Free Sacrificing Virgins by John Everson

couldn’t see anything past the periphery… That was when she dropped the spade and ran back up the hill to the house to find a flashlight.
    She wasn’t going to get lost in the dark…but she was going to explore the hole that spied on the roots of her garden.
    The narrow tunnel turned out to extend beneath the hill that led to her house. The floods and debris of decades had apparently built up a covering of mud that had obliterated the entrance, but Natalie had revealed the edges…and found her way inside.
    And inside…was old.
    She moved a flashlight back and forth like a pendulum as she made her way, first in a crawl and then a crouch down the path that led away from the hole in her garden. She hadn’t gone too many steps into the earth when she saw the colored stones. They were placed on the ground, as if meant as a sort of gated periphery. Turquoise and ruby and slate-colored, they were fist sized and placed in a semi-circle of three rows. Beyond that, though, was what interested Natalie.
    Bones.
    Laid out on the dusty gray ground was a skeleton of old bones. Old human bones, she had to assume, from the look of the arms and legs and skull. Around the whitened bones were other things.
    Strangely carved bits of wood and colored stones and twisted ropes of twined twigs and other unidentifiable things that looked both organic and very old—desiccated.
    Natalie stepped into the weird buried cavern and bent down to touch the forehead of the skull that lay in the midst of the open space. It didn’t move. But she whispered anyway…
    â€œI’m not here to disturb you,” she said in the narrow space.
    That was when she saw the rusted spikes between the bones of the skeleton’s hands. And the decayed bits of rope that still circled the wrists and ankles of the long-dead figure.
    Why had someone staked and roped this person to the ground? Natalie wondered. She said “this person” in her head because she couldn’t even tell if it was a he or a she.
    The hair stood up on the back of her neck, and she stepped back from the skull. “Who were you?” she whispered. Natalie crouched on her haunches and looked at the skeleton lying on the earth, deep beneath her house. On a whim, she reached out and pulled the frayed twine away from the bones of the skeleton’s wrists, and then did the same to the rope that remained around its ankles. That was when she saw the stone.
    It lay between the thigh bones of the skeleton. Unlike some of the other stones and bits of debris, this was a carefully formed, sculpted piece of rock—rock so smooth and polished it looked like marble. It was mostly cylindrical, almost a foot long, Natalie thought, as she stared at its shape there in the dirt. The white stone stood out sharply from the dirt of the floor it rested on, and the shape stood out more. On one end, two round circular shapes had been carved. If they’d been rectangular, she would have compared them to a gun handle. Only…they were round. Like balls in a skein, stretched away from the thing that held them fast.
    On the opposite end of the cylinder, the shaft was capped in a faintly mushroom-like shape, a softly carved rounded triangle of stone.
    Natalie reached down and pried it from the soil. As her fingers curled around the long center of its shaft, she felt her heart trip. She held her breath and turned the thing first one way and then the other in her hands. Her fingers clung hard to the smooth surface of its center and she could feel her face blushing in the dark as her blood pounded faster. There was no question about what this thing was that she’d found.
    It was a dildo. A carefully carved, ancient sex aid.
    She looked at the bony remains of the long-dead body on the ground beside her and whistled. “Did they crucify you for using this, or making this?” she whispered in the shadowed chamber. She turned it over in her hand and ran the tip of