Sacrificing Virgins (28 page)

Or was it blank?

Was there just a hint of knowing there? A thinly veiled glint of malevolence?

“Anna, we have to talk,” I said, reaching for her arm to pull her out of the kitchen.

But she slipped away with a giggle.

“Sit,” she said. “Breakfast is served.”

Reluctantly, I took my place at the table, and Anna came right behind me, a plate of steaming pancakes in her hand. She stabbed three with a fork and slid them to Camille's plate, and then did the same for her own before handing the rest of the platter to me.

“How are you feeling this morning, sweetheart?” I ventured.

Cammy didn't answer. Instead, she picked up the butter knife and held it poised, just over the top of her golden-brown cakes.

“No, baby, let me,” Anna said, and pried the knife from her hand to cut the cakes up with deft precision.

As she did so, Camille slowly raised her head and met my eye. Her lips parted, just slightly, and it seemed that she gave the faintest hint of a grin. Then it was gone.

A shiver ran down my spine.

When Anna went to work on her own plate, our daughter sat still, unmoving.

“Aren't you hungry?” I ventured.

Anna reached out to stroke Camille's hair.

“She's still in shock, I think,” she said. “She probably just isn't hungry.”

“Not very talkative, either,” I said.

Anna set her fork down with slow deliberation. When she looked at me, I could see the tears threatening in her eyes.

“Leave her alone,” she hissed. “What did you expect from her? This is going to take time.”

Then Anna forced a smile and ruffled Camille's hair again. “Try to eat something, sweetheart.”

Camille didn't look at her plate. Her eyes remained pinned on mine. But slowly, her right hand lifted a fork, and stabbed a square of pancake sopping with maple syrup. She raised it to her mouth, pushed it between her lips, and swallowed. She repeated the act a second, and a third time, pushing the pancakes past her lips and gulping them down.

I never saw her chew.

After breakfast, I pulled Anna aside at the sink. Camille remained at the table, staring unmoving at the wall behind where I'd been sitting.

“Something didn't go right,” I whispered in her ear. “Maybe it took too long to raise her, I don't know.”

Anna grabbed the front of my jacket. “She was dead, Jack, what did you expect?”

“Just be careful today,” I said. “When she woke up last night, she gave me this.” I pointed to the bruise already well-formed on my forehead. “And then, before you came downstairs, she came after me with a knife.”

Anna shot me a disgusted glance and shook her head sadly.

“I don't blame her. Go to work, Jack.”

Not knowing quite what else to do, I did.

Over the next few days, Anna continued to work with Camille, coaxing her to eat, to dress, to talk. But while the child remained pliable, she also remained wooden. She only seemed to move when pushed to do so, and the light I remembered so well in her beautiful blue eyes remained dull.

She stared straight ahead at all times, unblinking.

I found myself avoiding her, sitting in the kitchen when she was on the couch, and vice versa.

“Go play with her,” Anna insisted one night as I read the paper at the kitchen table. “You did this. You're the one who wanted her back. And you've done nothing but avoid her ever since she woke up.”

There was nothing I could say to that. So I nodded, and went to sit in the front room. I put my arm around the bony shoulders of my dead daughter, and stared for a while at the TV with her. It might have helped if the set had been turned on.

We sat silent that way, her and I, for a long time, as Anna clattered about in the kitchen, cleaning up the remnants of dinner. She sounded abnormally loud, every drawer slamming hard, and every dish clattering on the counter. Then came a crash, glass breaking in the sink, and I heard Anna swear. The catch in her voice sounded dangerously close to hysteria.

“Are you okay?” I called out. “What broke?”

“Just a glass,” she answered.

That's when I realized that Camille had turned her head. She was staring at me.

Just staring at the hairs on my neck, with the dogged, unwavering attention of a mounted deer head.

It was creepy. Goose bumps broke out on my arm, and I realized again how cool and clammy her neck felt against my skin. Cold as riverbed stone.

I pulled back my arm and stood up.

“I'm going to see how your mom's doing,” I announced, and left her frozen grin behind.

“How are you?” I asked Anna later on, as she settled into bed beside me.

She shook her head. “I can't say it,” she said. “It's too horrible.”

“I know,” I said. “I wish I'd never…I'm sorry.”

Still later, I came awake suddenly in the pitch-black of night as Anna snored heavily beside me. Something felt wrong. I knew it before I opened my eyes. The air tasted feral. And icy.

I slit my lids open just a hair, and took in as much of the dark room as I could. I caught the faintest whiff of something both sweet and sour.

Something sparked near my face and I sat up like a shot.

Camille stood by the bed.

A knife protruded from the pillow where my head had rested just a second before.

A breath hitched in my chest. She had almost put the blade right through my eye as I slept. She hated me. Camille seemed capable in her new pseudo-life of almost nothing. But one thing she had proven.

She wanted me to be as dead as she.

I slid my legs to the floor and took her by the shoulders, leading her away from the bed and back to her room. She did not resist. Except for the dull movement of her feet, she didn't show any sign of life, whatsoever.

When I tucked her back into her own bed, and pulled the covers back up to rest on her frail shoulders, a tear bled from my face to fall glistening on her chin. She made no move to wipe it off, only stared straight ahead, at the ceiling. I rubbed it away with my forefinger, and felt my skin crawl. I now had a horrible revulsion at the touch of my daughter's skin.

When I left the room, her eyes remained open. Unblinking. Unfeeling. Dead.

I locked the bedroom door behind me, pulled the knife from its sheath in my pillow and slid it beneath the bed. Sleep didn't come for a long time. In my head, I replayed scenes from the past year, when Cammy had been full of beaming sunshine and infectious laughter. When she had laughed at my funny faces and begged me to bounce her on my knee like a bronco pony. When she had kissed me and said, “I love you, Daddy.”

When she had been
alive
.

Then I remembered her calm in death, as all around her quiet body people moaned and cried. She'd lain there in a coffin built just for children. Anna's mother had moaned tediously about the horror of the thing, proclaiming to any that would hear that they should never need to build wooden boxes for kids. But, as I finally pointed out to her, they do, and Cammy had hers, and her face had looked small yet peaceful on the cloud-white silken pillow.

Now she had neither the joys of life nor the peace of death.

I was the reason. As the gray light of dawn slipped in through the bedroom window, my mind finally slipped into a troubled hour of sleep, soothed only by images of black blood and newly filled graves.

I knew what I had to do.

My eyes felt slathered in sand when Anna finally managed to jostle them open with a punch to my shoulder.

“Get up,” she insisted, “you're going to be late for work. And why did you lock the door last night?”

I didn't answer her question, but stumbled as fast as possible from shower to closet to car. When I passed Camille, already sitting motionless at the kitchen table, I couldn't meet her eyes. I didn't want to see what was, or wasn't, in them.

The day passed in slow motion. Every time I looked at the clock it seemed that only another five minutes had passed. I could barely hold my head up, but still, I welcomed the crawl of time. Anything to avoid what I had to do when I got home. All through the day I replayed the images of Cammy's gravesite on the night I brought her home. Of how I propped the industrial flash on the side of the loose dirt, and of how each shovelful rose with the ache in my back to join the growing pile beside the flash. Of how, after what seemed like hours, I finally reached the wooden gleam of the top of her deathbed, and of how my fingers fumbled at the clasps to free my baby.

It all had to end.

It
had
ended, and I'd refused to believe it, thinking that somehow Madame Trevail and her voodoo could cheat the reaper. In some way, I supposed, it had. But the reward was worse than the loss it answered.

When I finally pulled into the garage that night, I hit the button to close the door behind my car, but didn't immediately enter the house. Instead, as the chain ground through its heavy cycle to bring the garage door to the ground, I opened the trunk, lifted the false bottom that hid the spare tire, and pulled out the heavy tire iron that fit the expandable jack. Then I replaced the bottom, and lined the surface of the black carpet floor with black trash bags from my workbench.

I pulled a long spade from its rest on a round hook in the garage wall, laid it on the plastic, and shut the trunk.

Then I hefted the tire iron in my hand and slapped it lightly against my free palm. The sting from just that slight touch said it would easily do the job.

But could
I
?

Taking a deep breath, I assured myself that I could, and turned the doorknob to enter the house.

The foyer was dark as I stepped inside. I slipped off my shoes in the small mud room between the garage and the living area and opened the door into the great room. The room where I had almost been skewered not so long ago by my dead daughter. The TV and lights were off here too, which was unlike Anna, who normally lit the house up before dusk, but I could see light beaming from the kitchen.

“Anna?” I called.

The only answer was a faint thump.

Something was wrong here. The air screamed with the electricity of evil, and my stomach clenched. Why hadn't she answered? Where was Camille? Part of me had hoped to find her planted here, unmoving, in front of the television while her mother fixed dinner.

But there was no warm smell of spice or stew in the air. The house felt empty.

I crept across the front room carpet until I reached the entryway to the kitchen. The hanging fixture on the far end of the room over the kitchen table was on, and I could see something resting on the tiles of the floor, something that peeked into my view from just beyond the edge of the cabinets. Something pale and fleshy.

Something that looked like a bare toe.

I stepped into the kitchen and flipped the florescent light on. As it flickered to life over the counter and I moved closer and closer to the table, the shadows lifted and the light…
oh God
, the light. It burned the image into my brain forever. I wish to God I could forget it.

Camille sat beside my wife on the floor. My daughter's face was blank, but her hand still held the weapon. Cold steel tempered in the heat of life. Silver wetted and warmed with her mother's blood.

Anna wasn't dead yet. She reached out to me from the floor as I gasped in shock at the tableau. Blood streaked the pale skin of my wife's fingers; her entreating arm was streaked and spotted with gore. I could see Anna's lips moving, trying desperately to say something to me as her eyelids fluttered, struggling to stay conscious.

She never got out a word.

Her hand dropped back to the awful, bloody wound on her stomach. The beautiful skin of her belly, that soft flesh I'd kissed and caressed for so many years, looked as if it had been punctured and ground through by a dull can opener. Bloody shreds of skin peeled back and wept life as her fingers grasped and struggled to hold the slippery wound closed. I could see something undulating beneath the skin, beneath the blood.

Something creamy. Something soft and pink.

I gagged as the realization hit. Anna was holding her very guts in.

She wheezed and coughed, then, her whole body shuddering, and a stream of crimson spat from between her lips. A heavier flow sluiced from the ragged slice in her neck, running like thick juice to ripple on the tile. Her eyes held open firmly and locked on mine for just a second, and my heart froze. Then she seemed to shiver, and her pupils rolled back in her head until I could see only white.

A keening, pitiful cry came from her throat before gagging off to a painful, gargling choke. Her beautiful raven hair stirred a broth of blood as her whole body shook. Before I could break my paralysis and kneel to hold her, she was still.

“Anna,” I cried, and fell at her feet and crawled through the warm stickiness of her blood. Ignoring the silent presence of our daughter, I pressed my ear to her chest. There was no sound, no breath.

Her face was still, her features quiet. I looked into her eyes, hoping for some spark of life, but already, their luster was gone. With a fingertip stained red in her blood, I closed her eyelids. At last, I realized my own danger, and looked up.

“Why?” I whispered, sitting back on my haunches to stare at Camille. My daughter sat at her mother's head. Her empty eyes didn't stray from my own.

I hadn't expected an answer and I didn't get one. I sat there for some time, waiting for the tears to come. But they didn't. I couldn't quite fathom that Anna was really dead. This shredded, bloody mess on my kitchen floor couldn't be her. And the deadly child couldn't be ours.

I stood up, and started towards the phone to call 9-1-1 for the police, or an ambulance, whoever you have to call when these things happen.

My hand was on the receiver when I stopped.

What could I tell them?

That my dead, eight-year-old daughter had brutally murdered my wife with a knife while I was at work? I pulled my hand back and looked at Camille, who scratched at the back of her neck.