Sacrificing Virgins (2 page)

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 many 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.

In a haze of time, he even vaguely remembered once getting his driver's license, which allowed him to drive the car…
speaking of which…

Jayce pulled to the side of the road and put the car in park. Then he pulled out his wallet. If he had a license, he at least would know where to go home to, since it included his address. So long as he hadn't moved recently.

In moments he had discovered his address, and cross referenced it with a map from the glove box. The morning fog lifted as he navigated his way home, stopping once at a gas station to find out exactly where he was starting from, since Clandestine wasn't on the map. He laughed at that.

The gray morning fog had lifted by the time he stepped onto the wooden porch of the small bungalow he apparently called home. He froze for a second as he slid a key into the lock. What if he was married and there was a woman inside whom he didn't know? Or worse yet…what if he was divorced and he no longer actually lived here?

The lock clicked, and before he could think of any further debilitating scenarios, the door had creaked open. He stepped inside, shutting it quietly but firmly behind him. He knew in an instant that nobody was home. The air hung stagnant, stale, yet spiced with the hint of cumin.

He quickly saw why when he stepped past the empty dining room table and into the narrow run of the kitchen.

One long counter, meant for a cook's workspace, was littered with empty Thai takeout boxes. As he stepped into the room something small and brown darted away from one of the boxes to slip in between the creamy counter backsplash and the kitchen wall. From the corner of his eye, Jayce thought he saw the dash for safety repeated elsewhere around him. He shivered and left the room to the bugs.

Upstairs in the bedroom, he found a rumpled mess of pale sheets wound inside an ocean-blue comforter. Elegant gold thread slipped and curled in subtle filigree patterns across the thick bedcover; they glimmered like firefly capillaries in the dull light as he threw the sheets up to cover the crushed mound of pillows. Apparently he hadn't cooked
or
made the bed in a while. He ran a finger across the dark wood of a woman's dresser and stared at the gray silt that had collected there. Or dusted or cleaned.

He reached around a ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary to pick up a picture frame from the dresser. The frame enclosed an action shot, rather than a portrait. He recognized a younger version of the face he had seen in the mirror this morning. Broad cheeks with a shadow of time turning to whiskers. Thick black eyebrows pulled back against an unmanageable tousle of hair. He was laughing in the photo, as was the woman whose shoulder he draped an arm around. One long lock of cinnamon hair obscured her right eye, but her left held the secret mirth of a cat's eye. Emerald and squinting at whatever moment they shared. Captured in that second when all the two of them could do was gasp for air from laughter, while holding back the tears of life. He searched his memory for some clue, but his brain remained mute. His heart did not turn over. Jayce felt no connection at all to the picture or the woman.

Next to the frame was another, this one a posed portrait of a small child. A boy judging by the outfit. The toddler knelt in front of an obviously fake fall photo backdrop, chubby hands locked together atop a small stepladder with a collage of red and orange and browned leaves behind him. From the light of the photo, it appeared that the child's eyes were green.
Like his mother's
, Jayce guessed.

I knew these two well, if I kept their pictures on my dresser
, he supposed. Girlfriend and her kid? His own wife and son? He realized suddenly that there was a ring on the fourth finger of his left hand.

God! Jayce slammed his fist down on the dresser and a bottle of woman's perfume shivered on the edge of a small shelf next to the mirror. It fell and shattered on the wood below and the room filled with the dizzying scent of gardenias and vanilla.

Jayce breathed in the scent and gasped.

…black lace slipped high and stark on the cream of her thigh, and he moved his lips farther, up into the warmth of her, tongue teasing at her sweetness as he inhaled that warm elixir of her sex. Her fingers twined in his hair, pulling him closer as he tasted her heaven and breathed in her perfume, lust mixed with the lush of gardenias, woody vanilla spiced with love. His eyes flickered at the intensity of the moment, as she pressed harder against him and filled the perfumed air with the soft cry of her pleasure…

In a flash the moment was gone again, and Jayce staggered backwards, resting against the bed. He pressed a palm to his cheek, and closed his eyes again, trying to delve deeper into the memory, farther into the moment unlocked, and then stolen away again. But now he only smelled the overpowering thickness of spilled perfume, and presently he went to the bathroom to find a washrag to sponge up the spill before it ruined the wood. It was his dresser, he supposed, so he might as well take care of it.

He opened the bedroom and kitchen windows and cracked the front door to let in a breeze. The air chilled him to the bone and the furnace kicked on and ran and ran. It couldn't keep up with the first breath of winter. But the cold braced him, woke him. He'd been in a fog since he'd woken this morning in the strange bed, and now he needed a plan. Something had happened to him, and he needed to find out what. Was he in danger? Where was his wife, and, he supposed, his son? Who could he call to find out?

He glanced across the room and saw the black-and-silver answering machine station sitting on an end table, one receiver poking its thin plastic antennae at the ceiling. A red light flashed incessantly, a heartbeat demanding notice.

Jayce reached out to touch the button to hear the message and then hesitated. His neck grew instantly cold. What if he didn't want to know?

He
needed
to know.

“Hey, Jayce. It's Bill from work. You remember work, don't you? We remember you…but we haven't seen you this week. Or heard from you. And well… Listen, I'm sorry about this, I really am, but…you brought this on yourself man. I mean—we were really understanding after Becky and…well, you know. But…it's been months now, Jayce. And you're not any better. We never know when you're going to turn up…or if you're going to turn up at all. I talked to you about this last week and you promised that was the last time. Well…I'm afraid this is the last time. We've gotta pull the plug and get someone in here who's
here
, Jayce. I'm really sorry about this because you're a nice guy and I know it's been a lot to handle but…um…well listen, I'll see you around, I'm sure…”

So…he'd apparently gotten himself fired from…wherever it was he worked. He would have called back and found that much out at least, but the phone said
unlisted number
on the call log.

Jayce closed the door and the kitchen windows. He was now cold inside and out. Stacking the partially empty takeout cartons one inside of the other, he cleared the kitchen counters of debris, wiping up the food and stains with a wet paper towel.

That was when he found the notepad by the kitchen phone. The edges of the top sheet were covered in scrawled notes, and doodles.
Thai Bonsai—555-1223
read one note, which matched the name on the boxes he'd just thrown away.
Saturday at 8
read another note, without further description. Who knew what he'd been planning for Saturday. Or even which Saturday.

Jean says quote is no
read another. And
Nothing lasts
still another. As he searched for a memory to explain them, to find context, Jayce wondered if all the notes people scrawled by their phones were so oblique. At least to a stranger. And he was a stranger, at the moment. A stranger to his own life.

At the bottom of the sheet, hedged off in the corner by a triple crosshatched box, was another phone number, this one surrounded by a single explanatory note:
She can help
.

Jayce picked up the phone, and dialed the number. He didn't know what “she” could help with. But at the moment, he'd take any help he could get.

A cool female voice answered on the fourth ring. “How can I help you,” she asked.

“I'm not really sure,” he said. “I can't really remember how this all started…”

He was surprised at her answer. “That's a great start…”

The road seemed vaguely familiar as Jayce wound through the city following the directions the woman had given.

After a while, he realized it was more than familiar. He pulled through the narrow steel gates and drove into the parking lot of a building that teased the sky in a defiant thrust.

Jayce wondered if he'd taken the same parking space as he'd left earlier this morning. Shrugging and curious, he exited the car and walked towards the building where he'd awoken just hours before.

The parking lot was still empty, but for his car.

The door opened just a crack and Jayce could see the shadowed glint of a large brown eye through the narrow opening. “It
is
you,” she said, and a chain clattered metallic against the door as it opened farther. “Come in,” she said.

Jayce stepped inside, but didn't immediately follow her after closing the door. The room was exactly as he remembered it from this morning, only now, there was a woman inside…and that made everything about the space different. She wore only two thin strips of black lace lingerie above and below a tightly cinched corset. Jayce followed the bob of the dangling corset laces as she crossed the room and sank to the bed. She patted the mattress beside her and beckoned him over.

“Come here,” she said in the lowest melody of near-silence. He obeyed her, taking her all in as he came to stand beside her and then joined her on the bed. Her eyes watched him, wide and brown as a doe's, lashes unblinking. A haze of lushly black hair cascaded over her shoulder, broken in its midnight by a thick strand that glowed as red as neon. As red as her glossed lips. As red as the balm that traced and overwrote the thin seam of her eyebrows.