Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee

by Edward Lee

  Westmore looked around. Every face at the table turned grim, especially Karen's.

  "Did something happen?"

  "I had one of those things that Cathleen and Adrianne had," Karen told him.

  "One of what things?"

  "A pan-planar rape," Nyvysk answered for Westmore's benefit. "A discorporate sexual assault."

  This again, Westmore thought. But Karen looked sullen, fractured. He knew that she was no great believer in all this psychic stuff-she could take it or leave it-and she didn't at all seem the type to be manipulated by the power of suggestion. She looked truly shaken.

  "So where did this happen?" he asked.

  "The inner courtyard." She winced thinking about it. "It was probably just a dream."

  "It was no dream," Cathleen felt confident. Then she asked a seemingly irrelevant question: "What were you wearing?"

  Karen's shoulders drooped. "Nothing. I was sunbathing. No one was around so I took everything off."

  "Mobilizing imagery?" Nyvysk asked.

  "I think so," Cathleen said. "This house is very sexual. We all felt that the minute we walked in. When I was doing my alomance in the graveyard, I was naked."

  "And when I did my OBE, I was only wearing my bra and panties. When I came back, they'd been taken off."

  Maybe YOU took them of, Westmore had to think.

  "Shortly before this happened," Cathleen asked Karen directly, "were you thinking about anything sexual? Whenever I do a divination, a seance, or try to make a contact, I think back to some pleasurable sexual experience in my past, not because I'm trying to summon anything but it sometimes tunes my psi, makes my receptivity more keen."

  "I sort of do the same thing before an OBE," Adrianne admitted. "I've been orgasmically abstinent for years nowI have to be-but sexual thought always primes my senses, helps me slip out of my body easier."

  Westmore was stupefied by the talk. Orgasmically abstinent? Thinking about sex to summon "psi?"Jesus. This isn't exactly small-talk at a Tupper are party. He couldn't believe this. And they were all serious.

  "What about you, Karen?" Cathleen asked.

  "Oh, jeez." Karen-unembarrassible-looked embarrassed; were it not for the tan, she'd be blushing. "Yes, I was thinking about sex before I fell asleep."

  "Sex with anyone in particular?" Willis asked, pouring himself some lemonade.

  "Sex with Hildreth, or any of the men who died here, or any of the women?" Cathleen inquired.

  "God, no! What difference does it make who?"

  "Believe it or not," Nyvysk piped in, "it could be important. In a place like this? Some of the most powerful human emotions are relative to sex-drive, and the same can be true of any corresponding inhuman emotions, or discarnate emotions. This house is charged which, to you, means it's full of spirits. Negative spirits, and probably very sexual spirits."

  Westmore just sat and listened. Ordinarily he would've scoffed. But now?

  "All right," Karen confessed. "1 was ... fantasizing. About Westmore."

  Now Westmore blushed. That's just peachy ...

  No one else was the least bit surprised. They listened, serious.

  "Were you asleep at this point?" Willis asked. He slid the pitcher of lemonade to Westmore, who noticed that the man was still wearing jersey gloves.

  "It started out with me just thinking ... about sex with Westmore. Then it changed to one of those things like you're dreaming, you're seeing the dream, but you're still awake-"

  "Hypnapompia," Nyvysk and Willis said at the same time.

  Or hypnabullshitia, Westmore considered.

  "-then I fell asleep and Westmore continued to be in the dream, but ... only for a few moments. Then I was someplace else. In Hell, I think. Hildreth, Jaz, and ThreeBalls-but they had demon features. They were killing my daughter, and me."

  "The place?" Adrianne asked next. "Was it like a church made of flesh? Something like that?"

  "No," Karen said, lighting a cigarette to dispel her discomfort. "It was more like a prison cell, but there were some holes in the wall, and through one of the holes, I did see something like that. A temple that looked made of skin."

  "That's what I saw," Adrianne said.

  "The Chirice Flaesc," Nyvysk said grimly.

  Adrianne was enthused. "That's the term the figure in my vision used."

  "The temple of worship for the Sexus Cyning," the older man went on. "According to the Morakis grimoires and other major demonological tomes, it's a church made of flesh, the nexus for the lord of carnality-"

  "Belarius," Westmore uttered, remembering Nyvysk's explanation in the office. "The demon in the engraving, and you also have a voice saying that name on one of the EVP tapes."

  "In my dream, Hildreth used that name, too," Karen acknowledged. "This is really scaring the shit out of me now.

  "Hildreth's pieces are starting to fit together." Nyvysk was absently diddling with his beard. "He may well have been using this house as a power icon, to revere Belarius. Belarius is a very sexual demon, and this is a very sexual house. Orgies, prostitutes, pornography, rape movies. The sacrifices on April 3rd were sexually grounded." He looked to Willis. "Your target-object visions the other day. You said you saw Hildreth?"

  "Yes," Willis said. "In the Jean Brohou Parlor, where the prostitutes were throat-cut." He closed his eyes to pause. "Hildreth and two men."

  "Probably Jaz and that goddamn Three-Balls," Karen said. "I saw them with Hildreth in the cell, before they made me look at myself being raped."

  "But who was raping you?" Cathleen asked with concern.

  "No who, what. They were things. They were like shadows-"

  "Subcarnates," Willis said. "I saw them in my flash too. Like touching an oily gas is the only way I can describe it."

  "And the same kind of things were what molested me near Hildreth's grave," Cathleen said. "Not a revenant of Hildreth. They were like ... a pack of monsters that I could only partially feel. I've been assaulted by subcarnates before, but never like this."

  Westmore interrupted with a smirk. "What the hell is a subcarnate? A ghost?"

  "Actually, no," Nyvysk said, "and utterly confusing to a novice. A subcarnate is a surviving entity that's trying to become flesh, to become incarnated-but can't because its physical body is dead."

  "Sounds like a ghost," Westmore said.

  "Or, if its physical body is somewhere else," Nyvysk added. "Another plane, perhaps. But you get the idea."

  Do I? Westmore thought.

  "Strong living human emotions as well as revenant residue can summon subcarnates," Nyvysk continued. "And it's really making me think harder about this house."

  "Like the house is an antenna," Adrianne posed, "and Hildreth was tuning it, calibrating it, with more carnality-"

  "And eventually ritualized sacrifices," Willis said.

  "Yes," Nyvysk agreed. "But I don't really know anything about the house since Hildreth bought it."

  "Mack would know," Karen said.

  "Where is he?" Cathleen asked.

  "Probably sluffing somewhere," Karen added a pinch of sarcasm.

  "Sluffing? You can't possibly be talking about me." Mack strode into the room, then switched on a television sports show "I just got back from that damn locksmith company. Says Vanni must've quit on him, 'cos he can't reach her."

  "Maybe she ... ," Westmore began, but thought the better of it; however, Cathleen finished for him anyway: "Maybe she saw something here"

  Adrianne laughed. "Wouldn't be the first time a subcarnate scared somebody out of a house."

  "Anyway," Mack went on, "The guy who owns the lock place said he'll send somebody else out as soon as he can."

  There went Westmore's hopes about the safe. There was probably something in it that was much more understandable and concrete than ghosts, subcarnates, etc. Something he could relate to.

  "What do you know about the house, Mack?" Karen asked. "Before Hildreth owned it?"

  "Does it have a history?" Nyvysk aske
d.

  "Well, yeah, now that you mention it." Mack sat down at the table next to Westmore. "It's always had a rep that it's haunted. In the early 1900's, it was a sort of a lockup treatment center for the Presbyterian church, for sick priests."

  "Ministers, not priests," Nyvysk corrected.

  "Whatever. These days if a priest or minister gets caught messing with kids or boffing half the congregation, it's in Time magazine. But back then it was very hush-hush. One day the guy'd be in his church doing the sermon and the next day he's history, replaced. They'd shuffle him off in the middle of the night and stick him here, to give him psych counseling and keep him away from the public. Evidently, some of these guys were really screwed up."

  "Sex-addiction problems, in other words," Nyvysk augmented.

  "Yeah." Mack helped himself to some lemonade, then propped his feet up on the table. "And during World War Two, and on into the early 'SOs, the mansion was a bordello. It stayed open for a long time 'cos the madame had ties to the cops, cut them in on the profits to look the other way, even after the murders."

  "Murders?" Karen asked. "I didn't know there were other murders here."

  "Yeah, a bunch of them. Especially right after the war. Guys'd come home from Germany and the Pacific theater, all boned up and still salty from killing, and they'd get carried away and wound up killing some of the hookers. There was also a lot of sexual misadventure later, guys getting too rough with the girls, taking the kinky stuff too far, and some girls wound up dying."

  "Interesting," Nyvysk commented. "More sexuallymotivated murder. A very powerful revenant residue. Sex truly is a component part of the charge of this mansion. There's a full century of negative sexual energy here."

  "What exactly does that mean?" Westmore asked.

  "We think of any so-called haunted house as a `charged' location. Charges can manipulate the living, especially to those who are psychically attuned. Take a house where there's been multiple murders. Those murders leave a residue, so to speak, of negative energy, in which discorpo- rates, subcarnates, spirits, etc., gain strength. If a homicidal person enters such a house, the charge accelerates, becomes stronger. The charge in a house where a suicide occurs becomes stronger when a depressed or suicidal person enters. And this house?"

  "A double whammy," Cathleen said.

  "Quite so. Sexually-motivated murder leaves the strongest charge for they involve two of the strongest human emotions: hatred and lust. Such revenant energy is an ideal environment for the kind of entities we're experiencing here. It's like a catalyst, a summons of sorts."

  Karen's eyes glanced up. "That's what Hildreth said in my nightmare. He said that lust summons them, and that's why he chose this house."

  "Lust summons who?" Westmore edged in.

  "Subcarnates, for one," Cathleen offered. "And potentially any revenant entity. Lust, hate, greed, pride-"

  "You're saying emotions like that," Westmore deduced, "combined with tragedies, sex-crimes, and all that, can turn a house into a culture dish for ghosts?"

  "In a manner of speaking, yes," Nyvysk verified. "And it's a good bet that Hildreth had a very deliberate and specified purpose in choosing this house and turning it into a pornography den."

  "What purpose?" Westmore asked.

  "He was making it into a church of his own," Cathleen said.

  Nyvysk nodded. "A church to worship Belarius."

  Chapter Eleven

  I

  The next several days passed without event, or at least with none that Westmore could observe. The only person he felt close to would be Karen, but even she, now, seemed different. Less animated, low-key, bereft of the sharp sarcasm she'd been radiating since they met. And since her incident at the inner court, that overt sexual aura of hers was enfeebled, replaced by a caul. She didn't even dress provocatively anymore-jeans and a baggy blouse most days. And no more nude sunbathing.

  He wrote productively several hours a day, though he still wasn't sure what he was writing. But if the others wereand it sounded like they were-then he would have something pertinent to report to Vivica Hildreth. She wants to know exactly what her husband's last night in this house was all about.

  Now he knew.

  It was about Belarius.

  But he remembered her most crucial instruction from the day he'd met her at the penthouse: My husband was preparing for something he thought would occur in the future. I want to know what-exactly-it was he was preparing for. And I want to know when.

  What could he have been preparing for? The murders were obviously a rite of some kind, a sacrifue.

  To Belarius?

  To trigger something, he guessed. In something so senseless, it made perfect sense. The key to it all was in Hildreth himself, who-in spite of his wife's conjecture-was probably dead. That was one grim chore that awaited. Westmore knew he'd have to go into the woods soon and exhume that coffin, and he had to do it without anyone else knowing or else suffer the wrath of Vivica's non-disclosure agreement. He knew she was much more bite than bark.

  Over time, Westmore stumbled upon some channels in the house that could only be described as secret passageways-he even got lost a few times. One led to the Scarlet Room, another to the strange, railed walkways suspended above the South Atrium. A third, behind a curtain in Hildreth's office, led to several very narrow stairwells built behind the walls, which eventually ended in a small windowless study that seemed embedded in the house, somewhere on the first floor. The mansion was a strange place that just kept getting stranger. And over the course of those days, he'd found more DVD's which he dreaded to watch but watched nonetheless, hoping for more clues about the mysterious Rodenbaugh girl. But there were none. The discs were either more T&T porn frolic or more nauseating rape and brutality movies. He found a few more snapshots in an otherwise empty bedroom on the first floor, on a shelf in the closet. The dowdy, overweight woman he'd seen in the Halloween disc. Faye Mullins, he recalled Karen telling him. The house janitor. In the pictures, she posed half-smiling with some of T&T's stars and starlets, but beneath the smile, he could clearly detect a restrained misery. The question begged: Where was Faye Mullins on the night of April 3rd?

  And where was she now?

  Westmore called a private research consultant he knew from his newspaper days, to do some searches on Deborah Rodenbaugh, and he asked for a complete make on the background and financial portfolio of Hildreth himself. How did he get so rich? Vivica and others claimed he was a financial genius, yet the basic web searches Westmore had done on his own revealed no traces of the man whatsoever, which seemed very odd ...

  "Did you hear what that kook Cathleen says she's going to do tonight?" Mack asked him in the kitchen. He fixed some espresso, diddling around. "She's going to do some sort of a seance."

  Westmore was not surprised. In this house? "What, to contact the dead?"

  "To contact Hildreth." Mack smiled sarcastically and walked away with his coffee.

  "Come in here," Nyvysk said, surprising Westmore. "There's something you might want to see ..."

  Westmore went out to the atrium. "What's this about Cathleen doing a seance?" he asked.

  Nyvysk chuckled. "It's not quite what you're thinking. Cathleen's a mentalist-that's a sort of medium-and she can put herself in what we call a theta-trance, which sometimes solicits communication-prone spirits. Some surviving spirits are very talkative, Mr. Westmore, to an annoying degree. But what Cathleen will do isn't like anything you've read or seen in movies. No Ouija boards, no people sitting around a table with their pinkies and thumbs touching."

  "Cathleen seems pretty diversified," Westmore observed. "You only do one thing the tech stuff. Adrianne only does the out-of-body thing. And Willis does the touch thing-"

  "Target-object tactionism," Nyvysk corrected.

  Westmore frowned. "Right. But I take it Cathleen has a number of skills."

  "Oh, yes. She's clairvoyant, she's trance-inductive, she's a scryer-a crystal-gazer, in other words-and quite par
anormally sensitive."

  "Is she famous?"

  "In her field, yes, quite famous. She keeps to herself much more now. You rarely see her on TV anymore. Twenty years ago was another story. Do you know what her claim to fame is?"

  "Not a clue."

  "She's a psychokinetic."

  "She can move things with her mind?"

  "Oh, yes. She stopped doing it publicly a long time ago. She got in some trouble; someone was injured. A wall she was holding up-mentally-fell on someone."

  "A spoon-bender, you mean."

  "Mr. Westmore, there was a time when she could bend a crowbar. She could look at a car jack, and raise a car." Nyvysk cast an amused glance. "But you don't believe that, do you?"

  "Sorry, but I gotta see it to believe it."

  "Your skepticism is not only healthy, it's crucial. And now, here's something you can focus more of your skepticism on."

  Westmore noticed some computers and screens that Nyvysk had set up on a William and Mary trestle table. Nyvysk explained, "I've set up a small observation post down here so I don't have to keep running up and down the stairs all the time," the bearded man said. "And I thought you'd like to see exactly what an ion signature looks like. The readings thus far have been ... interesting."

  Westmore focused on a flat-panel screen. He saw a blank, black screen.

  "Do you know what zeolite groups are?" Nyvysk asked.

  "No."

  "Do you know what labile ions are?"

  "That's a big negatory, professor," Westmore admitted.

  "Ions are charged sub-atomic particles; they're in everything," Nyvysk began. "What my scanners detect are ions in the air. Any physical body, in any space other than a vacuum, will disrupt the ionic environment, and these disruptions can be monitored. Heat, moisture, movement, minuscular radiation given off by the skin, will cause airborne ions to fluctuate or even reverse their electrical charges. Follow me so far?"

  "I ... think so," Westmore said.

  "A human being walks into a room, ions around that physical body change in a detectable manner. But the same is true of revenants, discorporated entities, subcarnates---the manifestations we were discussing earlier."