Steps for a Sacrifice by Anna Anderson

 

I. The Reckoning

When they come for you, you’ll be sitting at the kitchen table. You’ll be halfway through double-stitching Katy Hammond’s torn up overcoat when Councilor Petrovy blows in, easy as the wind, four guards in featureless white masks and rippling black robes drifting in his wake. The guards’ costumes are meant to disguise their identities, but you’ll know it’s Marcus and Clint and Nina and Paulie; you have lived your whole life alongside them. You have the dimensions of each of their bodies scribbled down in your black notebook, lying somewhere in the mess on the counter just across the room. They have asked you to sew pants and coats, darn their socks and hem their shirts. Now they come asking you to die.

What you’re going to say is, can I finish this seam first? And Petrovy’s beady, red-shot eyes will recede into the fleshy creases lining his face while he takes in the scuffs on the hardwood floors and the window hung a touch off-kilter and your father’s spare work boots sitting by the door twenty years now, still waiting for him to come home. You might want to say something like, My great-grandfather built this house with his bare hands, but you’d be wise to hold your tongue.

You’ll finish the seam, though. Your mother would have wanted you to finish the seam.

II. The Cleansing

Wind hollering like this used to mean God was blowing up a rainstorm, the washerwoman will tell you. It hasn’t rained in the valley in decades, but somehow, in the middle of the village hall floor, an old claw-foot bathtub sits full to the brim with clear water.

You will wonder if this is what they had your father digging wells for.

The washerwoman’s arthritis is acting up and she’ll break three matches before she gives up, flings the matchbook at you. The flames will catch hungrily at the dry kindling lining the fireplace, but they won’t take the chill out of the air.

III. The Recording

The archivist, a rotund man with a shiny bald head and a beak-like nose, will recite your name – first, middle, last – as he records it in a fat purple book. Really what is being recorded is your grandmother’s name, then your mother’s name, then your father’s name. In all your life, you’ve never had a single thing that was only yours.

So he scribbles down your second-hand name in a cramped, miniscule hand and proclaims that now you will be preserved in history forever, revered for generations. Then the archivist will close the book and bundle it away while the collection of councilors around him, Petrovy among them, all clap politely.

IV. The Spectacle

A crowd will have gathered in the village by now. They’re waiting to see you off, their clamoring voices carrying up to you on buffeting gusts of wind. You will walk in the middle of the guard procession with your shoulders back and your head high, like your mother taught you.

In the center of town stands a statue of the Matriarch’s first tribute: lips pressed thin, eyebrows pulling down, arms tight against her sides. A sharpness to her granite eyes, which are angled up toward the treetops, staring down something only she can see.

The villagers will close in, reaching past the guards to touch you: your hair, your hands, your cheek. These are people you’ve known all your life, acting like you’re some kind of saint. They want to hand you things – flowers and coins and little trinkets they’ve carved from wood or cut from stone.

Let the offerings fall from your fingers. Crush as many as you can beneath your feet.

V. The Silence

You wouldn’t expect this, but it’ll be a relief to reach the forest and leave the village behind. The crush of people will be replaced by withered, leafless trees drooping above your head, their roots straining to stay grounded as the gale rips down from the mountain and snatches at their desiccated branches. Dry brown grass will crunch beneath your feet. The hems of the guards’ robes will carve a thin trail through the dust.

You’re following the empty bed of a long-gone river. When you were a girl, your father used to talk about how freely the water once flowed. How as a child, the sound of cool, clean water tumbling by lulled him to sleep each night.

You could never picture it, but you have always wondered whether there was a moment, deep down in the well, when the rock slide that buried him sounded like the rushing of that river? Perhaps he died believing he’d struck water at last.

VI. The End

The Matriarch’s wood lies beyond a sharp curve in the river’s path. The guards will go no further. Instead, they’ll fan out behind you, shoulders squared, Clint’s hand hovering and flexing near the knife at his belt. The clearing is right ahead, Nina will tell you. Good luck.

The trees in this part of the wood will be a touch heartier, a hair twistier: grown fat and gnarled on near a century of spilled blood, crushed bone. Their bark and branches and leaves are sickly pale, bleached to a strange off-white; their bony limbs stretch beseechingly toward the sky.

Above, the clouds will begin gathering and thickening, pressing in as close to the earth as they can reach. Their roiling dark mass blots out first the stars, then the pale sliver of the moon. You’re going to have to hold your hands out in front of you. There’s going to be a bit of stumbling blind in the dark.

When you hit the tree-line, everything’s going to happen fast: a spin of silk around your waist, the ground disappearing beneath your feet. Your legs might kick uselessly at rushing air as you go up and up and up, or perhaps you might freeze, rendered utterly inanimate in abject terror. Before you can draw breath to scream, you’ll be flat on your back ten feet in the air.

You won’t notice her at first. The edges of your vision will have gone red and misty, and your heart will be hammering out an arrhythmic plea for mercy that’s loud enough to drown out even the wind.

Your fingers are going to be itching to reach into your pocket, but it’s important that you wait.

Lie still until the Matriarch is looming over you. Her face is almost human, almost beautiful – if you disregard the six extra eyes, the bulbous arachnid body, the thin line of greenish poison dripping from her snarling smile.

This is the point where most people become trapped inside their minds, lose their will to resist. You’ll need to remind yourself it does not matter if this creature is born of man or beast or sick, twisted god. What’s important is the matchbook you carry – the one you swiped as the washerwoman was fixing your bath.

Once you feel the heat of the Matriarch’s breath on your neck and the brush of her fine golden hair across your cheek, strike the match. Her silken web will go up like a pyre.

VII. The Beginning

Falling will take longer than you think it should; certainly much longer than the ride up. It’s going to feel like decades passing instead of seconds. Above you, the Matriarch will twist and writhe in the air, her uncanny cries pealing out across the valley.

The flames will have beaten you to the ground, and you know the wind has been waiting all day to catch something good. Wildfire will swallow up the clearing in seconds, turning those sepulchral white trees into blackened torches, picking up momentum as it tumbles downhill in search of the village.

You need to run, stumble, crawl back down the bank of the empty river bed and up the other side. Ignore the burning in your muscles, the bite of sharp river rock slicing open your palms and snapping off fingernails. You need to get behind the flames before they devour you, too.

The clouds will break open about the time your legs give out. You’re going to be on your back in the mud, sweat and tears and heavenly, impossible water flowing down your ash-streaked face while bright white lightning rips apart the sky. You’ll hear thunder for the first time, feel its rumble deep inside your pounding chest.

Come morning, the first trickle of the old river will begin to flow.