“At first, I thought maybe it might be food poisoning, since he was such a porker.” She tapped her foot and flipped through the pages mumbling. Cerberus yipped at her heels and pounced on her toes. She nudged him away, but the dog grabbed her foot with his front paws like a hug as Libitina brought it back down.
“You silly,” she said as she scooped him up again. “Doggy noogies.” She raked her knuckles in a loving, aggressive way across the dog’s head between the ears. Cerberus’s tongue lolled as he panted and wagged his tail, grinning the most fantastic of doggy grins.
“Okay,” she said, setting Cerberus down. “Mommy has to get back to work now. Go be a good boy.” She opened the bedroom door and he romped out ahead of her. He turned to make sure she followed just as she closed the door. He whined and scratched at the barrier a few times, then huffed and lay against it, his collar making a soft scraping noise as he settled.
She opened the book to a detailed photograph of a distressed heart. “Man, I wish I had more time in there. I wanted to see if it looked like this.” She ran her finger over the glossy page. With a sigh, she slammed the book closed and shoved it back onto her shelf.
“Okay, time for a walk, little man.” She grabbed the dog’s leash from a hook on the wall and headed for the front door, Cerberus now panting at her heels. She securely latched him and walked into the green light that filtered through the trees dappling her long driveway. A squirrel crossed their path from left to right, and Cerberus tried to give chase, barking and snarling as he ran. When he caught the end of the leash, his hind legs skidded under him and then out in front, lifting him off the ground for a moment before he landed on his back in the dirt. “No squirrels today, baby,” Libitina said and snickered.
The mailbox waited across the street from her driveway. She held her breath before opening it, not daring to hope that this time… this time would be different. The trees seemed to sigh with her as a gust of wind sent them swaying. A wolf howled in the distance and she shivered. Her dog growled toward the sound. “Don’t worry, Cerby. Mommy won’t let them hurt you.”
Like tearing off a band-aid, Libitina flung open the mouth of the mailbox and peered inside. Would it come today? She threw a coupon newspaper into the trash next to the row of mailboxes.
She tucked the phone bill under her arm and gazed at the green envelope from a private medical school near where she lived. “Oh my god,” she whispered. “They’ve responded.” She held her breath with eyes half-closed as she opened the letter, almost expecting it to self-destruct. She stopped reading at the words,
“We regret to inform you…”
Her head sagged. She wiped away a tear and sighed.
Libitina stood straight, her red hair shining in the sunlight like a warrior maiden, strong and stubborn. Her eyes flashed when she said, “Fuck them! I don’t need their stupid program, their stupid degree. I’ve already learned more on my own than what they’d teach me anyway. Fuck it all. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing. One day, they’ll notice.”
She stomped back down her driveway, Cerberus getting pulled backward for a step or two since he was trying to sniff at something interesting in the bushes. He skipped along ahead of her, happy to be outside, oblivious to her angst. She smiled at him. “I should be more like you, Cerby. You don’t let nothin’ get you down.” She marched on, letting the latest symbol of her rejection fall from her hand to fly away in the wind.
“They’ll see. I’m good at what I do. They’ll see it, someday.”
She put Cerberus in the back seat of her car and secured him in a doggy harness. She ran inside for a moment. When she returned, her arms were loaded with a shovel, some rope, a lantern, and a lunch box with some snacks for her trip. She wore a brown wig, cut short and styled like a boy’s haircut. The thick mustache and goatee covered the lower part of her face and the bushy eyebrows obscured her blue eyes. A new tattoo of a scantily clad woman decorated the left side of her neck and she wore heavy gold rings on her fingers. The thick flannel jacket she had on masked her actual size. Work boots and jeans completed the ensemble.
“I’m tired of waiting on these assholes.” She flung open her car door. “I need a body to practice on. Dammit! I can’t keep running from hospital security. I know last time didn’t go so well, but I’ll get a fresher one this time.” She dreaded what she meant to do, remembering just how awful the embalmed body she’d dug up had been, and looked back at Cerberus. “Mommy talks to herself too much, doesn’t she baby? I need to start talking to you instead. I will, okay? Okay.” She giggled as she drove away.
With Mozart again blaring from her car speakers, Libitina used her finger like a conductor’s baton, punctuating the crescendos. She lowered the rear, passenger-side window, and Cerberus squinted against the wind in his face, licking at the air. On the Main Road, called this because it led to town and for no other reason, she noticed an abandoned blue car. It faced the opposite direction in which she was headed but stood out since the road was seldom used.
She shrugged as she drove past and began humming along with the classical music. She drove for about thirty minutes through twists and turns, ups and downs before coming to a small clearing with tombstones, crypts, and systematically patterned pillars.
She grabbed her dog and walked through the graveyard until she found a freshly populated plot. The date marking the time of departure indicated this person had died only a week before. “That’s the one,” she said. Back at her car, she wrote down the name and location, then drove off.
A little after two a.m. she came back, a bounce in her step, a shovel in her hand, and the rope and lantern in tow. Cerberus bounded along at her heels.
She went back to her earlier chosen site and set down her supplies. The lantern made the fresh engraving in the marble look like some kind of ancient writing, a script long since dead. She placed her hand atop the cold stone and hung her head, shying away from the name glaring at her like eyes cast in contempt.
“I’m sorry to do this to you, Beverly.” She shook her head. “But I don’t really have much of a choice. I’ve got to practice somehow and they won’t let me in. If I don’t practice, I’ll never learn; I’ll never become good enough.” With a half-smile, she finally looked at the headstone. “But I’ll make it up to you, okay? As soon as I’m done with you, I’ll put you back as if you were never taken out, and I’ll bring you flowers every week, okay?” Cerberus put his front paws on her knee and wagged his tail. He seemed to be telling her it would be okay. Everything would be okay. She would see.
“Well, here goes.” She picked up the shovel and dug at the soft earth. As she flung the dirt over her shoulder, she shuddered, a loud sob erupting from her thin chest. Cerberus scuttled out of the way and stood on the other side of the grave. Libitina’s fake, bushy eyebrows scrunched and danced as her features contorted. She sniffed and composed herself, took another deep breath, and continued digging.
But only after a short time, she couldn’t do it anymore. She stopped and leaned on the shovel. Tears streaked over her mud-smudged cheeks, wetting her fake mustache. Whines turned into sobs as she hunkered down over the small hole she’d managed to create. The sobbing then turned to dry heaves, shaking her body as she spit on the ground.
She scraped the loose soil back into place and patted down the grass, making a muddy mess of it. But the more she tried to fix it, the more screwed up it looked. Cerberus sniffed at the ground where she’d made her disruption.
“Oh, god,” she whispered. “The other ones were so terrible. I just can’t do this again. I can’t dig up another body.” People in the hospital were different because their bodies hadn’t been laid to rest. But the people in the cemetery were supposed to be at peace. She couldn’t disturb another person’s death. She wouldn’t do that again.
She gathered her items and scurried back to the car, Cerberus chasing. She sped away after securing the wiggling mini-beast in his harness and placing her grave-robbing tools in her trunk.
It wasn’t typical to find a discarded car in this area. Dust plumed as she skidded to a halt. Reaching for her keys, she stopped just before killing the engine. “No,” she whispered and took her hand away. “Just in case. I’m no dummy.” She left the car running and stepped into the cold night air.
She approached like a leery dog, nerves and muscles bunched, ready to run the second anything strange happened. She hunched over, unable to straighten. Her clothes whipped around in the wind, giving her shadow the look of a hungry monster creeping along as it stretched across the road’s shoulder. It loomed against the car in front of her.
The driver’s door was unlocked. Libitina opened it. A rotten smell wafted out. She stumbled back, gagging. Once she recovered, she covered her nose, leaned inside, and looked around for any clues as to whom the car belonged. The sight of the blood-soaked backseat made her heart stutter.
She stood too fast and hit her head.
“Oh my god.” Hand clamped over her mouth, she stared through the back windows, the glare from her headlights on the glass obscuring the mess inside.
“I’ve got to check this out.” She hurried to the other side of the car. When she got to the passenger side rear door, she saw the blood drying on the ground and the smeared handprint crusted over the door. She swallowed hard, the short brown hair from her wig shaking in the gusting wind. A wolf howled, sounding far too close. She gasped and clutched her chest through the thick flannel jacket.
“Dammit!” she said. “Get a hold of yourself, Libitina. Get a grip! Probably some woman gave birth back here or something and the husband called an ambulance. That’s why they aren’t here. That’s all. Now quit being such a fucking baby and look inside the car. How can you be a pathologist if you can’t even look at dried blood on upholstery?” After she finished her self-inflicted scolding, she smiled—a strained grimace over her lips—steadied her mind, and stooped into the backseat.
The thick rancor wasn’t as strong as when she’d first opened the front door but she gagged once again. Tears stood in her eyes. She shivered.
“There’s so much blood,” she whispered. She touched the middle of the thick goo and then jerked away as if burned. Red stained her shaking hand. “Oh god,” she whispered. She looked at the back of the driver’s seat. Four jagged rips lined the vinyl. Droplets of blood spattered several other surfaces.
“This was no childbirth.” She turned and almost ran back to her car, slamming the door as she plopped into the front seat. Gripping the steering wheel, she stared at the glaring crime scene, her mind working to recreate what might have happened on this lonely road. Cerberus whimpered and licked his lips in the back. She took a shuddering breath, threw her car into drive, and sped away. She kept her eyes straight, avoiding looking into her rearview mirror at the diminishing shadow in the distance.
“We just won’t talk about it, okay, boy?” She shook herself, remembering all that blood. She looked at her hand. “Ugh!” she said, mouth turned down, wiping it on her pants. “Gross.” What had happened back there? Something terrible, she knew. But what?
Cerberus whimpered again.
Clearing her throat and mind, an attempt at formally calming herself, she said, “Okay, gotta get back on track. I guess it’s back to hospitals for us, buddy.”
No longer in the mood to get a fresh body, but needing something to distract her from what she had just found, she drove to the same hospital she’d visited earlier. Her disguise would keep security from spotting her right away.
“You wait in the car. I’ll pop the trunk, then go in. Keep it running, okay boy?” She laughed, a high, pinched sound like a child trying to convince herself that the thump she heard from under her bed was just the heater coming on and not a monster with claws that would grab her ankle as soon as she dangled her leg over the side.
In her flannel jacket, with her bushy eyebrows and beard, she sauntered through the front doors, swaggering a bit with a be-bop in her step. She moved around like she belonged there. Soon, without any questions, she found herself inside the morgue looking at charts, running her fingers over the names listed. When she came across a Jane Doe, she set the file down and opened the cooler that contained her.
Inside, Libitina found a naked woman. Her relaxed legs rested shoulder width apart revealing a gaping wound in her genitals. Several twin crescent shaped wounds adorned her breasts, like two new moons facing each other, the ragged skin a purplish color in the center. Libitina knew the sucking marks associated with bite wounds when she saw them.
“What happened to you?” Libitina ran a finger down the woman’s cold cheek. “You poor thing.” She looked at the corpse’s closed eyes as she ran her fingers through her black hair, smoothing out some of the tangles. “There you go,” she said. “You’re coming home with me. We’ll find out what happened to you together, okay? You can tell me your story. I’m a great listener.” She didn’t know why but she suddenly felt a strong connection with this dead girl. The need to help her, to find out what happened to her—this poor Jane Doe—pulsed in her mind, snapping into an obsession.
She grabbed a gurney from the hallway and wheeled it up to the open cold-cupboard. The body was heavy, but she managed to lift it. When she had Jane Doe in her arms, cradled like a large baby, Libitina pushed her nose into her hair and breathed in the scent of death. “You must not have been dead for long,” she whispered and then shrugged.
Once her new educational opportunity rested on the table, she covered her with a sheet and wheeled her outside, pulling a white lab coat on over her flannel jacket.
She guided the body through several passages and found a door in front of a large sleeping nurse near the ambulance entrance. No patients. One of the call buttons next to the large woman flashed and buzzed but the soft noise was inaudible over the snores.
Libitina snickered under her breath at her good fortune and sped toward the exit, never looking back. Once outside, she glanced around to assure herself of her privacy then pushed the body to the front of the hospital where she was parked. The corpse’s head moved from side to side a bit as if protesting its removal from the morgue.
“I can’t believe how easy this was,” she said as she got to her car. The motor hummed in the dark as she opened the trunk and placed the body inside, still wrapped in the sheet. It shouldn’t have been this easy. She knew that. But she didn’t question her luck. Just coincidence. That’s all life was, one coincidence after another.
She left the gurney near the hospital entrance then drove off, not speeding so as not to draw attention to herself. They might not recognize her, but they would sure as hell remember her vehicle.
“Oh, WOO HOO!” She bounced in the front seat once she hit the main road. “Holy shit! I did it!” Home free. She’d gotten away with taking a body from the hospital, something she never would have thought possible. Cerberus barked and wagged his tail, trying to pull away from the harness holding him in place. He bit at the frayed seatbelt before settling down, content with the rhythmic thumping of his fifth appendage.
Chapter Three
Aludra crouched in the corner with her hands working between her legs. Her white-blond hair hung down her back in a thick braid that coiled around her ankles. Knee-high wool socks hid the fine leg hairs on her shins and her black skirt bunched around her hips, pooling on the floor behind her. Candlelight made the shadows dance. Windowless walls absorbed the dark. In one corner of the room there was a small pad covered with a thin blanket, no pillow. A desk loomed to Aludra’s right and to her left, a closed closet hid her secrets. A metallic aroma permeated her surroundings.
Facing the corner, she closed her eyes and licked her lips, glancing down on occasion at the blood dripping fro
m her white leg. She grasped a razor blade and pushed it into the previously healed cut on her thigh, opening the old scar deeper and longer. With her other hand, she worked her fingers inside her underwear, moaning on occasion. Blood coated her fingers; she licked it off and smiled as the blade she still held nicked her upper lip. Just as her rocking intensified, just as her breathing quickened and her eyes began to roll back, just as she pushed the razor deep enough to cause a new freshet of salty blood, keys jingled in her door and the knob rattled.
Eyes wide, she leapt away from the corner and in almost one motion dropped the tiny blade in a wooden box. She snapped it closed, turned to face the door, and sucked the remaining blood from her right hand while smoothing down her skirt. Small traces of red remained under her fingernails, so she hid her hands behind her back just as her chamber door swung inward, admitting a figure in a hooded brown robe with a rope tied around its waist. She looked at her feet as the obscure figure strolled in and announced in an androgynous voice, “The High Priestess craves a word with you.”
Aludra didn’t nod, didn’t look up, and didn’t look surprised. She kept her attention on the floor between her feet and waited, back straight.
A tall woman with long white hair stalked in. Her velvet hooded robe rippled around her. Her white hair draped over her chest and hung to the hem of her garment, but her face remained partially hidden. If Aludra were to look up, she would only see the candlelight glinting off her wet eyes.
“Aludra Erebus,” the High Priestess hissed.
A trace of a flinch flashed over Aludra’s features when the High Priestess spoke, but nothing more.
“Our own dark virgin.” She brought her hand up, nails sharp like claws, and caressed the top of Aludra’s head. “I smell blood and sex, dear girl. Are you on your cycle?” She put her face close to Aludra’s and inhaled as if drawing in her soul, the red hood still obscuring her features. “No, you aren’t. You won’t be for another week.” Like a striking snake, she pulled Aludra’s hands from behind her back. She licked the bloody fingers then slid her tongue across the clean-looking ones of her left hand. She made soft smacking sounds, closing her eyes as if tasting something delectable. “I see what you’ve been doing,” she whispered. “Naughty, naughty.”
Women Scorned Page 3