by Abe Moss
Maria drooped her head, chin to her chest, crying the last of her tears. As she did, footsteps came toward her, the creature coming near, slapping the dirty cave floor. She jolted at the creature’s approach. She looked up just as the creature touched her, hands upon her face. Only she didn’t fade away this time like before, though she wished she could…
The creature held her face in both its hands, turning her gaze toward its own.
“See my eyes?” the creature said. “Hmmm?”
Maria’s chest filled with frost as she peered into its eyes. Bright and yellow. Tiny, eager pupils. Deep, dark wells of knowledge and malice. Desperate to look elsewhere, Maria dropped her gaze to the creature’s neck, down to the space between its saggy breasts where she saw a pouch hanging from a necklace it wore. It was the only thing the creature wore.
“Up here, up here,” the creature urged, bringing Maria’s attention back to her. “Let me look into those pretty eyes.” Maria peered into her eyes once more. It made her sick to look into them, but they mesmerized her even so with their strange beauty. “Ah, pretty eyes. Pretty girl. We’ll make good use of you, we will. Very good use…”
The man moaned beside them. The creature turned to him, her grin faltering.
“What do you want?” she snapped.
The man leaned toward Maria again, held upright only by the pull of his chains in the wall. He blinked lazily, and it frightened Maria, that he looked to her rather than the creature. His eyes, too, were beautiful, she thought distantly. They were just about the only beautiful thing left of him. He moaned again, like he had something urgent to say through the threads in his lips but couldn’t get it out. Maria felt a sick pain, a reluctant ache as she continued meeting his sorry stare. Why did he look at her that way, she wondered?
“Oh, Harvey,” the creature crooned.
She stepped toward him, her feet wet on the cave floor, blood between her toes. She hovered over him, held his face in her hands, and Maria was both guilty and grateful to be rid of the attention for a short while. Perhaps that was even his intention…
“Are you getting jealous?” the creature asked, giggling—a grotesque, wet sound from the back of her throat. “You wanted some attention, too?”
To Maria’s confusion, the man—Harvey, did the creature say?—nodded in agreement. He shut his tired eyes, unable to look into the creature’s for long, either.
“Sweet, handsome Harvey. Don’t you worry. We’re not done with you yet.”
He continued nodding, and it dawned on Maria. He wished for more, because then it would be over for him soon. The misery could only end one way…
“Hiltrude!”
A voice called out from that hidden area beyond the brown cloth. Roughened by an endless amount of age, another woman’s voice. That’s what they were, truly. Women. But not like any Maria had ever seen. Not in the world as she knew it.
“What?” the creature replied, still cradling Harvey’s pathetic face in her hands.
A hand pulled the brown cloth aside, another hideous face peering out.
“Enough with your games. We don’t have all night.”
“Oh, silence with you!” Hiltrude said nastily, waving her hand in the other’s direction.
“Silence with you!” the other retorted. “We can’t do everything, Talma and I! Be useful for a change!”
“Feck off!” Hiltrude straightened, turning her back to Maria and Harvey, hands on her thick, rolling hips. “I’ve done plenty, so don’t you start—”
“Both of you!” Another voice came from behind the cloth. Altogether, their voices were hardly different, though this third voice carried a great deal more authority than the others. “The time is approaching, don’t waste any more of it! Hiltrude, bring the blood!”
“Yes, fine, all right…” Hiltrude ducked her shameful, scraggly head as she went to the large bowl beneath Michael’s suspended body. She bent, exposing her horrid, melting backside, wrapped her arms around the bowl, and hoisted it up with a mannish grunt. “I’m… coming…”
“Annora!” that third voice bellowed. “Help me, please…”
The second creature, looking daggers at Hiltrude as she wobbled with the bowl against herself, returned into the depths of that other place, letting the cloth fall as Hiltrude approached with her arms full. Maria listened as Hiltrude muttered violently under her breath, kicking the cloth with her feet in her struggle to get inside.
Once the creatures were out of sight, Maria leaned back, breathing deeply. She shut her eyes against the cave full of traumas—against the image of her dead brother, which still burned bright in the dark of her mind’s eye regardless.
She’d have wept more if there were any tears left in her. But she was exhausted. Her mind, her body, yearned for rest, which she wouldn’t find here, she knew. She rolled her tired head toward the man—Harvey was his name—and watched him somberly. The violence he’d endured was still much too gruesome to observe for long. At the sight of his injuries, her own body ached. From the corner of her eye, her brother’s body continued to twist back and forth on the rope. She dared to look at him. His head was made faceless by the thick flow of blood. Now that blood was in a giant bowl somewhere beyond the curtain. His blood.
She wished she could cry, could sleep, could fall into such a heavy shock so as to not feel anything for a while. Unfortunately, her mind seemed more resilient than that. The gore and death weren’t enough to break her. Not yet. The imagery that had previously disturbed her to the point of fainting now only troubled her. She looked upon Michael’s body more frequently as the minutes passed. Whereas she once couldn’t look for long, now she couldn’t look away. She studied him with a hot lump in her throat, a cold lump in her chest.
—one of them howled my name—
She flinched as one of the creatures exited the cloth. Hiltrude again. She stomped irritably to the table on the other side of the cave, where she’d been mixing things in the bowl before. Now she grabbed something else. Swiped it from the table in a silver arc. It caught the light of the torch for a brief instant. A gleaming, fiery blade. Clenching it in her fist, she moved toward Michael. She raised it up. Maria stiffened.
“No,” Maria said, the words slipping from her mouth like liquid. “Please.”
Hiltrude paused, peering in Maria’s direction peculiarly.
“You say something, love?”
Gulping dryly, Maria said nothing more. Her eyes bounced pleadingly between Hiltrude’s and the knife she held. Hiltrude waited a moment, following Maria’s frantic gaze until she finally laughed.
“Oh, this?” she said, and held up the knife. She watched Maria, amused by the hopeless fear she couldn’t hide. Then she squatted, looking remarkably like a flesh-colored toad, and cocked her head wonderingly, observing Michael’s blood-soaked face. “By the looks of him, I think the knife has done its job already.” She grinned cruelly, delighting in Maria’s discomfort.
Hiltrude stood, raised the knife up over her head, and took the rope around Michael’s ankles in her other hand. She slipped the knife underneath. With a couple back and forth slices, the rope cut cleanly and Michael dropped. His head cracked against the floor. His body crumpled in a soggy heap. Just when Maria thought she’d reached the limits of what would disturb her this evening, she gasped.
Hiltrude opened her mouth like a naughty ape’s, alight with guilty pleasure.
“I don’t think he felt a thing,” she said, eyes wild and bright. “Not a damned thing, love…”
A little number, a little braver, Maria spoke to the creature a second time.
“What are you doing to us?”
Though the creature spoke likewise, and Maria understood her, it felt nothing like speaking to another person. Another human. Whatever this thing was, she wasn’t human. She donned a human disguise, a convincing one, and shed it like a jacket in an instant. She spoke the language, and showed human expression, but the motives and desires behind them were cold. Alien. She sm
iled upon Maria, and her smile was full of jagged, sallow teeth and malicious intent.
Stepping over her brother’s broken body, the creature shuffled toward her.
“You could be in bed sleeping right now,” Hiltrude told her. She bent over Maria, and a whiff of something sour reached her. Body odor from hell. “We only wanted him.” She looked over her shoulder at the body. What had once been Michael but wasn’t any longer. “But you decided to come with us, didn’t you?”
Maria frowned and closed her eyes, wishing for an end to the exchange. She waited to feel those knobby fingers take hold of her face again, but they didn’t. Hiltrude returned to stooping over Michael’s body. She looked over her shoulder at Maria, thoughts swirling in her yellow eyes.
“We haven’t a use for you yet,” she said. “But we can save you until we think of one.”
She turned toward the table full of ingredients across the chamber. Maria followed the line of her gaze to a pair of shelves fastened along the wall above it, where she only now spotted the unusual items stored there. Many jars lined those shelves. Colored jars. One blue, one green, a couple different shades of orange, and many others. Except…
“Harvest them young and pretty,” Hiltrude said. “Use them little by little…”
The jars weren’t colored. They were simple, clear glass jars. But the things inside them were colored. The blues. The purples. The oranges. The greens. Faint, pulsing lights within the glass.
“A shame we couldn’t keep a little of his…” Hiltrude bent and took Michael’s wrists in her hands. “…we used him up right away…”
She dragged Michael toward a dark opening on the other side of the room which Maria only now noticed—a narrow passage. She watched in silence as Hiltrude vanished into the dark passage, Michael’s trailing feet disappearing after her. She listened for his body whispering over the cave floor until she heard nothing at all. She looked to the jars again, the dim light inside that of fireflies. As Hiltrude returned, empty-handed now, she caught Maria studying them.
“Yours is dark gold, in case you’re wondering” she told her, smiling. “Like honey.”
With that, Hiltrude disappeared behind the brown cloth again for a time.
✽ ✽ ✽
Maria waited. As if she could do anything else. The man next to her seemed about dead, he moved so little. He hadn’t opened his eyes since closing them last, when he’d freed Maria from Hiltrude’s bullying for a short while. Maria would have thought him dead now, if not for the gentle sounds through his nostrils, or the puffing of his mouth as he tried and failed to breathe through his sewn lips in his sleep.
Maria listened as the three women occasionally whispered amongst themselves behind the curtain. Snapping at one another, moving things about, bickering and bemoaning the state of things, the messes they’d made. Then an order was given. A sharp, authoritative bark. Hiltrude slapped the brown curtain, stepping through in a huff. It seemed she was at the bottom of the pecking order, if such a thing existed.
She started toward them, and as she came, she pinched the small pouch hanging from her neck, fitting her long, spidery fingers inside in search of something. She twirled her index finger, stirring the contents until she found what she looked for.
“Ah…”
She produced a shiny, gold key. She hunched over Harvey, who remained still as the dead. She worked the key into the cuffs around his wrists. With a twist, there was a metallic pop and they were freed.
Harvey’s eyes snapped open. He thrust himself toward Hiltrude, put his trembling hands around her fat throat. She screamed.
“Agck!”
He rocked forward, stood on the bony stumps of his legs, gritted his teeth through the pain which must have resulted. He pushed forward still, hands throttling the horrid creature, until he toppled her over and they fell together in a pile.
Something fell to the ground, skipped across the stone. Tiny and shiny and gold.
“Help!” Hiltrude choked. “Annora!”
The key lay idle between them. As Harvey and Hiltrude struggled on the floor, Maria slouched, extending her leg, tapping the ground with her bare foot toward the key. She could only slink down so far before her arms and hands ached behind her back. She spread her toes, reaching, slapping the cold stone.
Hiltrude screamed for the other creatures as Harvey pressed her to the floor beneath his weight. He was rather slim, and without legs, and bled nearly to death, but he still had fight in him. The cloth swept aside as the other creature stumbled out. Annora. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously, examining what the hubbub was.
“My hell!” Annora croaked. “My hell, my hell!”
Maria slapped her foot atop the key. Biting her cheek, she dragged it along the stone toward herself, inch by inch. Annora moved toward them, crossing the cave in a hurry. Her attention, luckily, was on the quarrel. Pulling her foot back to herself, the key stuck against the bumps in the ground and she lost it for a moment. She placed her foot upon it again. Dragged it a bit farther. She shimmied up the wall as she brought it closer and closer, until she was sitting up normally.
Annora saw none of this. She bent over the two on the floor, her sharp, claw-like fingers curled over their bodies as she decided how best to intervene.
“Let go of her,” she demanded of Harvey. Hiltrude gasped and sputtered with his fists pressing into the thick meat of her throat. “Harvey, that’s enough!”
Annora gripped him by the hair on his head and pulled him back. He moaned, but held firmly to the creature beneath him. Annora bared her teeth. With her thumb—the long, yellowed fingernail growing from it like a thorn—she pierced Harvey’s eye. His hands released Hiltrude’s throat and he fell away from her, the cave filled with his agony as Annora pulled him away by his tangled hair. He collapsed onto his back, writhing there, hands to his face, his eye leaking like drool between his fingers, moaning endlessly.
Maria’s forehead glistened with sweat as she waited stiffly, the key concealed beneath her foot. Hiltrude got to her feet with Annora’s assistance. They stood panting, eyeing the poor man on the ground. Maria cringed listening to his sounds. Guttural moans from deep in his chest, muffled by the—
He rolled suddenly, flipping onto his stomach, and pulled himself toward her across the stone. Maria flinched. His hand slapped her foot. She didn’t dare pull away, lest she reveal the secret underneath. His hand moved to her ankle, and he gripped her. She looked into his nightmarish face—one beautiful eye left with which to see her—and watched as he moaned so fiercely that the stitches tore through his lips, spurts of blood down his chin. Mouth open, he gasped for air he hadn’t tasted for who knew how long. He inhaled it greedily with a rattling in his lungs.
“Grab him!” Annora barked.
Hiltrude continued massaging her throat, unable to do much else for the time being. Growling, wheezing, Annora reached down, grabbed his legs above the ragged stumps, and tugged him back. He was dragged a foot or so, and his arm straightened, still holding Maria’s ankle. Annora tugged a second time, and he jerked Maria’s foot from the ground. The key lay exposed for all to see.
“Pale Mother’s heart!” he shouted, his voice a weak rasp. “Pale Mother’s heart! Reveal your secrets!”
Maria felt the message was meant for her, though she hadn’t a clue what he meant by it. As he was pulled farther and farther away—he released her ankle, and she stomped her foot immediately upon the key once more—he wheezed one last thing to her, barely audible, though she thought she understood what he said.
“The way out,” he whispered. That single, beautiful eye was fixed on her. “The way out… say it… say it…”
Annora lugged him until they were in the middle of the cave where Michael had previously hung, where the floor was bare. Here, she commanded Hiltrude to quit her fussing and help her already. Reluctantly, Hiltrude staggered over and, clearing her throat again and again, bent over Harvey’s helpless form and held him in place while Annora bound his hands be
hind his back yet again, with a thin rope this time. He was weak now. Spent. They manipulated him easily. Bullied him.
Once his hands were restrained, Annora fetched something from the table at their backs. A thick stick of charcoal, it appeared. Carefully, moving clumsily as Hiltrude held him in place, she drew a circle around the spot where he lay. Once she was finished, Hiltrude stepped back, leaving him to lie on his own.
Annora sang a chant of some kind, words Maria didn’t comprehend. In the middle of it, she stuck her thumb in her mouth and bit, drawing blood. She squatted and placed her thumb upon the circle she’d drawn. Standing, reaching the end of her spell, she clapped her hands together once and Maria jerked against the wall as the black line of chalk ignited, brightened to a hot, glowing white. In that instant, the cave was harshly lit as if by a flare. After a brief moment it faded, cooled to black again.
“What’s happening out there?” the third, unseen creature called.
“Almost ready, sister,” Annora said. She turned to Hiltrude. “Help her…”
Grumbling, Hiltrude disappeared behind the cloth.
Annora paced the cave, finger to her wriggling lips as she muttered to herself. There was a great sigh of strain behind the curtain. Then relief. In another moment, the curtain parted and the third creature stepped out in all her gruesome magnificence.
“It’s coming…” she said, waddling out from the cloth on careful, heavy feet. “We’re almost there, sisters…”
She was slathered in fresh, wet blood. Michael’s blood. Hiltrude followed quickly from the curtain, carrying with her the same bowl of blood as before. As she carried it, the third creature dipped her hands inside, and rubbed the thick, warm concoction down her neck, her droopy breasts, her swollen belly…
She was enormously pregnant, her belly so distended that it pulled toward the ground, covering her sex. So absurdly stretched, it was the only part of her not marked by rolls or deep-trench wrinkles. She dripped with blood. She slathered more onto herself, slippery with it. Her feet thundered on the stone as she came to stand with Annora beside the table. Hiltrude followed closely, keeping the bowl within arm’s reach.
