is no answer to the thoughts she has sent. Behind the closed door is a deliberate psychic silence. Maria can’t bear the thought Elise may have changed her mind and is ignoring her.

  Wearily, she stands once more and raises her hand to knock. No. It’s no good.

  She wishes she could go inside, but she needs to be invited. It’s one of those traditions the folklore got right. If she can go in, she can at least see if Elise is all right. She shrugs and her head droops. She frowns as she descends the short staircase to the vestibule. Maria can’t believe it’s possible to sting with this much pain. She thought she left this part of humanity behind centuries ago. She has lived as a hedonist, existing only for herself and her pleasure. She hasn’t counted on falling in love, the ups and downs the emotion could cause. She knows why she has not pursued any attachments for so many years: this pain is insufferable; it is one from which even the living dead have no immunity.

  In the glaring, fluorescent-lit vestibule, Maria leans heavily on the steel-framed glass door to push her way out into the night. The door swings behind her, but doesn’t latch. She wonders how long the lock has gone unrepaired and if the owners of this building have any concern for its occupants. Probably not, but she does.

  She walks by the front of the building and turns the corner. She gives a glance up to the window that opens into Elise’s apartment and stops. Elise’s face, tired, pale, and almost ghostly, gazes down. Their eyes meet for an instant and, with the connection, Maria experiences a jolt. She is just about to reach up and even begins to lift her hands toward the window when Elise moves back quickly from it.

  Maria stops, stunned and embarrassed. She looks behind her to see if anyone has seen. She wants to cry out to Elise, but knows what statement her quick movement away from the window made. It is as much a rejection as if she has shouted, as if she has physically pushed her away.

  Maria wants to cry. She feels confused. Despair and rejection are emotions she has not experienced in so long they feel odd, strange, almost a physical twinge. She surmises Elise assumed Maria has not seen her; the apartment is pitch dark and her movement away from the glass almost instant. Elise, though, hadn’t counted on the abilities Maria has honed over many years to capture quick movement and to see into darkness.

  For a moment, she wants to turn around and go back, pound on the door and demand to be let in. But she shakes her head and continues walking east on Howard Street. Yes, she felt nearly human for a few moments, but she never lost her dignity.

  As she walks, her pace picks up, and she finds herself running. What is this dampness on her face? She pushes angrily at the tears, bringing her hands away smeared with blood.

  Never again will she let anyone get close to her.

  She stops when she can go no farther, when the broad, dark expanse of Lake Michigan stretches out before her. She stands alone on a beach and lets herself cry. She should have known this idea of love, this silly idea, was doomed.

  Maria wishes she could walk into the silver-capped waves and disappear. She wishes she had never seen Elise…or her art.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  2004

  The boy hadn’t put up much of a fight. It seemed they never did, anymore. Not since Tina had swooped into town and swept up Halsted Street, leaving death, despair, and a trail of broken promises in her wake.

  The small pink plastic bag is still in Edward’s pocket, the bottom and corner still retaining small shards of a whitish powder that resembles Drano. The bag had contained an eight ball of Tina, or crystal methamphetamine, if one wanted to get technical. Once upon a time, a little of his powerful reefer had been enough to lure the boys and dull their senses, but now crystal meth, affectionately referred to as Tina, was what the boys craved. Edward could buy a bag from a dealer on Cornelia Street, just off Halsted (also known as Boystown because of its preponderance of gay establishments, including several bars, a bathhouse, and a handful of adult bookstores). Proffering it around in the bars, he was suddenly like the Pied Piper; so many would follow him for a quick snort or two. This “poor man’s cocaine,” fashioned from ephedrine, drain cleaner, and other toxins, had taken a death grip on young and old in the gay community, in Chicago and across the nation. Edward had never seen a drug spike so rapidly in popularity. He was immune to its charms himself, which made it the perfect candy to lure little boys into his car, so to speak.

  And he had used it tonight. Not only was his body craving fresh blood, but he needed to get away from Terence and Maria, both feeling their own personal anguish over Elise, and what needed to be done about her. He hadn’t told them about their lakeside encounter. His trip out to the rainbow-pylon-lined street where many of Chicago’s gay men congregated was to numb himself, to obliterate the thoughts from his mind about what should be done about Elise. He knew well enough what must be done, and didn’t want to think about it. He saw the road in front of him as the watershed in his life as one of the undead, a capper that stood for everything vile and ugly regarding what he was.

  So when dusk lowered its purple curtain, Edward arose from the big canopy bed the three of them shared and knew where he had to go. It was a Friday night, and Halsted Street would be crowded with revelers, celebrating the beginning of another weekend. The weather had gotten warmer and the humidity had dropped, ensuring there would be an even bigger crowd than usual tonight. Edward often thought of going to Halsted as fishing in a barrel, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t looking for a challenge.

  After fortifying himself with a bowl of prime sinsemilla, that he had nurtured himself into reddish, sticky, and redolent buds in the basement of their house, he dressed for his evening out. Lately, it seemed the leather boys were the ones who were most willing to do whatever it would take to acquire the company of Miss Tina, so tonight, Edward pulled on skin-tight, faded Levi 501s (the crotch carefully abraded with sandpaper to boost its prominence), a studded leather harness showing off his defined pectorals to scandalous advantage, a pair of Harley Davidson motorcycle boots, and a leather biker cap pulled low on his brow, hiding his eyes and making his five o’clock shadow and full lips look anonymous, menacing, and irresistible. Years of practice had taught him what worked and what didn’t when one was out hunting. He could never have imagined being dressed as he was tonight and, even more, going out in public in this costume, back when he was alive. Back then, in the 1950s, he supposed there were people with leather fetishes, but you didn’t find them parading up and down brightly lit and traffic-clogged thoroughfares. Back then, Edward seldom even wore blue jeans when he went out, sticking with chinos, plaid shirts, or if he wanted to show off how artsy he was, garbed all in black (at least that much hadn’t changed; the goth boys still lingered here and there, especially around the alley entranceway to a bar called Neos on Clark Street; Edward had once hunted there, too).

  His mind in a fog, Edward had set off into the night. Any thoughts of the pathetic mortal th
ey had ensnared in their web and who was, right now, probably twisting and turning to free herself from its unrelenting bonds, were banished by the cloud of marijuana that had dulled the workings of his mind, weaving itself around the coiled pink structure of his brain. And his blood lust also played a major role in ensuring his thoughts were not bothered by what he saw as a betrayal of someone much like himself.

  But he couldn’t think about that now, as he raised his arm to hail a cab, not when there was a drunken and lonely boy somewhere to seduce, his blood and semen waiting for their final spurts into Edward’s hungry mouth.

  *

  The boy, nothing more than a carcass now, lies at his feet. It’s hard to decipher what anyone might have seen in him. Edward nudges the body over on its stomach with the steel toe of his boot, so he doesn’t have to look at him. He would prefer to remember the boy when he was vibrant, when the blood pumping hot just beneath his skin gave his cheeks color, when his vibrant life force caused his eyes to shine.

  Yes, that’s what I’ve spoiled, Edward thinks. He remembers talking to the boy in a leather bar called The Brig, where the air was dense with smoke (both cigars and cigarettes), the music was trance, and all the video monitors played hardcore pornography: here a crowd of muscular brutes tied a lithe young man to a St. Andrew’s cross and took turns fucking him, while the boy stared dull-eyed at the camera; there a man dressed as a member of the Hell’s Angels fisted two other men, on either side of him, their legs in chains in leather slings… Film production had come so far since Edward had surreptitiously watched men wrestle one another wearing posing straps on black and white 8MM celluloid. Edward remembers:

  The boy stands alone, in a corner. His bright, alert expression tells Edward he is new to this, and shy. He knows his attention will be welcome, and he knows the power his strong, cocky looks have. He’s done it so many times in the past, it is like a routine. The boy will be pliant, willing. And once he has Tina racing through his veins, he will be even more eager to be defiled. The boy has no idea how far defilement can go.

  Edward establishes no one will be looking for the boy, at least not for a while (he is from Indianapolis and has slipped away for the weekend, telling his parents he was attending a collegiate football game at Northwestern University in Evanston). It doesn’t take long for Edward to ply him with drink, smoke, and drug and lead him to the confines of Steam, the strip’s bathhouse, where he bribes the clerk behind the glass entry window to give them a double room without the benefit of a membership card or even ID.

  The drug, Edward’s compact, muscled physique, and his commanding manner all play into the boy’s wildest fantasies once they are alone in the room. Previously inexperienced, the boy becomes an insatiable whore under Edward’s tutelage, no limit too extreme. Or so the boy thinks.

  The sex is rough, even by leather and S&M standards, but still nothing so far out of the ordinary as to cause any true pain. For their first hour or so, the accent truly is on pleasure. But Edward leads the boy on a climb through dizzying heights of perversion and pain, ratcheting up the slaps, the nipple twists, the sudden thrusting of fingers into rectum, until the boy has a chance to grow accustomed to each level. Edward has done this a million times. The boy is interchangeable with so many others.

  Finally, the pain and pleasure are so intense, the boy doesn’t even have time to scream when Edward’s razor-sharp fangs pierce the tender flesh of his throat. Edward has the boy’s windpipe and vocal cords ripped out in an instant. No one passing by their room will imagine anything is amiss; there is more noise in any number of other rooms.

  Back in the present, Edward pulls on his boots, and decides on a whim to leave his harness atop the boy’s back.

  He pauses at the door, whispering goodbye, then presses his forehead to the cheap painted wood. “I should have killed her.” He nods. The knowledge, and the certainty, makes him feel sick, in spite of the fresh blood coursing through him, something that had once engendered in him a euphoria he had never imagined when he was alive. Now, it’s just another bodily function, like eating or taking a shit had once been, mundane and commonplace. Murder, torture, and the drinking of blood have little more allure than eating an apple. “I shouldn’t have killed this young man; I should have killed her, as I planned when I followed her from the house.” Edward shakes his head. He knows it has to be done. She can’t be allowed to live with her knowledge.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  2004

  Maria sits, numb, wanting to look anywhere else but into the eyes of her two companions. She stares at the black rectangle that is the room’s only window; once in a while, car headlights shine from below, moving across the sill, ghostly and suggesting movement, honing in on her desire to be alone, away, and not having to deal with the situation before her. She picks lint off her black blouse, crosses and uncrosses her legs, finger-combs her hair, takes a hit off the little one-hitter she clenches in one hand as though it’s life support. She attempts to ignore the near-human anxiety she feels, anxiety that causes one of her crossed legs to swing ceaselessly and manically, her scalp to tingle, and that makes her chew on the inside of her cheek. She had assumed reactions and emotions like these had deserted her long ago. “And isn’t it pretty to think so,” she whispers to herself, now staring down at the floor.

  “Are you even listening to us? Maria? Maria!” At the sharp tone of his voice and the sudden spike in volume, Maria raises her head dully to consider Terence. His long blond hair is in disarray, and his usual impeccable dress tonight is absent; he’s wearing a pair of old jeans and a Loyola University sweatshirt (a trophy?). Still, he looks impossibly beautiful, something crafted out of marble or a photograph off the pages of Vogue, the model airbrushed to elevate beauty into the realm of the unreal.

  “I hear you. What do you want me to say?”

  Terence exchanges glances with Edward and Maria reads the quick visual cues that speak of exasperation, that say, “What shall we do with her?”

  Edward kneels down before her, sliding his cold hand atop hers. “We want you to say you’re with us. We want you to say you understand and you realize what has to be done, however painful that might be. We want you…” Edward’s voice goes on, a buzzing drone filtering in and out, with certain words rising above the whitish noise, words like “merciful,” “duty,” “rules,” and “danger.” She knows they are trying to talk reason to her, but how can she be reasonable when her heart is broken? (Damn Elise for causing her to fall in love! Damn her for inciting these ridiculous romantic notions…broken heart indeed; but thoughts such as these do little to mitigate her despair.) How can she listen to “what’s right,” and “doing one’s duty,” when the thought of such courses of action fill her with revulsion, fear, and shame?

  Their voices filter in dimly, as if they are neighbors on another floor, having a conversation in which she is only vaguely interested.

  She tries to conjure up images to send to Elise. Benign things at first, speaking of her love, her devotion, her admiration. See the two of us by the fireplace in the living room, the flames’ light flickering across our faces and making our eyes sparkle. See you showing me your work, the shy expression on your face that shows you’re uncertain and that you want me to like what you’re exhibiting. These segue into rougher and more seductive erotic imagery; skin merging and disengaging, tongues dueling, sweat popping out to shine and smooth a silken back, teeth gently piercing the aureole surrounding a nipple, the slow trickle of blood.

  She closes her eyes and shuts down the imagery. They are pornography. Elise deserves better. Besides, casting these art house skin-shots out is like casting photographs to the wind. Her thoughts meet only a brick wall, as though Elise has shut down her mind and mentally placed a filter disallowing any of Maria’s thoughts to penetrate. And this, Maria thinks sadly, is probably exactly what she’s done.

  Maria closes her eyes and tries to slip away, to go somewhere else in her mind, somewhere where the sound of water hitting
against stone will calm her. But nothing works. There is only this vague feeling in her gut; a queasiness that will not abate. Is it possible for her to vomit?

  Edward’s hand is on her cheek, stroking. She opens her eyes to see his eyebrows knit together and the sympathetic frown; these speak of his concern for her. Her boys do love her so much! Why isn’t it enough? He licks his lips and begins, saying the same words, hoping repetition will aid in penetrating her consciousness.

  “Maria? Maria, are you listening to us?” Edward’s concern highlights the difference between Terence and him. Terence tonight is little more than a powerhouse of hatred and malice. But it’s his extreme emotion and his passion that have always attracted her to him; he may be hard to deal with sometimes, but he has never been boring.

  She gives Edward a glimmer of a smile and nods. She turns down the roar in her head, touches Edward, running her fingers across his smooth, bald pate. “I’m sorry. It’s just hard for me to think.” Maria sits up straighter, and realizes these are the people who have stood alongside her for many, many years, going through euphoric heights, depressing lows, and electric danger that threatened their existence in cities all over the world. “What is it you want to say to me? Hmm?” Maria already knows the answer, but delaying it gives her a small—very small—measure of comfort.

  “She knows too much.” The words hang in the air like shards of glass, waiting to penetrate, to cut, causing irreversible pain and harm. “I know how you feel, Maria. I don’t want to see her die, either. Here’s a secret: last night I followed her, intending to kill her, intending to make it quick, so we wouldn’t even have to go through what we’re going through right now. But I couldn’t do it. I was so close. My teeth were ready to pierce her flesh. But I couldn’t. Later, though, I realized I was weak. She has to die.” Edward shakes his head.

  Maria nods. Her tongue feels fuzzy and thick. A headache is beginning behind one eye. These sensations are so unused as to be completely new, frightening and confusing.