A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous

PASCAL’S WAGER

by Wrath James White

Spectral flames flashed about the room, casting horrible shadows that moved independently of the light as if animated. The twisted silhouettes of tortured, malformed creatures limped and convulsed in the fiery twilight, shrieking and roaring as fire ran down the walls and long finger-like tendrils of electricity crackled in the air like lightning. Ghostly figures whirled around the room in a mad frenzy, hurling their ethereal bodies against the walls and knocking books and artifacts off the dressers.

More of the bizarre apparitions crowded their way into Jamie’s bedroom as he rubbed sleep from his eyes and tried to focus on the chaos raging all around him. Dark abominable creatures growled, screamed, and shouted in unknown languages. At least Jamie tried to pretend that he didn’t understand them, but he could make out enough of the gibberish to be afraid. All of them were calling out for Jamie’s soul. Jamie shuddered and prayed, sweat bulleting down his face, his body shivering, a scream trapped in his throat.

Fire belched from the floor and engulfed the room in smoke and ash. The sudden, stifling heat seared the air in his lungs and boiled the tears in Jamie’s eyes. A voice like the roar of thunder buffeted his eardrums and shook the room, rattling his skull and threatening to shatter his mind like a pane of glass in a hurricane. Jamie clamped his hands over his ears and screamed as loud as his scalded lungs would permit him.

The flames died away suddenly as if they had never been, leaving only the cold night air blowing through cracks in the locked windows and shut doors. The caustic stench of burning souls still lingered in the air, tickling the hairs in Jamie’s nostrils with the scent of hell.

Jamie knew he had welcomed many horrible things into his life with his compulsion, but he could not stop. He had no choice. He had to be sure.

Doors slammed and mirrors and windows cracked. The floors and walls heaved as if they were breathing and undulated like a snake gorged with a fresh kill. The shadows in the room grew denser. Jamie could feel hot breath on his face as they moved in closer. He felt hands all over him, tugging at his skin, trying to claw their way through his flesh to get at his soul. Many voices shouted in his face at once, cursing and spitting at him as they dragged him from bed.

Every night these ghostly assaults worsened. The Gods were getting angry. It was time to begin his morning rituals.

JAMIE FLOGGED HIMSELF IN a delirious rapture as he simultaneously dug his jagged nails into the goat’s thigh, wrestling the muscle free of the sinews and ligaments that held it. A warm arterial spray spurted into his mouth, gagging him as he bit into the animal’s jugular with his blunt little teeth, ripping the still twitching and spasming muscle from the animal’s bones as it moaned and yelped.

He continued lashing himself with the cat-o’-nine tails, praying and chanting fanatically in Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. The knotted leather barbed with bits of bone flayed open his skin and gouged deep into his back muscles, ripping out small chunks of meat and hurling them into the air. The pain was terrible. Luckily, flagellation was not a part of his daily rituals. At best, it was a bi-weekly thing.

Jamie collapsed as the pain washed over him. His stomach roiled and bile scalded the back of his throat. The room spun and began to blur as he fought to hold onto consciousness and fend off the waves of nausea. Jamie turned his eyes heavenward, imagining how Jesus must have felt as he was lashed by Roman soldiers on his way to be crucified.

“Oh, sweet Jesus.”

Jamie’s back was a bloody ruin when he finally laid down the blood-drenched flail and picked up the sacrificial knife. He was panting heavily and dizzy from pain and exertion when he cut open the goat’s belly and dug his fingers into the animal’s steaming entrails, tearing out its guts in ragged handfuls. After all this time, the oily texture of the fat worm-like intestines slipping through his fingers was still revolting to him.

Finally, Jamie removed the goat’s still beating heart, held it above his head, mumbled a long litany of prayers honoring nearly a dozen different deities and then bit into the heart, stilling it.

He ate one entire ventricle, struggling to keep it down as his stomach tried to reject it, then divided the rest of the heart up between four different altars. The intestines he placed on the crude little altar by his bedside. The head he placed atop a particularly dark and terrible looking shrine that was tucked in the closet. Next, he began draining the animal’s blood and dividing it up into bowls which he placed on different altars in the bedroom, living room, and kitchen. Even the animal’s eyes and genitalia were laid at the feet of one of the myriad statues and icons decorating Jamie’s apartment.

After the goat had been completely gutted, he placed part of it in the freezer and the rest in the garbage. He’d learned with difficulty that the garbage disposal could not handle large bones. Jamie went back to the cages and removed a chicken. In a gentle reverent voice, he chanted prayers in Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Hindu, Spanish, and Yoruba before ripping the chicken’s throat out with his teeth, cutting off its feet and head, ripping out its entrails, and splattering its blood on the walls and floor.

The chicken blood decorated seven other altars by the time he was done. It helped, he found, to combine rituals. Otherwise, his morning prayers would take forever. Even now, he had to start before the sun rose in order to finish them all before work. Next, Jamie removed a rabbit, then a dove, then two more chickens, and then a lamb. The apartment was a slaughterhouse before The Gods Jamie worshipped were finally satiated.

Blood splattered the room in every direction and rained down the walls like red teardrops. The plastic tarp covering the floor now held the expanding puddle in which Jamie knelt, knees splashing in the tacky effluence. The animals Jamie had sacrificed to one God or another littered the tarp around him. Birds, butterflies, rabbits, sheep, and goat, some vivisected, some disemboweled or beheaded, and some immolated. Warm entrails, heads, limbs, and bowls of blood decorated the innumerable altars and icons crowding the candle-lit apartment.

The bloodiest part of his morning ritual over, Jamie stared at the ceiling, trying to see through it to the sky above and through that to The Gods in heaven as he pierced himself with needles and inhaled incense while kneeling on a mat and praying to the east. He still had many more rituals to go, many more gods to pay homage to before he could begin his day. To some, he offered fruit. For some, a simple candle and incense sufficed. For others, he burned money or special herbs. For some, he wrote prayers on the walls, or he scrawled them on paper and burned them. For others, he gave sacrifice. To them all, he pledged his eternal, unfailing devotion.

He recited prayers from The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Koran, The Torah, The Tao Te Ching, The I Ching, The Dhammapada, The Adi Granth, The Bhagavad Ghita, The Vedas, and The Avesta. He chanted spells and incantations from ancient grimoires and from fading xerox copies of hieroglyphics chiseled into temple walls and written on ancient scrolls. He had to make sure he had all his bases covered. Any of them could have been the true religion, any of the hundreds of deities could have been the right one, the one that would assure him a place in paradise when he died. Since he could not be sure which one it was, it was best to be safe and believe in them all.

Religious tomes cluttered the apartment in dusty heaps, filling the air with a musty newspaper smell. Candles of varying sizes and description flickered in almost every corner along with incense and herbs that, mixed with the dank mildewed stench of aging books and the funky animal smells of fur, excrement, blood, and organs, made the air almost unbreathable. A miasma of fragrant smoke and ash lingered in each room, a perpetual fog. Tikis, totems, statues and other icons, effigies, and symbols hung from the walls and sat atop every surface that would support them, representing over one thousand different religious sects.

Candles cast their flickering shadows across walls graffitied with prayers, spells, and other symbols of worship. The apartment was a shrine to mankind’s entire religious history.

Darkening pools of red stained the warped hardwood floors in every room and many of the prayers and symbols written on the walls were drawn in the same brown-red blood.

Dozens of animals raged, screeched, barked, and hissed in their cages. The smell of death was driving them mad. Each morning, a company that bred animals for experimentation brought him fresh shipments of creatures that he promptly slaughtered while praying without relent to one God after another. Cartons of rabbits, monkeys, snakes, and birds, cages of sheep and goats, hit his doorstep each morning and by the following morning those same cages and cartons would be empty. His trash can was full of their mutilated remains. His garbage stank like an abattoir.

Jamie stepped into the shower to wash the morning’s sacrifice from his hands, face, and hair. Blood spiraled down the drain as he scrubbed his skin and hair. He could feel the tension in his muscles relax slightly as he washed away his sins. As distasteful as they were, the sacrifices always made Jamie feel better. They quieted the demons within as well as those haunting the shadows around him. Jamie winced as he washed one of the numerous bleeding sores on his body and noticed with dismay that the melanoma was spreading. If the prayers were working, he couldn’t tell.

Jamie dressed quickly and walked past the cages of animals doomed to be executed that very evening into the room where he kept his “other” sacrifices, the ones plucked from street corners or stolen from emergency rooms. He paused briefly, staring at the locked door and listening to the muffled weeping within. He continued past.

Downstairs, below his apartment, was the occult shop he owned with his family. Jamie had worked there since he dropped out of college. He hurried around, tidying up and turning on lights, trying to eradicate every shadow in the room. But there were always places for shadows to hide.

He turned the sign around so that it showed “open,” unlocked the door, then plopped down behind the counter in front of his laptop to begin his research.

He punched in “Human Sacrifice and Religion” and his mind reeled as pages and pages of links sprang up on the screen, each one a different religion requiring its adherents to murder and mutilate in the name of its God, gods, Goddess, goddesses, saints, demons, angels, and/or devils.

“What do I do?” he gasped, staring at the screen in astonishment, overwhelmed by the enormity of his predicament.

He thought about limiting his religious mania to only modern religions or only the major ones, but he was smart enough to know that just because an idea or ideology had fallen out of popularity didn’t make it any less true. Truth was not a matter of popular opinion. Presidents, movie stars, and rock stars were the results of popular opinion, and he was seldom impressed with the tastes and wisdom of the masses. Most people, he knew, were idiots, terrified of truth, happier with pretty lies no matter who they had to hurt to maintain them.

“So, I am back where I started. Who is right?”

The bell on the door rang, announcing the arrival of a customer and startling Jamie out of his meditations.

The girl who shuffled in past the rows of love potions, power candles, and voodoo dolls had that look about her that told Jamie she was on the run from something or someone. Her eyes kept sweeping the floor, nervously shifting left to right and never once looking up at any of the spells, amulets, and potions lining the shelves. Her clothes were ill fitted, as if she had recently lost a lot of weight, yet she was far from emaciated. She was even plump in spots—all the right spots—thighs, hips, ass, breasts, the type of woman Jamie had always been attracted to before the disease robbed him of his desire. Even her shoes looked too big, slapping the tile floor as she shuffled up one aisle and down the other, looking at nothing. She was dressed inappropriately for the weather which wasn’t unusual. Most of the women in the neighborhood were strippers or whores who were accustomed to ignoring the frigid temperature in order to attract customers. She was not a shopper. She had come in to the store to hide.

Jamie slid out from behind the desk, leaving his computer in search mode, listing one religion after another and each demanded human blood to appease its Gods. He sidled up beside the young girl and smiled.

“Can I help you with something?”

“Do you have anything to ward off evil?”

“Lots of things. Evil spirits or evil people?”

“People. The worst kind of people.” The girl’s eyes glanced towards the store window as if she were expecting an attack from that direction.

“Who’s after you?”

The girl’s eyes rose to look up at Jamie. She stared at the rashes and lesions on his face and then back into his eyes.

“Are you sick or something?”

“AIDS. I’ll probably be dead by the end of the year. Now, you tell me your story. Drugs? Prostitution? Ran away from home?”

“All of the above. Except, I didn’t run away in the usual sense. I’m nineteen. My parents aren’t exactly going to be calling out the FBI, and yesterday was my first night as a prostitute and my last. Some guy tried to kill me. He threatened to cut my tits off if I didn’t let him fuck me in the ass. I ran and now my pimp is after me. I just met him, too.”

Jamie saw a quick, furtive movement out of the corner of his eye and turned in time to see something dark and ill-formed, the shadow of some grotesquely deformed thing, detach itself from the darkness behind one of the massive bookshelves lining the walls and dart across the room to join the other shadows behind the closet door. His pulse quickened. He didn’t know what these things were. Demons his rituals had summoned? Messengers of the many Gods he worshipped? Some of the lesser Gods themselves? He knew what they wanted, and he knew they were getting impatient.

“Well, I’ve got an apartment upstairs if you need a place to stay. You don’t have to worry about me trying to fuck you or anything. All the medications I’m on have left me with very little libido.”

His smile trembled as it spread across his face. He hoped she would attribute the bizarre expression to his disease and not the fear steadily increasing within him as more shadows flitted about the room on the edge of his peripheral vision.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s a blessing really. Could you really see me trying to get laid, looking the way I do? I don’t need that kind of frustration and I wouldn’t want to accidentally get someone else sick. Believe it or not, I used to be a really good-looking guy.”

The girl smiled at him. “I believe it.”

“So, what do you think? Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. Nobody should be alone on Thanksgiving. Do you want a place to stay for a few days?”

She looked around the occult shop and back into Jamie’s eyes. She was obviously the type who thought she could see everything about people in their eyes. Of course, if that were true, she wouldn’t have picked up a sadistic trick and fallen in with a pimp.

“You’re not into some satanic cult shit are you?”

Jamie smiled nervously.

“Yes. I am. And tonight at midnight, I’m going to sacrifice you to the goddess Kali or maybe the sun god Ra or maybe even Pele’ or Huitzilopochtli. He’s a particularly blood-thirsty Aztec deity, but then, he’s partial to virgins. I don’t suppose you happen to be a…”

“Not by a long shot.” The girl laughed.

“Oh well, I guess there won’t be any sacrifices tonight.”

“My name is Katherine. My friends call me Kitten.”

“Hello, Kitten. My name is Jamie.”

“You own this place or just run it?”

“My family owns it, my two brothers, my sister, and I. But since I’m the only one who didn’t want to sell the place and divide up the money when my parents died, I run it by myself. Once I croak they’ll liquidate everything, but for now it’s mine.”

“Cool. Mind If I take a look at that apartment?”

“Sure. Follow me.”

They walked to the back of the shop, past the register and up a flight of stairs to Jamie’s apartment door.

Jamie fumbled with his keys while he tried to figure out what to do.

“How long have you lived up here?”

“Since high school. This was my first apartment and it looks like it’ll be my last.”

Kitten smiled sympathetically, but said nothing. Jamie opened the door and the smell of incense and candles wafted out followed by the smell of animals. Kitten stepped inside and winced when the door slammed shut behind her.

THROUGH THE FOG OF incense she spotted the walls covered in blood spatters and scrawled prayers. She saw the cages upon cages of animals from rats to monkeys to snakes to goats and the multitude of statues, icons, totems, and altars. When she heard the sound of a muffled human voice coming from inside a locked room down the hall, Kitten knew something was wrong. She heard the door lock behind her, heard the footsteps approaching, saw the bowls of entrails atop the various altars, and felt the bile rise up to scald the back of her throat. Her eyes watered as she recalled the dozens of horror films she’d seen as a kid. They always culminated in a moment like this, the audience shouting for the heroine/victim to get out of there while the killer crept up behind her. For the second night, she had placed her life in jeopardy.

“Why does this shit always happen to me?” she said out loud as she turned back towards Jamie, already anticipating his attack. Her body dumped a gallon of adrenalin into her bloodstream in preparation to run or fight for her life. But it was too late. She wilted to the carpet as Jamie brought the sixty-pound brass Buddha down onto her skull. Minutes later she was hog-tied and gagged, locked in a room with two other girls her age and a boy no older than fourteen who appeared to be as sick as Jamie. She began to weep then stopped when she realized it would do her no good. She just had to wait for Jamie to get back so she could try to reason with him and seize any opportunity to escape.

JAMIE SAT WITH HIS back to the locked door as he listened to Kitten’s muffled screams. He had been sitting there for hours, watching with dread as the sun traveled across the sky, trying to work up the nerve to sacrifice one of his captives before nightfall. The winter solstice was drawing near. The shadows were increasing and they were hungry. He could see the bloodlust in their fiery red eyes as they glared at him from every dark corner.

The room began to shake as the shadows continued to multiply, thrashing about in fits of rage, eager to get at Jamie or the sacrifices he held locked behind the door. The floor bounced and rattled like a rollercoaster as the screams and roars of the demons drowned out the sounds of Kitten’s weeping. Jamie clamped his hands over his ears again, trying to shut them out.

“Go away. Go away. Go away! I won’t do it. I can’t! Not yet! I…I’m not ready yet. She’s not right. She’s too alive. I’ll find you someone better. I’ll find someone tonight.”

Jamie grabbed his coat and hat as he walked out of his occult shop and locked it up for the evening. He had to get out of there. He needed to think, to figure out what to do, and he needed to find more sacrifices.

As confusing as his life had become, his compulsive prayers and rituals at least made him feel like he was doing something to save himself. It made him feel as if he were taking control of his life. Kidnapping girls made him feel powerful. He just wasn’t sure he could take it to the next level, not until he was positive that this was what God, or Gods, or the Goddess wanted.

Jamie scratched absentmindedly at the raspberry-red melanoma spreading across his cheek as he pulled the collar of his jacket up against the cold. There was no parking lot on this street and parking meters lined the block in both directions checked almost compulsively by ticket-happy meter-maids, so he parked his ‘77 VW Beetle nearly two blocks away. As he walked, he smiled up at Ra as the fiery sun god struggled to break free of the clouds even as he hurtled towards the horizon. Jamie turned away as the dark clouds began to form hideous faces, human faces with horns and fangs and odd growths and tumors protruding from their skin. Reptilian eyes turned toward him as their mouths split wide with ear piercing shrieks. Jamie was pissing The Gods off with his refusal to act. But he just wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do.

Jamie studied every face that passed him. In some he saw the same taint of death that marred his own dour features. Others bristled with life so brilliantly that it was almost blinding. Jamie chastised himself for his jealousy as he scowled at them and imagined sacrificing them to the Sky Gods. But Jamie knew he didn’t have the heart to sacrifice anyone so alive. If he did manage to kill, it had to be something more like euthanasia. The three whores he had locked up in his room were all drug addicted street walkers who would have doubtlessly killed themselves in some way had he not interceded. The boy was dying from multiple sclerosis and was already partially paralyzed. Their deaths would be a mercy.

But would it be enough to appease the Gods?

The latest religion Jamie had adopted believed that without a human blood-sacrifice, the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli would be depleted of tonally and all movement in the universe would cease. The prospect so terrified Jamie that it haunted his dreams. Night after night he awakened screaming, throwing off his sweat-drenched sheets, grabbing for one of the hundreds of idols, amulets, and totems that guarded his bedside against evil and death.

In the morning he’d run panicked for his window afraid the earth had ceased its rotation, only relieved once he’d seen the sun rise. Last week he’d nearly fainted when he’d stepped out of his shop into the street only to find the road empty of cars and people and not so much as a breeze stirring the air. He’d thought that his procrastination had doomed the earth to inertia. That had decided the matter for him. He began collecting sacrifices that very same evening.

He’d picked up Naomi in a crack-house. He just walked in while she was nodding from a nose full of heroin and just about to chase it with a hit of rock cocaine, scooped her up into his arms, and carried her to his car. She slurred against his neck as he carried her, already negotiating for the next hit, heedless of any peril she might be in.

“Yooooou want to fuck? You can do anything you want for fifty bucks. Or I’ll suck your dick for ten. For ten more I’ll even let you fuck me in the ass. Just let me finish this last hit and I’ll go anywhere you want. Hey!”

She cried out as he folded her anemic body up into the trunk of his beetle and slammed it shut. He had to sit on it like he was closing an overstuffed suitcase in order to get the trunk to close. He dislocated her hip and broke three of her ribs but he made her fit. He could hear her cry out as her body collapsed in on itself and the trunk locked in place.

The very next day, Tara leapt into his car willingly as he pulled to a stop at a street corner crowded with prostitutes and drug dealers.

“Hey, daddy! Want some pussy?”

There were shadows all around her crying out for her blood. She didn’t seem to notice or care. Jamie heard a horrifying voice boom in the cramped confines of the car.

“Kill this whore! Sacrifice her!”

He wasn’t sure which God had said it, but he knew he had to obey. He gave her a snort of heroin and a whack on the head with a tire iron then drove straight to his apartment where he chained her up in the room with Naomi. He’d kidnapped little Bill while he was leaving the hospital after his last check-up, the one when they told him he only had a few more months to live. He’d scooped the boy up out of his wheelchair and walked right out of the building with him. So far he hadn’t hurt any of them. So far he hadn’t found the nerve.

The Aztecs sacrificed twenty thousand people a year to their gods to keep the earth in motion, Jamie thought. All I need is one to make my contribution. Why is it so hard?

He thought about Kitten, about Bill, and Naomi, and Tara, all chained up in his apartment waiting for him to make up his mind. But he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. The question kept nagging at him.

What if I am wrong? What if this isn’t the true religion? What if by killing someone I am committing a sin and damning my soul to hell?

But then the opposite thought would immediately rise up to complicate things and send him spiraling into a near panic.

What if the Aztecs, the Druids, the Africans, the Greeks, the Polynesians, the Egyptians, and three quarters of the ancient world were right? What if by not killing I am damning myself?

Since he’d first been diagnosed HIV positive and then with full-blown AIDS Jamie had been struggling with this same dilemma. Ever since his death sentence, he’d decided that in order to ensure his soul would not perish or suffer eternal damnation he’d had better play it safe and worship every god known to man just in case one of them was the TRUE god. Better safe than sorry. The problem was that so many of the religions conflicted. What was canonized by one was condemned by another. Sinner and saint were one and the same depending on the religion or the times. In order to cover his ass, he’d have to worship every religion, but by worshipping them all he was sinning against many and condemning his soul anyway. And then there were the jealous Gods, the monotheistic religions that made it a sin to worship any other. They pissed Jamie off the most.

There has to be a solution, Jamie thought. There has to be a way to make it work.

Jamie unlocked his car and collapsed behind the wheel. He closed his eyes and bit down on his lower lip trying to control his frustration.

What do I do? What if they are all wrong?

Jamie sighed in exasperation and looked at his face in the mirror. He looked like the Ghost of Christmas Past. He knew he’d be dead soon. If he couldn’t save his body then he had to at least save his soul. He drove to the hospital and followed the familiar path to the terminal ward. No one thought to question his presence there. With his emaciated body shivering from fever, the various rashes and tumors on his face and hands, Jamie looked like death. AIDS was kicking his ass. But he wasn’t technically terminal yet. The people housed here had only days or weeks to live. Jamie had another reason for visiting the terminal ward. Jamie was after virgins.

Finding virgins of any age was difficult. Even nuns were getting laid these days. Priests and altar-boys were having more sex than rock-stars if the rumors were true. The only place he could be relatively sure to find a pure unsullied virgin was among the diseased and dying. He considered it a safe assumption that the young adults, twenty-one and under, who’d spent much of their lives in and out of the hospital, probably hadn’t gotten laid much.

Jamie smiled at the night nurses as he passed their station. They smiled back with expressions of pity, disgust, or apathy. None of them questioned him. They had little doubt that he belonged. Jamie shuffled his way down to the farthest room and grabbed a wheelchair that sat unattended in the hallway. There was a boy inside the room exuding the all-too familiar smell of cancer. The smell was so overpowering that even without reading his chart Jamie knew the kid was terminal. No one survived with that much cancer.

The kid was tiny, his appetite long destroyed by chemotherapy along with his hair. Jamie looked down into the boy’s eyes as they fluttered open, his brilliant blue irises now wan and rheumy.

“Hi, kid. How was your Thanksgiving? Did they serve you turkey?”

The boy scowled and turned up his nose.

“Yeah, I don’t suppose turkey and gravy from the hospital cafeteria is much of a treat. Your parents sent me to get you out of here. Nobody should have to die in a place like this. We’re going outside beneath the stars. Would you like that?”

The boy nodded, too weak to speak. Jamie took a quick look at his medical chart to get his name and the name of his doctor should he need it. Then he slid the IV from the boy’s arm, disconnected his morphine drip, and removed his oxygen mask.

“You okay breathing without this thing?”

Again, the boy nodded.

Jamie threw back the kid’s covers and slid one arm under his legs and the other under his shoulder and lifted him from the bed. The boy’s head flopped backwards as if he had no spine and his head weighed a ton. Jamie eased him gently into the wheelchair.

“Do you have regular clothes?”

The kid nodded towards the closet across the room and Jamie walked over and withdrew a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. The kid must have been in the hospital since the summer. Jamie removed the boy’s hospital gown and slipped his t-shirt on over his head. Then he slid his shorts on.

“It’s kind of chilly out now. We’ll take this blanket with us to keep you warm.”

Jamie whipped the thin hospital blanket from the bed and wrapped it around the boy’s bare legs.

“There. That’s better. You ready to go?”

The boy smiled and Jamie wheeled him out of the room.

He wheeled the kid down the opposite hall, away from the nurse’s station, and into an elevator. Minutes later, Jamie strolled leisurely through the main lobby and out the front door without anyone once stopping to question why such a sick boy was being taken out into the cold.

Jamie wheeled the boy out to the parking lot and right up to his car. He slid the passenger seat back as far as it would go and lifted the boy into it. Then he hopped in on the opposite side and sped out of the parking lot leaving the wheelchair abandoned.

The boy was smiling as he looked out the window at all the passing cars. Jamie wondered how long it had been since he’d been outside. He decided to drive him around a little for one last tour of the city before taking him to the park and butchering him.

They cruised around Central Park, past Trump Tower and Rockefeller Center. Jamie watched as the boy craned his neck to see the top of the skyscrapers. He turned at Broadway and they cruised all the way down to Times Square. The boy smiled at the lights, and Jamie checked his watch. It would be dark soon.

Jamie turned the VW around and headed back toward the park. It was already emptying out. He decided to wait until the darkness was absolute. There were very few people willing to brave the park after dark even with all the progress Mayor Giuliani had made in the war on crime. They’d be alone soon.

They sat outside Tavern On The Green watching the carriage drivers change shifts as the sky grew darker. The park was alive with movement. Very little of it was human. Bizarre shapes gyrated and convulsed, thrashing about in the darkness. Here and there Jamie caught a hint of fangs or claws or flaming red eyes. He tried his best to hide his fear from the boy.

The hot dog and ice-cream vendors were streaming out of the park like cockroaches. Jamie jumped out of the car as one of them passed.

“Hey, my man, can I buy a fudgesicle from you? Two, please?”

“Uh-uh. I’m done for the night. I’ve got to get home to my family,” the guy said, his voice tinged with some faint Middle-Eastern accent that was nearly undetectable beneath the more pronounced Brooklyn one. The grizzled old ice-cream vendor pushed his cart right past Jamie without looking. He’d obviously had a bad day. Sales for ice-cream probably weren’t too good in November.

“C’mon, can’t you help me out? My kid is dying of cancer and I’m just trying to show him a good time on Thanksgiving before he has to go back to the hospital.”

“Thanksgiving is tomorrow. And I need to get home to my family tonight.”

“He might not be alive tomorrow.”

The ice-cream man knelt down and peered into the car. He saw the emaciated boy sitting in the front seat wrapped in a blanket, his mouth hanging open, struggling to breathe, his hair all but gone, and his eyes hollow pits sunk deep into his face. The boy’s eyes swam sluggishly towards the scruffy old ice-cream man as if even that took great effort. He smiled painfully, and the old man gasped and looked back at Jamie.

“Oh, Jesus. Is he gonna be okay?”

“No. No, he’s not.”

“I’m sorry, man. Here, just take the ice-cream. I already totaled my receipts for the day. It would be too much effort to make change for you anyway.”

“I appreciate it.”

Jamie took the ice-cream and hopped back into the car. The boy was too weak to hold the fudgesicle, so Jamie held it for him. He didn’t start eating his own ice-cream until the boy had finished all of his. When the boy was finished, Jamie wiped his chin with the blanket and unwrapped his own. They sat there quietly watching the curtain of night thicken as Jamie slurped on the melting fudgesicle. It was a good thing it was cold out or the ice-cream would have already melted.

“Thank you.”

It was a hoarse whisper barely audible above the sounds of traffic and the rustling of the trees. Jamie wasn’t certain he’d even heard it. He turned towards the boy. There were tears streaming from the kid’s eyes as he stared back at him.

“Don’t thank me.”

“My parents never come to visit anymore. They say it’s too painful for them to see me like this. I know they didn’t send you. They’ve forgotten about me. I don’t know why you’re doing this. But thank you.”

Jamie had to lean close to the boy’s lips to hear him. His voice was so weak, unable to get enough air into his lungs to project it. That close the smell of the cancer inside him was suffocating. Jamie smiled back at the boy and studied the kid’s face. It seemed impossibly cruel that someone so young was dying. Jamie wondered how long the kid had left. If he was in the terminal ward than it wasn’t long. They had only been gone for an hour but Jamie could already see the pain in the boy’s face as his morphine wore off and the agony of his disease slowly crept back upon him. His face twitched and spasmed as he struggled to maintain that appreciative smile despite his increasing discomfort. Soon the pain would be unbearable to him.

There’s no such thing as mercy killing, Jamie thought. Every death is an injustice.

Jamie cursed and started the engine. The wheelchair was still in the parking lot when they arrived back at the hospital. He wheeled the boy back through the lobby, up to his room, and then lifted him back into his bed.

“Thank you.” The boy wheezed again. Jamie turned quickly away. He walked off mumbling prayers in dialects that hadn’t been spoken on earth in two millenniums. His mind was in a tailspin as he drove home.

I can’t do it. I can’t fucking do it. I’m doomed. My soul is doomed. There has to be a way to satisfy them all without killing. There has to be a way!

The VW rocked and shook as shadows and dark apparitions hurled themselves against the vehicle, attacking it in a rage of disappointment. Jamie tried to keep his eyes on the road, looking straight ahead and not at the twisted creatures slithering across his windshield trying to pry their way in to pluck him from the vehicle and tear him apart, to punish him for failing them yet again.

“Give us our sacrifice! You owe us! Kill for us! Give us our sacrifice.”

“Who are you? What the fuck are you? Are you a God? A devil? What?”

“We are God. Kill for us! Kill for us!”

Jamie parked his VW back in its usual spot and headed straight for his apartment, shrugging off the spectral fingers clawing at him, threatening to make a sacrifice of him. He could feel the weight of their bodies as they grabbed hold of him as if they wanted to make it clear to him that they were not hallucinations. They wanted him to feel their strength and power. Jamie felt hands around his throat, choking him. He felt something jump on his back and drag him down. He was still being strangled as kicks and punches began raining down upon him. Jamie felt his ribs crack as something kicked him in his side. What little air remained in his lungs came exploding out as something punched up into his abdomen. He almost passed out when the presence seated on top of him suddenly disappeared and the pressure around his throat abated. He was left alone on the sidewalk bleeding and panting after being mugged by things he could not see. Jamie staggered home, trying to figure out what to do. This was no longer a matter of curing a disease. It was about saving his immortal soul.

He unlocked his front door and then the door to the spare bedroom where Tara, Naomi, Billy, and Kitten were still held captive.

“Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. The spirits are demanding a symbol of my gratitude, a tribute, a sacrifice. But first, we’re going to have a last meal, a Thanksgiving feast.”

His captives wept and trembled as he spoke. Jamie dropped his head then slowly turned and walked out the door, back to his room.

Jamie’s dreams were dark and violent. Demons and spirits, angry demigods and angels, worried at him as he slept. He dreamt about murdering Kitten, the prostitutes, and the young boy, ripping their hearts out to sacrifice to the gods. He dreamt of what would befall him if he didn’t. He imagined himself covered in blood, sawing a torso, that appeared to be the streetwalker named Naomi, in two. In his dream, he had an erection. He woke up with a scream and was appalled to discover that he had orgasmed. His underwear were soaked with sweat and semen. He had cum while dreaming about mutilating one of the women he had locked up in the next room.

What the hell is wrong with me?

He stripped out of his soiled briefs and dashed into the shower. As he scrubbed his drying seed from his pubic hair, he steeled his nerves for what he had to do. The sun was at its full height when he stepped from the shower. It was Thanksgiving Day. Time to show his gratitude to the gods with a blood sacrifice.

Today, Jamie forsook his normal rituals. Instead, he took the last three chickens from the cage and slit their throats. He offered their blood and entrails to the various deities who were satisfied by such pedestrian offerings. The rest of them went into a large pan then into his oven. He sautéed some potatoes and green beans as well. It was all he had in his cupboard. He wished there was time to make a pie. It just wasn’t Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie, but cold shivers wracked his body and the thought of venturing out into the cold to go grocery shopping made the chills worsen. It would not be much of a last meal.

Half the day was gone before the meal was ready. Jamie had been purposely avoiding the room where Kitten and his other three captives. He didn’t want to look them in the eyes until he absolutely had to. He knew that doing so might steal his resolve.

He placed the three chickens, the potatoes, and the beans on a platter and carried them into the room along with several plates.

“I know this isn’t much, but it’s the best I could do on short notice. I wanted this day to be as happy as I could make it. You know…under the circumstances.”

He went to each girl and untied one of their hands. He untied Tara and Naomi first. They backed into a corner hugging each other waiting for the violence to begin. When he got to the boy, he untied both of his hands. There was little threat of him escaping.

He began serving them, filling their plates with chicken and vegetables.

“You don’t expect us to eat this shit,” Tara said defiantly.

“I was hoping you would. It is Thanksgiving.” She knocked the plate out of his hand as he knelt to hand it to her.

“I said, I’m not eating this shit! Just let me go!”

“LET US GO!” Naomi yelled, adding her voice to Tara’s. Kitten and the boy remained silent, cowering in the corner.

Jamie sighed. There was no sense keeping them any more. Jamie knew now that he had no heart for murder. The very idea of it, after the dream he’d had, made his stomach roil.

“Okay, I’ll let you go.” He stood up and walked over to the girls, untying them one at a time.

“Don’t hurt me. Please, don’t hurt me. I’ll eat the chicken if you want me to.” Tara whimpered as Jamie untied her legs and her other arm.

“I’m not going to hurt you. Just get the fuck out of here. Go ahead, get out!”

The girls nearly trampled Kitten, who was still tied up, as they scrambled for the door.

“Wait! Take him with you! He can’t walk!”

Jamie was busy untying Billy as the girls dashed out of the apartment and down the steps.

“Fuck that! You take that little motherfucker back wherever you got him from, you sick perverted bastard! We’re callin’ the cops on your ass!”

Jamie heard the door slam downstairs as they ran out into the street. Then he heard them screaming for help. He sighed wearily and untied Kitten. She pulled the gag out of her mouth and stared at Jamie, scared and perplexed, trying once again to read his soul in his eyes and once again failing.

“You letting me go?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head in puzzlement.

“Then why’d you kidnap me in the first place?”

“You wouldn’t understand. Just please take Billy with you when you leave?”

Kitten reached down and threw the boy’s arm over her shoulder then tried to stand. It didn’t work. She tossed him over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry and walked slowly toward the door. She stopped in the living room and eased the boy back down to the floor, turning to face Jamie again.

“Why the fuck did you knock me over the head like that?”

“I’m sorry. I was just confused.”

Jamie could barely look at her. His eyes rose no higher than her shoes. Despite herself, Kitten felt pity for him. She could only imagine how insane she would be if she were slowly dying, rotting away piece by piece. Who knew what kind of crazy shit she’d do?

“Those girls are going to bring the cops back here ya know?”

“I know.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“I’ll be dead before they get here.”

“What? Why?”

“I have to. It’s the only way to satisfy them all. I’ve got to sacrifice myself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Gods!” Jamie yelled gesturing around the room at the innumerable objects of worship, “They want blood and I can’t give it to them! I’m too much of a pussy. But there is one sacrifice I can give them. I’m man enough for that at least.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Pascal’s Wager! You know… It’s safer to believe in God on the off chance that God exists so that you go to heaven then not to believe and wind up burning in hell. But there are just so many! How do you choose?”

“I don’t understand.”

So Jamie explained. He told her about Huitzilopochtli and Esus and Kali and Pele’ and Ra and the myriad other bloodthirsty deities and their demands for human sacrifice. He explained to her that there was no more evidence to support one religion than another, so he couldn’t be sure which one to worship. The only way to be sure was to worship them all, which meant killing.

“Will you help me?”

“Help you kill yourself?”

Kitten looked at Jamie and thought about all the terrible things she’d done in her life just to get high or disgrace her parents or impress her friends and how helping Jamie take his own life was really not much worse than blowing a guy for a hit of crack or pulling a train with half the football team in high school just to get attention. He was dying anyway so it wouldn’t exactly be murder.

Would it?

Perhaps, in some way, helping him would even bring her redemption.

Jamie wrote down all the prayers, blessings, and incantations she would need to send his soul off properly.

“You’ve got to recite all of these after I’m dead.”

“Okay.” She didn’t know what else to say. This was all so surreal, so unbelievable.

Kitten watched as Jamie climbed onto the biggest altar in the room and doused himself with lighter fluid. He laid more than a dozen different sacrificial knives and daggers out in front of him and began jamming them into his stomach one at a time until his lower abdomen bristled with the quivering hilts of blood-spattered steel. He began chanting and praying, crying out in mortal anguish each time he buried a new knife into his flesh. His eyes rolled up into his head as waves of agony ripped through him, burning in his gut. He bit through his bottom lip and almost lost consciousness for the second time that day. Blood bubbled up from between his lips and gushed from his wounds, drenching the altar. Still, he picked up another knife and then another and another until only one remained. He sat there swaying back and forth with a belly full of steel, looking as if he were about to expire right that instant. His chest rose and fell in deep laborious breaths as he stared at the last knife.

Jamie looked around the room.

“Do you see them?”

Kitten looked around and shrugged her shoulders.

“See who?”

“The Gods. They are confused. They weren’t expecting this.”

“What do you want me to do now?” Kitten interrupted.

Jamie’s eyes swung slowly towards her, missed her, and then swung back until they finally focused upon her. He opened his mouth and a spray of blood erupted from his lips as he spoke.

“This last knife is going in my chest and after that I’ll be dead so you have to cut my heart out for me and put it on that altar over there and recite these prayers. You have to make sure you say the right ones. Cut out my intestines and divide them up between those three altars by the bathroom over there and then chant this.” He handed her a sheet of paper stained with so much blood it was almost unreadable.

“Okay,” she replied staring at the blood-drenched sheet of loose-leaf as if it were something dangerous capable of attacking her.

“After that you have to cut off my head and put it at the feet of that statue of Artemis, but you have to be naked when you do it and you have to recite this six times before you chop my head off. After you chop off my head you need to remove my brain and put half of it in that bowl over there and the other half in that goblet by that statue over there next to the door.”

“Who is that?”

“Some Polynesian deity. I can’t pronounce his name. Now, after you’ve done all of that, just take my blood and pour it into those sixteen bowls over there on those altars and then burn my body on this one. You got that?”

“Uh…yeah…I—I guess so.” Kitten’s stomach was roiling. She wasn’t sure she was up for this. The blood spurting from the wounds in his belly was already starting to make her woozy.

Jamie picked up the last dagger and poured the remaining lighter fluid over his head. Jamie coughed up a thick wad of coagulated blood from a punctured lung and smiled through teeth streaked with gore. He laughed, wincing from the pain of the blades crowded into his abdomen. His stomach acids had already begun to leak out and corrode his organs. Blood sprayed from his lips as his laughter grew louder. He almost fell from the altar as the pain doubled him over.

Tears squeezed out from the corners of his eyes and rained down his cheeks as he stared heavenward, his arms held out in supplication. With all his prayers and sacrifices he had still seen no evidence of the all-powerful deities he’d read about in so many cultures. All he’d seen were the terrible bloodthirsty things that lurked in the dark. He had still yet to find God. He still had no idea which religion was the right one. He recited more prayers in languages that were dead before the fall of Rome and shoved the last blade into his chest with such force that the tip of the blade burst out through his back.

“But…but suicide is a sin. It says so in the Bible. What if you end up in hell?”

“Then I have lost nothing.”

Jamie smiled in exhausted relief as his soul vacated the flesh.

He fell back upon the altar and Kitten seized the knife in his chest. She had to jerk several times with all her weight and strength to dislodge it from his sternum. She then began cutting out his heart in vigorous strokes that left her sopping in blood up to her elbows. She turned her head as she sawed through his rib-cage, thankful he had chosen a serrated blade to plunge into his heart, trying her best not to regurgitate on him. She lost the battle with her stomach and yesterday’s lunch spewed forth in a deluge of liquid yellow.

Blood pumped from Jamie’s wounds. His heart sputtered to a halt. Blood plastered Kitten’s t-shirt to her breasts. The sound of steel on bone was even more nauseating than the wet squishy sounds of the blade cutting into meat and tissue. More blood splattered her face as she severed his aorta. She almost feinted again when Jamie’s corpse began its death spasms. Kitten had almost forgotten about Jamie’s disease and had to stop to wash her hands and face and put plastic gloves on before continuing. It was probably too late now anyway.

Jamie hadn’t told her which knife to use to cut out his intestines or which sword to cut his head off with and for a moment Kitten stood there looking around at the mess of blood and meat in confusion. It was okay though; there were a lot of knives to choose from. She would think of something. She began chanting the different prayers Jamie had left for her as she continued to unmake his corpse. She’d do her best to make sure Jamie’s soul found peace, even though she was certain she had already damned her own to hell.

The night had begun to flee the morning as Kitten finished unmaking Jamie’s corpse and distributing it among the various altars. She was surprised that the police had not returned with the whores, but she did not dwell on it. The two women had probably picked up tricks on their way home or had gotten high or been snatched up by their pimps. She could only imagine the kind of beating their pimps would lay on them when they finally found them after being missing for days. She doubted that anyone would have believed that they’d been kidnapped by a terminally ill man and then released without so much as a scratch. Kitten thought of what her own pimp would have done and shuddered.

She sat there for a long moment looking at the remains of Jamie’s gutted corpse, looted of all its blood and organs. She’d even removed his eyes, teeth, and sexual organs which now decorated altars on both sides of the apartment. Kitten remained seated beside Jamie’s body, breathing heavily and feeling exhausted as if the long hours of ritual mutilation had sapped all of her strength. It dawned on her that the sky had remained in that dim twilight between morning and night the entire time she’d been carving on Jamie’s corpse. She poured more lighter fluid onto what remained of Jamie’s corpse and prepared to set it ablaze, but match after match failed to ignite. Soon, she’d littered the floor with an entire box of matches.

Kitten looked around the room as the fine delicate hairs on her neck and arms rose and her body began to tremble. The sense that something was terribly wrong grew inside her until she was completely terrified yet unable to articulate why.

The room was still near dark as Kitten rose from the floor and walked over to the nearest window. She slid the window open and was surprised at the silence that greeted her. There was no traffic on the entire street. There was no movement at all in fact. Not a bird chirped, not a dog barked, not a horn honked, not a single human voice or footstep could be heard, not even the rustling of the wind through the trees. Everything had simply ceased movement. Kitten looked up into the sky. Her head felt heavy and her neck muscles had barely enough strength to lift it. She wobbled and had to grab hold of the window sill to keep from falling over. When she finally lifted her eyes skyward her legs began to tremble and then finally gave out on her, depositing her on the seat of her pants on the hardwood floor of Jamie’s apartment.

The sky was not covered in clouds as she’d been expecting. There were very few clouds in the sky at all. The sun had simply not risen. It was still low in the sky just barely peeking over the ocean but it wasn’t rising. It was stuck there on the edge of the sky, boiling on the horizon. Even the clouds did not move, their momentum arrested, hovering in the sky. All movement everywhere had ceased. It was then that Kitten remembered the one deity that had most terrified Jamie, the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli. Jamie had warned her that without a blood sacrifice Huitzilopochtli would cease to provide the world with something he called tonally and all movement on earth would cease. But the sheet of paper with prayers she was supposed to recite to Huitzilopochtli was covered with so much of Jamie’s blood that she’d been unable to read any of it and so, she’d simply skipped them.

She looked back at the horizon hoping that she was wrong even as she began to feel her own energy winding down. The sun had still not moved and appeared to be dimming as if it too were losing energy. Her sin against the bloodthirsty Aztec deity had damned more than just this world…perhaps the entire solar system, maybe even the entire universe.

Kitten collapsed onto her back as her muscles lost all vitality and shut down. Her arms and legs went numb, her heartbeat slowed, and her breathing became more shallow. Even her thoughts began to slow. She imagined how enraged Huitzilopochtli must have been, watching as all the other Gods received their offerings of blood while He alone was denied. She imagined how intense his wrath must have been after centuries of being ignored by humanity only to be reawakened by Jamie with the promise of blood and then snubbed.

With a sigh that emptied her soul Kitten watched the sun turn black and fall from the sky just as the fading spark within her winked out.