Ghosts in the Attic (8 page)

She and Joanne went all the way to the very foot of the stage, staring up into Dante’s mysterious green eyes. He seemed larger than life, towering above them, smiling down at them. “Such beautiful young creatures,” he said. “Every tour less and less young people attend our shows, but we need you. It is your youth that keeps the music fresh, that keeps it from going stale. You inspire us, you keep us going. Young people like you keep
us
young. On behalf of the entire band, and all those faithful who listen to our music, I thank you. Thank you, girls, for all you’ve given and all you will give.”

His voice was hypnotic, and Leslie felt herself swoon. A brilliant bolt of white-hot agony shot through her lower body, and she thought dully that perhaps she’d just had her first orgasm. She was aware in her peripheral vision that the crowd was closing in on her and Joanne, people leaving their seats and gathering around the two girls, but she was too enthralled by Dante Reed to give it much consideration.

The distinctive bass beat of “Sacrificial Lamb” started up, and Dante began singing, staring down at Leslie and Joanne as if serenading them.

“
In the heat of the fire
,” he crooned, “
the passion of desire
…”

The crowd encroached further, and Leslie felt herself being shoved up against the stage, but she hardly noticed. She couldn’t take her eyes off Dante Reed, and all she heard was his voice.

“…
the soul is consumed by the beast, as gluttons prepare for the feast….
”

Leslie sensed Joanne being pulled into the crowd behind her, and she thought she heard her friend cry out, but Leslie found it hard to concentrate on anything but the man standing on the stage above her.

“…
the life you forfeit in my name is the sustenance that I crave
…”

Leslie felt hands upon her shoulders, dragging her down, back into the sea of bodies, but she kept her eyes focused on Dante Reed, and he kept his eyes focused on her.

“…
you’ve made me who I am, my sweet sacrificial lamb
…”

The crowd was eerily silent as they tugged at Leslie’s clothes, at her limbs, trying to pull her in all directions at once. Distantly there was pain, but it did not reach her. The music numbed her more completely than novocaine. She did not even cry out when the crowd began to tear her apart. The last thing she heard before darkness swallowed her was Dante’s reassuring voice.

“…
your spirit will forever thrive in the music you help keep alive
…”

CIRCULAR

The gate was open, the sign hanging from its black bars reading, “Established 1681, Circular Church Graveyard.” The couple paused before stepping through, clasping hands and intertwining fingers. The sun was setting, the sky turning a somber shade of purple with veins of vibrant pink running through it.

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” Russ said, his voice soft and shaking.

His wife, Patsy, shot him a heated glance. “We both agreed that this was the right thing to do. Don’t try to back out on me now.”

“It’s just that…well, maybe we should think about it some more.”

“We don’t have time. The more time that passes, the less chance we have of success. According to the book, the optimum window is no more than a week after the burial. That deadline is almost up.”

Russ glanced at the book clutched in his wife’s free hand.
Spells of Resurrection and Reincarnation
. It had no dust jacket and the pages were yellowed with age. “Do you really believe it will work? I mean, you got that thing off eBay.”

“Yeah, for two hundred bucks. Trust me, I did my research. This book has an impeccable reputation of power; it’s the genuine article. The spell will work.”

Patsy started forward, but Russ didn’t move. “But even if we can do it, do you think we
should
? Maybe it’s wrong; maybe we should just let her rest in peace.”

His wife’s grip tightened so hard on Russ’s hand that he heard his knuckles pop. “Peace?” she said, her voice trembling with barely constrained rage. “You call that resting in
peace
? She’s in a box underground, six feet of dirt weighing down on her, worms and other creepy-crawlies feasting on her decomposing flesh. Does any of that sound peaceful to you?”

Russ turned away from Patsy’s accusing glare, his eyes dampening. When he spoke, his voice was almost inaudible. “I miss her, too.”

“I know you do, but the point is you don’t have to. We can change it.”

Shaking his head, Russ pulled his hand away from his wife’s. “We can’t make it like the accident never happened; it can never be like it was.”

“Not exactly, no, but it will be better than
this
.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it would have to be.”

Russ’s emotions were a chaotic whirlpool sucking at his gut, leaving him unsure what was right or wrong, which way was up or down. He wanted to do what was best, but how was he to know what that was? It hurt him too much to think on it for too long, painful memories assaulting him, and even once-sweet memories turning to shards of glass in his heart. It was easier to let Patsy make the decisions, to just go along with her plan.

Seeming to sense her husband’s surrender, Patsy took his hand again and pulled him past the brick columns into the graveyard. Tombstones of every shape and size were clustered close together like a freeway during rush hour traffic. Some of the markers were so old that they were crumbling, the names and dates worn away by time, erasing even the last memory of people long departed from this world. Mixed among them were newer markers, glossy in the waning light, the carved names standing out boldly. The graveyard orbited 360 degrees around the circular Church that stood at the center of the property, the bell tower thrusting up from the back of the building looking a bit like a dunce’s hat.

Or a witch’s hat
, Russ thought and shuddered.

The couple began working their way around the graveyard counter-clockwise. Their eyes did not scan the tombstones, their gazes trained on their feet, picking their way through the graves and foliage by instinct, as if this was a path they had followed many times.

And in fact, over the past five days they had indeed traveled this way often.

When they reached the marker they were searching for, they paused, pulling close and clinging to one another like children lost in some dark fairytale forest. Patsy began to weep, softly but openly, making no move to wipe the tears from her cheeks. Russ merely stared blankly at the writing on the tombstone.

Sierra Leigh Sexton

Born September 10, 2008

Died May 16, 2009

Our Little Angel

After a few more sniffles, Patsy seemed to regain control of herself and said, “We should get started. No sense in dawdling.”

Ever since his wife had come to him with her idea, he had felt a variety of emotions warring inside him. Excitement, hope, fear, shame, joy, trepidation. But now that they were here, ready to put the plan into motion, all he felt was a hollow numbness. He stood by and watched Patsy prepare to begin.

She knelt on the ground and pushed aside all the sod that had been laid atop the grave, revealing the black soil that covered their daughter. Patsy stuck her hands into the dirt, coming up with clumps of it that poured through her fingers. She wiped the dirt on her eyelids and then coated her tongue with it. While Russ watched, still feeling almost paralyzed, Patsy hiked up her skirt. She wasn’t wearing underwear and she smeared the soil on the lips of her vagina, sticking two dirt-caked fingers inside herself. It was the most unerotic display Russ had ever seen.

“It’s time,” she said, looking up at him, the dirt from the grave smeared on her face like war paint. “We have to do it now.”

Feeling as if he were observing his own actions in a dream, he unbuckled his belt and pushed his pants and underwear down to his ankles. His penis was flaccid, shriveled against his scrotum like a snail sprinkled with salt. He didn’t know if he’d be capable of doing what his wife needed of him.

She crawled to him on her hands and knees and took him into her mouth. Russ made a sound that was part gasp, part moan. Patsy hadn’t done this since the very early days of their courtship, and the sensation sent electrical jolts all over his body, making his skin tingle and his legs shake. Despite their reason for being here, the sensation soon got the desired reaction.

When he was fully erect, the head of his penis glistening with his wife’s saliva, Patsy took another handful of dirt and rubbed it into the rigid member. Then she lay back on the grave, lifted her skirt, and spread her legs. She motioned him to her, her breath coming in hitching pants.

Russ needed no further encouragement. He positioned himself on top of his wife and thrust into her without thought of gentleness or restraint. Patsy cried out and clutched his back as he went deep, feeling her open up to him and take every inch.

He and his wife had made love very seldom since the birth of their daughter last autumn. It wasn’t that they’d lost their desire for one another exactly, but having a newborn took up a lot of time and even more energy, and sex soon became less important, less of an urgent need. And when they did do it, there tended to be a perfunctory nature to the event. It had been a long time since Russ had felt any real passion in their lovemaking.

But he felt it now, an animalistic craving that led him to be rougher than he’d been in years, grabbing her shoulders to brace her as he pounded into her. Patsy didn’t seem to mind. She lifted her hips to meet each thrust, digging her nails deep into his buttocks, drawing blood, urging him deeper. They kissed, Russ tasting both himself and their daughter’s grave on his wife’s tongue. The dirt beneath them was surprisingly soft, their bodies making indentures in the ground as they coupled.

Russ wasn’t sure how long they kept up their frenzied lovemaking, but as he felt climax approaching, he became aware of Patsy speaking softly, repeating the words she’d memorized from the book. “Life is a circle. We enter, we exit, we enter again. We are powerless as to where and how we will reenter, what life we will lead after this one has passed. But I beseech the Old Ones, the Dark Ones, the Ones who hold sway over Life, Death, and Rebirth. Hear my plea and open a doorway, open a doorway inside of me and let the soul who rests on this spot enter through it. Allow her circle to be complete, allow her circle to close in me.”

With a strangled cry, Russ felt orgasm overtake him, exploding out of himself and into his wife. Afterward, he lay limp and exhausted atop Patsy, staring at their daughter’s tombstone. Eventually he rolled off his wife and the grave, sitting up in the grass and crying.

“Don’t be sad,” Patsy said, a grin spread across her face. This was the first time he’d seen her smile since Sierra had somehow managed to crawl over the side of her crib and fallen to the floor, cracking her skull. “It worked. I can feel it, she’s growing inside of me already. We made a life.”

“But do you really think…I mean, will it really be
her
?”

Patsy pushed herself up, leaning against the tombstone. She smoothed her skirt down around her legs. “This isn’t a matter of us trying to create a replacement for Sierra to fill the hole left after her death. This baby will
be
Sierra, her soul reborn.”

“Reincarnated,” Russ said softly.

“Yes.” Patsy reached over and picked up the book, hugging it to her chest. “According to what I read, all souls are eventually reincarnated, but there’s no way to know when or where. Sierra could have been reborn as an African princess, or as the child of a homeless person in Australia, or even as an exotic beetle in the Brazilian rainforests. What the spell did was channel her rebirth through me. We will have another child that will have the same soul as our first. We may have lost Sierra, but I just got her back.”

Russ didn’t know if he actually believed what his wife was telling him, and that somehow made it worse. To have done what he’d done, defiling the grave of his daughter, without truly believing there was a purpose behind it… He wished he could believe beyond any doubt, believe that his daughter was not gone but would be with them again, in a new body. He would have to try to let his wife’s belief be strong enough for the both of them.

After several minutes, he stood, pulling up his pants and buckling his belt. He reached for Patsy’s hand, but she pushed past him without even looking at him, her hands pressed against her belly. Russ took one last look at his daughter’s grave, the sod removed like an old man’s toupee, the dirt disturbed from he and his wife’s fornication, and followed Patsy out of the graveyard.

A STRANGER COMES TO LIPSCOMB STREET

Justin glanced out the window and saw a nude man walking down the street.

He was young, early thirties by the look, with a thick head of black hair and bushy eyebrows. His skin was luminescent in the light of the bloated moon, and he staggered as if drunk. His manhood lay curled against his right thigh.

Justin gaped from behind the curtain, too stunned to do anything but stare. He wasn’t sure what the appropriate action was to take. Call the cops? Ask the man if he needed help? It wasn’t everyday a nude man walked down the middle of the street; there wasn’t exactly a set of proper etiquette rules on which Justin could draw.

Outside, the man stumbled and fell. He landed on all fours and stayed there, voiding the contents of his stomach onto the pavement. Paralysis broken, Justin hurried out the door and down the walk, stopping a few feet from the man. Stomach emptied, he had curled up on his side, shivering like a newborn.

“Mister?” Justin said, looking around to see if anyone else had noticed the man. The street was deserted, all the houses dark. At thirty-seven, Justin was the youngest resident on the block, and his neighbors tended to roll up the carpet and hit the sack around eight p.m.