What no one fully appreciates is the kind of time it takes to properly prepare a sacrifice. You can’t just find a pretty young girl and light five black candles. You can’t just pronounce the names of Hell’s royalty over an altar you built in your garage next to the lawnmower while the kids are asleep upstairs and expect Their unholy essence to fill her mouth.
Any real diabolist knows that if you take shortcuts you just wind up with a dead girl in the garage and a lot of explaining to do. Besides, any meat needs to be properly seasoned before it’s delicious.
It had taken Aaron 10 years to season Jessica. She was a nice looking brunette, white skin, little button nose, hair cut to the shoulder in the style of girls who weren’t overt in their sexuality but who would definitely fuck on a first date if they had a couple margaritas first and were feeling spicy that day. It was her personality though, that made him choose her. The thing all women wanted to be valued for.
Meeting her was pure, exquisite chance. Aaron hadn’t had any interest in attending the university art departments open house. He thought of himself as too serious a person to go to parties but dormmate peer pressure won out. Besides, he knew that avoiding unwanted attention meant going along with little social niceties.
She glowed and bubbled earnest enthusiasm all over the gallery. A coterie of party goers clustered around her, charmed by her wit and clear laugh. She was a photography student, Aaron learned that after insinuating himself into the group and gaining her whole attention. She was 22, thought the world could be influenced by her art, was funny and kind and Aaron genuinely liked her. He actually loved her by the time he asked her to be his girlfriend, was honestly a little devastated by his deception for a few day before he asked her to marry him.
But Aaron never had the temperament to fully love something other than his own aims, so he hardened himself and began the years long process of peeling off little bits of her. Besides, the most essential component of a sacrifice is that it is really, truly valued. Fake emotional attachment at your own peril.
He stopped going to her art shows first, a few years after they were married. Something he saw with satisfaction wounded her. He pried that wound wider and poured in doubt. He went out with his friends when she was laid up with the flu. Criticized a grant proposal so bluntly that she quietly discarded it. He was bored and irritated when she talked about her day job. He began remark on women he found attractive when they were out in public. Gradually he stopped sleeping with her altogether. She began to apologize more, became deferential to his moods, eager to please.
He had began to lay the ritual’s physical framework around the house at the start of the New Year. A bird sealed into the walls at each compass point. (“Is something rotting? What the fuck is that?” “I can’t smell anything, babe.”) He dripped ipecac into her food so she couldn’t keep anything down and stitched the bezoar from a black goat into her pillow. When she was shaky and thin, too sick to leave the house, he dismantled all of the light switches on the top floor. It took two weeks of sweating over the concrete basement floor to finish the Sigil by solstice but teeth gritted and back aching he did it.
By the time he put on his robes and went to murder her Aaron was very, very tired. Satanisim had been so exciting when he was a teenager. It made him feel exotic and powerful before he had even managed a simple incantation. He’d imagined summoning a being of Hell- the highest of hidden arts- would be a more heady, almost orgasmic process.
Instead it was just fucking work. Like everything else in his adult life.
Aaron was pissed by the time he’d chased a delirious and screaming Jessica down the basement stairs. He’d rolled his ankle on the second landing in the pursuit. He was further annoyed at the amount of time it took to strangle her. She thrashed and punched out wildly, threatening to knock over one of the lit candles (Because you will actually need five black candles.) and he lost his temper and slammed her head into the floor to stun her. The final intonements would be another three hours of intensely focused reading and he was just ready to be done.
It worked. The moment he knew it had came the closest he’d felt to his boyhood wonderment at first learning about the awe inspiring vastness of The Pit. His skin drew tight and hot as he finished the final canto. A rushing heat at his back flowed towards Jessica’s open mouth that he had filled with smooth jasper stones. He finished the last word perfectly, speaking the syllable deep in the back of his throat.
Jessica’s body sat up, turned it’s head and spit out the mouthful of tumbled stones. Spittle dribbled down it’s chin when it turned back to look at Aaron. Blood vessels had burst in her eyes from the throttling. The demon sitting inside the meat of her brain peered at him with mildly malevolent curiosity.
Aaron held out his fistful of red salt, his grimoire held against his heart. “King Curson, Finder and UnObscurer, I have bound you to m-“
To his absolute terror Jessica’s body simply stood straight up and walked out of the protective rings of the sigil and towards the basement stairs.
It didn’t spare him a glance as she stomped up to the living room. It’s knee bent oddly to the side on the last step like the tendons holding her leg together went slack. It nearly fell but managed to yank itself upright and vanish.
Aaron stood there slack jawed at the empty door. He dropped his grimoire and pelted up the stairs after it.
Jessica’s body stood barefooted on the frozen back yard patio squinting into the clear night sky. Aaron paused, uncertain of what he was supposed to do now. He could see his fingerprints on her neck.
Her body began to shiver, then shake violently. Absently yet wonderingly it looked down at it’s raw, trembling arm and said, in Jessica’s voice as if from far away, “If it gets too cold it doesn’t work right.”
It came back inside, shutting the sliding glass door behind itself.
He flinched hard when it came towards him, eyes seeing but not seeing him. He was too terrified to move so it had to brush past him to get into the kitchen where it began opening cupboards and taking things out. A can of soup, four mugs, a half a bag of spaghetti that spilled everywhere. Jessica’s body pulled out a box of Spanish rice and opened it.
It turned back to Aaron. The red haze was vanishing around the whites of her eyes. It regarded him thoughtfully as it shoveled a handful of dry rice into it’s mouth and chewed a few times. It swallowed but didn’t blink. Not once.
It poured out the rest of the box on the floor between them.
“I don’t want any of this. Let’s go.”
It pushed past Aaron again and he turned dumbly to watch it pick up Jessica’s green parka and Aaron’s car keys. Jessica never liked to drive. She always made him do it.
It opened the front door and let it hang in the dark. He heard it get in the car and stood wide-eyed in the silence until it leaned on the horn. Then his feet were moving across the carpet, down the walk. He didn’t want to get in the car but he was going to get in the car.
The devil drove them to Waffle House. It was peopled with the usual scurf of 3 AM in a small town. Tired but kind waitresses, teenagers flouting school nights, a few drunks.
Jessica swung into a booth and scrutinized the laminated menu that was also a placemat. Aaron hovered by the tabletop, cycling through possible counter spells, quick sigils he could sketch out unnoticed… maybe Dee’s Purgative Immolation could work, although it would incinerate the whole Waffle House and probably himself…
Jessica glanced up.
“Sit.” She said and he did because there was nothing else to do. All of his meticulously memorized arcane knowledge was gone from him and he knew it always would be. The lingering sulfur smell in his nose and the look in the devils eye was enough to Know.
Their server was mid order with the teens but halted and came over with her notepad when Jessica waved. The teens only returned to their chatter after her departure, unbothered.
Aaron hadn’t seen her eat much in years, enforced isolation and despair wearing her appetite into nothing. Now she ordered steak and eggs, a side of ham, two hash browns covered, smothered chunked and peppered. The waitress gave Jessica a small smile and a quiet “Lemme get that for you , hun.” And Jessica grinned with all of her teeth, a crazy thing.
Jessica picked up dull knife and bit the flat of it between her back molars thoughtfully, eyes unfixed. Aaron sat with his new unreality in silence until the waitress returned with her burden and laid it across their table.
Aaron glanced down at the chunk of steak in its spreading pink juice and the oily fried eggs. He felt ill for the first time. He’d felt resignation, some pity maybe when he cut her, terrorized her, choked her till her eyes bloodied, but watching this King of Hell fork greasy hash browns into her (It’s?) mouth so voraciously made him want to vomit.
Jessica paused to wipe a drip of cheese off of her chin and ripped a huge chunk of ham apart with her hands and stuffed it into her mouth. Then she actually looked at him for the first time since leaving their home.
“Sorry, did you have something to say?”
“What are you?” He whispered through his rising gorge.
Jessica cocked her head, a little dimple of concern in her brow.
“I’m what you asked for.” She said and began sawing the steak into little pieces. “A nice, tight body wife and someone to find your…” She gazed at the ceiling in thought for a moment before seeming to grasp the word.” Deed! .” She finished brightly as she shook a bottle of hot sauce violently across all of the plates, slashing the food, napkins, and table indiscriminately with tapatio.
Aaron couldn’t help but lean forward. “Really? I mean, really, really?” He tried his favorite gambit with women- wide eyed innocence and confusion, genuine flummox at a situation that had always allowed him to eel around being held responsible for any upset. “How much do you remember, sweetie?”
Jessica paused, a whole egg half swallowed in her throat bulging grotesque in the center, gaze again unfixed and seeing something beyond a world of matter.
“I remember the Pit.” She said and finished swallowing. “I remember the imps at their toil in the Mills and Great Paimon’s crowned head vast in the black clouds as he went about his business. I remember digging the bones of our gilded enemies from the tar and making little animals from them to writhe and wail for the delight of my duchesses at court. I remember looking through a lens. I remember tall grass with little dancing lights all in it. And a mortal mother that held me. I remember a bank account and a gold ring and a feeling in this chest that felt like an explosion underwater.
I remember you, Aaron.” She finished and smiled a smile that looked false. “I remember loving you so much and with such despair that it left a taste on the back of this organ that I’ll remember forever, on any plane.” She stuck her tongue out all the way as evidence. The cavern of her mouth a descending blackness into an internal world.
Aaron opened his mouth to say something but all words slivered away from his mind. He knew with a bone deep certainty that his chance to speak, to defend himself was gone. A blown opportunity maybe, to woo his murdered wife and summoned demon to sympathy. Now he was at the mercy of whatever this Jessica’s whims may be.
The platter of steak and eggs was finished and Jessica held out the yolk clotted platter out as the waitress swooped by and dutifully took it.
“I’ve been here one before. Did you know it was very fashionable on this plane for about a century to call us? You’re little book of names is from… what was it…” She glanced again at the ceiling, searching her memory for a moment. “1532? From France? Do you still have a France? You poor, stupid animals never could get the hang of permanence.”
Aaron swallowed.
She smiled and made a generous gesture over her second plate of hash browns.
His tongue unstuck itself long enough to whisper, “I didn’t think you’d be able to leave the circle.”
She looked sympathetic for a moment.
“And that’s what arrogance will get you. Why would you think that inviting me into this flesh wouldn’t insulate me from your little scribbles? I mean, fuck, Aaron, you understand how the laws of your plane work only in the most narrow sense. Why would you think you had any understanding of Ours?“
“The flesh negates the metaphysical binding…” Aaron murmured.
Jessica grinned widely, like she used to when they were young and his project was just beginning. A young woman’s exuberance.
“Thank you for this lovely suit of armor you poured me into!” She said and shoved a forkful of cooled ham into his gaping mouth. “I’ll be happy to wear it until it falls off and I return home again. It’s fun here.” She slapped his bottom jaw upwards and forced him to chew. “Not that any of you ever appreciate it.”
He dribbled half masticated ham onto the table, unable or unwilling to swallow it. Jessica cleaned all of the remaining plates unbothered by his mess, even licking congealed yolk from one of them. She sat back in satisfaction.
“Now,” She said, regarding him with heavy eyes full of mirth. “Let’s get you what you want before we have to part ways.”
They left the Waffle House without paying the bill. In the parking lot Jessica asked a man smoking if he could spare a cigarette. She tucked the offered cigarette behind her ear and held out her hand for his lighter which he also handed her.
She tucked it into her coat pocket and meandered back to their car.
“You don’t smoke.” Aaron said.
She halted at the bumper of the car and held out her hand to him. She smiled, just like she did on the last summer he spent with her before he began his real work.
He slid his hand into hers and smiled back, hopeful, loving.
She easily snapped his ring finger back. He cried out in shock.
Jessica opened the drivers side door and slid in.
“Get in the car, Aaron.”
He did.
He was so distracted with his injured hand that twenty minutes went by before he recognized the route she was taking. Bare ash trees spindled through power lines on a residential street lined with squat, dingy bungalows. He turned to look at her in alarm.
“No,” He said desperately. “No…”
She only twisted her head to scrutinize a street sign. Satisfied it was the one she was looking for she turned left. “What’s wrong? You wanted the deed didn’t you?”
“Not…not like this.” He began desperately. “Mom will be home. She doesn’t like people in the house, we can go later…” he tried.
“Nah,” Jessica said. “We’ll go now.” And turned up a driveway to the home of his mother, still littered with decades old patio furniture and boxes spilling their contents, all of it rimed with January frost. His mother had covered the windows with gaudy wrapping paper a few years before he managed to finally leave for university but a weak light filtered through the cracks and tears.
Jessica switched off the ignition and hopped out. Aaron sat rooted in the passenger seat, throbbing hand clutched against his chest, eyes wide and dry, hyperventilating. He made a thin noise in the back of his throat when Jessica yanked the door open and bent to regard him with mock concern.
“Well? What are you waiting for?” She asked. “You’ve worked so hard for this! Let’s go, baby!”
And Aaron, breath strangling in his lungs, moved at her command.
There was a long pause after they knocked before Aaron’s mother cracked the door. The waft of rotted food and piss was punishing even in the winter air, so powerful nothing could halt it.
“Aaron?” Theresa asked, bewildered. She had deteriorated since he abandoned her to her hoard. Her grey hair was clumped and frizzed, skin sallow and blotched red. She was swaddled in the bloat of inertia so common to midwestern women who had been engulfed by their own despair. She used a cane now. But she was still his mother.
Aaron tried to say “Mom, shut the door.” Or, “Mom, help me.” but nothing would pry his teeth apart. Jessica shouldered the flimsy partial board door open as far as it would go, blocked as it was by piles of detritus and forcing Theresa to go stumbling back, cane lazily toppling over a stack of water stained board games.
Aaron’s mother did a sort of flailing crab walk backwards over the matted carpet as skittering piles of brick a brac cascaded around the three of them when Jessica pressed her way in, Aaron following mutely behind.
“What a lovely home you have Missus Gold.” Jessica said brightly, looking around at the piles of stuff, half obscured furniture, and thick dusty cobwebs clinging to every corner. She inhaled deeply of the fetid air. “It’s so weird that Aaron and I have been together for ten years and I never got to see the house he grew up in!”
“Aaron! Aaron, what are you doing?” Theresa screeched as she retreated, managing to gain her feet. “Get out!”
Jessica kicked the front door shut with the back of her foot and hauled Aaron forward by his coat collar to thrust him towards his mother. “Aaron, why don’t you calm mom down while I work, ok?”
He fell into his mother who clutched at him. “Get this woman out of my house, Aaron! I didn’t clean today, you can’t just show up with out ca-“
“Mom, shut the fuck up!” His voice was high pitched and panicked. Jessica’s footsteps crunched, crinkled, and shuffled through a rabbit run of trash further down the hall and towards the adjoining bedrooms. There was a creek and then the sound of breaking glass. Theresa gasped and made to bolt towards the back of the house but Aaron grabbed her by the arms and forced her down onto an arm chair covered with sweaters still bearing tags from Dillard’s.
“Sit down!” He hissed. “Just fucking stay there for a minute!” He hopped through the living room precariously. He had gotten out of practice moving through his mother’s hoard in the years he’d been away. A broken swiffer caught the toe of his snow boot and he nearly went down. He gained the entrance of the master bedroom to find Jessica shaking glass out of a framed portrait of the first dog his family had onto a soiled day bed. She began to dig something out from behind the photo paper.
“Jessica,” Aaron started.
“Hm, social security cards.” Jessica said thoughtfully and held up four of them fanned out like playing cards. “Not what you wanted but I could smell some kind of curiosity about them. You always did wonder where your original one went.”
Aaron had. At least for a little while before accepting that it was lost in the growing piles of shit and spent the time and money to get a new one.
“Let’s see, Theresa, John, Aaron, and…Sara?” Jessica squinted at the last name. “That’s the sister that died in the car accident right?”
Aaron never talked about his sister and there was no one else aside from his mother to do so. He swallowed dryly. “Yes.”
Jessica stacked the cards in her hand and tore them neatly down the middle, tossing the scraps over each shoulder. “Welp, now you know. Gimme a minute. It’s kind of hard to work in this thing.” She wiggled her arms and shook herself like a dog. She grinned. “Long time outside the corporeal world.”
“Jessica, I’m sorry.” He tried. “I shouldn’t have uh, killed you, but if we can just go somewhere and talk…”
“Nothing to talk about!” She said cheerfully and threw a standup mirror over a pile of boxes in emphasis. “I’m not even that dead!” She brought her foot down hard on the mirror, snapping it in half and sending slivers or glass all over empty chip bags and crumpled tissues. He winced at the sound.
“It’s nice that you’re finally sorry though.” She gave him a pat on the cheek that felt more like a slap as she pushed back into the hall. He stood there in the fresh destruction of an already ruined room until he heard Jessica’s pleased sound from the end of the hall.
“Ah! Door number three!”
Aaron’s mother screeched incoherently from the living room. Finally Aaron managed to get back out of the bedroom just in time to see Jessica punch a hole in the hollow door of his fathers old study and use the leverage to rip it off the hinges. Theresa kept screaming while chips of particle board rained down. Theresa dived over the piles with the grace of a younger woman in an attempt to halt Jessica from stepping through into the cold, dark room. She didn’t make it. Aaron seized his mother’s arm, fearful of what would happen if she tried to touch Jessica. Some nameless instinct told him it would be bad.
His mother shoved him. “Why can’t you leave me alone? It’s MY life! It’s MY house! You always do this! Get her OUT!”
“Jesus, she’s loud. I see why you don’t visit.” Jessica stood illuminated in the flickering flame of the purloined lighter. Documents came up to ankle height and a teetering pyramid of boxes reached nearly to the ceiling by a window covered with newspapers from 2002.
Theresa lost it. She ran at Jessica, hands snarled into claws. “Don’t touch my husbands things, you bitch!”
Jessica caught her forward momentum with an open fist to the side of her grey temple. Theresa was flung into the boxes and crumpled to the ground, howling and sobbing pitifully. Jessica reached over to the nearest box and yanked. The entire stack went crashing overtop of Aaron’s mother even as he was lunging to stop them.
“All I asked for was some space to work,” Jessica said and for the first time since her murder she sounded angry. Truly angry. “All I asked for was some consideration, for some affection, for a husband that didn’t try strangle me! Fuck!” She turned her back on him and began to kick through the papers underfoot. “You’d think I was asking for the fucking world.”
“I’m sorry…” Aaron tried again and crouched down to move aside one of the capsized boxes that had spilled its contents, his sisters old Carebears and naked barbies, to try and reach his mothers weakly grasping hand. He heard her pained whimpers.
“NOW you’re SORRY.” Jessica over turned a pile of papers with her foot so forcefully the flew into his face, cutting him. He shut his eyes instinctively.
When he opened them again there it was. Laying face up, right on top.
The deed to the cabin in the Blue Mountains. The last place he had been with his family, when they had been four instead of two. Before his mother got down to the serious business of burying herself. Above him Jessica stood in her new uncanny stillness, lighter still held aloft and casting weak light on the notary seal. He picked up the document.
The lighter went out.
“Finally.” Jessica said. “Our contract is complete, Aaron Gold.”
His head snapped up.
“What?”
She didn’t even look down as she stepped over his hunched form. “You have the one thing you needed me to get for you, that you wanted more than anything, even a life. Our business is finished.”
Still on his knees with the deed clutched in his hands he looked up at Jessica standing framed in the weak yellow light of the living room. Her rich brown hair wreathed around her face like a lions main and her eyes burned. She looked unholy and strong and terribly beautiful.
“Jessica,” he said and got no further. Jessica opened her hand and the sound of a trumpet blast sounded. The accumulated debris of Aaron’s family home rose around her in the hall and the bedrooms and rushed in a wave towards him. Water stained books, bags of adult diapers, childhood photos, tchotchkes, garbage buried his screams and his mothers fading whimpers. Darkness swallowed him totally and he struggled like a pinned insect under all that weight. He struggled for breath. Under the pressure of their physical lives his mother had somehow wormed her hand through it all to grasp his wrist. Aaron wanted to hold her hand, but it was the same one that still clutched the deed and even now, with his breath sawing unsteadily in and out, he still couldn’t bear to let it go.
A King of Hell in a woman’s body stood on the stained carpet gazing into the dark mouth of a hallway in a small single story house in a suburb that her husband had grown up in. Garbage vomited from the mouth of the hallway and Jessica had a sense memory of another dark hall somewhere far away full of sinners viscera and felt a calm comfort.
Now there wasn’t a husband and resolved summoning. Now there was freedom until the flesh fell off and King Curson had to return to his legions and his Lord.
“What a nice vacation.” Jessica thought. She pulled out the cigarette she had gotten from the man at Denny’s who wondered in his soul where his kids and ex wife were living now. She lit it and blew out a weary breath. She ashed on the carpet and watched an ember eat away at the cheap fibers.
Jessica dropped the half smoked cigarette on to the floor where the cherry began to smolder then kindle a little flame. She opened her hand skyward to encourage it along and it burst into full life like a sudden bubble of laughter and spread. Jessica smiled at it like a proud parent.
She turned and walked out the front door, got back into the car and drove off into the biting Midwestern night to enjoy the rest of her vacation.
The house fire couldn’t be contained, the local news said the next day. Two deaths were reported and a career was made by a journalist’s feature about the many tragedies of the Gold family. A few years after that piece, the journalist would produce a Pulitzer winning series about pollution in the Great Lakes alongside a photojournalist who seemed to come from nowhere.
She was credited under a different name, but the writer only ever knew her as Jessica.