Sacrificing Virgins (27 page)

Gordon's voice boomed again. “Shoulda taken your winnings and gone.”

A heel ground into his left hand, and Terry screamed, yanking it away. But before the big man could crush his remaining grip, Terry pulled himself up as hard as he could with his remaining arm and managed to swing a leg back up to the board.

“No you don't,” Gordon laughed, but Terry was fast.

He reached with both hands around the wood and pulled, levering himself back up to the topside of the board. As the burly man reached down to grab him and throw him off, Terry struck. He kicked as hard as he could, catching the man right in the kneecaps and then shimmying backwards toward the game room as Gordon yelled in agony and fell to a crouch.

Petey came from somewhere and tried to stop him, but Terry kneed him in the balls, collapsing the wiry bandleader awkwardly over his fake leg. He dove around the other doorway back into the bar, grabbed his backpack, and was almost out the door when Jasmine stepped in his way.

“Wait,” she implored. “We could have fun. This'll blow over. Don't leave.”

He shoved her back, but she grabbed a beer bottle from the bar and raised it over her head.

“Don't make me use this,” she threatened. By now some of the rest of the crowd had piled back into the bar and were right behind her.

“I won't,” he agreed, raising a hand in surrender before slumping his shoulders to let his pack rest on the floor. The Indian with the chunk missing from his head stepped toward them. Terry could see that whoever'd sewn him up had done a pretty poor job. His cheek and forehead were crisscrossed with leathery scars. He looked like Frankenstein's monster.

Terry lunged out with one foot, kicking the sultry waitress right in the shark tattoo above her belly button. She gasped and fell backwards, disrupting the gathering crowd and bowling over Frankenstein. Terry yanked the door open and dashed out into the night. He dug around in his pack as he ran down the gravel of the main street and found the cool butt of the pistol they'd packed to hunt with. He pulled it out, shoved it into his waistband, and dropped the pack so he could move faster. They were right behind him.

“Fish bait!” they screamed. “Come back, worm!”

He ducked off the road into the forest and lay down behind a bush, hardly daring to breathe as he heard the tromp of several feet crash by. Then he stood up and slipped back toward the road. He knew he'd never survive out here if he got lost in the woods. And before he left this town, he had a debt to settle.

Terry slipped up around the side of the bar and listened at the voices arguing within. From the woods he heard the call and response of his hunters.

He stepped up to the wood porch of the bar and went back inside. Jasmine, Petey, and Gordon looked up as he came in.

“Take a walk,” Terry said and motioned toward the game room.

Gordon pointed at the swell of his knees. They'd had to cut off his pant legs and had been applying a towel filled with ice when he came in. “I ain't walking nowhere thanks to you.”

“Help him,” Terry said to the other two. “I mean it.”

Petey got up and started toward Terry, who leveled the gun straight at his face. The bandleader thought better of the attempt and stopped. He helped Jasmine lever Gordon up.

“The others will be back here in a couple minutes to deal with you,” the injured man warned, white goatee wagging like a tail.

“Won't matter,” Terry said. He herded them back to the game room. “Walk the plank,” he insisted.

“We won't all fit,” Jasmine protested.

“Walk,” he said and fired a shot at their feet. The sound was like an explosion, and the trio jumped forward as one. Two others were across the room, bandaging a wound on the bartender's half arm. They stood up.

“What're you thinkin'?” an older woman said, hands on her hips. “That man has got no chance against the sharks with those knees. That's not fair.”

“It wasn't fair what you did to us,” Terry said, turning back to Gordon. “Get in.”

“No. You can shoot me if you want.”

Jasmine tried to grab at Terry, but he swatted her away with the barrel of the gun, catching her on the side of the face. She went down hard and rolled off the plank to splash into the water.

“Now,” he insisted. “Go now and I'll give you a chance.”

Petey was crying. Terry aimed at his head, and the man lifted his fake leg over the edge and toppled in.

“Go.”

Gordon was the last man left, but he wasn't standing. The big man began crawling toward Terry, pulling himself sideways to keep the weight on his hip instead of his knees. Terry aimed the gun and shot him in the thigh. Gordon screamed and grabbed at the wound. He rolled in agony, hit a swollen knee, and screamed again, and this time fell off the plank, making a satisfying splash.

The old woman was coming around the pool, and Terry aimed at her. “You too.”

Bruce lay in the arms of another woman across the pool and didn't say a word as the old woman slid quietly into the water. Terry could hear someone crying.

The dark shapes came again from the corners, converging on the fresh bait. There was a scream, and a cherry bomb exploded in the water. And then another.

Terry stood and watched for a moment and then aimed his pistol at the thrashing, watery fight. He pulled the trigger once, and then again. And then twice more, for good measure.

Terry thought of the Fourth of July. The smell of gunpowder overpowered the stink of fish temporarily. As the echo of the shots faded, four bodies moved as one toward the edge of the pool. Two gray shapes drifted motionless.

“You killed them.” The bartender's whisper could be heard from across the pool.

Terry left the room and grabbed Wayne's backpack from the bar. He risked a last glance back at the bloody pool, where Jasmine clutched a wounded leg and the other two were trying to pull Gordon's bulk from the water.

“Fish bait,” he yelled. He didn't realize that he was crying.

Then he slipped out of the bar and ran down the gravel road until the first rays of dawn shone on the horizon and he couldn't run anymore. He yearned to see the headlights of a car, to hear the welcoming sounds of an FM radio. But the road was empty, and the woods remained still around him. In his head he only saw the face of his friend, wide-eyed and dying beneath the water. He only heard two words, repeating over and over and over.

“Fish bait.”

Camille Smiled

Camille smiled. I thought so, anyway.

And then she sighed.

It was faint, light as baby's breath. But I swear I heard it.

I stroked a wisp of black hair from the marble-smooth slope of her forehead.

“Wake up, honey,” I whispered. “Talk to me, baby.”

It had been days since I'd last heard her voice, and the house felt deadly still without the sparkling tinkle of her laughter. As if the whole world was holding its breath, waiting. I didn't know if I could stand another day of it.

Hour after hour I'd waited by her bedside, pacing, praying, bending to listen for her heart at her breast, holding a mirror to her lips to see if she breathed. I straightened the handwoven necklace that voodoo queen Madame Trevail had sold me, down in her tiny shop hidden near the French Quarter. I centered its small pouch of leaves and clippings and extracts of God only knew what until it rested like a teabag in the small of her neck. Then I reconsidered and moved it out of that pale hollow, thinking that its miniscule weight might choke her tiny throat as it rested in that most delicate of settings.

“Wake up,” I begged again, and stared at her tiny frame, so still and frail there on the bed. She wore her finest dress, a yellow chiffon summery thing that my wife Annabel had picked. “It brings out her eyes,” she'd said.

If only I could see those eyes now. It seemed like forever since they'd gazed up at me, so wide and blue, and turned my scolds to dust. She had one of those faces, one of those
looks
, that melted any offense. She was going to bring a lot of men to their knees someday, I knew.

“Jack, come to bed,” a voice spoke behind me.

I turned and Anna was there in the doorframe, her eyes red and swollen, her fist stifling a yawn.

“She sighed,” I explained.

“She didn't.” Anna's voice sounded brittle as spun glass.

“She did, I heard her. She'll wake soon, I know it.”

Anna cried, a low stifled moan, and I went to her. This was a pain we shared, a fear we couldn't live with. I couldn't bear to see her suffer, though I felt the same empty pit in my soul. I pulled her close, cushioning her head to my shoulder.

“Believe, Anna,” I whispered through the tangled web of her raven hair, so like her daughter's.

She pushed away.

“Believe?” she hissed, shoving again at my shoulders. I retreated toward the bed but she kept coming.

“Believe in what?” she yelled. “Our daughter is not going to wake up again, why can't you understand that?”

She stomped to the bed and grabbed Camille's dress with both hands. The sound of ripping fabric filled the room and Anna turned to me with the shredded lemon chiffon still gripped in her hands.

“Look at her,” she cried, pointing at my eight-year-old daughter's undeveloped chest. The porcelain-white skin was hideously broken by accusing blushes of purple and midnight blue. Black, oozing stitches held my daughter's chest together from the ruin that the fender of an '87 Ford had made of it. My daughter would never grow up to wow the boys with her bosom. She would never have one.

“Cammy is dead, Jack,” Anna wailed. “When are you going to accept it? When are you going to take her back to the cemetery, where she belongs?”

Her voice had risen to a dangerous boiling-tea pitch.

“I can't stand to see her anymore,” she cried, laying her face on the ugly dark crosshatching of Camille's chest. “I can't stand to see you like this anymore.”

“Anna,” I began. She shrugged off my hand and rushed from the room.

I turned back to Camille, and tried to draw the shreds of her dress back to a seemly covering.

“Wake up, baby,” I said for the thousandth time. I thought I saw her eyelids crease, just slightly and I leaned forward, anxious.

Her eyes opened.

Maybe it was the press of Anna's touch, or her tears or the violence of her actions. Maybe the voodoo sachet I'd hocked my second car to obtain had just taken its time. But for the first time in days, my baby's beautiful crystal-blue eyes stared up out of that tiny angel face and into mine. Only they seemed dulled, lacking that ocean-deep warmth I remembered.

“Cammy?” I said, bending to hug her.

She clubbed me in the side of the head with her fist.

“Huh?” I gulped and fell to the floor, more out of surprise than hurt.

Camille sat up in her bed, and looked down at me on the floor. Her expression remained blank.

“Honey?” I said, rubbing my ear. I could feel the heat of swelling as a flood of blood rushed through my earlobe. It felt like a bee sting.

Camille lifted a foot over the edge of the mattress, and then stood, walking slowly, stiffly past me to her dresser. She stood there staring at the mirror and didn't move. I thought she was looking at her face, but then as I eased off the floor, I saw that her finger was tracing the long jagged paths stitched into her chest. Her skin shone with the glossy smear of something liquid, something leaking, where her finger had passed.

“It will all be okay now,” I said. She leaned in toward the mirror, and then turned. A split second later I realized that it might not all be okay.

I barely saw her arm in the air before her pet rock caught me right between the eyes with the force of a major league fastball.

When my vision cleared, she was gone. My head was aching, but my heart felt worse. Something had gone horribly wrong. My beautiful daughter, the little flower who meant more to me than life, would never have hurt a fly, let alone her daddy. But her first two actions upon waking from a sleep deeper than death were to try to hurt me.

Bad.

I gingerly probed the thick bump on my forehead.

Was my daughter dangerous?

Was my daughter alive?

A ragged blade of ice serrated my brain when I turned my head, but gritting my teeth, I grabbed hold of the mattress and pushed myself to my feet. Gingerly, ignoring the pain, I padded out of the room. I had to find Camille. Before she hurt herself.

Or someone else.

I pushed open the door to our bedroom, and saw the pale moon of Anna's cheek setting into the pillow. One hand grasped at my untenanted pillow, and her chest moved slowly, rhythmically. She was already asleep.

I pulled the door shut and took the stairs down to the front room, praying Cammy was still in the house.

And afraid to find her if she was.

The great room was all shadows and floating fear, and I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other to cross it. I had to get to the light switch, but what if my newly resurrected daughter came at me when I couldn't see her?

With each step, I paused to listen, but my heart's insistent pounding drowned out any ambient noise. The house seemed silent. I found the wall near the front door and slid my hand along the frame, looking for the switch plate. I could feel the draught of cold seeping in from outside through the seam in the doorframe, but it wasn't as cold as the ice in my belly. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I pushed my hand fast up the wall, at last connecting with the switch.

The light on the end table near our couch blazed on, blinding me for a moment. I turned and pressed my back to the door, ready for whatever might come at me.

But nothing did.

The room was empty, still. The morning newspaper still lay open on the center cushion of the couch, and the TV remote hung halfway off the coffee table, where I'd left it hours before.

Then I saw her.

Camille stood, unmoving, in the arch leading to the kitchen. Her eyes stared straight at me, yet she seemed unaware of anything. There was no recognition in her gaze. No life in her smile. She seemed like a living doll.

There was, however, a long silver carving knife in her hand. It was the knife I used to carve Thanksgiving turkeys, and it looked ludicrously large in her grip, its point just barely above the carpet as she held the shaft in her tiny hand. I knew exactly who and what it was meant for.

“Cammy,” I said, trying without success to level the tremor in my voice. I had to be calm. She was just a child.
My
child. “Baby, what's the matter? Everything's okay now, you're with Mommy and Daddy again. I brought you back because I loved you.”

She began to walk toward me then, placing one delicately sculpted foot in front of the other, her ghastly white toes glowing in contrast to the taupe of the carpet. She said nothing.

“Cammy,” I tried again, trying to think of what would entice her. “Let Daddy…get you a nice bowl of ice cream. Does your tummy hurt?”

Her feet sped up and she was across the room, raising her arm with the clear intent to pin me with her blade to the door.

“Baby, stop,” I begged, but she didn't.

As the knife flashed into motion, I acted, sliding down the door and throwing my body to the right. The knife clacked against the wood behind me. When I hit the floor in front of the end table, I rolled away, coming up in a crouch, ready to move again. She was already upon me, raising the knife for the kill.

“Cammy, no,” I cried, and instead of rolling away from her, I launched myself
into
her, tackling her at the knees at the same time as I brought my palm up to grasp her thin forearm. She fell backwards with the unexpected slam of my weight, and the floor reverberated with the smack of her skull on the carpet. She didn't move.

I almost let go of her arm to cradle her head, parental concern overriding self-preservation, but Cammy didn't miss a trick. Her stillness had been a feint. The knife began to slice towards my throat as I hesitated, and I pushed away from her just in time. Something warm was suddenly dripping down my chest, but I didn't pause to look. She was already on her feet again, free, and coming towards me.

“Stop,” I cried, putting the coffee table between us, and desperately looking for something I could use to hold her back, without hurting her.

She held no similar concern. Face blank of any emotion, my little baby walked around the coffee table, knife raised high, ready to slice without remorse into her daddy.

I grabbed one of the couch cushions and thrust it out at her just as she struck.

“No,” I yelled, and pushed the cushion—and Cammy—backwards until her feet tangled and she fell again. This time, her back slapped on the decorative oaken strip of the couch front and I heard something crack.

Then she was lying still again on the floor, eyes open, and still empty. This time, she stayed down.

The hall light flicked on and Anna appeared on the steps, one fist shoved into her teeth, stifling a yawn.

“What's going on down here?” she demanded, hand and yawn serving muffle her words.

I looked down at our baby lying on the floor, the knife lying just inches from her hand.

“It's Cammy,” I said, still fighting for breath. “She's alive again.”

Anna said nothing, but continued down the stairs until she was standing just a couple feet away. Her cheeks glistened in the dull orange light.

“She's dead, Jack.”

“No, honey,” I argued. “After you left, she woke up, and she punched me and then she ran away, so I came down here to find her and…”

“
Stop!
” Anna screamed. “Our daughter is fucking
dead
, Jack. She's dead, dead,
dead
. I don't know what you're doing down here with her body; I don't want to know. I can't stand this anymore. I can't stand you. Put her back upstairs. And tomorrow, you're taking her back to the cemetery. And I don't want to hear any more about your voodoo black magic bullshit. This is too much.”

My wife ran up the stairs then, leaving me standing there, staring at the unmoving form that once was my baby, on the carpet.

“Cammy,” I whispered, kneeling down next to her. But she didn't answer. The hair stood up on the back of my neck as cautiously, I touched her cheek, and felt the side of her neck. She was cold to my fingers. There was no pulse. After a moment, I traced the soft skin of her eyelids, and then pushed them closed. Slipping my hands beneath her neck and knees, I lifted my baby from the floor, and carried her back to her room.

She didn't move as we walked up the stairs, and didn't blink as I laid her once again upon her bed. There was nothing to show that, just minutes before, she'd been trying to stab my life from me.

I closed the bedroom door behind me, but didn't turn out the light. As I crawled into a bed gently shaking with the slowing sobs of my wife, I was trembling. I lay there for hours, listening to the subtle shifts and creaks as the house settled. I was waiting. I was anticipating the tiny footsteps in the hallway, ready for the slow creak of our bedroom door as it opened, revealing the form of my killer baby with the empty eyes and silver sharp blade.

It was a very long time before I fell asleep.

The sunlight hurt my eyes when I opened them. I blinked out a tear and reached out for Anna, but she wasn't there. The sheets were rumpled with the absence of her weight. The clock gleamed 8:14 in electric blue LED.

I pulled on my sweatpants and shambled into the hallway, hearing the sounds of breakfast echoing from the kitchen.

“Anna,” I called, and my wife answered with more cheer than I'd heard from her in a week.

“Down here, hon,” she said.

The air was alert with the smell of burning butter, and pancakes. I winced. Cammy's favorite food.

And when I stepped into the kitchen, I saw why.

Cammy was seated at the table, in her usual place. Anna looked up from the griddle and smiled. She finished flipping a cake and then met me at the doorway, kissing my cheek with a flutter.

“I'm sorry I doubted you, honey,” she said. “I don't know how, I don't wanna know how, but she's back. Oh Jack, it's a miracle!”

I looked over to the table, and saw the same blank stare from my daughter that had haunted me the night before.