Sacrificing Virgins

by John Everson

  I took my chance.

  “Is one of those rooms called the Field of Flesh?” I asked.

  Andreisa was silent. I could almost feel her draw away from me. I knew instantly that she knew what I was searching for. And she didn’t want to talk about it.

  “What do you know about the Field?” she whispered. “Virgins aren’t supposed to see the rooms I’m showing you, let alone…”

  “I heard someone talking about it,” I dodged. “Voyeurs, the Field…it all seemed to go together.”

  Andreisa nodded. Her hair bobbed with the shakes of her head, but her eyes never really left mine. They were beacons, no, searchlights, honing in on me. Measuring. Considering.

  “I can show you where it is,” she said. “But I wouldn’t go there if I were you. It’s forbidden. And they say that people who enter the Field never come out.”

  “Well,” I said, “Maybe that’s just because they don’t want to leave!”

  The expression on her face said otherwise.

  “I can show you some other things that you might be more interested in,” she suggested. I could tell that she was still hoping that I’d change my mind. Maybe I’d finally get horny enough to strip her down and give her a good flogging in one of the other rooms with hooks and chains and the heavy smells of leather and wax and oils and sex. But I shook my head. “I really want to see the Field,” I said.

  “They say it is the ultimate place for voyeurs,” she said. “But we’ll have to be quick. If any of the Watchers saw me take you to the Field…”

  “I understand,” I said. “I won’t be a problem. But I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “You’re never going to hold a whip for me, are you?” she asked.

  I sensed the question was rhetorical, from the sadness in her voice.

  “I had hoped that maybe, once you saw a bit of The Red…”

  “That I’d want to bend you over?” I finished. I shook my head. “No, you have the wrong guy for that. I might watch some other guy bend you over…but it ain’t gonna be me!”

  Andreisa nodded. “I’m beginning to understand that.” She looked around, and then took my arm and pulled me back to the bloody hallway. “All right, c’mon, let me give you a glimpse of a place that almost nobody ever sees. At least, nobody who comes back to chat about it. Most people in NightWhere never come here…but I’m told a lot of people do end up there. The Watchers take them.”

  When she said that, a chill shot through my gut. It didn’t sound like the place I wanted to go, given every other enticing perversion I’d seen so far. But it was why I was here.

  “Who are the Watchers?” I asked.

  Andreisa laughed. “You are a virgin, aren’t you? Haven’t you seen those men here who are pale and bony…almost ghoulish? They walk the club and make sure that everyone is having a good time. They call the shots here. They’re known as the Watchers, because they never take part in any of the fun…they just encourage it.”

  I followed her quick and quiet steps down the corridor, which grew ever more shadowed. The sounds of moans and twisted cries of pleasure disappeared behind us until all I heard was the shuffle of our feet across the stone. The place was like a crypt to begin with, but as the path wound along, the torches lighting the way grew farther and farther between. The air was cooler, damp, as if we were descending into the bowels of the earth. The titillation of watching the obscene began to wear off, and I began to grow nervous about Andreisa’s intent. She seemed very accommodating…almost too much so. Was she really taking me where I needed to go, or…

  The next words she said didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Here it is,” she said, gesturing at two large, wooden doors. The path dead-ended into them. You either went forward, or turned around. The tops were both curved in an arch that met in the middle, and the wood appeared to be carved with a number of strange symbols. It reminded me of the entryway to a very old church, only…there were no symbols of doves or crosses here. There were eyes, and chains and strangely intersecting circles and jagged lines.

  “This is the entryway to the Field of Flesh,” Andreisa said. “And this is as far as I’ll take you. I really would suggest that you just sneak a peek through the doors, satisfy your curiosity and then come back with me without going inside. I can show you so many other…exciting things.”

  As she said it, she slipped a hand across my belt buckle and down, trying to raise my lusts again. I took her hand in mine and squeezed it.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said. “But I feel like I really need to do this. Maybe I’ll see you again in the club, later tonight.”

  She gave me a humorless grin and nodded. “Maybe,” she said, as I released her hand.

  I could almost hear what she was thinking. “Maybe…but I don’t think so.”

  She turned away and disappeared around the bends in the corridor in a heartbeat. I took a deep breath and turned back to the doors. They were easily ten-feet tall, but when I reached out to pull the handle, the door swung towards me without a sound.

  I stepped into the room beyond.

  “Holy Mother of God!” I whispered. I stood in an alcove, but just a few steps ahead of me, the floor was much brighter. The room ahead seemed to stretch out forever, but it wasn’t the enormity of the place that shocked me.

  It was the bodies.

  The field.

  There were thousands of men and women ahead of me, all of them tied to row after row of heavy wooden stakes. They all appeared to be nude, but that wasn’t the shocking part. It was what their nudity revealed that was frightening. Just a few yards ahead of me, a woman shivered and moaned faintly on her pillar. She was missing her left arm. But it looked as if the arm had just recently been severed. Blood flowed in a thick, rhythmic pulse down her side from the ragged hole in her shoulder. It was collected in a trough near her feet, and sluiced away in the gutter.

  Her other arm remained whole, and she was using it to masturbate. Her moans seemed to be related to that activity, rather than the fact that she appeared to be bleeding to death. When her head raised momentarily from staring at the ground, I thought for a second that her eyes were closed. But then I realized that her eyelids were open. There were just no eyeballs beneath them.

  I looked away, only to have my gaze fall upon a man without legs at all. He was strapped to the wooden pole with a harness.

  His body wept blood from a dozen gashes that all ran parallel his ribs. But like the woman next to him, his hand was busy, masturbating himself with the lubrication of his own blood. As he arched his chest in apparent orgasm, the slits in his chest also opened, spilling more blood down his sides to splash in the gutter alongside his stake. This man had eyes, but he was looking somewhere that I couldn’t follow. His eyes were wide, but when I stepped a few steps closer, he seemed stare right through me.

  “Jesus Christ,” I murmured. As my eyes slipped over the bodies behind and around these two horrid figures, I quickly realized that they were not nearly the worst abominations in the room. Every body appeared to be missing some “pound of flesh”, and many were clearly getting off to some invisible porno show that must have been playing in their heads. Others hung limp, and apparently lifeless.

  The most horrible part was that there were so many of them. I couldn’t see where the rows began or ended. There was no way in hell I was ever going to find Lucas in this.

  I looked from right to left, taking in the sea of humanity ahead, and then looked back the way I’d come.

  The door had closed as quietly as it had opened. I stepped back to push it open, to escape back into the corridor to consider. I didn’t think that I could do this job for Mrs. D anymore. And I had a really creepy feeling about being in this place. A sense of dread that I couldn’t contain. Maybe it was time to give back the retainer, and cut bait.

  The door wouldn’t budge.
>
  Great.

  My heart froze. If I couldn’t go back…then how was I going to get Lucas out of here if I actually managed to find him in this sea of bodies?

  I thought about what Mrs. D had said. She’d talked about me finding a back door to the place and sneaking her in.

  One bridge at a time, I thought, and turned back to the bodies. The first thing to do was actually find Lucas. Then we’d figure out how to get back out of the room. I suspected the former was going to take a lot longer than the latter.

  I looked out at the field before me and considered my strategy. I wondered if the people were arranged here in some order. If they were staked in order of entry, presumably Lucas shouldn’t be buried too far into the middle.

  Only one way to find out.

  Ask.

  It’s what a good detective does.

  I walked up to a guy who seemed to have all of his limbs, though his body was a mess of scars and oddly formed bumps where the flesh hadn’t knitted back together evenly. He looked like he’d survived a walk through the threshing machine.

  “Hey,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  One of his eyelids slowly raised, revealing a cotton-white orb behind it.

  I swallowed hard, but asked my question. “How long have you been here?”

  “Not long,” he said. “And not long enough.”

  Great. That was really helpful.

  “I mean…have you been here a week? A month? I need to find someone, so I need to see where they’ve put the most recent arrivals.”

  His head tilted slowly to the left, and he opened the blind eye again. “We reap. We rotate.”

  “How can I find the man I’m looking for?” I asked once more.

  “Close your eyes,” the man advised. “In the Field, you see what you wish.”

  I gave up and began walking down the row, looking right and left for a chest tattooed with a man in chains. This was going to be a long night.

  I walked past men holding their entrails in slick fingers, and women massaging the raw meat holes where they had once had breasts. I saw an old, gray-haired guy with no lower jaw, and a beautiful blonde girl who looked right out of the sorority. Her body was flawless, but when her blue eyes turned to follow me as I stepped closer, she opened her mouth to smile…and a stream of blood slipped over her lips. She had no teeth.

  Damn.

  I passed what seemed like one hundred people bound to stakes when I finally came within sight of the shadowed wall on the other side of the room. The sight gave me comfort; I had started to believe that there really was no end to this chamber of horrors.

  I reached the end of the row, finally, and then began to walk back. This time I counted the rows. When I reached the other side, I was pretty sure that I had just walked past 216 rows of people bleeding from any number of gashes and amputations. My guess was that there were at least that many going longitudinally as well.

  My feet were going to hurt.

  I started down the next row and caught my breath as I slowed down to stare at a tall redhead. Her hair was striking, hung in long curls down her shoulders and trailing strands almost all the way to her elbows. Her breasts were small, but her entire body looked to have been poured from cream—she was flawless and shockingly white. Without a freckle or mole.

  And she was masturbating herself with a frenzy I had rarely seen.

  I felt myself growing hard, something I would not have thought possible in this room of abominations.

  She moaned and cried out, louder and louder, eyes closed the whole time. I didn’t think she knew I was there, until she suddenly opened two amazing large green eyes. Cat’s eyes.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?” she asked. I was taken aback, since nobody else seemed to acknowledge me. But she was looking straight at me. No mistake.

  “Well,” I began, and stopped.

  She stopped rubbing herself and instead offered me her palm.

  It was thick with blood, and pink, fleshy petals that I could only believe were the shredded lips of her labia.

  “Take it and eat,” she said. “A feast for the beast. My body is yours to enjoy…”

  Her thighs were running with scarlet, and now I could see the ragged shreds that she had made of her sex. Pieces of her hung between her thighs like unstrung tampons.

  I backed away from her bloody fingers and hurried down the row, eyes looking right and left.

  Sexual cannibalism had never been a part of my fantasy landscape.

  I was midway through the fourth aisle, and my feet were already killing me. I stopped to take a breath. This could take forever. I wasn’t sure how many more glimpses of the grotesque I could take. And there was no place to avert the gaze; the abominations were everywhere. Blood and scars for what seemed like miles.

  I closed my eyes and breathed deep. And then remembered what the first man I’d talked to had said. “Close your eyes. In the Field, you see what you wish.”

  If for no other reason than to try to wipe clear the images I would now see in my dreams forevermore, I held my eyes closed, and pictured the photo that Mrs. D had given me. Of Lucas’s broad chest, overprinted with another man’s chest in chains.

  It was weird, but instead of just seeing that tattoo, I suddenly saw a hazy maze of bodies all around it. In my head, I was looking to the left, and about fifty yards down, the chained man tattoo almost seemed to glow in the distance.

  I stepped towards it, and realized that while the bodies looked faint as ghosts around me, I was seeing them in their actual positions, relative to where I stood. Without opening my eyes, I reached out to a woman with long dark hair, and touched her shoulder. My hand felt her flesh; I wasn’t dreaming that she was really there, just in front of me.

  Nor was I dreaming that my hand now felt sticky.

  I had an idle thought that no amount of soap was going to wash this place from my body.

  I held my eyes closed and slowly threaded my way through the bodies, occasionally reaching out to touch one, to validate that the ghosts that I saw in my head were really there.

  They were.

  And in moments, I stood at the place where that glowing tattoo had lured me. I was afraid to open my eyes.

  But I did. I was standing before a man.

  It was Lucas.

  And now I saw why the tattoo was glowing. Someone had carefully used a knife or a razor to trace the lines of his body art. They had painstakingly carved the tattoo into his skin. The flesh behind each link of the tattoo chains had been removed, turning the chains around his heart into three-dimensional weeping wound. A chain of broken flesh and blood.

  Lucas’s eyes were already wide when I opened mine, and the ghostly vision of all the abominations around us turned undeniably real. How I had been seeing him with my eyes closed…I didn’t want to know. I’d never really believed in dark magic until the past hour. But in a room filled with bleeding people who clearly should be dead but seemed very much alive—and even happy with—their fate…I knew that something was at work here that I did not really want to understand.

  “Were you looking for me?” Lucas asked. His eyes were piercingly blue, and his voice low. Soft with a hint of gravel. He would have made a good country music singer, I thought.

  “Word on the street is you want to break those chains,” I said.

  He smiled. Slightly. “I think my chains have already been broken,” he said. “But I would like to see my wife again. Is Patricia here?”

  I shook my head. “She’s outside. I’m supposed to call her now that I’ve found you—she sent me in to rescue you…she said they’d never let her past the door.”

  “Hmmm,” the other man said. “They might have let her in, but probably not out again.”

  “I didn’t know if I was really going to find you,” I said. “The rows see
m to go on forever.”

  Lucas shook his head. “Not forever. There are 216 rows.”

  My eyes popped wide. “How did you know that?”

  He smiled. “It’s a special number. Six times six times six. There are never more and never fewer voyeurs watching here. The Field must always have exactly that number of people in it.”

  “What happens if too many die?”

  “Nobody dies here.”

  “But I’ve seen them—there are people bleeding to death all around us.”

  “We bleed so that NightWhere lives,” Lucas said. “So long as we are connected, we will not die.”

  “That’s insane.”

  Lucas smiled, grimly. His face grew distant. “It is beautiful. The things I see every time I close my eyes…”

  I heard murmuring coming from behind me. As if the field was growing agitated suddenly. “Let’s just get you out of here,” I said, bending to look behind him, to see what chain or rope tethered him to the wooden pole.

  There was nothing there. His naked back pressed against the wood, but there appeared to be nothing keeping him in place.

  “You can walk away from this at any time!” I yelled. “Why are you just standing there?”

  “No,” he said. “There are things you do not see. Run your hand down the outside of the pole.”

  “And doing that will release you?” I now imagined that he was held by a line of hooks on the inside back of the pole, fastened deep inside his skin. Maybe by tripping a switch that he couldn’t reach, those invisible bindings would be released?

  I didn’t see any such button or switch, but I grasped the pole and slid my hand down it. As I did, I heard laughter from one of the bodies beside me. I ignored it, as Lucas fell away from the pole, his body collapsing with a grunt on the stone next to me.

  “Damn,” he breathed. “My legs don’t want to work. It’s been a long time.”

  I pulled my hand from the pole to help him up, but found my hand wouldn’t budge. I yanked it again, and then pulled my arm so hard I could feel my wrist bones threatening to crack.