Blood Sacrifice (10 page)
2004
Harsh lights arrive as an unexpected visitor. Elise stirs, turning over, pulling the sheet over her head. How can it be morning already? Yet she hears the birds outside, the traffic, the cries in the street…just another day. The pedestrian sounds are unreal, the soundtrack to a movie. Elise struggles to return to the oblivion of her sleep. Was the night before a dream? She can’t remember. She just wants to remove the bright reality of consciousness.
But sleep betrays her, scampering away, casting mocking looks over its shoulder. Besides, it’s already hot. Elise whips the sheet away from her moist, overheated skin. Squinting at the sunlight, she wonders where the darkness and the cool cover of night have gone. The air hangs palpable and dead. Elise sits up, looks around her small room.
Night, Elise thinks, isn’t the only thing that left her while she slept. Where has Maria gone? The pillow where her head had lain still bears an indentation from Maria’s head. She had not expected, for the first time in how many years, to wake up alone again. Her head buzzes, with anger, with hurt, with the fog left over from the pot Maria fed her. Her body aches: sore nipples, sex that feels bruised and chafed. These are pleasant pains, but would have been almost celebratory had Maria still been here with her.
Why should she expect more? Hasn’t she learned that life is nothing more than a series of disappointments? Isn’t that what she has steeled herself against?
How could it be so easy for someone to come in (a woman, no less!) and just knock over her defenses like tiny green toy soldiers?
Elise dangles her feet over the edge of the bed, squinting at the light filtering in through the vinyl mini-blinds in the window across from her. She will make coffee. She will soak in a tub of cool water. She will buy herself a cat. No, wait—forget the last part.
She will forget Maria. She will forget Terence. She will not permit them entry into her body, her life, her soul. It will be healthier that way. Art or no art, she is striving to be a realist. Romantics only absorb pain like sponges.
Where has Maria gone?
Elise wishes she didn’t care. She gets up and ambles slowly across the cracked vinyl flooring to the kitchenette, runs cold tap water into her Mr. Coffee glass carafe, sets it in position, pours some ground beans into a filter, and sets it to brewing. She wishes she smokes, like every other whore she has seen on the street. Somehow, the effect would be right, after a hard night of debauchery and God knows what else.
She leans against the counter, closing her eyes, the breathing sound of the coffee maker as it drips and steams through its cycle a background soundtrack to her thoughts. Memories, like dream images, rush back, knowing no chronology or order. She recalls sensations and has trouble putting them in context. Now, the feel of Maria’s hand on her lower back, the cool skin against the fevered, sensitive flesh. The whisper of dark hair across her thighs. The moistness of a tongue and a cool mouth at her nipples, nipping and sucking. Elise hears the whispers, the sighs, the laughter. She sees Maria’s eyes above her in the darkness, gazing down at her, rapt and hungry.
Why did she leave me asleep and alone?
The coffee maker is quiet and Elise opens her eyes.
A horn blares outside. “Hey, asshole! You gonna move that?” someone shouts. The horn blares again, louder, longer, angrier.
Elise turns and pours herself a cup of black coffee, gazes down through the steam, and sees Maria’s face in the dark liquid. She blows away the steam and the image clarifies: her pale white skin floating on a sea of chocolate. Her hands move up toward Elise, summoning.
Elise looks away, to her drawing board, and remembers her promise to accomplish something with her art every day. But the tools, the charcoal and the heavy-weight paper, do not tempt her. There is something cold and lifeless about them right now.
She is not inspired. The muse has left the house, trailing after Maria like a groupie.
She sips her coffee, the burn numbing her tongue and scorching her throat. She doesn’t care. At least she feels something.
But today, she will not take up a pencil or a stick of charcoal and create. Her mind is too crowded with thoughts of Maria. Once upon a time, she might have called this feeling love. Now she wonders if she even knows the meaning of that weighted word.
But she has learned better.
Elise sets down the coffee and walks naked toward the bathroom. A scrub in the shower; quicker than a bath, even though it won’t be as soothing. She doesn’t have time for soothing. Elise finger-combs her damp hair, pulling it away from her face. She wiggles into a denim skirt, a white blouse she knots at her waist. Black ballerina shoes on her feet. Simple.
Outside, the air is cloying and heavy. She smells cigarette smoke, car exhaust, frying food, all underscored by the bracing, slightly fishy odor of Lake Michigan, just a few blocks to the east. Elise soothes the pounding behind her eyes, concealing them behind a pair of dark sunglasses. She walks the short distance to Sheridan Road, where she can pick up the 151 bus, the only transport she will need to get to the house she remembers.
The ride is a short one. Ten thirty in the morning, rush hour is past, and the green lights on Sheridan Road have been timed so drivers can traverse maximum distance in minimal time. By ten forty-five, Elise is stepping off the bus. The bus driver calls, “Be careful,” and Elise wonders if he is referring to stepping down from the bus or if he knows what lies ahead of her.
The house is still the same: a large, white brick box, with dusty leaded glass windows, a black wrought iron fence, a wide expanse of stairs up to the massive oak front door. She notices the empty stone planters, the only things growing in them a few dandelions, some nettles. The yard is a riot of grass gone to seed, Queen Anne’s lace, more dandelions, and here and there, a Black-eyed Susan. It would be more fitting for a prairie than a Midwest turn of the century urban mansion.
It occurs to Elise, as she stands outside the imposing structure, that Maria, Terence, and Edward are probably squatting here. She starts up the steps. The really frightening thing about the thought is not the illegality of it (she does, after all, earn her living though commerce that is against the law), but the question that looms: if they are squatting in this splendid old house, how are they keeping others at bay? How are they managing to keep what seems like a practically priceless collection of art here without alarms or other forms of security? Elise looks to the south, where a rag-dressed man is accosting passersby to purchase a copy of
Streetwise
, and adds another question to her list: How are they keeping out the homeless—of whom there are plenty–who would embrace this place as a free palace?
How, indeed?
Elise pauses in front of the house, listening to the almost aquatic flow of the traffic behind her and beyond that, the actual aquatic flow of Lake Michigan as it hurls itself against the boulders at Thorndale Beach.
Elise reaches the front portico and pauses in its shadows. Is Maria inside? Is she still asleep? She imagines finding her new love on a bed of red satin, imagines leaning in to plant a furtive kiss on her brow.
The house appears to be abandoned, darkened, empty. She wonders if these people who came so mysteriously into her life, will leave just as mysteriously. Fear grips her.
She imagines slipping inside, finding the place empty—all the art gone. Perhaps it was never there in the first place. Perhaps Maria and her friends are nothing more than phantoms, dream images made flesh. Elise could be living out her own weird real life version of
The Twilight Zone
. The possibility, she realizes, is not so far-fetched, living the kind of existence she has for the past several years. It would almost be saner to imagine herself going insane.
Insanity would explain a lot.
She’ll ponder such mysteries later. Right now, she is making a social call. Let the phantoms answer her knock…
Her signal sounds hollow, reverberating inside. It could be true; in the gray, milky light of day, it seems more likely this abandoned looking house is truly empty and her imagination has conjured up its inhabitants. She pictures scurrying mice and cockroaches, expanses of dusty wooden flooring, unmarred by human footprints, cobweb-choked chandeliers. Yet she continues to knock.
And no one answers.
After her knuckles have become reddened and sore, Elise gives up and turns away. She scans Sheridan Road to the south, looking for another 151 bus to take her home. Disappointment catches in her throat. She hadn’t realized until now just how desperate she is to see Maria again.
No bus is in sight. And hailing a cab is out of the question—too luxurious, unless the driver happens to be horny enough to want to trade commodities. Elise doesn’t feel like gambling, although she has played such games before, and won more than she has lost.
A chill breeze comes to her from off the lake. Since there is no way to return home in sight, what harm can there be in just seeing if the door is unlocked? The possibility is remote, but why not just give that tarnished doorknob a turn? Where’s the harm?
She doesn’t really expect it to open. But, in a way, she thinks there can be no other outcome. She is being propelled forward in a story whose narrative is slightly out of control.
The door opens easily. There is no dramatic creaking. No talon-like hands reach out to grab her and snatch her inside.
Elise steps into the cool shadows and closes the door behind her. The
thunk
of the door closing shuts out—entirely—the sound of traffic on Sheridan Road, the rhythmic pull of the waves of Lake Michigan across the street.
“Maria? Terence? Edward?” Her voice echoes. Dust motes play in sunlight streaming in through leaded glass. Elise steps further into the room and notices the art: the paintings, drawings, sculptures are still here. There is something disconcerting about their presence. This time, she notices that all of the art has humanity as its prime subject; even the abstract art retains some semblance to human bodies, eyes, faces. There are no still lifes or landscapes, no sculptures representing a what rather than a who. The thing that’s scary, and Elise thinks this notion is so Walt-Disney-haunted-mansionish it makes her smile, is that it seems as though the art is watching her. It chills her even more, this legion of inanimate people eyeing her as she makes her way further into the room. She can imagine hands on sculptures coming to life and reaching out for her. She shakes her head to clear it and calls out, “Maria? Maria, it’s Elise.”
No one responds, and Elise continues through the gallery that makes up most of the first floor. She steps into the kitchen and finds it empty. By daylight, the room looks even more unused and barren than it did in the darkness the other evening. Don’t the three of them ever eat? In one corner is a refrigerator, a relic, the kind with the motor on top. Elise opens the door and a strong odor of rot and mildew emerge. Inside, there is only a bouquet of withered roses, the petals blackened and ready to crumble at a touch, perhaps even a breath.
She moves toward a window near the back of the kitchen, over a grime-filled and rust-stained porcelain sink. Outside, sunlight glares down on weeds, some of them as tall as she. She turns and notices, for the first time, a staircase in the room. Servants probably used it at one time. There’s nothing grand about it, just a door frame and a simple flight upward.
She has come this far. Why not see where these stairs lead? Something tells Elise now would be a good time to turn back. For one, she is trespassing (whether her new “friends” are squatting here or not is beside the point). For another, and more importantly, she doesn’t know what might await her upstairs. She could flee this strange house a lot more easily from the first floor than from the second, where the only quick exits might end in broken limbs or death.
But she puts her foot on the first step anyway. Unlike the front door, it does creak. Elise’s heart begins to thud.
Listen to yourself. Listen. Go home
. But she puts her foot on another step. A vision of Maria briefly stays her ascent up the creaking, narrow staircase, but she forces it away. She grips the wall for support as she makes her way up.
An image from the night before assails her: Maria biting her breast hard enough to draw blood. She can see, in sickening close-up, the droplets of blood which rise from the puncture wounds on her soft, white flesh. She can see Maria’s upward gaze and the flicker of a smile as she lowers her head to lick away the blood, to pause, watching the droplets appear again, and then repeating the action, moaning softly at the taste.
Why don’t you turn and hurry back down these stairs before it’s too late?
It’s already too late. Part of her recognizes her desire to flee as a lie and another part, the part that’s stronger and winning, tells her that nothing associated with Maria could be harmful to her. She ignores the queasiness and the sweat popping up on her brow and mounts the last step.
Upstairs, it’s quiet. A long hallway is before her: three doors on the right, two on the left. She can see the handrail for the front staircase, its rich, burnished wood hidden under a thick layer of dust. The walls are covered with peeling wallpaper, cabbage roses Elise can discern only when she gets close. Parts of the wall are losing their plaster, exposing rotting holes and wooden studs.
Is Maria sleeping behind one of these doors?
Elise wonders. She’s rooted to the floor, unable to move for the moment, paralyzed by the very sensible desire to flee and the very provocative desire to begin opening doors.
Elise starts down the hallway, comes to the first door. She pauses outside, biting her lip until she tastes blood, then takes a deep breath and swings the door open. It complains loudly, the creaking of metal against metal akin to a scream.
The room is empty. There are two large leaded glass windows that may be facing Lake Michigan, but the glass is so clouded and dirty it’s impossible to see anything outside except the silhouette of a nearby tree branch. Still, the windows do their duty of admitting light, grayish and watery as it is. Elise steps into the room, turns. It’s a large room, with brass wall-mounted light fixtures topped with stained glass. The walls are crumbling plaster; in places, Elise can even see the naked brick and mortar. She walks to the closet, opens it, and flings a hand to her mouth to stifle a scream.