by Lee, Edward
After a quick shower, the stature of the day changed.
When she alighted from the bathroom, drying her hair, her heart surged. Mr. Roulet was lying on the floor, half out of his room. His bulky shape was shivering.
Fuck! She acted instantly, lunging, flipping him over, feeling for pulse. Heart attack, she could only presume. She didn’t know what to do save for what she saw on TV shows. She blew one short breath into his mouth, then straddled him to apply heart compressions. He lolled back and forth; it was as if she were straddling a manatee. Just as she thought, I don’t know what I’m doing! This big fucker’s gonna die! he seemed to stabilize a little. “You’re gonna be okay, Mr. Roulet,” she blabbered. “I’m calling 911—”
“No!” he gasped.
She called, then pulled on a robe. “No if’s, and’s, or but’s.” She got back down on a knee to make feeble attempts to comfort him. “They’ll be here soon, they’ll get you fixed up,” all the while thinking, if you didn’t stuff your face with caviar and lobster and drink like Charlie Fuckin’ Sheen, you wouldn’t be in this mess!
He pointed to his open bedroom door, gasping. “Amethyst. On chain. And leather pouch. On my dresser…”
What the fuck? He was probably terrified and insensible due to the attack’s reduction of oxygen to the brain. Hypoxia, she recalled from dim CNA classes. She went hesitantly into a bedroom—a huge, dark, commodious chamber—composed mostly of shadows which half-concealed bookshelves, old portraits, knickknacks, etc. She found the dark-clotted dresser. Amethyst, did he say? What the fuck? And a pouch…
There they were, the crudely cut semi-precious gem on a silver chain, and a small leather touch with drawstring. She inserted her finger in the latter, felt powder, and immediately considered heroin or cocaine. But it was more granulated and when she tasted a few granules on her fingertip she realized:
Salt.
She paused a moment before rushing back to her felled employer. She noticed a small unmistakable object also on the dresser: a 128-gig SD card.
Sirens blared outside. She darted back to the foyer, opened the front door, then returned to one knee beside Mr. Roulet. A crabbed hand snatched the amethyst and pouch, and he gasped “Thank you, Jessica…”
She grabbed his other hand. “Here are the EMT guys, don’t worry, Mr. Roulet, you’ll be fine in a jiffy,” and very swiftly two young medical attendants were in the house, lifting their obese charge onto a collapsible gurney with surprising ease, and were wheeling him out into daylight that had not touched his face in seven years. Jessica trotted after him. “I’ll locked up the house and follow you to the hospital, Mr. Roulet—”
“No!” he wheezed. “Stay here! I’ll call if, if—”
“There’s no ‘ifs’, Mr. Roulet. You’ll be fine. I’ll see you real soon…”
The gurney snapped into the back of the ambulance, the doors slammed shut. Jessica stood ineptly in the middle of the street, watching wide-eyed as ambulance sped away.
Of all the fucked up things, she thought. There goes my cash cow. What am I gonna do if he dies?
««—»»
Her most immediate notion was to go to the hospital right now and check his status. The modest medical data she’d gleaned from her old CNA classes made her think that he would probably survive. He’d been conscious when the EMTs took him, and he hadn’t looked like one at the foot of death’s door. And business was business, yes, but in spite of his being fat weird alcoholic glutton, Mr. Roulet was a nice guy in a world where nice guys were rarely found in stocking the shelves of humanities inventory. His death would slingshot her right back to web-camming and all the seediness that companioned it. Of course, she hoped he didn’t die, not only because that would terminate the best gig of her life but also because, simply, she liked the man.
But for whatever reason, he didn’t want her leaving the house.
I better say put. Calling the hospital for a status report, she knew, would be useless; these days no medical information about anyone would be relayed via the phone unless Mr. Roulet granted such access.
Idly, she looked around the living room and all its old books and relics. She knew that Mr. Roulet’s assertion that these possessions were all worthless was mere posturing. Rich men owned expensive things and some of this would certainly be valuable. However, Jessica knew she wasn’t crummy enough a person to steal.
If Mr. Roulet died…well, that was a bit different she supposed. And God knows what kind of valuables he’s got in his room…
His room.
The door to his bedroom remained opened from the mishap. Dare she enter for an expedited look around? Mr. Roulet could hardly object…
No second thoughts followed her back into the dark chamber. The opened door provided nearly all illumination but as her vision acclimated, the graininess began to divulge details: tall shelves, glass cases, undecipherable framed pictures. An immense antique bed. Imprints of other doors formed, no doubt the bathroom and a private kitchen. A bank of wide computer monitors behind a desk filled one corner, presumably Mr. Roulet’s work station and surveillance post for all of his supposed hidden camera, but the monitors were all off. An 11”x14” framed picture sat on the dresser, and she picked it up to turn it toward the light.
A wave of nausea accosted her; she winced, gagged, and put the picture back. Fuck…
It was a demented oil painting apparently, reminding her of the famous old paintings and engravings by Hieronymus Bosch and Gustav Dore: graphic illustrations of Hell. What Jessica had absorbed in that single glimpse looked like a bacchanal of nether worldly lust, a triptych panel suggesting the everlasting sins of the flesh in some deep recess of perdition. The vision shifted like vertigo in her head: a meld of concepts. Was it a cave, a cavern of some kind, lit by torches? But what the cave wall surrounded could only be a club or tavern or some such. What a fucked up idea for a painting, her thoughts murmured. Most fucked up, however, were the activities of the figures populating this appalling artwork. Gaunt and grinning demons converged among the nude throng, arms buried to the elbows in vaginas, rectums, and cranked open mouths. Other bulkish, craggy-looking creatures yanked off heads, arms, legs, breasts without discrimination, using taloned, dinner-plate-sized hands the color or slug-skin. Horns rose from their slab-like heads, their mouths jammed with fangs like shards of plate glass. But the inhuman were not the only participants: two men who were rotten but very much alive effected a double-penetration upon a woefully young woman; Jessica only hoped that it was a mistake of the artist that he’d depicted her as more adolescent than woman. Another female, just as young, had been fettered to a wooden table, legs spread so wide her hips must’ve been broken. Her face froze like the visage in Munch’s “The Scream.” She was outrageously pregnant.
But strangest of all was this bizarre “tavern” element to the scene, where in the background there was indeed a long bar top seated at which were keen-eyed customers, mostly of the human variety, all turned around on their stools, cocktails in hand, watching the abominable fete taking place at the center of the establishment…
Jessica gagged again at the recollection, going light-headed, then stumbled around in the bedroom’s dark crannies feeling for some evidence of Mr. Roulet’s fancy Scotch. Eventually, her hand fell on a bottle and she staggered back out to the kitchen.
“Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck!”
She took a long chug off the bottle, her eyes widened, then she swallowed. The refined liquid burned down her throat and bloomed in her belly. How do people drink that shit? she thought, outraged, but a moment later the much-needed buzz kicked in.
Fuck. Who would paint such an awful picture? Kind of warped artist would even think of such a concept for a piece of artwork? And worse… Only a really warped person would want something like that…
Mr. Roulet.
And there was something else, wasn’t there?
She went back into the darkened bedroom, her motives on auto-pilot. It wasn’t to look at
the picture again—God, no—it was for the SD card she’d seen.
The work of a moment had the card in her fingers and herself seated at the big computer screen before the couch. She snapped the card into the slot, and opened the file, and was never the same again…
««—»»
She sped to the hospital in an enraged daze. She no longer had a speck of concern for Roulet’s well-being, she only wanted to confront him. She couldn’t vomit anymore because there was nothing left to throw up.
It was as simple as this: that painting of the tavern in Hell and all its atrocious trimming was devised from reality, a rendition of an image in a photograph.
And the photograph had been a frame off the 4-hour SD card she’d found on Roulet’s dresser.
She hadn’t been able to watch the entire thing; she doubted if any sane person could. The place in the painting was real: the tavern or dance club or whatever it was, situated in some forsaken, Hadean grotto lit by torches of burning pitch. All the carnal and charnel horror of the painting unfolded before Jessica’s eyes High Def 1080p. The camera roved leisurely about as though it were the eye of casual onlooker. One atrocity after another, for hours, unrolled on the screen, all that she’d seen in the noxious painting and a hundred times more. Several spectators sitting at the bar seemed to nod to the camera as if the bearer were an acquaintance. Among such spectators were a finely dressed elderly couple, tonsured men in sackcloth surplices, a woman with skin as black as volcanic glass, her bald head beaded with intricate scars, her earlobes hooped and her neck extended half a foot past the norm via brass bands. One young modern couple kissed lewdly and fondled each other’s crotch; they wore matching shirts that read INDEPENDENT BAR next to whom stood a man in the regalia and helm of a Roman legionnaire, circa 100 B.C. All stared raptly at the horrific atrocities taking place on what would be the dance floor, some masturbating with nonchalance.
But then the camera ventured deeper, though a stone-arched corridor tinged white by nitrous encrustations. Fewer torches burned here, perhaps a good thing, forever every few yards a recess appeared, each revealing more atrocities and cacodaemoniacal sex acts which trebled the tenor of those in the club. The camera never lingered long over each revelation, moving in and out, in and out. The attendants here were clearly not human, for humans didn’t have great wings folded behind them, nor prick ears, nor horned heads. They seemed to be supervising the goings-on of more of those slab-like things she recalled most distinctly from the painting, those tartarean ushers with chisel-slits for eyes, flesh like slug-skin stretched tight over massive musculatures, mouths like knife-slits in clay. In each chamber, these things were either raping women to living-death, bare-handedly dismembering humans and unhumans alike; eviscerating, castrating, and exsanguinating others in place; and filling occupied bathtub-sized vessels with red-hot coals—all this while grinning in demonian glee.
The rest tried to recollect itself in her head but she forced it aside, parked in the visitors’ lot, and walked hurriedly into the hospital, unabashed by her parsimonious apparel (flip-flops, short cut-offs, and a yellow tube top) and not caring in the least that stock was being taken of her. “I’m here to visit a patient named Edmund Roulet,” she droned to an elderly woman at the info desk. “What room is he in?”
“Edmund Roulet, you say?” The woman seemed hesitant, off track. “Yes, uh, please have a seat. Someone will be with you shortly,” and then she picked up the phone in a manner that seemed furtive.
Jessica sat down in the empty waiting lounge, still nerve-racked. Why not just tell me what room to go to? Unless…
The inclination dawned on her now that Mr. Roulet must’ve died, and soon a doctor or nurse would come down to notify her. FUCK, I hope that fat sicko didn’t croak. I’ve GOT to find out what was on that card…, and it was then that the last bit of footage she’d watched shifted back into her head: the unseen cameraman wandering about in the rear coves of that diabolical undercroft. She’d already guessed that the “cameraman” could only be Roulet himself, and this was verified in the next few frames when the image crossed an oval-shaped mirror in whose silver veins could be seen the face and chest of a younger, slimmer Mr. Roulet, with a tiny lapel camera concealed on his shirt pocket.
One more chamber would be examined before Jessica, clenching in nausea, would turn the screen off.
Like a floating eye, the camera drifted into the next appalling, stone compartment. Women, clearly, were the victims of choice in these chasms, and the woman in question now had been lain out on a stone slab (nude, of course, and semen-covered), shackled down, and convulsing as the slug-fleshed denizens applied some sort of bucket-like apparatus over her head. Etched pictographs, geometric glyphs, and words in an unknown language covered the helmet-like device. Obviously, some occult science was taking place as other gathered round to spectate, including one of the horned, perfectly bosomed she-demons with wings and also an old oriental man with clasped hands and keen eyes. The woman bucked on the slab; smoked poured from around the opening of the device, and muffled screams could be heard—screams of such tenor and hideousness that they could never be accurately described. A moment of tense anticipation rose in the room until finally the smoke subsided and the screams degraded into sluggish blubbering.
When one of the monstrous acolytes removed the “bucket,” it could be seen that the entirety of the woman’s head had been collapsed; hair, nose, ears, and mouth still intact, but as if her skull had been removed, leaving a slack, quivering flap of flesh with eyelids that opened and closed over nothing. What had become of her skull?
The skull, still complete with roving, lidless eyeballs, was removed from the “bucket” and then placed on a wall of shelving alongside dozens of other such flesh-denuded heads. Now a spectator, an ordinary human man, climbed onto the slab to commence fornicating with the quivering, skull-less victim. It was at this time-stamp that Jessica snapped the SD card out of the slot, turned off the screen, and tripped away to vomit.
“Miss, miss?”
Jessica’s fugue-state of memory dissipated like fog, and through it she saw a tall, broad-shouldered man with short, greyed hair, dressed in a well-tailored suit. It was not the doctor or nurse she expected, but a police detective with his badge clipped to his jacket pocket.
“I’m Lieutenant Spence of the Metro PD Homicide Section.”
“Homicide?” she muttered. “So he’s—”
“I regret to inform you that Edmund Roulet is dead. Cause of death is as yet undetermined; however, it’s clear that it was murder via some mode of extreme and unrepresentative violence.”
This was far more than she expected. She stared up at the immense, well-dressed man.
“If you’ll follow me, please,” he said.
Up the elevator they went, with Jessica droningly answering his salvo of questions. “No, not a friend, really, I was his house-sitter and I ran errands for him.” “No, I don’t think he had any direct acquaintances, and no family.” “No, in fact, he never left the house. He told me he hasn’t for seven years.” “I’m an ex cam-girl and, yeah, I know what you’re thinking but, no, nothing romantic or intimate ever happened between us.” “My overall impression? He was a recluse interested in anthropology and mythology and stuff like that. He was a nice guy.” “No, nobody ever visited him at the house. I almost never saw him.”
More cursory inquiries followed as Spence nodded to a uniformed cop posted in front of a patient room. Before Spence opened the door, he said, “I need you to identify the body. I need to know that he is the same man on his license.”
“I don’t get it,” Jessica said. “Isn’t his face the same as the face on his ID?”
Spence looked at her deadpan. Then he led her into the room.
Jessica looked at the man in the bed beside the plaque which read ROULET, EDMUND, screamed, “You gotta be shitting me!” and ran back out of the room.
Still deadpan, Spence walked out to where she leaned gasping against the
wall. “Fuck!” she bellowed.
Spence’s brow rose. “That’s him, I take it?”
“Yes…”
“How can you be sure?”
“The chain around his neck, the amethyst, and the leather pouch in his hand. It’s salt.”
“Salt, amethyst?”
“He asked for them when the ambulance was coming.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He asked for them so I got them.”
“Hmm.” Spence pinched his chin. “His fingerprints aren’t on file, but we’re checking with his banks. Dental records, of course, will be useless.”
“Forget all that shit. It’s him,” she said, staring at the wall opposite.
“Over the course of my career, I’ve seen many bizarre things. But I’ve never seen anything even close to this.”
Yeah, but I have,” Jessica thought, because atop the body in the room there was no head where a head should be, just a skull-less sack of flesh, bearded, slack-mouthed, slits for eyes behind which no eyeballs existed.
“And you say he asked you for salt and amethyst?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why?”
Some kind of protection, I guess. But why say that? “No, I can’t.”
Spence went on, “There are security cameras all over this hospital but my people checked them all. No one ever entered that room except for a few doctors, and shift nurses. I don’t know how that’s possible.” He squinted at her. “Did he have any enemies that you know of?”
“It sure looks like it,” Jessica whispered, “but not that I know of.”
Spence contemplated this with soulless eyes. “I need to ask you one more thing, and I need you to come back into the room for just another moment.”
“My, God,” she croaked.
“It’s important.”