Blood Sacrifice Read online

  Elise moves to the window, attempting to obliterate memory by the simple act of staring outside. Dusk has fallen and the sky belies the earthbound life before her. The sun is setting, the sky deep violet, filtering down to tangerine and pink near the horizon. If she keeps her eyes trained on the riot of color and shape to the east, she can almost forget where she is.

  But the denizens of Greenview Street make sure she stays reminded. They stroll the night in an attempt to escape the heat, the hot, moist air pressing in, smothering. They call to one another, using words she had barely heard, let alone used, back in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where she had grown up: nigga, motherfucka, homey. Fuck used as an adjective, verb, and ejaculation (but rarely, ironically, utilized in a sexual context). Snatches of music filter out from apartment windows. Cruising vehicles pass by, bass thumping hard enough to cause the glass in her windows to vibrate. She has picked up names of artists like Bow Wow, Def Soul, and Trick Daddy as she walks the streets. Elise puts a hand to the screen, testing the air. Will there ever be a breeze again? She wonders if her neighbors would recognize any of the names attached to the music she loves, names like Vivaldi, Smetana, Bach. Other music fills the street: arguments and professions of love shouted with equal force. Headlights illuminate the darkening night, which is also lit by the flare of a match here, neon there, and sodium vapor overall. The world glows orange, filling up not only the streets of the city, but the sky, blotting out the stars.

  East of her churn the cold waters of Lake Michigan, and Elise imagines its foam-flecked waves lapping at the shores. She’d like to pad down to the beach at the end of Birchwood Street, kick off her sandals and run across the sand and into the water, its cold obliterating and refreshing. She wishes she had the freedom, but east is not her path. Her way lies south, to Howard Street, purveyor of pawnshops and prostitution.

  Her destination.

  Elise turns to survey her cramped apartment. Near the ceiling, industrial green paint peels from the walls to reveal other coats of grimy paint no color describes. Metal-frame twin bed, sheets twisted and gray, damp from sweat and humidity. Next to that, Salvation Army-issue scarred oak table, small, with the remains of this night’s meal, a few apple peelings, a knife, and a glass half filled with pale tea, darkening in the dying light.

  It’s a place no one would ever call home. Elise’s apartment is utilitarian, a place to work, to sleep, to eat. It’s little more than shelter.

  The only sign of human habitation is her work: huge canvases mounted on easels, bits of heavy paper taped to her drawing board. Much of her work is done in charcoal and pencil, but the palette of grays and black remain constant, whether it’s a sketch or a completed painting. Her subject matter, too, is always the same, although the variety of choices she has to explore is endless. Elise likes to draw intensely detailed renderings of crime and accident scenes, aping the cold, clinical detachment one might find in a book of crime scene photographs. Here is a woman, slumped beside a corduroy recliner, a gunshot ripping away half of her head (the blood black in Elise’s rendering), beside her, a half-eaten chicken leg and the Tempo section of the Chicago Tribune, folded neatly and splattered with her gore. There’s a man lying beside a highway, the cars a fast-moving blurred river. His head has been severed from his body. On the wall she has masking-taped a nightmare in quick, staccato slashes: a young woman strangled and left to lie in the pristine environment of an upscale public washroom, clean, shiny ceramic tile, untarnished metal stalls. Another woman, looking bored, checks her lipstick in the mirror. Near Elise’s floor is a small, intricately detailed drawing done in charcoal: two lovers lie in a bed of gore, the aftermath—one presumes—of discovery of their union by a jealous lover. The woman has a sheet discreetly covering her up to the neck. The man lies splayed out in a paroxysm of agony. And why not? His offending penis has been slashed from his body. Is that it on the floor beside the bed, a smudge of black, nearly shapeless?

  Where is all the color? Elise herself wonders as she dresses for the evening. Color has been leached out of her world; it is getting increasingly difficult to be able to remember what color was like and thus, increasingly difficult to duplicate its varied hues on paper or canvas. Color, it seems, is but a hazy memory out of her past.

  Enough of art analysis, she thinks. It’s her days she has designated to her art. Nighttime is when she prepares for her other job, the occupation that keeps a roof over her head. The job which perhaps is responsible for stealing the color from her vision.

  Enough! Enough! Enough! she thinks. Put the introspection behind you. It’s time now, time to become a creature of the night, an animal doing what it must to provide its own sustenance.

  She rummages in the apartment’s lone closet, pulling out one of her “uniforms,” clothing that helps identify her occupation as much a mechanic’s jumpsuit, or a waitress’s ruffled apron and polyester dress.

  Tonight, she dons a short black skirt bisected by a wide zipper ending in a big silver loop. Over her head, she pulls a white T-shirt, tying it just above her waist. In combination with the low-riding skirt, it perfectly frames her navel. Elise pulls the skin apart and plucks out a piece of lint. She completes her ensemble with dark seamed stockings and spike heels. These are the tools of the trade as much as the brushes, sticks of charcoal, and pencils littering her space.

  Elise flips back her long whiskey-colored hair, and leans close to the mirror. She lines her lips with a shade of brown, then fills in with glossy crimson. Cheapens her green eyes with thick black kohl. Elise pulls her hair back, away from her damp neck, and up, pinning it all together with a silver barrette adorned with the smiling face of a skull. Pentagram earrings. Tonight a witch, creature of the night.

  Then she turns, hand on doorknob. The night awaits: exhaust fumes, traffic, the chirping of cicadas.

  *

  Maria, Terence, and Edward sit in a circle, facing one another. Atop the mantel, an army of candles, blood red pillars, votives, tapers, flickering, banishing the shadows to the corners, barely. The gloom is palpable, a fourth presence. But here is a trio who prefers the darkness, a threesome preternaturally attuned to it.

  Edward, as always, has one eye on the paintings covering the wall. His vision reacts to their presence, even in the dim. His favorites stand out. There’s an original etching by Van Gogh hung next to a portrait of Terence done years ago by a bag lady who used to sell her paintings on the steps of the Art Institute for a pittance. Even while living on the streets, Lee Godie’s work was being collected by museums and important collectors. This one of Terence, commissioned on a bright, moonlit night in 1969, would probably sell these days for around $5,000. Terence had paid ten dollars for it. Further down, a Picasso (in his blue period) painting of a boxy woman contrasts with a drawing of a scream, giant, done in shades of magenta, black and yellow…a siren. Edward likes the paintings that have distilled emotion and movement into simple colors and lines. More paintings and sculptures choke the room, making of it a gallery, a warehouse, anything but what it is supposed to be—a living room. No room in this house, Edward thinks, is a living room. He does not grin at this play on words.

  For Terence, the art is mostly a backdrop, a witness to an evening ritual and to his stunning presence. Terence has always been his own canvas, and the artwork he admires most. He holds a glass cylinder topped with a glass bowl. He has filled the bowl with a sticky mass, a brownish-green bud, sticky and redolent with a pungent aroma. He tamps the bud in firmly with his thumb, leaving just enough room to allow it to ignite and burn. His long, flat palm covers the cylinder’s opening at one end as he brings it to his lips. A flame shoots up from a sterling silver lighter and Terence lights the bowl of marijuana. The bud glows orange, drawing Edward’s gaze; it’s a beacon in the darkness. Smoke rolls into the cylinder, gray and ephemeral. Terence removes his hand from the end of the cylinder and his mouth becomes a vacuum; the smoke disappears.

  He passes it to Maria. “To hedonism! To art!”

&
nbsp; Maria rolls her eyes. “Save the hyperbole for someone who gives a shit.” She takes the glass cylinder and lighter from him. Where Terence’s mouth and hand had been, the glass is icy cold.

  *

  Elise paces Howard Street. Her face, lit by streetlights from the parking lot across the way, reveals apprehension and longing in yellow. She toys with an earring, examines the bottom of her shoe. Behind her a 7-11 and an adult bookstore compete for not-so-conspicuous consumption. The 7-11 offers Big Gulps. So does the adult bookstore, Elise thinks.

  Her heart pounds faster. There is more sweat at her hairline, dribbling down her back like the crawly legs of insects, than even the humid night could provoke. Even though she has been doing this “work” for at least two years, she never gets over the fear. Never gets over the shame. Never gets past wondering if she will end up another crime statistic, another hard-to-identify young woman discovered in morning mist in an alley, or stuffed into a Dumpster. She did a drawing once of a woman in spike heels, lying in an alley with a plastic bag over her head, its bottom knotted tightly around her throat. She called it “Pessimistic Self Portrait.” Thoughts like these cause her to shiver, in spite of the heat. Thoughts like these make her long for the solace of her tiny apartment, despite the mice whispering through the walls, and the cockroaches scattering when she turns on a light in the middle of the night.

  Right now, it feels like one of those mice gnaws at the inside of her stomach. She breathes deeply, trying to focus her attention on the traffic cruising by. Which will slow to look? Which will cause her to move forward from her post in front of the store, a smile brave and totally false, plastered across her features? These initial movements—before any words are exchanged—are where the deal is truly struck. The eloquent meeting of the eyes between the wanted and the wanter is where decisions are made. Elise’s slow walk to the idling car, the negotiations: nothing more than busy work, after-the-fact necessities. In spite of her anxiety, the motions of this work have become stale and as routine as the filing and photocopying her more conventional sisters do downtown, in some Loop office.

  Elise smoothes her skirt, stiffening as a gang of Hispanic boys charge up the street. They call to each other in Spanish, tossing a basketball back and forth. There are at least eight of them, their youth raucous and threatening. They haven’t seen her yet, but soon will, and Elise knows what’s coming from past experience: the whistles and catcalls, the unintelligible sexual come-ons in Spanish they will all laugh at.

  And she is a woman alone. No matter that she is plying a trade almost as old as mankind itself. Never mind that she is a criminal in this commerce.

  These boys could take what she seeks to sell.

  Take and destroy.

  Elise prays they will surmise she has a pimp, leave her alone. Running in these heels is a fantasy, and a gangbang is not what she has in mind for tonight.

  The boys press closer and Elise strains to understand the quick, staccato rhythm of the Spanish. But only the most basic words filter to Elise, not enough to make sense. Their laughter is evil, predatory.

  The boys surge close, their heat and aggression a warning scent.

  Elise moves on.

  *

  Maria sets the glass cylinder on the floor. She closes her eyes, and beneath the delicate, blue-veined lids, her eyes flutter. Movement stops and she exhales; a plume of blue smoke jets upward into the darkness, tinged just a bit brighter where dull light shines in through leaded glass. “That’s it; there’s no more left in the bowl.”

  The two men nod. Edward rises and moves to the rheostat on the wall. Recessed lighting disperses the room’s shadows and brings the paintings to brilliant life. Sculptures formed from granite, marble, and metal move in the sudden light. The three’s eyes glaze at the drama the paintings and sculptures present: the liquid flow of color, images conflicting, jumping from canvas and paper, rock or metal become bone, flesh. It is the ingestion of THC that causes their sudden fascination, but it’s also the sudden riot of color and form the light reveals.

  It excites them. They see mockery in this art, love, too…sex, death, and betrayal. Violence. Serenity. The art sharpens their focus and brings them closer to what they will hunt, the population they were once part of: humanity.

  They see it all. Theirs is a special sensitivity, approaching empathy.

  This is an old ritual.

  It attunes them to the night…and the hunt.

  *

  Elise finds solace under the Howard Street el tracks, under a street lamp’s pool of light. Trains rumble overhead; she barely hears herself breathe. She wants to vanish, to become silent and invisible. If I had any guts at all, she thinks, I’d go into the station, pay the fare, walk upstairs, and fling myself on the tracks just before the next rapidly approaching train. Think of the excitement, the clamor, the shouts, and the cries. Picture the blood dripping down from the tracks onto the sidewalk and street below. Windshield wipers swishing away blood. And I would be a part of none of it. I would exist only in memory.

  But whose?

  Her own memory she would like to extinguish, have an operation to excise that part of her brain that stores what happens to her. There would be a kind of comfort in awakening each day and not remembering what happened before, starting life over every day. It seems there would be more possibilities. But that option has already been explored too much by Hollywood screenwriters and seldom happens in reality.

  Besides, she is a nameless entity now, a utilitarian tool, waiting to be used. This other job allows her to disconnect, in a way. It frees her from worrying about where the idea for her next drawing or painting will come. It frees her from wondering if the only thing she has a passion for is anything she’s really good at. If she deserves—one day—to make a living from it.

  An el train rumbles by above, the brakes squealing as the muffled voice of a conductor announces, “Howard Street, change here for Evanston/Wilmette trains. Howard Street.”

  There’s a rush of people behind her as passengers descend the stairs from the platform. Elise casts her gaze downward when the stares come…in an instant, contempt, desire, and indifference. They know her and they don’t. In some ways, she’s used to the looks, the leers, and the sneers. In others, she will never get used to it. She can never stop being the good Jewish girl from Shaker Heights. She thinks of her mother, to whom she has not spoken in two years, and imagines her shock if she could see her daughter now, the clothes she wears and the blatant advertising the shoes, shirt, and skirt convey. What would her mother do? Try to strong-arm her into coming home? Arrange for a deprogramming?

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  A wheedling voice. Elise tries not to jump. Before her is a man, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Seersucker suit, frayed around the edges; dirty, colorless hair hanging limp across a creased forehead. Black plastic-frame glasses. The glare on the lenses makes it impossible for Elise to discern color or intention in the eyes beneath.

  “What?”

  The man slides his hand around in the sweat on his forehead. Thin, pale lips like worms break into a grin. “You sellin’ it?”

  What is this? Elise wonders. Chicago vice? He’s got quite a disguise. The nerd routine, perhaps it’s worked before….

  “Well?” The man moves even more restlessly, toying with buttons, mopping the sweat that pops up in frantic beads from his forehead.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You know,” he says like a whining child. “Come on.”

  Elise shakes her head. One of his shoes, a scuffed Hush Puppy, has a hole in it. His baby toe, pink and crowned with a dirty nail, pokes out.

  Is this character for real?

  “I can’t help you, sir.” Elise puts mocking emphasis on this last word. “Unless I know what it is you want.”

  “You,” he stammers, “I want you.”

  “Well, you can’t have me.” There’s something too odd about this one, something too bizarre. Be
sides, if he can’t afford even a pair of shoes, how could he afford her?

  “Even if I pay?” Words tremble. His shirt collar darkens with perspiration.

  Elise looks him up and down, considering.

  Something better will come along. Elise’s stomach churns at the thought of this man above her.

  Still, the rent will be due in a few days. She has closed her eyes to others before.

  No. Even a streetwalker has to have some standards. “Get lost,” she whispers to the guy. “I couldn’t. Not even for a million bucks.”

  Even though nothing has blocked the glow from the streetlight, a shadow darkens the man’s face before he turns and hurries away. And Elise shivers. In this commerce, even the most innocent-looking prospect can be a latter-day Jack the Ripper. By refusing, one never knows whom one is pissing off. She’s dealt with outraged rejects before…and in spite of his look of harmless geekiness, this one could have a switchblade in his pocket, the strength of a strangler in his hands.

  *

  The night is alive. Humidity and heat press in, heightening the smells and feel of living, breathing flesh. They are restlessly attuned to the smell of prey. Criteria: Which one is weak enough? Which one has a healthy supply of blood, one that will not pollute their evening repast with disease or drugs that have the power to set their systems on edge and cause them to turn and thrash in their daylight slumber?

  Hunger.

  They have moved north, to Roger’s Park. Here Terence, Maria, and Edward can mingle with the detritus Lake Michigan and the city has washed up: the homeless, the runaways, drug addicts (crack, coke, meth, and heroin their most popular choices) and those who seek to addict others.

  Prostitutes.

  The ones no one asks questions about. The ones few notice missing and fewer still care about. These people are especially drawn to their looks, their casual affluence, and the lure of easy money. These are the ones that go missing for days with no one wondering who they are, the ones the authorities don’t spend much time searching for. The three of them prefer the lonely, the alone, the ones who arouse no suspicion upon their departures.