by Abe Moss
Harvey moaned from the ground. Maria watched with mounting terror as he rolled side to side. The black circle traced around him lit bright and white again as he rolled against its edge, then faded as he rolled away from it. A barrier of some kind.
The cave filled with the sounds of all three creatures’ chanting. It was language both stunning at times, alluring, but also repugnant. Perhaps that was only the quality of their voices. Garbled, overripe. Annora unfolded a long blanket or towel from the table and placed it on the floor at the edge of Harvey’s circle. Setting the bowl of blood on the table for a moment, Hiltrude helped the third creature—Talma?—onto the blanket, positioned on her back, knees raised. Maria hadn’t quite the wherewithal to realize until now what she was about to witness. It struck her with a sick, stomach-clenching dread.
“Here we are…” Hiltrude said, returning to the table, lifting the bowl into her arms once more. “Here we are…”
She carried it toward Harvey, standing beside his thrashing head, his mouth parted weakly. Annora joined Hiltrude, dipped her hands into the bowl she carried, and trickled the blood onto him. He flinched as it dripped on his face, turned away.
The creatures shuddered with pleasure as they resumed their incoherent, mostly tuneless chanting.
“It’s coming!” Talma cried from the floor. “O’ unhallowed Mother, it’s coming…”
Maria’s guts made terrible sounds. She felt them slither inside her, coiling, preparing to eject themselves if she watched any longer. But her eyes were locked as if under a spell themselves, secured to the bleak and depraved ritual. In the back of her mind, as she witnessed each increasingly macabre evolution to the night’s events, it occurred to her she would follow in Harvey’s footsteps at some point soon. This wasn’t only his fate. It was the fate of those poor souls whose heads were on display along the walls, and whose essences were contained in the glowing jars along the shelves. They’d each endured something like this, she imagined. Some worse than others, possibly. Some worse than this, though she couldn’t fathom anything to beat it…
Intermixed with their chanting, Maria heard phrases she did understand.
“It’s coming…” Talma breathed from the floor, again and again. “It’s coming… It’s coming…”
Annora waved Hiltrude away. Hiltrude set the bowl upon the floor, just outside the ritual circle, and then scurried off behind the brown cloth, disappearing for a short while. Annora went to Talma, kneeled beside her. She put her blood soaked hands upon her sister’s belly. Talma’s breathing quickened. Louder. Louder. Raspy and choked with mucus.
“O’ child of sin, child of the moon!” Annora called. She threw her head back in ecstasy, her wide, crooked-toothed mouth opened toward the ceiling. “O’ child of sin, child of the moon! Hiltrude!”
Hiltrude appeared again, dashing through the cloth with something new in her possession.
“I’m here, I’m here…”
An axe rested heavily in her hands, old and rudimentary in appearance. But sharp. The blade was stained a dark reddish-brown except for the very edge where it had recently been sharpened. Maria watched almost in a daze by this point, caught in the sickening momentum of their ceremony. Hiltrude shuffled toward their ritual grounds and came to stand over Harvey, the handle of the axe clutched in both hands.
“O’ child of sin, child of the moon!” Annora repeated. She rested her adoring gaze on her pregnant sister, then looked to the harvested man on the ground, hands tied behind his back. “Accept this false father’s sacrifice, o’ true father! Oh, grace us with your unholy adoption! Accept our child of sin, our child of the moon! Bound in blood, by your darkness, have him! Have him, our father! Our dark father, our dark lover, have him! Have him!”
“Blood of the innocent,” Hiltrude sang, and lowered the axe’s head into the bowl of Michael’s blood. As she lifted it, those old, dark, dry stains were refreshed with bright, dripping crimson. “Blood of the innocent,” she repeated, lifting the axe over her head. “Blood of the sinner!”
Maria’s heart pounded to the surface of her chest and she rocked with it, swayed in place, a sensation of weightlessness as the creatures’ magic pulsed into the room, enveloped them like a throbbing, intoxicating cloud.
“In death, give us life!”
She let the axe fall.
In that final moment, Harvey’s tormented face craned to see Maria, bound in fright as much as in chains. His remaining eye penetrated hers, seized hold of her thoughts like a tightening lasso, and time stood still. He urged her. She stilled in her rocking, held firm by their wordless exchange. Carried through the wicked magic in the air, a great favor was asked, a pleading, and she was helpless not to consent to it. Like the chains around her wrists, a phantom chain formed between them, anchored in the space between each of their ribs. Crushing in its urgency. All it took was a meeting of their eyes and the promise was made.
There was a noisy chink of metal against stone and he twitched, the thick blade crushing his neck in two. His head rolled from his body, met the invisible barrier with a flash of brightened chalk, then stilled.
Annora let out a soft breath of awe. She got to her feet, something moving and alive cradled in her arms.
“Sister,” Talma said from the ground. “Let me see. Show me.”
The baby was glistening and serene. Annora crouched beside its mother, allowing her a closer look. Talma sighed pleasantly.
“My, my, my…” she said, and touched the baby’s tiny fingers, which it curled into fists beneath its squishy face.
Meanwhile, as the pain and brutality of the last several minutes caught up with her, and her insides squeezed themselves at the sight of it, Maria vomited.
Scowling at Maria’s lack of tact, Hiltrude set down the axe and turned to the shelves. There she searched until she found an empty glass jar. She returned to the ritual circle. As Maria finished wiping her mouth dry, she looked to the spot where Harvey’s body remained and noticed something spectacular within.
A glowing mist hung suspended in the air, long and curling like a ribbon. Dim and red. It floated gently in circles, skirting the invisible barrier, it seemed. Hiltrude approached with the jar in hand, the jar’s lid in the other. She recited another incantation—elegant if not for her putrid voice. She extended the jar into the circle, apparently accessible from the outside, and Maria watched as the glowing mist suddenly redirected toward it. It trailed through the air, winding slowly. Hiltrude chanted all the while, guiding it like a snake charmer. The mist pooled into the jar, filled it up until its glowing tail slipped inside and Hiltrude hastily screwed on the lid. She held it up over her face, admiring the energy trapped inside.
“Welcome to your new home.”
She carried it to those other shelves, the highest ones lined with similar jars, and placed Harvey’s alongside them. Maria wondered if her brother had a place up there. She hadn’t been awake when it was done, after all…
As if overhearing her thoughts, Hiltrude looked over her shoulder.
“You’ll have a spot there, too. Soon… Pretty girl…”
“Help me,” Talma spoke to Hiltrude. “Help me to bed…”
With the baby in her arms, Annora stood back as Hiltrude toward their fatigued sister. She bent, took her Talma’s hands, and with a strenuous grunt helped her to her feet.
“Oh, what a miracle,” Annora whispered to the baby. “A treasure…”
“Annora,” Talma said as Hiltrude assisted her toward the brown cloth, each step a labor of its own. “Bring the child… bring the child…”
Together, the three women disappeared behind the curtain. Their voices went on and on, enchanted by the creature they had spawned. It appeared as a human baby, but Maria thought she knew better than that.
As they were preoccupied for the time being, she dragged her foot closer, the key still pinched there, sliding across the rough stone. Exhausted as she was, she tried her best to get the key under her toe and to flick it toward her
self. Just a little. Close enough to reach with her bound hands …
She scraped the key under her toe and sent it skipping toward the wall at her back. She slouched again, felt it on her fingers. She picked it up, squeezed it preciously in her fist. She watched the brown curtain across the cave, listened to their voices endlessly talking and crooning over one another. A haunting sound.
Now wasn’t the time, she decided. They might come through the curtain at any moment. She would wait. They must be tired, she thought. It’d been a long night. After childbirth, Talma would certainly rest. Absolutely. And as she rested, what might the other two creatures do? They would rest as well. They must, at some point. And until then, Maria decided she would rest. Gather some strength. Think of a plan.
She turned the key in her fingers behind her back. A chance in her grasp. Just one.
Her weary eyes fell upon Harvey’s corpse in the middle of the cave. So much blood spilled. And somewhere out of sight, down the black passage on the other side of the cave, her brother’s body lay waiting. Poor Michael, she thought. She wished she could cry for him. More, at least. Perhaps if she lived through this, she might. If the numbness which seeped into her ever lifted, that was. She felt a shell of herself. A body at their disposal. Nothing like Maria. She was an animal now, waiting for the slaughter. Plotting her escape. Gears turning.
—Pale Mother’s heart—
Harvey’s last words rang in her mind emptily. Meaningless. She lay her head back against the cold stone and shut her eyes. Despite the chance she held in the palm of her hand, she felt it ultimately a slim one.
There was plenty of space left on that shelf of glowing jars.
CHAPTER SIX
DREAMS OF DAWN
She didn’t sleep, but she rested and her mind drifted into a smooth kind of thoughtlessness. She breathed—in and out, in and out—and her muscles turned limp for a time. In the background, she listened to the witches—
Witches. That’s what they are. Exactly what they are—
—murmur to one another, fawning over the newborn.
—in death, give us life!—
She thought she’d wait until they decided to sleep, but it seemed they might never.
“Bitch!”
Maria opened her eyes just as the brown curtain flapped open violently. Hiltrude stormed out, baring her teeth as she marched across the cave in her direction. Her eyes fell upon her, and Maria withdrew as she recognized the spite in them.
“You,” Hiltrude said. “Where is it? Hmm?”
Hiltrude scanned the ground around the ritual circle, around Harvey’s corpse. She bent and lifted his head, like turning a stone, and then dropped it carelessly. She pushed his body aside with her foot. She huffed, dissatisfied. She focused on Maria again. She came toward her, trembling, breasts like pendulums against her belly. Her fingers were splayed like claws as she neared.
“Where is it?” she said again.
Maria stuttered. “I-I don’t… I don’t…”
“Move,” Hiltrude demanded. “Move, I said! Scoot!”
She leaned aside as Hiltrude demanded, moved an inch or so away, as far as her chains allowed. Hiltrude scoured the floor with her menacing, yellow-slit eyes. She crouched so that their eyes were level. Her odor—fishy and oily and sour—clung to Maria’s face and she grimaced.
“Hmmm?” Hiltrude asked, a rumbling in the back of her throat. “You have it. I know you do.”
“What are… what do you mean?”
Hiltrude’s frowning mouth curled into a snarl. She seized Maria by the hair, pulled her forward away from the wall, head bent toward her lap. Maria cried out. With her other hand, Hiltrude took Maria by the arm, observed both her tightly clasped hands.
“Open your hands,” she demanded. “Now.”
“I don’t have anything,” Maria pleaded. “I don’t—”
Something pricked the skin of her wrist like a tack. Hiltrude’s claws. She sank them deeper, squeezed Maria’s arm tighter as the nail bit deep. Whimpering, Maria opened her fingers. She grew rigid at the sound of the key clinking against the stone.
“Ha!”
Hiltrude snatched the key up. Still gripping Maria’s scalp, she forced her back, knocking the back of her skull against the cave wall. Maria blinked her eyes and saw a spiral of flashing gold across her vision. Hiltrude’s bloated, scowling face slid into view. She grabbed Maria by the chin, forcing their eyes to meet.
“Look at me, bitch,” she growled. “Look into my eyes.”
Those awful, sleepless yellow eyes bore their way into Maria’s resolve. She only became aware she was crying as she tasted the salt of her tears on her tongue.
“Your time is running out. You understand? You see him, there? You see him?” The witch nodded in Harvey’s direction. What was left of him, anyway. “Get a good look. Yours will be worse.”
She released Maria’s hair. Maria brought her legs in, huddled into herself, head bowed on her knees, letting her hair fall around her face as a shield to her vision. She cried pitifully. A barbed, biting dread expanded inside her. She would die here, she thought. Of course. She’d been silly not to know that already. In her mind’s eye, she saw Michael’s lifeless form fall and scrunch on the cave floor like a rubber suit. She would be next. And though she still breathed, still sobbed, still trembled, she felt dead as them already. The worse part was that it wouldn’t be over quickly. They would take their time.
Hiltrude shuffled about. Maria listened under the blindfold of her hair. A dull ache radiated around the back of her head. Hot and flashing. Soon another set of feet joined Hiltrude’s. Annora, most likely. Their feet slapped and scraped and whispered over the cave floor as they bustled about, cleaning up by the sounds of it. Talking to themselves.
“Bitch…” Hiltrude muttered in a low voice to herself. She was organizing things back on their shelves, clearing the table. “You bitch… That’s right. You pretty, good-for-nothing little bitch… I’ll tell you… I’ll tell you, you sniveling… you sniveling…”
Practicing for their next exchange, perhaps.
Maria wondered what time it was. Was it still dark? Did the full moon still shine high in the sky? Was it morning? Were her parents awake? Did they see their children’s empty bed? The motel door standing open? An early-morning chill blowing through? They were vanished, Maria thought. As if out of thin air. Taken into the night. In the desert, there would be no sign of them at all.
“What will we do with her?” Hiltrude asked aloud. “A pretty, virgin girl…”
Maria listened intently, though she didn’t raise her head to see them.
“Virgin?” Annora asked. “You think?”
“Oh, yes,” Hiltrude said. She laughed softly. “I tasted her before. As she slept. It’s strong. Innocent as her baby brother, twice the age. She’s… ripe.”
Hiltrude cackled—a grating sound between the cramped cave’s walls.
“We’ll make plenty use of her,” Annora said matter-of-factly. “We’ll need her later, surely.”
“For our next hunt,” Hiltrude said excitedly. “To don our youthful disguises. Oh yes… With her, we’ll glow!”
“Finish cleaning this mess,” Annora advised. “I’m taking the bodies outside to bury. Start scrubbing in the meantime, will you?”
“Yes…” Hiltrude said, still fantasizing. “Of course…”
Maria lifted her head to watch Annora go. The naked hag moved toward the dark passage. She put her long-fingered hand on the wall as she entered, following it into the black. Then she was gone.
Hiltrude returned behind the cloth for a moment. Her voice carried faintly to Maria’s ears, talking sweetly to the sleeping baby somewhere in that hidden space. When she returned, she carried a bucket of sloshing water. She set it down heavily, panting with her effort. She turned around, searched the table. She peeked underneath, where a disorganized variety of things were stored. She grabbed something and brought it to the bucket. It appeared to be a sponge,
or a brush. It was black in the witch’s hands. Groaning like an old woman, she got down on her knees atop the ritual circle, where the blood was coagulated now. Slimy. She dipped her sponge into the bucket and then got to work scrubbing the floor. Dirty water released from the sponge in a pink wave.
As she continued to clean, she glanced in Maria’s direction and caught her watching.
“It should be you…” Hiltrude growled. “Cleaning all this up. That’s how we should get use out of you. Such a pretty thing… easy to break…”
She wrung the sponge inside the bucket. Each time she began scrubbing the floor with more water in the sponge, the blood lifted from the stone a little more, a puddle of dirty, bloodied water spreading across the ground. It was less cleaning the cave floor than it was simply spreading the mess and thinning it out. Judging by the looks of these creatures, the witches, cleanliness wasn’t at the top of their priorities, anyway. As it’s said, cleanliness was next to godliness. Wasn’t that how it went, Maria thought? She couldn’t remember…
Even if it was filled with her brother’s blood, Harvey’s blood—and blood older than both, most likely—Maria couldn’t help swallowing dryly at the sight of the puddling water. The sounds as Hiltrude twisted it into the bucket. Again and again.
Hiltrude continued washing the floor, and Maria, mind floating distantly in a dark, full-moon sky, found herself entranced by the pouch around the witch’s neck, dangling and bouncing and swinging as the witch scrubbed on her hands and knees. Maria’s chance was inside that pouch. Contained there hopelessly…
Hiltrude squeezed the sponge out, dipped it into the polluted water, and then splashed it again across the stone, washing the chalk away. The death.
As Maria licked her dry lips, an idea occurred to her.
Softly, she said, “I’m thirsty…”
Hiltrude didn’t seem to hear at first, so Maria said it again, a little louder.
“I’m thirsty.”
