by Edward Lee
Holly edged toward the doors and peeked in.
Damn it!
The big poster bed was neatly made. Alice wasn’t in it.
But she had to be here. Her car was in the garage. Why was the house so dark?
One slow step at a time, then, Holly entered the watch room. The air-conditioner chilled her when she’d stepped fully inside. All that lit her way now was the moon shining through the draped gaps in the windows. Alice’s bedroom was empty, and so was the guest room.
And so was the kitchen and the dining room and the living room.
There’s only one other place she can be…
The basement.
Her bare feet took her ever so slowly through the foyer, past the front door, past the ticking grandfather clock. She turned in the darkness then—no moonlight to guide her here—and squinted into the back hall.
In a few moments, after her eyes adjusted, she saw it.
I was right…
There was the faintest line of light under the door that she knew led to the basement.
Here goes, she thought.
It seemed to take an eternity to traverse the short hall, and even longer to open the basement door and proceed down. The single bare bulb she remembered was all that lit the basement, and everything here was exactly as she recalled. Just a lot of moving boxes lined neatly against the jagged stone walls. A few pieces of sheet-covered furniture.
Everything was exactly—
Wait.
No, it wasn’t.
Holly noticed it at once.
One of the moving boxes toward the end had been pulled out, away from the wall. And when she went to inspect it—
God Almighty, the thought pulsed quietly in her head.
Behind the box, several large plastic garbage bags had been secreted, and the first one drooped open—
Good God Almighty…
—and it was stuffed with bloody rags and clothes.
Holly leaned against the wall, rubbing her eyes.
She guessed that was why she’d come here so crazily, driving drunk, fleeing the police, climbing over the back deck and sneaking into the house. Because part of her wanted to believe otherwise. She wanted to prove herself wrong. She wanted to come here and find Alice asleep and normal.
She wanted to believe it was all a mistake, just her own drunken imagination running away with a string of coincidences. Subcarnate demons, sacrifices, a house possessed. She wanted proof to dismiss it all as a dementia, as she’d been trained to do all her professional life.
But here was what it all boiled down to: a plastic bag full of bloody rags and the certain realization:
Alice is a murderess.
I’m in love…with a murderess…
“Holly?”
Her gaze jerked up.
Alice stood at the back of the basement, before an open door. All she wore was a white nightgown so sheer as to be transparent, ghosting her beautiful nakedness beneath. Holly could do nothing but stare back.
“Holly?” Alice took a silent step forward. “What are you doing here? It’s so late. And where have you been all day? I went by your house and your office earlier; I called so many times.”
“Alice, stop it. We have to t—”
“I was so worried.”
“Alice…”
Even in the wan light Alice seemed lustrous. She took more steps forward, a nearly liquid series of movements, unhindered by her prosthesis. Holly’s vision fixed ahead of her; her breath went thin looking at her approaching lover, her common sense sloughed away. Alice’s large breasts were plainly visible through the sheer nightgown, the dark nipples erect. Every lovely curve of her body was visible, too, and these visions only seduced Holly further, further into fantasy, further away from all the things in the world that were real.
Alice reached out, smiling so gently, so lovingly.
Tears ran down Holly’s cheeks.
“It’s all right,” Alice whispered, and embraced her. Holly shivered in spite of the warmth of the embrace.
Alice kissed her cheek. “What’s wrong?” And then she kissed her again, again and again, till their mouths were joined. Alice’s groin slid against Holly’s hip.
No…
Alice’s hand traipsed down Holly’s back, pressed against her buttocks, pressed their hips together more firmly.
Holly’s mind reeled.
“I want us to make love now,” Alice whispered. “I promised, didn’t I? The other night. I’ve wanted to for so long, I’ve loved you for so long, since the first week that we met, but I was afraid to tell you. I didn’t know how you’d feel about it, Holly…”
Holly felt shock, wonder, exuberance, her mind still split like wheat from its chaff, reality threshed away.
Could this be true? That Alice loved her, as Holly loved Alice, for all this time, but they’d both been too afraid and too unsure to speak it?
Holly gave in to the kisses then. Not once did it occur to her that she was kissing a killer, that she was in love with a homicidal maniac…
Alice’s hand came around then, as her tongue roved inside Holly’s lips. The hand seemed to trickle, like rainwater, following down the front of Holly’s sweat-damp dress, caressing the breasts, trickling further across the abdomen, then gently cupping Holly’s pubis…
“This is what you want, isn’t it?” Alice whispered. “Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted?”
“Y-yes, but—”
“I want it too, just as badly. I really do love you…”
Something snapped, then. This is crazy! Holly’s thoughts finally exploded. What am I doing? What in God’s name am I thinking?
And, next, with perhaps more strength than she’d ever mustered in her life, Holly pushed Alice away.
“I know all about it, Alice!” she shrieked.
“What are you talking about?” came Alice’s innocent reply, her expression one of total confusion.
“I know all about the men, and what you’ve been doing to them! I know all about the murders!”
“Murders? Holly, what—”
“Don’t play with me, Alice! I know all about this house and what’s in it! I know all about Dessamona!”
Alice smiled, and then the smile turned up into a lustful sneer.
“Good, good. I’m glad you know,” Alice responded in a much darker voice. “But that doesn’t change anything. All this time you’ve wanted to fuck me. So let’s do it. Let’s fuck.” The voice grated down further, a darker and darker croak. “Let me fuck your brains out right on the floor. I’ll get your pussy off—”
“Alice! Listen to what you’re saying!”
“I’ll suck it so hard, Holly—”
“Alice!”
“My pretty little alcoholic dyke. My wonderful little lesbian piglet. Let me eat you like food. Let me fill my belly with your lust and your sadness and your broken life—”
Holly shoved her away again, forcefully, shrieking her sobs. She fell to her knees, nearly gagging, nearly mad now from all the compounded impossibilities that she knew were real. Moments later, when she looked up, Alice was gone.
A door clicked.
Holly’s eyes darted. There, at the back Sheetrock wall of the basement, was another door, to another room…
Holly rose and barged into it—
And froze.
It was not a bare bulb that lit this place; it was candlelight. Holly stood speechless, thoughtless, as she stared at the scene. Part of the basement’s back wall had been dismantled, and with the pieces of rock, Alice had erected—
An altar, Holly realized.
An altar had been crudely built out of the disgorged stones. And—
Jesus—
Bound by leather straps to the altar was a man, gagged, naked, stretched out and tensing against his bonds.
And standing behind the altar was Alice.
“You’ve got to stop this, Alice!” Holly yelled. “You’ve got to stop killing these people!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s Dessamona! She’s tricked you!”
“How can you be so sure?” Alice’s black voice replied. “How can you be so stupid?”
“Alice!”
“What, you think I’ve been killing people?” Alice coyly said. “What, Holly? I’ve been sacrificing my lovers?”
“Yes!” Holly screamed. “Dessamona has possessed you! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“Prove it.”
Holly stared. How could she prove it? But then Alice pointed to some more boxes along the wall. Atop one box was…a letter.
“I found that in your mailbox today, when I came by looking for you. What is it?”
Holly snatched up the letter. The return address was Bill Stone, St. John’s College. Her mind raced over the clinical statistics. Schizoids and psychopaths often never believed their crimes until the crimes were proved to them. Here’s my proof! Holly thought. She tore open the envelope.
“Those men, your lovers,” she stated. “You said they left these notes, but they really didn’t, Alice. You wrote them, under the influence of Dessamona.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I can prove it!”
“There’s only one thing you can prove, Holly—”
Holly pulled out the contents of the envelope: Alice’s handwriting sample, the three notes from the male “lovers,” and Holly’s own set of handwritten instructions to Bill Stone—
“—and that’s your own frailty and failure—”
Holly opened the letter from Bill Stone—
“—and once you read that letter,” Alice croaked on, “you’ll see, you foolish little lovelorn piglet. Pussy-licker. Alcoholic. I didn’t do any of this—”
Holly read the note:
Holly: What is this, some kind of joke, right? Testing my skills as a handwriting analyst? Well, you didn’t fool old Bill! The three notes, of course, were indeed written by the same person, but not by the person whose sample you provided, not by this Alice person, whoever she is. The notes were all written by you.
Good job, though. You almost got me! Let’s do lunch soon!
Bill
The letter fell out of Holly’s hand.
“You did it all, Holly,” Alice said, still grinning in the candlelight. “That’s how Dessamona has always worked, and you would’ve known that if you’d sobered up a little more before your feeble research attempt. You are Dessamona’s apprentice, through me, of course.”
Holly stared.
Visions flashed. Visions of herself. The first time she’d met Alice in her office, and all the beautiful images, all the certainties that she loved her. Alice’s vibrant eyes. Alice’s smile. Alice’s perfect body as she dried herself from the shower—
And then more images.
Images of herself: crying over her love, drunk, passed out.
More images:
Driving through the night in her Maserati. Opening her trunk. Tossing out wet, heavy parcels into Dumpsters, alleys, culverts and ravines, and apartment utility rooms.
And still more:
A knife plunging downward. Blood flying. Naked bound bodies flexing in death throes, and abdomens slit open in single, expert swipes of the blade.
Glimmering organs removed—
Hearts removed.
And all held high to the feast of power.
Me, Holly thought.
“The cycle is almost finished now,” Alice said.
When Holly looked again, she saw that Alice had shed her lambent nightgown and was coming around the altar, pristine, naked, perfect.
With a knife in her hand.
“Some things never die, Holly. Do you understand? There’s only one thing left to do—”
And with that, Alice leaned forward, kissing Holly one last time very gently on the lips.
And raised the knife.
It glittered there, high in the candlelight.
“The final sacrifice to Dessamona.”
“No!” Holly screamed.
The knife did not plunge down into Holly’s heart as she expected. Instead, it turned, rather daintily, then switched hands as—
“No no no!”
—as Alice cleanly and painlessly slit each of her own wrists to the bone.
But she didn’t fall; not yet.
Blood guttered from her wrists like water from twin spigots. The floor turned red.
Alice took the knife then, and pressed its haft lovingly into Holly’s palm.
“Just one more thing, my love,” flowed the dying, smiling voice. “One more thing for you to do…”
Alice collapsed.
Holly looked at the knife. It was a pretty knife, pretty like jewelry. She turned it in her hand, watched it flash marvelously.
And then she understood it all.
Everything.
She approached the altar, smiled down on the gagged and bound pig.
She raised the knife high in both hands—
Amon!
—then brought it down swift and sure, deep into the new piglet’s beating heart.
— | — | —
Epilogue
The body of Alice Sterling was found in the basement of her current residence, by her psychiatrist, one Holly Ryan. Ms. Ryan authenticated the county medical examiner’s rather immediate conclusion as to the official cause of death: profuse arterial blood loss via self-inflicted knife wounds to the wrists. An open-and-shut case of suicide.
No other evidence of violence was found in the basement or any other area of the Taylor Watch House.
««—»»
“Just tying up some loose ends, that’s all, Ms. Ryan,” the man said. His name was Cordesman, a county police homicide captain. He didn’t fit the stereotype at all: he had long hair, crumpled clothes, and a face so thin one might think he was a drug addict. Holly didn’t like him at all.
“I can’t imagine what loose ends there could be, Captain,” she said.
He was looking around the watch house as he spoke, never once actually looking at her.
“Well, let me run this by you real quick, and see what you think,” he said, now eyeing the crystal carriage clock on the mantel. “Last week a photographer named John Suit was here to take pictures of Ms. Sterling’s house, for an article in the Weekender. Also, the day after Ms. Sterling’s suicide, we found the body of a man named Steve Willet; Willet, we discovered, had been engaged to Ms. Sterling last year. Both men, in other words, had a direct proximity to Alice Sterling, and they both have one other thing in common.”
“I realize that, Captain.” Holly didn’t bother letting him finish. “They were both murdered.”
“They were both murdered, Ms. Ryan, in an identical fashion. They were systematically eviscerated.”
“I’m aware of that, too, Captain. I read it in the papers.”
“Don’t you find that odd?”
Holly shrugged. “Not particularly. Not in this city.”
Captain Cordesman seemed to repress a smirk. “I think it’s very odd, Ms. Ryan. But…I don’t have anything on which to base further investigation.”
“Really, Captain. Alice committed suicide; there can be no doubt about it—your own medical examiner agrees.”
Cordesman said nothing for a moment. Now he was in the foyer, eyeing the grandfather clock. “What was your relationship with Alice Sterling?”
“Professionally?”
“Well, yes.”
“She was my patient,” Holly said.
“What were you treating her for?”
“Unipolar depression and suicidal fixations.”
Cordesman pushed several long strands of hair out of his face. “It’s a little strange that she should will her entire estate to you, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” Holly replied. “She had no relatives, no friends to speak of. When she died I was closer to her than anyone.”
Now Cordesman seemed to be staring down the short hall,
at the door to the basement. “Was there a nonprofessional relationship?”
“Yes,” Holly answered with no reservation. “I was in love with her.”
The clock ticked loudly in the ensuing silence. Captain Cordesman shrugged then, thanked Holly for her time, and left the house. Holly never heard from him again.
««—»»
Holly moved into the watch house within the week, leaving her sterile town house behind her. She dropped her current patient list and had them all reassigned to other local psychiatrists. She didn’t need to work anymore; she didn’t want to.
Every night she cried herself to sleep.
««—»»
Summer ended. A quick fall and a hard winter followed. Holly lived as a stoic. She met no one. She cultivated nothing in the way of friendships, and certainly no love relationships. Her only real love was gone now. Alice wasn’t coming back…
««—»»
She gained weight, let herself go. She let her self-concept go, too, all her ideologies, all the psychological tenets she’d ever been taught proved a lie. She even considered suicide on several occasions.
One night in early spring she lay awake in Alice’s bed, half watching the pristine moonlight on the bay. It was a beautiful night, yet Holly couldn’t have felt less beautiful just then, less useless, less wanted.
And as she drifted off to sleep, she thought she heard something… A voice?
A woman’s voice?
(Holly? Holly?)
— | — | —
About the Author
Edward Lee is the author of almost fifty novels and numerous short stories and novellas (or is it novellae? Hmm.) Several of his properties have been optioned for film, while Header was released on DVD in 2009; also, he has been published in Germany, England, Romania, Greece, and Austria. Recent releases include Bullet Through Your Face and Brain Cheese Buffet (story collections), Header 2, and the hardcore Lovecraftian books The Innswich Horror, Trolley No. 1852, Pages Torn From A Travel Journal, Going Monstering, and Haunter of the Threshold. One of Lee’s creative ambitions is to one day write an effective M.R. James pastiche.