Sacrificing Virgins

by John Everson

  Soon I spied the squat stone hut perched behind a row of six-foot marble statues in the shape of a weeping Christ, a cheerful mother Mary and a score of harping and praying angels. I ducked beneath a low-hanging tree branch, sending a litter of dead brown leaves to the ground and stood still, holding my breath before the double doors. Its shadow stretched long and dark across the graves to the right of its doors, and I felt naked on its stoop, standing stock still at the lock, ready and armed with a paper clip to brave the inner crypt and disturbed the dead.

  If the world hadn’t been spinning, just the tiniest bit, I’m sure I would never have continued.

  But the world was tilting, just a little bit, and my arms seemed both light as air and heavy as lead, and my lips burned with the bitter, secret, pine power of gin, and I pulled out the paper clip and stuck it inside the small padlock holding shut the entrance to the Tchichovesky family’s crypt.

  I had little hope of tripping this lock fantastic; its hook was rusted and dark, and even if I could fool the mechanism inside, I doubted whether I could convince the metal to part from where it falsely joined.

  The moon fell across my shoulder, and a tree branch somewhere nearby moved back and forth, making it feel as though the dead themselves were sighing and leaning and breathing across my shoulder as I picked and twisted at the innards of the padlock with my small metal barb.

  My flesh shivered and I shoved the paper clip deep into the lock like a spear, jamming and twisting it with neither finesse nor delicacy.

  And it sprang.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. Not only did the lock trip, but the U lifted away from the shank and I had easy, free clearance to the tomb.

  Shit.

  I was far more prepared to try, fail, and pay the $50 than I was to venture inside the black house of death. But I was also enough of a competitor that I couldn’t intentionally throw the game.

  I slipped the lock from the clasp and let it drop to the ground. And then I pulled the aging steel door open. It creaked far louder than the cemetery gate, and for a moment I didn’t breathe.

  The stones around me stayed still, angels and saints frozen in timeless gazes, staring, witnessing my unholy violation. The wind slipped like scarves around the trees and whistled. There was no more safety outside than in, I concluded and threw the door open wide to the wind.

  Stepped inside.

  Gasped.

  The air was heavy and cold. Stale. Foul.

  The breath of the crypt.

  I waited ’til my eyes adjusted, wondering if rats awaited my prying fingers. Slowly, the moon shadow proved bright enough to light the crypt, and I stood before the bronze marker holding the name of a long-dead corpse.

  Benito. 1902-1946.

  I grasped at the handle of his deathly bed and pulled. Pulled. Felt a muscle gasp in my back and pulled again. Icy sweat slid down my back, whether from fear or exertion, I don’t know.

  In moments, Benito’s casket lay exposed before me, slipped from the hollow confines of his stone bunk bed, and I stared at the dirty cover. Was I really about to rob a grave for $100?

  Yeah, an inner voice whispered. Get on with it.

  There were clasps on the edge of the wooden frame and one by one, my hands slipped along the edge of the lid and threw them.

  Did I really want to do this?

  Get it over with, the voice in me screamed, and I propped both palms against the coffin lid and pushed upward.

  Another creak, a wooden scream, and the lid was up, and my nose assaulted with a rush of stale fetid air like a hammer blow across the skull.

  I gagged, sneezed, and cursed, but refused to let go of the lid.

  I stared down, in the pale, diffuse moonlight, at the mummified vellum skin of a man once called Benito. He still wore the dusty dark shards of a suit, its buttons caught and reflected the faint light of the devil moon behind me. His palms were crossed over his chest, and I shuddered.

  They were at peace.

  Clutched together.

  Skeletal white.

  “I’m sorry,” I remember saying, and reached in to grab his right hand.

  I pulled, and the arm lifted, the dust of his decayed, forgotten flesh rising in the air like a cloud. The suit sleeve pulled back, revealing a worm-eaten white—now grayish—shirt, and I pulled hard on the hand, crumpling in my hand like popcorn.

  But the hand wouldn’t separate from the arm bone.

  It lifted and shook and dust clouded the narrow space…but the hand remained connected to the dead man beneath me.

  “Damnit, let go,” I cried, and I do mean cried. Tears were streaming down my face but I would not, could not stop. I propped the coffin lid up and held the dead man’s dead arm over the edge of the coffin. With my left hand I brought my palm down in a karate chop to sever the hand from the wrist.

  There was a snap and a pain in my hand from a sharp stab of bone and it was done. I stood there, in the center of a mausoleum, holding my prize.

  The bony hand of a man some sixty years gone. The hand that had once, perhaps, driven spikes to build a railroad, or whipped up a horse to pull a plow, or caressed the breast of a lover and stroked the brows of his children. Now reduced to a $100 prize.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  The wind howled on cue, and the door behind me slammed shut with a crash.

  At the same time, the coffin lid fell.

  I was holding the hand of a dead man. In the dark.

  Both feet in his grave.

  Something outside sounded like laughter. Something in my head screamed and screamed and wouldn’t stop.

  I fell to the floor and cried out, begging, “Please, please, let me go.”

  It was quiet then, in the tomb, and I waited, breath drawn.

  There was no sound at all. With the door closed, the wind was silenced; all sound from outside was cut off. It was me, and the hand, and the coffin.

  That was all.

  I wanted to scream out. But my throat was closed.

  And then.

  A knock.

  Behind me.

  On the coffin lid.

  And another.

  “No,” I whispered. “There’s no one here.”

  Silence. For a moment. And then a tap on the lid. Inside the lid. I turned to stare at the dead man’s box in the faint light that slipped through the small barred window in the door. I watched the dust lift and twine with each tap like swirling spirits in the near-black shadows of the tomb.

  Benito wanted his hand back.

  “No,” I gasped again, and lunged toward the door.

  I flung it open and lunged out into the icy chill of the October wind. The cemetery seemed suddenly angry, watchful, and I dashed through the long grass, stomping hard on the soil of sunken graves until I reached the paved roadway. I looked back at the mausoleum, for a second, and saw that the door swung open in the breeze; it opened wide and then slammed shut in the wind.

  I waited at the X Ramondo had marked on the roadway for an hour.

  Once, I thought I heard someone cry out. But it was faint, perhaps only the shriek of another night bird. Another moment and I thought I heard the teeth-grinding drag of metal on bone.

  And another time, I thought I heard something slam. Probably the door of the crypt I’d plundered, opening and slamming shut in the wind, I told myself.

  But when I heard the laughter behind me, the horrible, heavy throat-gasping laughter coming from the road on the left, I ran through those forced cemetery gates, back to the land of the living.

  I ran through the open cemetery gates and past the low orange glow of the Excelsior.

  I ran past the healthy homes of seductive sleeping suburbia and past the sinking row houses of the wrong side of the tracks slums.

  I was crying and wheezing and very, ve
ry sober when I reached my home, and once inside threw both locks on the front door immediately behind me. Lightning flashed outside as I mounted the stairs, and shed my clothes. I lay in bed, cowering beneath the covers, every shadow a ghost of coming death.

  And soon, very soon, the tapping began.

  They were light, at first, the sounds. Branches on the window, I told myself, though that didn’t help me sleep.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Hour after hour, all night long. Eventually, when my heart couldn’t pump in double time any longer, the steady rhythm of the tapping lulled me to sleep sometime before dawn.

  The next day, when I woke and the cleansing rays of the sun washed through my windows, I laughed and told myself we had all been drunken fools. Still, I shivered when I stared at the bony hand lying on my dresser that said I’d won the bet. I showered and dressed quickly, eager to compare stories with my friends on how they had fared the night before. Who had run home first, I wondered. I left home in such a rush, I forgot to take my trophy with me.

  But neither Al nor Ramondo showed up that day to work.

  The tapping that night on my bedroom window grew louder, though there was no wind or storm in evidence. I pulled the sheets up to my nose and prayed to all the saints for forgiveness. The bony rhythm was not slowed by prayer. I could almost see the whitened digit drumming slowly, persistently against the glass.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  But I dared not throw the curtains to look.

  The next day passed and at lunch I called Al. I called Ramondo. Their answering machines gave the ghosts of their voices and a machine gun’s report of beeps.

  I lay in bed staring at the white knuckles of Benito on my dresser, and shuddered. My eyelids had barely shut when the tapping began again at my bedroom window.

  This time, from my dresser, I could have sworn I heard an answering staccato response:

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  I pulled the covers over my head and hid.

  But I couldn’t hide from the sound.

  In the morning, the skeletal fingers were spread, like a wave, on the floor of my room. I used a towel from the bathroom, and carefully picked it up, depositing it back on top of my dresser with a series of bony clicks.

  He’s here again tonight. Rap, tap-tapping on my window panes. I can feel the stab of each tap throughout the room, each crack like the sound of his hand snapping against the hard edge of his coffin and I know, I know, the glass will break soon and let him in.

  Should I be brave and open the window? Open the front door and let him in? Will he kill me quickly, if I do? Will he thank me if I give him back his hand, and let the door slap shut, safely, behind him?

  Tomorrow, if I live through this night, I think I’ll finally take Benito’s hand and offer it to Maria to shake. It’s the only thing left to do. It’s why we did this. It’s why we all will die. Someone should finish the job.

  The irony is, whether she shakes my hand or Benito’s, whether Maria realizes it or not, she will be clutching the bones of a dead man. Once disturbed, I don’t think he will rest again. Not without my punishment.

  Even now, behind me, I can hear him again.

  A question. An accusation. A demand.

  Tap.

  Tap.

  Tap.

  The White House

  “There is no poetry in death,” Mrs. Tanser said. “Only loss and rot, stink and waste. I never could understand those gothic romantics who celebrate the dark and lust after the cycle of decay.”

  The little girl in front of her didn’t say a thing, but nodded creamy, unblemished cheeks as if she understood.

  “I suppose that doesn’t make much sense to you,” Mrs. Tanser continued, running a powder-coated finger up the girl’s cheek. “You came here hoping to sell cookies and to visit my nieces, and here I am talking to you about death! But I can’t deny death, mind you. Everything has its place. And every place, its thing.”

  The older woman laughed, and stood up from the table. Her plate of thinly sliced apples remained untouched, uneaten, the brown creep of time already shadowing the fruit. The girl’s plate, however glistened with the juice of apple long gone.

  Mrs. Tanser ground a pestle into a tall bucket that squeaked and shifted on the counter as she worked.

  “Well, I’m sorry my nieces Genna and Jillie aren’t here any longer. They only came for a visit, so I’m glad you got to meet them. Perhaps you’ll have the chance to be with them again soon. But I talk too much and time passes. Too fast, too fast. Eat my apples, dear. Waste not, want not.”

  The plate slid across the table. Mrs. Tanser raised a silver eyebrow as it did.

  “You are afraid of this house, aren’t you?”

  The child nodded, slowly. Her eyes were blue and wide, and the reflection of the older woman’s methodic grinding and pummeling of the substance in the bucket glimmered like a ghost in their mirror.

  “I can’t say that I’m surprised. Quite the reputation it has. I didn’t realize that when I moved in, but now it makes sense what a steal it was. I knew there was something wrong when the Realtor quoted me the price—you could see it in her face. She was afraid, that silly woman was, not that she knew why. A beautiful old mansion like this, perched on the top of the most scenic hill in town? I have to admit, I didn’t care what was wrong with it—for that price, I thought, I could fix it. And then I moved in, and started teaching down at Barnard Elementary, and I found out why that girl was scared. You know, she wouldn’t even walk into the house past the front foyer?”

  Mrs. Tanser laughed. The pestle clinked against the top of the bucket, and a hazy cloud puffed from the opening like blown flour.

  “The one warning that woman said to me was, ‘You know, it’s a bad place for children.’ I didn’t even ask why. ‘I don’t have any,’ I told her. That shut her up. Or maybe it didn’t, I didn’t care. I walked up those gorgeous oak stairs that wind out of the living room and up to the boudoir. I wanted to see it all, with or without her help. She didn’t come with me.”

  Mrs. Tanser stopped her grinding then and considered. “Would you like to see the upstairs?” she asked.

  The little girl shrugged, and the older woman dropped the pestle.

  “That settles it. Genna and Jillie aren’t here, but I can still show you the house. Come on upstairs. I’m going to show you the most beautiful four-poster bed your little eyes have ever seen. The girls loved it! It may be the only four-poster bed your little eyes have ever seen.”

  The girl rose from the table, hands held straight at the sides of her red-and-green-striped skirt. She wanted to leave, felt embarrassed that she’d been coaxed into staying somehow. Her freckles threatened to burst into flame as she waited for Mrs. Tanser to wash her hands in the sink.

  “C’mon then,” Mrs. Tanser said at last, and led the girl back towards the front door she’d come in. Her backpack from school still lay abandoned on the floor nearby. Mrs. Tanser put a foot on the first varnished step, and then paused.

  “What’s your name again then, young lady?”

  “Tricia,” the girl answered, in a voice high as a flute song.

  “Tricia,” Mrs. Tanser announced, waving at the crystal jewels of the chandelier above, and the burnished curves of the banister on the second-floor landing above.

  “Welcome to White House,” she said. “Welcome to the House of Bones.”

  At the top of the landing, Mrs. Tanser stopped again. “This house was built in 1878 by Garfield White,” she announced. “I looked it up. He was a railroad man, made his living helping folks move their steel and wood and food and such from one place to the next. Why he settled here, in the middle of nowhere, I’ll never know, but there you go. Everything has a place, and every place a thing. He built this place, and put his wife here in it to raise their son. Maybe he thought she’d give the boy a good
upbringing here, away from the corruption and sin of the cities.”

  Mrs. Tanser motioned the girl to follow her down the hall to the dark-rimmed doorway of a room.

  “That woman spent her time in here, so the stories go, day after day after day while her Garfield rode the rails making his fortune. He stayed out on those rails more and more, hoping maybe to gain his son an inheritance.”

  The older woman stepped with a click and an echoey clack into the room. The walls were papered in a pattern of whirling pinks and blossomed yellows. But the garish sidelights did little to detract from the majesty of the enormous mahogany bed that dominated the center. Its rich posts rose from lion claw paws on the floor to taper in spears to within inches of the faded ceiling. A translucent gauze of yellowed lace hung between the posts and darkened the space with ghostly light.

  “The more her husband stayed lost on the trains, the more his wife stayed lost here, in this very bed,” Mrs. Tanser said.

  “Go ahead, sit on it yourself and see why!”

  Tricia stepped into the room but stopped at the edge of the mattress, which was nearly as tall as her.

  “Use the step,” Mrs. Tanser said, pointing to the dark wooden box near the girl’s feet. “In those days, you wanted to sleep as high above the ground as you could. Rats, you know.”

  Tricia hopped up on the step with the mention of rodents, and rolled her body onto the heavy down mattress, smiling at the caress of the silken blue comforter that covered it.

  “They called it the White House, and not because it was in Washington, D.C.,” Mrs. Tanser said. “But it was anything but white inside. Mrs. White kept all of the drapes pulled shut, and spent more and more time here, in this bed. They say she was trying to make it feel like nighttime inside, so her son would sleep. Had the colic, and cried all day long. But pulling the drapes did nothing to calm the boy, and after a while, Mrs. White went a little bit mad, I think. Day after day, night after night, her baby cried, cried, cried and she paced this floor with him, pounding his tiny back and begging him to burp and then screaming at him to burp.”