Sacrificing Virgins (12 page)

I pulled out my skeleton key and tinkered with the lock. This one wasn't budging as easily as the outside door. I could almost hear my “mission clock” counting down in my head.

And then the tumblers tumbled, and the door eased open.

I felt around on the wall inside, and found a light switch.

Clicked it.

And swore out loud.

Granny didn't work in a dainty little old-fashioned kitchen.

No sir.

The light switch activated a long fluorescent light fixture that hung over an island workstation in the center of the room. I know a thing or two about browning a good piece of beef, and I have to say, that long wooden counter, with its rack of expensive-looking carving knives off to one side got my hands itching to slice and dice something. A half empty box of mason jars sat on the floor nearby, and a gleaming stainless steel sink divided a huge countertop against the back wall. There was a row of dark wooden cabinets lining the wall above the sink. I stepped over and yanked a couple open to confirm by guess.

Yep.

The old bat's toothy face looked back at me from dozens of home-canned jars of Grandma Wanda's Belly Jelly.

The contents of these cabinets would bring me thousands on the open market. But they wouldn't tell me how to make more. I shut the doors and peered deeper into the room. The light yellowed and dimmed before reaching the far wall, but I could see there were racks of something over there in the shadows.

An old white refrigerator hummed against one rocky wall, the kind that you actually had to pull a handle down to release the door. Probably had been here since the house was built. Another door was tucked into an alcove in the wall near it, but that wasn't what held my attention. Instead, I noticed the strange array of thin clear plastic tubes running along the floor towards the shadowed rack. I followed them across the room and up a metal shelving unit. Each tube ended in what looked like a glistening, bloated sack. They smelled rank and heavily sweet at the same time.

I reached out to touch one with a fingertip and recoiled instantly. It was cool and slick with a slimy ooze of what I'd guess was decay. And it seemed to quiver when I touched it.

A lightbulb burst in the back of my head and I connected the name of Grandma's jelly with these lumps of bloated flesh on stainless steel bar racks.

Bellies.

She actually was fermenting the jelly in stomachs!

My own middle began to churn dangerously as the sour part of the smell hit home. I stepped back a pace.

What the hell was she mixing in there? I followed the tubing past the fridge and under the lip of the closed door. This one wasn't locked.

I wish it had been.

When I opened it, my nose was immediately assailed by an earthier, fetid odor. The stench of decay. Of death.

And laid out on a half dozen cots in the center of the room were the reasons.

Six men.

With their abdomens sliced open. Autopsies in progress, only the procedure seemed to have been put on hold for a bit too long. The flesh hanging from the open bellies to drip brown stains on the floors near each bed had long ago ceased to weep. But the chilly temperatures and lack of flies had worked together to keep the flesh of these men bearable. Barely.

The man nearest me was grossly overweight, and one blackened arm hung to the floor, its hand smeared in his own dried guts. His eyes were open, and though they'd filmed over a yellowish white, I still thought I could see the terror crying in them.

She had stolen their bellies to make jelly!

This was bad.

This was not a recipe the home office could adapt.

But who was going to believe me when I described this scene? Disemboweled men rotting on cots like discarded carcasses in a meat locker. Their bellies hosting some weird jelly concoction and connected to, what I now saw in the far corner of the room, was a hospital drip bag hanging from a hook embedded in the blue-gray rock walls?

“Care for some jelly, mister?”

I almost jumped onto the cot with the fat man.

Almost.

Grandma Wanda stood in the doorway. And unlike the toothy likeness on her jelly jar labels, this Wanda was not smiling.

“Maybe another time,” I answered, edging farther back into the room.

“Well if you didn't come for my jelly, my guess is, you came to learn how to make it, eh?”

I didn't answer. But her voice was not in a tone that demanded, or even sought, reply.

“My guess is, you've realized by now why I really couldn't sell this little grocery list for mass production.”

She laughed then, a not-particularly pleasant cousin of a cackle.

I continued to step backwards, a few inches at a time. I was near the third cot, and the air was growing thicker by the moment. I stifled the urge to gag, and Grandma Wanda finally stepped fully into the room. I intended to barrel past her just as soon as she moved a couple steps from the door. She was only about four foot eleven. How hard would it be to knock her out and clear the stairs. Even if she had a knife or a gun, which I couldn't see handy at the moment.

And then I noticed the face of the man in the third cot. Long nose, thick mustache, mouse-brown hair. I knew that man. As only a rival salesman can know another man.

I hated him.

And in a way, I loved him. We'd warred for years through jelly market penetration, favored distribution contracts, clever television slogans. Ted Mernier. From Fucker's. Apparently I wasn't the only jelly gigolo to come creeping around Granny's basement on the sly. Or maybe she'd lured him here with the promise of a deal.

No matter what the circumstances, Ted wasn't going to be sharing any panels with me this year in Cleveland at the Bread Spread Convention. His stomach just wouldn't be in it.

So to speak.

She saw me staring at Ted and grinned. The veins in her cheeks only seemed to deepen, spreading like an interstate system across the wrinkled states of her cheeks. “Seems your competition got the ‘can't beat 'em, join 'em' philosophy. Care to devote your life to a greater purpose?”

Now.

I threw myself at the doorway and Wanda didn't even try to stop me. She stepped aside, that horrible grin still etched on her face like a Halloween mask.

I made it through the kitchen and down the outer corridor before I found out why.

“Hiya!”

The brown-freckled bimbo from next door was sitting comfortably on the third stair from the top. And she was aiming a small pistol right between my eyes.

I stopped.

“Looks like I'm going to be having lunch on my own tomorrow,” she sighed.

“You don't have to. Just let me up those stairs and I'll show you the best lunch you've ever had.”

“Now you know I can't do that, sweets. You've been in Wanda's back room. Nobody who goes in that room comes back up these stairs outside of a jar 'cept Wanda and me.”

She ran a tongue over her upper lip. “Pity though. You looked like you'd have tasted good.”

“Oh, he still will, he still will,” came a rasp from behind me.

I had an idea. If I could grab the old bat around the neck and gain a hostage…

I turned to see where she was and something cold struck me in neck. Like an icy bee sting.

Wanda was just two feet away. I could do it!

“Got him, Wanda,” the bimbo keened as I reached for the old lady. She dodged me easily, strangely fast for an old woman.

I felt funny, thick-lipped, loose-limbed. The cold sting…

I reached my hand up to feel the area around the cool pain and found a small needle still poking from my neck. Tranquilized.

Giving up on Granny, I flipped back to the stairs. The room spun crazily, but I didn't wait for it to right itself. I launched myself up the wooden steps, cracking my shins on the lower ones in my haste and rapidly declining motor skills. Annie didn't move, just kept the gun leveled at my brain as I crawled the stairs towards her like a ladder, one hand at a time. When I reached out to grab her ankle and pull her down and out of my way, she mumbled something about “cute” and then brought the barrel of the gun down on my head. I probably would have dropped out of the conscious zone before reaching the kitchen table anyway, but she did speed it along by a few seconds.

My headache was the first thing I noticed when I came to. And then this weird burning in my belly.

I tried to lift my head to see where I was, and found that not only was my neck restrained, but my arms and legs appeared to be beyond my control.

“Are ya in much pain?” a disturbingly familiar voice asked. I tried to shake my head, which only made the rocky ceiling turn into a red kaleidoscope of pain.

“I used to be a nurse, so I know how to take out the lower nerves without much fuss. But I'm never sure about the upper half.”

Grandma Wanda's wicked face loomed above my own. “Ya shouldn't go a poking around in folks' homes 'at haven't invited ya, son. Now look what it's come to. But don't worry. You'll come to some good use. I've got your tummy busy a-pickling up a new batch of jam right now.”

“Oh my God…” I cried out, but she shushed me.

“I don't take for no swearing now. I'm trying to do you an honor here. I've sewed up all the ends of the intestines and whatnot that I had to cut to take your tummy, so that you might last a couple days. I figure the least I can for a man who's given his all to my jelly is to let him taste some of what he's helped make. So far, I haven't been able to keep one of my donors alive quite long enough to get a taste, but I'm getting better. The chubby man over there lasted four days. Just a few more hours and he would have been able to sample his own jelly. Maybe you'll be the lucky one. Here, I'll prop you up a little, so you can see something.”

The hazy pain collided like a car crash between my eyes and then the walls swam into focus. As did the open pit where my stomach used to lie. She saw me stare at my middle and nodded.

“I know it looks bad, but I'm no tailor. There's little point in trying to stitch you back together without a belly, so I just cauterize the main bleeders and let things lie. Now, is there anything I can get for you, while you wait for your jelly to be done?”

I couldn't think of a thing.

I Love Her

I love her. How can I explain it better than that? Every night, I come home from the Many Mammals Meatpacking plant, covered in the blood of a hundred sheep, slathered in the slippery juices that stick and drip from the loopy large intestines of a hundred pigs, peppered with the explosions of one hundred gas-bloated cow bellies.

But
she
doesn't care. Her love is thick, like the steaks carved from an Iowa corn-fed cow. Her love is ever flowing, like the blood that ripples in the slaughterhouse trough. Her love is the rich red drawn by a rose—one that has pricked and scratched away the flesh of your finger 'til the blood runs fast and bright over velvet white petals. Her love doesn't care that I smell like I've bathed in a fountain of feces, or that my hair is thinning…

Well, perhaps more than thinning.

Okay, bald.

Her love sees past the brown moles on my forehead, and the deep pockmarks on my cheeks. She doesn't care that I'm missing my left eye from that unfortunate meat hook incident. I know she would kiss the crooked scar there if she could.

She is the saint of one thousand acnes, the Madonna of my moles.

I love her.

Every night, when I come home bathed in the sewage of the slaughtered, she says to me, without judgment,

“You have no messages.”

I admire her honesty. Another girl might have lied to me, said, “Someone called, but I forgot who. I'm so sorry.” Or, perhaps, tried to change the subject entirely with false compliments: “I love that cologne you're wearing, is that Slaughterhouse 5?”

But no. She always tells the truth.

“You have no messages,”
she says.

I thank her, and ask how her day went. After a moment, I realize that she doesn't want to talk about it. Her concern is solely for me. She wants to hear about
my
day.

Once, after I discovered how to push her buttons the right way, she used to regurgitate the monotonous pitches of the day's telesales calls, one after the other after the other. I know she must have been so frustrated when they would demean her authority, her self-worth, her depth perception and instead of inquiring as to the solid state of her circuitry ask, “Is Mr. Mantain at home?”

I installed a telemarketer screening device this year to spare her from such mundane attacks on her ego.

And her time. I want her to enjoy her hours at home.

After all, I love her.

I love the way she blinks at me with her glowing red eye, when she wants to tell me about someone who called.

I love the way she puts my mother on hold or just cuts the old windbag off “accidentally”.

I love the way she doesn't berate me for being out too late, or condemn me for my own brutally physical condemnation of so many animals. She knows that I wield the slaying hammer with ruthless efficiency, sparing them as much pain as I can. When I look into their wide brown eyes, I see the empty stare of my mother, and I know I must be quick.

Ahh…she asks for so little, but gives so much.

So you can imagine that when she does ask for something, I do everything I can to give it to her. Not that she ever asks for anything outright. She is not like some girls, who
want, want, want
and never fail to let you know it. You know the kind, the ones who reach around while you're giving them a hug to run their hands across your ass to see how much of a bulge there is in your back pocket. Oh, they pat the front pocket too, occasionally, but they always try the right ass cheek first. If that's sitting slim, so's your chance of unleashing for them the snake of eternal delight.

The eye that sees best in darkness.

The gopher of the Lilith hole.

The Tommy gun that is always cocked and loaded.

She's just not like that. You might say that's because she has no hands to reach for your wallet, but I know better. She's not like the other girls. And she never nags.

When the telemarketers got to be a pain for her, she never complained. Instead, she would say, with a calm matter-of-factness,

“You have fifteen messages.”

I noticed, as the number seemed to grow each day, as my phone number was propagated exponentially to more and more telemarketing lists, that she began to pause before reciting the so-obviously-read-from-a-sheet-of-paper pitches on replacing my windows (
does the draft lift the hair off your head even after you shut your shutters?
) or fertilizing my lawn (
does your grass look more like the sandpit than the putting green?
). She would hesitate before burdening me with such intrusions. I know she only wants to protect my privacy, but is still obliged to report their messages. It's just her nature. But she pauses before doing so.

“You have fifteen messages. Message one.”

…and she would wait. After a bit, really an electronic sigh, she would let the caller's voice come through.

“Hello, this is Johnson's Dig a Ditch service. Do you need a ditch dug? We bet we can dig a ditch down deeper than dozens of ditches you dared to dig yourself. We're the diligent dirt devils that don't…”

At this point, often, she just cuts them off.

Sometimes, she doesn't cut them off as quickly as I wish she would. And sometimes, she gets just a little too anxious to hold messages at bay.

Take Melissa. She runs the front office at work, and for three months now I've tried to have a drink with her. I've been to her house—a dozen times, I bet, fixing her faucets, cutting her trees, trimming her bushes. When I agreed to check out her bush, I'd hoped she'd really meant more than just her evergreens. But no luck so far.

“Message two.”

“Hi, Ray, it's Melissa. I know I promised if you cut my lawn yesterday that I'd go out with you tonight, but something's come up. I have a…”

Sam cut her off. She hates it when Melissa uses me.

Oh, I guess I hadn't mentioned her name. Sam.

Short for Samsung. She's oriental. You can tell by the slant of her receiver. Now don't take that the wrong way. Not
that
receiver. I would never talk about her private places in public like that. That's between her and the phone company. I never go there. Our relationship isn't like that.

Still, I love her.

I love the way her slim, sculptured body exposes itself to me every time I walk into the room. I love the way she winks at me, a sly coquette, when I'm watching
Bot Wars
on cable. I know she lusts after the hard silver carapace of Bart Bot, but I don't say anything. After all, I'm trying to date Melissa. And sometimes I watch Cinemax After Dark right in front of her. How could I complain about her harboring an appreciation of the fine physique of another machine when I do
that
right in front of her?

Anyway.

As I was saying. I love her. She does so much for me, and she rarely asks me to do anything for her. She listens as I tell her about the cows that refuse to drop dead, even when my hammer has crushed their skulls three times. She feels for me when I tell her about the rendering room, and was especially sympathetic the day I cried in front of her when I explained how Charlie had fallen from his ladder right into the vat of boiling pig fat that was headed for the Crisco plant. Most guys search their whole life for a confidante like Sam, but I found her on the shelf of my neighborhood Best Buy.

Life's funny that way, sometimes, you know?

She doesn't say much, when I tell her the sinew-steeped stories of my death-dealing days. But when she does, I listen. A few months ago, she played a message from mom for me, and was a lifesaver.

“You Have One Message. Message One.”

“Honey, it's Mom, just checking in. Frank and I are looking forward to seeing you this weekend. Do you know, last night he gave me the sweetest gift—”

Sam cut her off right on that word. She doesn't say much, but when she does, it just hangs out there.

Gift.

I was stopping at Mom's for Mother's Day tomorrow and I had yet to purchase a potted plant or a pair of oven mitts or a subscription to the Meat of the Month club for her.

“Thank you so much,” I told Sam, and slipped my blood-spattered shoes back on and headed out to the mall. She takes care of me, she really does.

Now and then, she even answers an occasional sales call, just to make a point. Usually, she'll let me know she's serious by the tone of her voice.

“You Have On-on-one Message. Messs-sssa-aage One.”

I always listen especially close when she stresses a point like that.

“Hi, Mr. Mantain, this is Olsen Rugs calling. Does your carpet have the wear and tear of thousands of footprinmnnntttssss…”

She cut him off then, and I stopped walking away from her across the family room. Looking at the carpet, I saw the tracks left by boots that had bled a thousand carcasses that week, and it wasn't a pretty sight. I'd forgotten to take them off when I dropped my duffel bag on the milk crate and scattered the roaches that covered the cracked tile in my foyer.

That's how I know she's psychic. She saves the messages that will be needed, and discards the rest. She knew I'd track on the carpet.

“You have no messages.”

I know that everything is good when she tells me this. We're in love, after all, and in love, no news is good news. News means she's leaving you for a man with a full head of hair and a red Mitsubishi two-seat convertible.

“You have o-on-one mess-ss-age. Message o-o-ne.”

It's Melissa again.
“Hi, Bart,”
she says.
“Just looking out at the baby dwarf rose bush that you gave me. She's so full of pink buds, I love her. I think the Rose of Sharon next to her needs a trim though. Sharon's just branching out like crazy, and hanging over Rosie. I don't want Sharon to kill her.”

Sam cut her off again. I get the feeling she doesn't really like Melissa.

I didn't really think much about this one. Just called Melissa back and found out that the next time I cut her lawn, she wanted me to trim all of her bushes. I could do that. She'd have dinner with me next week, she promised. But the next night, I got another message. A clearer one. Sam spoke really meticulously, as if wanting to make
sure
I understood every word, and stopped the caller in the middle once more.

“You have o-on-one mess-ss-age. Mess-ess-ess-age one.”

“Hi, Bart, it's me. Did you mention to Alice that you were doing yardwork for me? She came to me today and said that she was concerned that I might be taking advantage of you. I could just kill her—”

“I know she can be a pain sometimes,” I told Sam, “but you've got to understand. I think she's
the one
. You'd love her too, if I could ever get her to come over. I know you would.”

I didn't hear from Melissa for a couple days. Her lawn was trimmed, after all. Her bushes pruned. And then, one night, as I picked the gluey pink strand of a pig ligament from my shoulder, and washed the creamy beef fat fragments from my forehead, I heard another message stop suddenly.

“Mess-ess-ess-ess-ess-ess-age two.”

“Hi, Bart. Me again. Listen, I know you sprayed the dandelions with that stuff to make sure they wouldn't come back, but I'm worried about Muffie. I think she's licked some of it and she's acting kinda funny. Do you think that stuff would…kill her?…”

Sam stopped the message again. Just hanging it out there.

…kill her

I stopped washing the gobbets of animal flesh from my face and neck and stared hard at the single eye in the mirror. It drooped and wouldn't look back at me. All of a sudden, I got it. She'd asked me three times now. I nodded. I knew what I had to do.

I put my work clothes back on, and laced up my boots. They'd been light tan when I first bought them, but now they were the color of heavy rust.

In the garage, I kept a sledge much like the one I used every day on the cows at work. I lifted it from its hook and weighed its heft in my hand, practicing my down stroke on the wooden workbench. I left dents a half inch deep in the hard wood.

It would do.

…kill her

I had to use all my skill. Right between the eyes, and with full, unflinching force. It would be hard, I knew—those eyes were wide and blue and blinked long lashes at me all the time. Usually just before she asked me for a favor.

But I had to do this. I'd make sure it was quick. When it comes down to it, I guess Sam is the only woman for me.

I love her.

She doesn't ask for much. And she never asks me to cut the grass or trim the bushes.

…kill her

Hammer in hand, I take one last look back into the family room. Her eye shines cool and red in the darkness. It occurs to me for the first time that we both have only one eye, Sam and I. We are so alike; a match made in heaven! Why had I been blind to it before? She is all I ever need.

“I'll be back soon,” I promise, and shut the door.