Sacrificing Virgins

by John Everson

  And then she stood outside of his sliding glass door, long brown hair rimmed in moonlight, white dress clinging to her like fairy gauze. Her eyes stared at him, as if questioning. She lifted one blue-white calf and then her bare foot was through Eric’s window, and in a heartbeat, the rest of her followed.

  Eric dropped the mug to the carpet.

  “Who are you?” he whispered. She didn’t answer, but instead flew towards him, moving across the room in seconds to stand silent within reach of his embrace.

  His heart beat like a hammer and his arms were paralyzed as he stared into the faintly liquid eyes of the ghost. He could vaguely make out the outline of his sliding glass door through the pale glow of her skin. Part of him wanted to reach back and flick the light back on…but he couldn’t move. From his throat, he managed a tortured whisper of “Why…?” But the room remained completely otherwise silent. The ticking of the kitchen clock was painfully audible as the woman slowly raised a hand and put a finger to Eric’s lips. And then she placed the same hand flat on his chest.

  He looked down and saw the shine of his belt through her thin luminescent arm. What did she want, why did she touch him? He could feel the strangest tingle beneath her hand, but no pressure of flesh. Was she sucking the blood from his heart?

  She only paused there a second, and then removed her hand from him and began walking down the hallway. She paused once and looked back over her shoulder, as if waiting for him to follow. Eric found that his panic had relaxed, at least enough so that he could move again, and after a moment’s hesitation, he began to follow. As soon as he did, she turned and continued walking deeper into his house, through the hall and around the corner and into his bedroom. As he rounded the doorway, he saw that she crouched next to his bed. One translucent arm pointed to the dark beneath.

  What did she want? For him to crawl under the bed? Eric stood at the entrance to the room and watched her point repeatedly towards the space beneath his bed. Her eyes flashed with anxious need, as if it was a matter of life and death that he follow the clue of her ghostly fingers.

  Eric shrugged and decided to play along and move the bed to see what she was pointing at. Absently he reached to the wall to flick the light on, so he could see what he was doing and…

  …in a heartbeat, she was gone.

  “You stupid shit,” he cursed himself out loud. “How could you be such an idiot!” He turned the light off and waited in the empty room for a few minutes, hoping that she would reappear before walking back to the family room and looking outside towards the garden and the willow. He waited, but in his heart, he knew that she was gone for the night. She hadn’t reappeared after the light had taken her the past two times, and so he supposed she wouldn’t this time either.

  Finally, he turned the lights in the house back on, and cleaned up the tea from where he’d spilled it on the carpet. Then he went back to his bedroom and moved the bed away from the wall. Dust bunnies rolled along the back wall, but it was the discolored wood a couple feet away from the wall that he stared at. Part of the reason he’d placed the bed where he had when he’d first moved in was because he’d noticed that spot in the floor. It looked as if someone had cut into the hardwood at some point, pulled out a square, and then replaced it with not-quite-the-same wood. He’d assumed that someone had needed to dig through the floor to fix a utility line at some point in the home’s past, and had ruined the original flooring doing so.

  Now he wasn’t so sure.

  Eric went and got a crowbar from the garage. He slipped the edge in the groove between the new square of flooring and the rest.

  He pushed back on the other end of the tool, and the square shifted. Eric rocked the metal bar just a bit, and then pushed again, and the entire square of five strips of hardwood lifted as one. It clattered to the floor upside down, and he saw the flooring had been nailed together with two other thin boards. It was a doorway into the ground without handle or hinges. And beneath where it had lain, was a dark hole.

  Eric peered inside. Six or eight inches below the flooring, a number of things rested on a small blue-and-green-checked blanket. He lifted them out, one by one, and then pulled the blanket from where it rested on the concrete of his foundation as well.

  Then he sat back and looked more carefully at what he’d found.

  A stack of faded black-and-white photographs, taken in a wide variety of locales. He recognized the Grand Canyon and Times Square amid many other less obvious locations. The common element of them all was a smiling woman with dark eyes and hair. She looked like the kind of girl who laughed easily and hugged hello. She looked a lot like the woman who had pointed to the space beneath his bed.

  Her name was Emma Hodgson. At least that was what he surmised after reading the name on the prescription bottle that he had pulled up with the other things. And when he opened the small leather-bound book titled simply Diary, on the first inside page it read, These are the private thoughts of Emma Hodgson.

  He noted quickly that the slim, loopy handwriting in the diary did not match the jagged script within a small notebook that had also been tucked into the “vault”. The notebook held a man’s writing.

  Eric gathered the books and blanket, the bottle and a necklace and a jewelry box with a ruby ring inside, and took them out to the family room. After setting his bed to right, he began to read the story of Emma and Jerry Hodgson.

  This house is everything I ever dreamed of, Emma had written early in the book. We’re so far from anyone, we could run naked as a jay through the backyard and nobody would ever know. It’s a sanctuary. Jerry’s going to plant some trees so that in a few years we might have some shade; there was nothing but scrub grass and the willow here when they built the place.

  The entry was dated April 22, 1954.

  The early entries extolled the beauty of the prairie and eventually bemoaned the fact that a new house was going up a little ways down the road. They’d no longer be alone in their wilderness. Emma wrote about Jerry’s new job at Goldstar, selling appliances, and about how much he loved her spaghetti, and about how they often they sat in the afternoon or at night in their family room looking out on the grassy plain behind their house, frequently watching falcons hunt rabbits.

  But by 1957, Emma’s entries grew shorter, and her mood less upbeat. She complained of headaches and sickness and more. I don’t want him to worry, was her frequent explanation for why she told these things to her diary, but kept them from Jerry. Eventually, Jerry apparently noticed that her slim form had grown bony and her smiles turned from cheer to grimace. In December of 1957, he forcibly took her to a doctor, despite her protestations that they couldn’t afford it.

  They came home with two bottles of pain pills and the memory of the doctor’s expression of hopelessness.

  In February of 1958 she wrote, It hurts to breathe, it hurts to eat, it hurts to live. It’s killing Jerry to watch me die. He’s been so good to me, trying to keep me warm, making sure I take my medicine so that the pain goes away, a little bit. I don’t think this can drag on much longer in any event. Every night when I say good night to him, in my heart I say goodbye, just in case. But I so hope to see the spring come one more time. If I could just see my hyacinths bloom one last time and the goldfinches return…

  Jerry’s notebook told an equally painful story. The short version was, he’d lost his job before Thanksgiving and had no family to turn to as his wife grew more ashen and frail by the day. He couldn’t afford the morphine, and so he sold off his possessions, one by one, to buy them rice and milk and medicine. After he sold their car, he spent two and a half hours walking down the country roads back from town in a snowstorm. That was on February 16, 1958.

  On March 21st, 1958, he wrote:

  Emma screamed all night. I couldn’t do anything but watch her and rub her head with cold rags. Her fingernails drew blood on my arms. But this morning, she got her wish. The green she�
��s been watching all week finally burst into color—the purple hyacinths she planted the spring we moved here have bloomed. I carried her outside so that she could smell them, in the grove she dug near the willow. When I brought her back in the house, she fell asleep on the couch, and there was a smile on her face for the first time in weeks. I hate to admit it, but I cried then. I sat in front of my wife and cried, and she didn’t hear me; she’s too far gone. That’s when I went to the kitchen and poured all of the morphine pills into her broth. It’s not right that she suffer anymore. I can’t do anything else for her. Today, she got what she’s been praying for—she found spring. Tonight, I’ll send her home to heaven.

  On March 22nd, Jerry wrote simply, I laid her in the earth by her hyacinths. I have no money for a coffin or a stone or to bury her in the cemetery…but her flowers will mark her place.

  The next entry was dated two months later, and was equally brief.

  I can’t stay here any longer. The bank threatens foreclosure, and the electric company turned the power off last week. This is no longer my home, it’s her resting place. I will place these memories of her someplace safe, and say goodbye. Emma found her spring, now I have to find mine.

  There were no other entries, though the ink was blurred on that final page, as if it had gotten wet. Perhaps from tears.

  Eric felt chilled as he closed the notebook. He looked at the date on his phone and nodded. It was March 21st. Fifty-three years to the night that Emma had died. On a hunch, he looked up his calendar on the computer to see when his business trip had been the year before, when he’d seen her walk towards him as he shoveled snow from the drive. He’d left on the Monday, and been shoveling snow Sunday at dusk…March 21st.

  He couldn’t narrow down the previous sighting to a date, but he knew it had been an unseasonably warm day in March…

  Eric marked March 21st on his calendar so he would remember, and set it to repeat on the same day every year. The entry simply read Emma Hodgson.

  Over the next few weeks, Eric researched the history of his house, and found that it had been built in the early ’50s. Its first owners had been a young couple named Jerry and Emma Hodgson. Four years after purchasing, both had disappeared, and when the mortgage was six months in arrears, the bank had reclaimed the property and sold it to another couple who owned it for the next thirty-one years, while a subdivision grew up all around them. Two more owners had held the property before Eric bought it. In all his searches, he never could come up with an answer to where Jerry had gone.

  Eric finally researched the mythology behind willow trees too, and found them closely identified with the feminine aspect and intuition and deep emotions, as well as with dreaming, enchantment, rebirth and spring.

  Fitting, he thought.

  That summer, Eric didn’t plant his vegetable garden. Instead, he cleared the topsoil off the area he’d been planting. Not far from the willow tree, at the edge of his garden plot, he found a large round boulder buried a couple feet below the soil. He dug carefully around it, focusing on the area pointing away from the boulder…he guessed that stone would likely be a poor man’s headstone.

  The clay didn’t get any easier to turn over the deeper he went, and Eric’s shoulders were aching when he scraped away another thin layer of orange clay to reveal a ragged edge of some kind of material. He chipped away at the ground until more of the fragment was revealed. It appeared to some kind of white silk.

  He worked more carefully then, and little by little, he freed the material from the soil…and then his shovel scraped ever so slightly against something that wasn’t dirt. It could have been white rock, but Eric knew better. He climbed out of the hole and got a small garden hand shovel, and carefully carved the earth until the vertebrae and jaw were revealed. A half hour later, he sat back in the hole, and stared into the black pits that remained of Emma’s eyes.

  Her skull stared back at him, sightless in the cool earth. Beneath the sweat streaming from every pore, Eric shivered. “I’m sorry, Emma,” he whispered at the skull beneath his garden. “But I had to know for sure. I won’t bother you again.”

  Gently he pressed the dirt back over her face, and then climbed out of the hole. He cut a branch of lilac from the bush nearby, and tossed the fragrant purple flowers into the hole in offering. Then he filled the grave back in, and lifted the boulder out of its pit so that it visibly marked her resting place clearly once more.

  Eric replaced his garden plot with a stand of lilies…

  Eric read Emma’s diary cover to cover that summer, walking the yard to try to find places and views she described. Everything was different now, with houses now all around. But the willow remained, and just as she described doing more than fifty years before, he frequently rested there, content in the summer shade beneath its rain of branches. Somehow, in his focus to plant a proper memorial on her grave, his own personal ennui and exhaustion disappeared. How could he feel empty inside when others had experienced so much worse? He still had his life, and his warm house and the comforts of a million things that Emma and Jerry had never even imagined.

  In the fall, he filled the entire area with hyacinth bulbs.

  On March 21st, Eric was ready. He was as nervous as a boy on a first date—so afraid that he might be stood up. But when the dusk came down after a warm day and the stars came out, once again Emma rose from her grave beside the willow, and walked towards the place where her life had loved.

  Eric waited for her there on the couch facing the sliding glass door. He sipped a bottle of winter ale, and smiled as the glowing woman in white stepped through the glass and across the carpet to join him.

  For a time, the two of them simply sat there, staring out the glass at the shadows of a hundred hyacinths blooming atop her grave.

  And then Eric began to speak, quietly in the dark room. The ghost of Emma Hodgson turned her face to meet his own as he began to tell her the story of her house—of all of the things that had happened here in the years that she had been away. He told her of the cycle of rebirth and death, again and again. She slipped a glowing hand into his own, as Eric told stories of love, and loss…and spring.

  In Memoryum

  They say the memory is the first to go. That was his first thought as he turned his head from one side of the pillow to the other, and recognized…nothing.

  Jayce got up from the sagging mattress and wondered where his memory had slipped away to. His lower back spasmed as he walked across the tiny room, nearly spilling him into the yellow-rimmed window shade he’d crossed to open. He caught himself with a shaking palm on the wall, gasping at the pain and the sudden dizzying speed of his heart. Two inches to the left and he might have fallen forward, full force, and put his hand through the glass, and after his hand, maybe his whole body, unless his neck hung up on a jagged shard and left his body dangling there on the inside of the room while his lifeblood spilled down his severed neck and the fractured glass to pool on the pavement below.

  Or was there pavement? Jayce shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs. He didn’t remember. He didn’t know where the room was or what was beyond it, or how he’d gotten there in the first place.

  The shade pulled down and released like a slingshot, clattering around and around at the top of the battered wooden window frame. Jayce squinted at the sudden influx of sun. Blinking away tears, he leaned forward to look outside.

  An empty parking lot. Tufts of grass split the graying surface. To the left, Jayce could make out the rusted base stanchions of some kind of large signpost, and to the right, a single car overran the yellow guidelines of a designated parking space. The lot seemed to end at the back of an abandoned field, which stretched on to disappear into a stand of trees far away on the horizon.

  Jayce turned back from the window and took a closer look at the room itself. There wasn’t much to look at. A single bed, with a thin mattress that had obviously seen the press of ma
ny a heavy backside. A green floral comforter dragged off to the floor where he’d thrown it, and the only other piece of furniture was a dark brown nightstand topped by a thrift shop lamp and a $5 traveler’s alarm clock. The red LED read 11:21. From the growl of his gut, he also assumed that it had been some time since he’d last eaten. Though he couldn’t remember when or what that last meal might have been.

  There were no other personal effects in the room, but Jayce found a set of keys in his pants pocket. The world felt skewed, everything tilted forty-five degrees. He stared at the keys and wondered what doors they opened. He wondered who he was. He knew his name, and when he touched his arms, they felt familiar. Right. But everything else felt gray.

  Jayce stepped through a doorframe into a tiny bath, and plunged his hands into the water from the sink faucet, splashing his face again and again. When he looked up into the mirror, he saw a face dripping with exhaustion…deep-set eyes ringed by shadowed purplish circles, and a patchy growth of beard spread like a rash across wide cheeks. Lips cut through black stubble like a pale river. It was a face that Jayce didn’t recognize. But then, he had no mental picture of himself at all to compare it to.

  He looked closer, trying to remember. Despite its fatigue, the mug that stared dully back at him didn’t look that old, just a worn-down thirtysomething, not the ancient creaking geriatric his back and limbs and mind seemed to indicate he might have physically become. Jayce wiped the water and his frown on a dingy white hand towel, and decided to see what lay beyond the room.

  The keys in his pocket started the car in the parking lot. But Jayce didn’t know where to go. He edged it out onto an empty side road, Clandestine Road, the sign read. He laughed at the irony of that. Behind him the vacant shell of the building he’d awoken inside loomed like a cutout prop against a gray sky. These moments hardly seemed real, yet, no matter how many times he tried pinching his skin, or biting his tongue, he did not wake up. Nor did he remember. At least, he didn’t remember what he had done yesterday, or what people called him, but he did remember learned motor skills, like walking and opening doors and driving a car.