Sacrifice Read online

  SACRIFICE

  EDWARD LEE

  Smashwords Edition

  NECRO PUBLICATIONS

  — 2014 —

  — | — | —

  SACRIFICE

  © 1995, 2014 by Edward Lee

  Cover art © 2014 Travis Anthony Soumis

  Model: Natalia .X Asylum

  This edition © 2014 Necro Publications

  ISBN: 978-1-939065-13-1

  Cover, Book Design & Typesetting:

  David G. Barnett

  Fat Cat Graphic Design

  http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  a Necro Publication

  5139 Maxon Terrace • Sanford, FL 32771

  http://www.necropublications.com

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  — | — | —

  Epigraphical excerpt, from “The Succubus Kiss,” 1993 by W.H. Pugmire. Reprinted with permission of the author.

  Copyright © 1995 by Lee Seymour

  — | — | —

  Then with your kiss you steal my final breath And lead me to the timeless realm of death.

  — W.H. Pugmire

  — | — | —

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  — | — | —

  Prologue

  I’m beautiful! came the rushing thought.

  Katelyn ran across the moonlit field, swift as a spirit in the flowing white cotton nightdress. Her glee caressed her; it touched all her secret places in ways she’d never known, like hands ranging her breasts, smoothing circles over her abdomen, stroking her sex. Yes, she was beautiful now, and for the first time in her thirty years she was able to love herself. Katelyn had been…reborn somehow, transformed into a real woman of real beauty.

  Her beauty sang to her, along with the beauty of so much else: the hot summer nights, the endless sounds of crickets trilling, the lush grass under her bare feet, the beauty of—

  Everything! she realized. Everything in the world!

  She ran on across the field. Jubilant. Hot. Joyous in her desire…

  Yes, it was everything.

  But it was especially the grotto.

  ««—»»

  “Oh, blast, Kate! Get your fat arse off me,” her husband had muttered that night several weeks before. He pushed her away from him in bed. “I been in the quarry all day working my bloody tail off to keep food on the table. You think I got the spark left to be rolling about with your fat arse?”

  The words hit her like blows. They hurt even more than the real blows he often inflicted on her on Friday evenings when he came home from the pub, reeking and drunk. Katelyn knew she wasn’t pretty anymore, but her husband was no prize either. Fat, unwashed more often than not, his teeth going bad. But at least in the past they’d loved each other. What happened? she wondered now, her cheeks damp. Real beauty came from the inside—that’s what she’d always believed. When people loved each other they were always beautiful. Katelyn knew he was spending a good bit of his pay on the prostitutes who loitered at the pub; she could smell other women on him. But she’d never mentioned it because she knew what would happen. Another row. Another blackened eye, bruised cheek, or broken lip…

  He slapped her hand away when she tried to touch him again. “Go to sleep, ya cow,” he muttered. “You got an arse on ya bigger than the Mitchells’ kegs down at the pub, and tits hangin’ down to yer knees…”

  Katelyn stifled her sobs. The words hurt more than his fist.

  She got up in the dark, left the hot, ale-smelling bedroom. Her husband snored loudly behind her. She seemed to cry for hours once she got outside. She felt haloed by pain. Aimless, crushed. Without forethought, then, she walked through the wood, her grief following her like a slow shadow.

  Before she knew it the moon lit up her face. She crossed the dense wood, into the field…

  What if someone saw her? A grown and married woman wandering oblivious through the old soy field well past midnight? They’d think I’m daft, Katelyn thought, but she really didn’t care. Why should she? Her life was in ruins.

  But suddenly she felt only partly solid. The field seemed warped, boundless; the low moon lay an eerie, throbbing white smear across her mind.

  The night’s smothering heat sucked sweat from her skin—her nightdress turned wet, sticking to her flesh. She could not escape the sensation that the field, the tinseled darkness, and the heat were leading her someplace in particular, but she couldn’t imagine where. Beyond the next treeline, she knew, was only the army camp, some outcroppings of rock, and then the quarry.

  Where am I going? Katelyn thought dizzily. Her pulse rose for no reason, paced by the night’s throbbing chorus of crickets and peepers. An owl hooted. She slowed, skirting the next woodline.

  Then she heard a quick crunching: footsteps. Movement flicked at the edge of her vision. Two figures rounded a small stand of trees…

  The moon blurred in her eyes.

  “Hey, Sarge,” came the voice of a man. It seemed to issue from the moon, which blinded her. “Get a load of this bird, wanderin’ ’round in her nightie.”

  Another man seemed to appraise her. “Well, well, and bless my soul. What have we got here?”

  ««—»»

  Soldiers, Katelyn realized at once. From the big camp down near the docks. Since the War had ended, King George and his Tories had allowed trade to be reestablished with the Colonies. Many of Cornwallis’s riflemen had been reassigned to the engineering regiments stationed along the coast. Frequently, men in the familiar red military tunics were seen coming off guard watch in the wee hours, tracing the woodline back to their camp.

  St. Bride‘s Bay had been turned into a quay of shipping docks; the engineer regiments saw to the dockyard’s security, and they also supervised the civilian excavation operations in the nearby quarry. Many miners and stonecutters were employed there, Katelyn’s husband among them, to cut ballaststones and transport them to the docks for loading onto the Colony-bound freighters and trade vessels.

  And these two soldiers, it occurred to Katelyn, were obviously a pair of sentinels coming off watch. Little else occurred to her at all…

  Katelyn felt so distracted, she never realized the full weight of this scenario: here she was standing in the woods, in a sweat-clinging nightgown, before a pair of young soldiers in the middle of the night. Part of her consciousness seemed to drift away from herself.

  The two soldiers, blackened to slim silhouettes by the moon, stepped forward and flanked her. The one who appeared younger said, “Hey, birdie, you’re out past curfew.”

  “I didn’t know there was a curfew,” Katelyn replied.

  “Military order,” said the older one, a master sergeant. “We’re at war with bloody France, in case you didn’t know. All coastal towns are on curfew. There’s a penalty. ”

  “I—I’m sorry,” Katelyn said. But still she felt completely disconnected from herself. The men were leering at her.

  “’Specially for prossies,” added the younger private.

  “You know, I think you’re right there, Colson. Bet this big bird here’s one ’o them town whores. What’sa matter, sweet? You get drunk’n get lost on yer way back to the whorehouse?”

  Katelyn’s voice abraded, “I’m not a whore.”

  “Oh, really now? Then wh
y mightya be traipsin’about the wood with scarcely a stitch on?”

  Katelyn just stared at him, or rather at the blurred moon to his rear. She could voice no answer. The thought pushed through her sentience: They’re going to rape me… But then something pulled it back. She didn’t understand—

  Something seemed to be pulling her.

  In another moment the sergeant grabbed her. His rough hands pawed at her buttocks, raising the nightdress, and his stale tongue plowed into her mouth. Next, he was dragging her down…

  “Gotta big arse on her, this one, eh, Colson?” The gritty hand slid up to Katelyn’s sex and squeezed. “And a plot the likes of the seaweed clumps the scarvies are always scrapin’ off the boats.”

  Katelyn descended, stunned. What was being done to her barely registered. The husky silhouette loomed, etched crisply black by the bright moonlight. All the while, it felt as though some arcane force deep in the wood was tugging on her mind.

  The younger private stood aside, obviously dismayed. “Aw, come on, Sarge. She’s a civilian. We can’t be doing this.”

  And before the sergeant could even reply, Katelyn grabbed his collar, and whispered, “Yes. You can.”

  ««—»»

  An oil lantern was lit. Like a doll, Katelyn was yanked back to her feet. “This one’s hot as the lid on a potbellied stove, Colson. Let’s get her back to this grotto, eh? We’ll all have ourselves a fine time…”

  Katelyn felt inebriated as the two soldiers half-led and half-dragged her into the dense wood. Their boots crunched over the thicket. She noticed a dell among the trees, surrounded by large and seemingly cut boulders whose gaps were filled by weeds and other pale vegetation. A cave, she observed, for this outcropping of rock had an entry. This was the grotto to which the lusty sergeant had referred.

  They dragged her into the grotto’s mouth. Katelyn’s bare feet scuffed large, fiat stones and clumps of weeds; the oil lantern cast manic shadows upon the cave’s stone walls.

  And Katelyn’s consciousness at once reverted to a feeling of…placation. Comfort. She was about to be raped, but somehow she felt…at ease.

  Deep in the grotto, she was pushed onto her belly. Her white nightdress was yanked over her head; then the soldiers leaned their infamous bayoneted Brown Bess muskets against the crudely formed stone walls. “Would ya take a glance at this arse on her, Colson ?” the sergeant said, having already lowered his trousers. “And gander them titties, eh? Like a coupla of flounders, they are!”

  The private laughed. “Bet the whore ain’t had a stiff one in a long while, like about a quarter of an hour!” Then he, too, began to lower his tight white military trousers.

  Katelyn felt caressed, but not by the hands that next invaded every aspect of her body. Something seemed to soothe her, comfort her. It was something out of her body. Something in the darkness, or in the air…

  The two soldiers commenced to use her. Not as another human being, nor as an entity of passion. They used her as a thing. They gave succor to their own groins in ways and positions that seemed inconceivable to her, and they did so repeatedly and for hours on end, and in manners that were better left undescribed…

  — | — | —

  Part One

  The Watch House

  — | — | —

  1

  Alice Sterling stopped at the traffic light. To her right, Clay Street’s broken asphalt and run-down row houses seemed to ascend, dark in the sunlight, as a byway into another, darker world.

  Alice’s bitter-chocolate-brown Audi idled at the light. She was staring…

  Two white prostitutes dawdled on the corner, across from a bar; they were rack thin, in jeans and halters, their chalky faces lined by the anguish of drug addiction. A thin black man stopped to converse with them, a quick exchange was made; then he walked on. The women disappeared. Up the narrow road, more figures loitered, weighed down by despondency. Then two couples, more than likely a sexual solicitation, walked out of the bar.

  Alice’s brown eyes remained fixed.

  Up around the bend of row houses, a black man traversed the sidewalk, on crutches. His left leg was gone from the hip.

  Alice nearly yelped—a car horn brayed behind her. The light had changed. All right, already! she thought.

  God, people could be so rude! She pressed her right foot, and the Audi’s turbo jerked her away from the line. Good riddance.

  She’d been daydreaming so much since the accident. How many times had she caught her thoughts straying at traffic lights? How many times had she stopped in her tracks on the street, or at malls, only to be bumped into or cursed at under someone’s breath? I’m getting flighty, she thought.

  What’s wrong with me?

  In moments such as this, moments of delving thought, she forced herself to count her blessings. At least I’ve got a nice car, she reminded herself. At least I was born in a free country. At least I still have friends, and a place to live, and a career—

  It was the image of the black man, she knew. The black man teetering down the street on wooden crutches.

  The man who had no left leg at all…

  At least I don’t have to walk on crutches.

  She forced herself, as the therapists had taught her, to turn the good into the bad. It wasn’t easy sometimes.

  The firm had given her a six-month leave of absence; they’d really come through for her. We’re going to bury that motherfucker, she was told quite crudely to her face by Karl North, one of the managing partners. He’s got a big insurance carrier. Don’t worry; you come back to work whenever you feel ready. Is six months okay? A year? He had touched her shoulder affectionately, which shocked Alice—this gesture from a man she’d always thought of as devoid of feeling. When we’re through with him in county court that motherfucker’s gonna think somebody dropped a floor safe on his head from twenty stories. We’re gonna give that pissant little drunk-driving fuck a headache he’ll never forget.

  She turned left at West Street, then proceeded to Church

  Circle and took the next right. More of Karl’s words echoed. He was so vulgar sometimes!

  And that other motherfucker? What’s his name? Steve? Well, unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about him, since he didn’t violate any laws. But shit on him anyway, you know? Forget that lying motherless cockhound fuck.

  Alice had worked around lawyers enough not to be offended by profane language, though she never indulged in it herself. So, in her thoughts, she agreed, Karl’s right. Forget that lying motherf— Well, just… forget him.

  Unconsciously she flinched as she passed the hospital. She gritted away visions of herself turned pale with her teeth. The street beyond, however, extended in subtle beauty. Plush trees along the sidewalk, beautifully refurbished brick homes, no litter, no bums. The Audi’s intricate suspension buffeted Federal Street’s lane of cobblestones; the sun shone bright at the intersection, and brighter still on the bay.

  These narrow back streets once beat as the city’s heart; many residences had remained in the same family for over two hundred years. Grand town houses and “middle houses” lined either side of Federal Street, most still showing their original tabby brick, oculus windows, and Georgian-style doorways and sills. But several years ago many of the state-funded historical societies had been forced to put certain buildings up for sale, the less spectacular and historically significant edifices such as the old docker domiciles near the water, the council and watch houses, and even some of the port city’s original inns and taverns—redundant tourist sites of little interest compared to the eminent colonial landmarks downtown. All of the buildings had sold quickly and for astronomical sums—

  Except the Taylor Watch House.

  Alice didn’t even know what a watch house was, and she didn’t care. The Society of Historical Dwellings had stopped listing it as a tourist landmark years ago. “It’s ugly as sin,” the realtor had told her. “The roof leaks, and there’s no electricity. You’ll want to look at something
else, I’m sure.” But Alice had already seen it on several drive-bys. She didn’t think it was ugly at all, but unique, even cozy. She’d bought it for a song; in fact, the price of the house had been less than the contractor fees, and she’d been able to pay cash for everything, since the settlement had come in. She loved the detailed entablatures along the eaves, the crawling ivy, and the stone-silled windows. It was a squat little house, darkened by massive oaks and the larger surrounding brick homes. Beautiful, lighter stones formed the foundation, which made for a gorgeous contrast against the dark, pastel red of the exterior’s original brick walls. The main dwelling had been erected as a simple, deep square with a rather drastically peaked roof; a small bull’s-eye window showed Church Circle at the end of the street. But an addition jutted south, facing the water. This was the “watch room,” Alice was told by the realtor, its walls angled queerly forward, its roof flat. She’d paid a small fortune to contractors in order to have the roof completely retopped and sealed. Because when she’d first seen the watch room, she had fallen so in love with it that she had decided to relegate the proper bedroom to guest quarters and turn the watch room into her bedroom. Double French doors opened to a small stone veranda. The view of the bay’s southern estuary was spectacular; she couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful than to wake each morning to the dawn’s light reflecting off the water.