Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee

by Edward Lee

  Westmore didn't get the wink. "What?"

  "She's good at more than opening safes."

  Westmore rolled his eyes. He didn't want to know "I guess she'll come down when she's done. If we're not all asleep."

  "I'm sure I'll be up. I never sleep much," Nyvysk said. "I'm a night-owl, and so's Cathleen."

  Several clocks chimed distantly. Midnight. "I need to find her. I want her to show me the cemetery, where this psychic rape or whatever supposedly took place."

  "Discorporate sexual assault," Nyvysk corrected.

  "Sure. And Adrianne said something about several can on the property."

  Nyvysk sighed. "Please do me a favor, Mr. Westmore. Don't go onto the grounds at night."

  Mack laughed. "Maybe Westmore needs a little of that ghost action."

  Nyvysk ignored the remark, continuing to Westmore, "You're not used to a place like this. You're very subject to suggestion. And anything that might be out there can manipulate you, especially at night."

  "What, the Witching Hour and all that?"

  "Just don't go onto the grounds at night," Nyvysk stated more firmly.

  ..Okay okay"

  "And I need your help with something now if you don't mind."

  Westmore had nothing else to do. Except begin writing whatever it is I'm supposed to write. "Sure."

  "Let's go upstairs to the Scarlet Room."

  Mack jerked a more concerned glance at them this time. "You guys got balls going in there at this hour."

  "Why, Mack?" Nyvysk challenged.

  "It's creepy enough during the day You wanna give yourself nightmares, go ahead."

  Westmore followed Nyvysk up five winding staircases. From behind, in the meager light, the man looked like a hulk with the long hair and wide shoulders. Each floor seemed darker, more grainy, with a soundlessness that somehow seemed beyond silence.

  "Are you a believer yet, Mr. Westmore?" Nyvysk asked, back still to him. The low voice echoed.

  "I'm open minded," Westmore answered. "But I haven't seen any ghosts yet."

  "What about Mack? He thinks this is all a joke that he can ride along on."

  Westmore shrugged. "He's Vivica's errand boy."

  "Is that all, though? I don't know. He appears to have been close to Hildreth, too. He knows all about the house."

  "Then he's the family errand boy, I guess. I don't much care about him if you want to know the truth. I don't think he likes anybody here, just pretends to be cool."

  "Maybe he's Vivica's spy."

  Well, that would be me, actually. "Maybe. Or maybe he's just maintaining security like he said, to make sure we don't trash the place. This house and everything in it must've cost twenty million."

  Nyvysk turned up the next landing, to the fifth. "I don't trust Mack."

  "You trust me enough to tell me that?"

  "Yes," he said, lower. More to himself: "You might be the only trustworthy one here."

  Westmore appreciated the remark but not too deeply. Nyvysk could easily be playing him, just as anyone could here. Westmore was totally blind in the thick of it all. But the implication struck home. Something about this place or these particular people-or both-ignited quite a fire of suspicion. He wished he could tell Nyvysk he intended to dig up Hildreth's grave tomorrow ... but thought the better of it.

  He knew he couldn't tell anyone that.

  Maybe Pivica's the one being played. By Mack, or even Karen...

  "Here we are." Nyvysk stopped, seemed unsettled. Just a heavily molded door stood before them. On the floor were three cylindrical implements fronted by grills, that looked like fancy air-purifiers.

  "What're those?"

  "They're gauss sensors, the newest generation. I need you to arrange them in the room, three wide positions, facing each other. They're a little weighty-they have portable battery packs that I have to charge every day. But when you're done-" He picked up a roll of cable on the floor. "Plug this into the jack on the videocom, please. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes."

  "Piece of cake." Westmore picked up the devices and wire. Nyvysk opened the door, then stood back. "Aren't you coming in?"

  Nyvysk shook his head.

  Westmore's brow lowered. "Something wrong?"

  "I'll tell you when you're done. I can't go in the room."

  Westmore entered, not at all reading the other man's suddenly weird attitude. Whatever. He didn't care. He wanted to see the infamous Scarlet Room.

  Low lights from electric wall fixtures filled the room with a solemnness. This is it. All those people murdered by Hildreth and his boys. In a second, he understood Mack's observation about the room: even someone who didn't believe in the supernatural would be bothered by coming in here.

  But why hadn't Nyvysk come in?

  Everything was red. Furniture, carpet, wall-coverings. Odder was the room's center, which stood empty, where one would expect to find more furniture. Stillness surrounded him with the flickering, tinted light.

  He arranged the gauss sensors as instructed, then connected the end-cable to the corn-jack. There. Big deal. I'm done.

  The deepest impressions set in when he crossed the carpet again to get back to the door, his belly flipflopping. There were bodies lying here, and parts of bodies, he thought. Three weeks ago, the carpet I'm walking over was drenched in blood. When he was back in the hall, he felt normal again.

  "All set up?" Nyvysk asked.

  "Yeah. Don't you want to go look, make sure they're in the right position?"

  Nyvysk shook his head again.

  Westmore lit a cigarette, looked at the man. "I didn't mind doing it, but ... you could've done it just as fast as me. How come you didn't want to go in the room?"

  Nyvysk nervously pushed his hair back, led them both back toward the stairs. "I'm too afraid to," he finally said.

  Westmore considered the man's size and constitution. "Come on. You don't look like the kind of guy who's afraid of much. What, the ghosts?" Westmore smiled. "There weren't any in there that I could see."

  "Let me play some of these EVP's for you," was all Nyvysk said.

  Back in the communications room on the third floor, Nyvysk quietly addressed his equipment, and seemed to be clicking on sound files on the big computer. "Listen. These are some voices that were picked up in one of the parlors."

  Westmore put an ear to the speaker. He heard nothing but dead air at first. Then:

  A scratchy voice from far away, a woman's: "Look."

  Another woman: "Who're they?"

  Several seconds of silence, then a man's voice: "I wanna cut something up."

  Westmore fingered his chin. "Interesting."

  "Here's one from the stairwell hallway leading to the stairs to the first floor."

  Westmore listened intently, fascinated. He heard faint thumping, like someone walking in a stagger. "Where's my knife?" a man said.

  A woman: "I think you left it in the bucket with the blood."

  "Where's Jaz?"

  "He's bringing the heads down when he's done fucking...

  Westmore backed up from the speaker. "When were these recorded?"

  ,> "T

  He recalled the name, too, from his shocking conversation with Karen. Jaz. One of Hildreth's porn guys.

  "I've got a dozen or so of these just from today" Nyvysk said. "You don't need to hear them all but you get the idea. Oh, and I know what you're thinking. Recordings are pretty weak proof of a haunting."

  "That is what I'm thinking. That stuff could easily be created or staged."

  "Of course, it could. But we're not looking for proof anymore; we're confident that the house is charged. From our point of view, these messages serve as an information source. It doesn't matter if you believe it. We do, so we're proceeding in a practical manner."

  Of course. Westmore was the outsider here. "But I'll also admit, if those recordings are for real-it is a big deal."

  "From your standpoint, yes. You've never experienced anything like this bef
ore. But from a psychic standpoint, or the standpoint of a technician such as myself-we've heard things like this a million times. We're not surprised at all."

  "So what's this got to do with you being afraid to go into the Scarlet Room?"

  Nyvysk clicked on another file.

  "Rejoice in him, rejoice in what awaits," a tiny voice whispered after some silence. "Rejoice and join hands with us...

  The voice sounded male, with an obvious middle-eastern accent. "Like this place, my love never dies. I love you."

  Westmore leaned closer.

  "I await you, Alexander. Don't make me wait too long."

  "Who's Alexander?" Westmore asked.

  "Me," Nyvysk said.

  Westmore stared at him.

  "And the voice is that of a twenty-year-old Kurd exorcist named Saeed. I fell in love with him, so to speak, in Iraq, twenty years ago."

  "So, uh, you're-"

  "I'm gay, if you will. I don't believe that God has a problem with that but the Catholic Church certainly does, which is why I stepped down from the priesthood a long time ago. But to this day, I haven't broken my vow of celibacy."

  Here was a bombshell.

  "Everyone in this house has a secret, Mr. Westmore. I suspect that you do too. At any rate, the young man on that recording from the Scarlet Room has been dead since the day I met him. I was supposed to see him later that day, but I didn't at the last minute, a moral reluctance, I guess. He was murdered by muggers, waiting for me in an alley near what was once the market square of the ancient city of Nineveh."

  Jesus, Westmore thought.

  Nyvysk was showing him out. "There's no reason for you to stay here, the tapes are all similar, if not grim. Tomorrow I'll have the ion-sensors working. I'm sure you'll be fascinated by the results."

  Westmore took his word for it. He'd be going to sleep soon, and he didn't need those voices in his head. "Let me check on the locksmith while we're up here," he said, looking for a distraction. Secrets, he thought. Yes, he supposed there were all kinds of secrets around here.

  In the office, there was no sign of Vanni. "I wonder where she is." The safe in the wall remained closed.

  "Where is this safe?" Nyvysk asked. "I haven't even seen it."

  Westmore pointed. "Talk about a secret. It was hidden behind two paintings and an armoire."

  Nyvysk looked down at the two frames leaning against the wall, and picked up the engraving. "Oh, this is very interesting right here."

  ..w?„

  "It appears to be an original work by a German engraving artist named Stettin Albrecht. He was known to dabble in the occult and make custom engravings for rich satanic societies."

  "Why's he important enough for Hildreth to hide his picture?"

  "Nobody knows how for real Albrecht was, but it's fairly certain that his patrons weren't for real, not genuine satanists, in other words. The idle and very debauched rich just going through the motions because a `satanic' orgy was more interesting than regular orgies. These societies merely looked for an alternate excuse for sex, pretending that their satan-worship was their under-the-table revolution, their rebellion against a very oppressive Church. So Albrecht was hired by these people to render portraits of Lucifer and the other demons. If this is original, it may be worth low six figures

  Westmore shook his head at the engraving. "I don't know from engravings, but it doesn't look that good to me."

  "No, Albrecht wasn't known for any great skill or talent, he was essentially a hack with tin plates and a burin-tool. The conditions and age of the piece is what warrants a high sale price. But-" Nyvysk's eyes poured over the plate. "I doubt that its value to a collector was why Hildreth purchased it."

  "What, then?"

  "This is ... troubling."

  "I don't understand."

  "Look at the engraving within the engraving." Nyvysk's big finger pointed.

  "A monster, it looks like," Westmore said.

  "Not a monster, a demon, and this seems to be the only artistic rendering of it. Albrecht would typically be hired to depict the more well-known demons such as Asmodeus, Baal, and the like. The same way artists at fairs do portraits of famous baseball players. They don't do many thirdstringers, do they? This demon here, I mean. Is much more obscure in the realms of the occult."

  Now he pointed to the caption: MY SELF AS I DARE TO REFASHION THE COUNTENANCE OF MY VISION: BELARIUS.

  "Belarius?" Westmore thought back to old lit classes. "That name rings a bell now that I think of it. A character in Shakespeare, right? Cymbeline?"

  "I'm afraid this Belarius is quite different from Shakespeare's amorous warlord. Belarius was Lucifer's first servant in Hell, and, according to the compendiums, Lucifer rewarded Belarius for his loyalty. He was made the Sexus Cyning, which is very old-English for something like the Lord of Lust, the magnate of sex, something along those lines. If Lucifer is the Prince of Darkness, Belarius is the Prince of Carnality."

  Nyvysk set the frame back down, sullen. His eyes had widened in some knowing dread.

  "What's wrong now?" Westmore asked, irritated by the man's sudden crypticness. To him, a demon was a demon. Like Roman gods and other nature-symbols of mythology.

  "Follow me."

  Nyvysk took him back to the communications room. He clicked on another voice file. "This is from the parlor where the prostitutes were beheaded."

  Westmore could only hear a barely audible drone, like listening to a blank tape with the sound all the way up.

  Then he heard it, a single group of heavy syllables through a warbling, suboctave voice: "Belarius ..."

  Chapter Nine

  I

  "Call it," Diane said.

  "Heads," Jessica answered. She knew her luck. She caught the coin and frowned. Tails. I lose.

  Diane was polite enough not to laugh out loud. "Tough luck, sister. This is what we get for dropping out of high school."

  "Yeah."

  "You get to wash the Sack!"

  That's what they'd dubbed Faye Mullins. The Sack. Because that's what she looked like.

  Diane was just getting off-shift. "At least she shouldn't be acting nutty today. Didn't make a sound all night. The Prolixin hit her hard this time."

  "You probably slipped her a double dose just to keep her quiet during your shift," Jessica suspected.

  "Me?" Diane's grin sharpened. "That would constitute an extreme occupational dereliction. Of course, if you think I do stuff like that, you can turn in a written complaint to the ward director."

  Jessica got the joke. They all did it sometimes, they had to. Some of these patients just took too much out of you, and no one gave a crap about them anyway. They were lost and had somehow landed here. The families paid the in-patient bills to keep them shut away. Out of sight out of mind.

  But Jessica wondered who was paying the Sack's bills. No living relatives were listed on her admittance form. Doesn't matter to me, she realized. 1 just get paid to wash their dirty butts.

  She trudged into the dorm. That's what they called them. Dorms. Like a college. This was no college. But any employment was better than none. Changing bedpans, mopping vomit, and sponge-bathing bedridden or incapacitated female patients was the most regrettable part of her job description.

  In the dorm she wheeled the cart to the bed. "Hi, Faye," she tried to sound cheery. "Rise and shine!"

  There was no response from the woman in the bed. She looked dead-eyes slitted, head lolled. Her mouth hung open to show crooked teeth and foamy saliva. But she wasn't dead, she was just zonked. All the better for Jessica; she'd be a lot easier to wash if she wasn't spitting or trying to bite her. So far, at least, they hadn't had to four-point her or put her in a bed-net or straitjacket.

  Her cart's casters squeaked when she brought her wash buckets around the side of the bed.

  Oh, Jesus. Even Jessica had some remaining pity. Faye Mullins was a wreck of human flesh, insensate. Her hair was a pale-brown tangle, eyes silently delirious. "Come on, hon, hitc
h it up for me, okay?"

  Jessica got her leaned up on the bed and managed to drag her wrinkled white gown off. Long flat breasts sagged like flaps over the stomach roll; hair shot from the creases of her armpits. Detachment, Jessica forced the thought. That's what the doctors and RN's always said. Sometimes it was easy, when the patient had lost enough humanity.

  Grim-faced, Jessica sponged Faye's body, sometimes averting her eyes.

  "No more, no more," the patient murmured. "I don't want to do it anymore."

  Nuts. "You don't have to do anything, hon."

  "No more crack my God please no more crack. .

  Jessica wilted, trying not to imagine what horrors the woman had witnessed. At that house?

  She'd heard that some satanic cult lived there, and were sacrificing women. Jessica almost wished they'd sacrificed Faye, to avoid the misery, a ruined body and the hell of a pudding brain.

  "Sexus Cyning," Faye mumbled next, spittle glazing her lips. "I saw it .. .

  "Hmm, hon?" Jessica said, sponging rolls of belly.

  "The Chirice Flaesc."

  Such talk was nothing new to a psychiatric janitor. Patients often lived in a delusion, and invented their own words, their own language.

  "Don't let them make me go there again . .

  Slop, slop, slop, went the sponge. "You don't have to go anywhere you don't want, hon. You get to stay here and watch TV where it's safe. And breakfast will be ready soon."

  Faye urped up a line of bile.

  Great. Jessica plunged the sponge.

  Eventually came the part she always put off. She could avoid it, just say she did it, but then the patient could get a rash or something, and there'd be hell to pay.

  Oh, God ... What did she do?

  Jessica parted Faye's rice-colored legs, winced as she sponged down the genital region. The doctors and nurses had informed her well in advance that some psych patients mutilated themselves-usually something guilt-drivenand some would even mutilate their genitals. But this was the first time Jessica had ever seen it.

  Faye Mullins' pubic region looked gnawed.

  Jessica washed it all the same, thinking Don't look, don't look, but she couldn't help a glance or two.