Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee (19 page)

What in the name of Christ is that?

Figures moved before what could only be described as a
temple, but instead of pillars and stone, the temple was constructed of ... flesh.

Fluted columns sided a wide, corniced archway, where
each stone was a block of some flesh-like substance. Steps
rose to a closed entrance; Adrianne could tell it was a doorway because she could see a seam between two high panels,
and some indescribable wavering in the seam. Was it light?

A colonnade with thinner pillars sat recessed behind the
main archway, these columns too composed of palpable
flesh. Figures stood between the columns.

Adrianne was aghast when she looked more closely.
Wide jointed but thin-limbed things looked back at her
through faces with no eyes or noses. Bald-lumpen heads sat
tilted on plops of shoulders, and the faces had only mouths
rimmed by narrow lips the color of garden slugs. They were
naked, and seemed teeming in sweat or oil, the flesh that
composed their bodies semitranslucent. Malformed genitals
hung like flaps of pale meat at their groins.

"A traveler," came a voice from aside. The voice radiated, like raving light in this dark place. "Meet the sentinels of
the Chirice Plaesc."

Adrianne shrieked psychically, turned her spirit about.
Facing her now was something different from the repugnant
creatures that prowled the colonnade.

It was a man, or something akin to a man, for he had a
face, a stunning, handsome face with burning eyes like
melted emeralds and a smile that burned similarly. He wore
a tunic over sculpted muscles, but Adrianne felt instantly
queasy when she realized the tunic was fashioned from
veined skin that appeared identical to the skin that covered
the entire, hideous temple.

"You're enlightening," he said next, stepping with interest past the column. "We have so few travelers here."

Who are you? Adrianne asked with her mind.

"Jaemessyn, " he said, the strange word rolling from his
mouth.

And, and-what did you call this place?

"The Chirice Flaesc." The eyes smoldered at her. Adrianne
shuddered when he extended a hand-no normal hand at all.
She saw now that the limbs attached to his magnificent torso
were dissimilar-they weren't human. They were tunneled
and darkly splotched, heavily sinewed. More revolting were
the hands themselves: each finger was a stout, tumid penis.

He gestured the figures in the colonnade. "And these are
the Adiposians. They guard this temple ... and wait."

"Wait for what?".

"For the very rare chances, to venture out and taste the
Living World---the world of your God. But this ... is the
world of mine."

Adrianne tried to focus on Jaemessyn's face but found it
difficult. She sought more detail. Each strain of her out-of body vision, though, caused an annoying series of shifts, like
trying to look at something through jerking blinds.

Several of the things-Adiposians, he'd called thempeered facelessly out at her, from behind the flesh-columns.
The one that stood closest stepped out, and Adrianne
gasped, sickened, to see the vaguely featured genitals, like a
sausage skin filled with lard, grow aroused.

How can it see me? she asked Jaemessyn. I have no body to
see, and that thing has no eyes.

"It senses your desire," the penis-fingered being told her.
"That's what this place-and our Lord-thrives on. Desire.
All the desire of history. And you are ... drenched with it."

Adrianne gasped again, and actually hovered higher at the
start, when a set of skeletal wings spread behind Jaemessyn's
back, a complex webwork of bones. "No, I'm not a demon,
as you can see. I'm one of the righteous Fallen."

The bones of the wings were pitted and charred black.

"The Adiposians aren't demons, either. They're crafted,
by our Warlocks. They're soulless; they're made from rendered fat and shaped, then animated by spells, to serve, to
protect, and to rape. All in the name of my Lord. And like
yourself, they're venturers. A soul in Hell can't ever leave,
but what of something that has no soul? They can venture
out, I cannot."

And they can go ... to my world?

"Yes, that delicious sphere of sin and failure. Once every
eon or so, someone on your side is smart enough to open a
Rive, and a few Adiposians depart. They don't last long over
there, but long enough to send some visions back. To be
suckled by the lord of the temple."

If Adrianne had possessed a throat, it would've been
parched when she asked, What's your lord's name?

"You're not worthy to hear his unholy name. But he is
Lucifer's third-favorite, and he is known as the Sexus Cyning. This is his church, where he is revered. And this ... is
how we revere him ..."

A muffled peal resounded then. Was a bell ringing behind
the closed doors to this temple of skin? Was it a clock?

The Fallen Angel stepped back behind the column
where, set into the temple's main sidewall there appeared to
be a tall narrow panel. Veins throbbed beneath the panel's
sheen of skin. Jaemessyn whispered something and the
panel opened. What hung there, in the coffin-shaped depression, was a woman, or some facsimile thereof: a thin,
voluptuously curved but horned demonness with caninelike fangs and skin pink with rash. Elegant, long-fingered
hands twisted against wire bonds which tacked her wrists
together. "One of our courtesans," the Fallen Angel said,
producing a pair. of iron pliers. "They can be irascible,
though." The demonness jerked on her mount as Jaemessyn
manually extracted the longest of her fangs. Blood much
thinner than human blood poured down her nude body,
some of it actually flying off her convulsing belly in crimson pups. Adrianne couldn't help but notice large breasts
that were each almost entirely nipple. Then the Fallen Angel lifted her out of her containment, from barbed hooks,
and threw her down at the feet of the Adiposians.

The slug-rimmed mouths gaped-mouths with no teeth
but only broad, foaming tongues. The gelatinous things fell
on the female, and began ...

"Watch," Jaemessyn said. "This is what we do here."

Adrianne watched ... the unwatchable. Her spirit
floated dizzily; during an OBE, she couldn't close her eyes
because her vision was lidless. Jaemessyn supervised as the
female was primordially raped on the temple's peristyle. I can't stay here, Adrianne thought, dismal. It was time to end
the OBE, go back to her physical body where her mind
would be safe. She willed herself to move off, to return,
but...

"Not yet," Jaemessyn said.

Adrianne couldn't move.

"Behold the wonders that take place here in the Chirice
Flaesc." Jaemessyn's luminous voice crackled. "Stay and
watch awhile. Let these beauteous images be branded into
your mind ... Something to take back and tell your
friends."

Adrianne squirmed as she hovered. The demonness was
mauled in place, Ripped over, contorted about, to afford the
sex organs of her attackers every conceivable purchase of
coitus and sodomy. Eyes the size of peaches and clear as
glass bulged forth as she was taken and taken again.

But the creature had never screamed, and when the things
were done with their rut they left her calmly limp and gratified in spite of the ravenous degradation. Then the ten
stout penises of Jaemessyn's hands lifted her up by her
throat and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed some more, until
her back arched backward in midair, and-

CRACK!

-her neck broke.

The body dangled flaccid now in Jaemessyn's grasp, but
when he set her back up on the hook,Adrianne noticed her
face: a serene and very sated smile.

Ecstasy in eternal death.

The Fallen Angel's gaze moved back up to Adrianne.
"Go now, traveler. Go back to your domain and speak of
what you've witnessed here."

Again, Adrianne tried to move off, to flee, but couldn't.

"And if you have the will to meet my Lord-and I think you do-then visit me again"-he pointed to the arch-
way-"and I will open those doors for you. You're not
ready now, you haven't gone far enough. But I think-I really think you soon will."

Adrianne stared back at the flawed but grand being.

"I know that my Lord would love to meet you."

Adrianne soared away, her ethereal exit followed like a
flapping banner by the darkest scream. That scream still
filled her head when her soul-tether constricted and
dropped her spirit back into her physical body with an effect like a rock being dropped into a lake.

She felt dead as she lay on the bed. For minutes she could
barely move, could only stare upward. The bedroom's darkness seemed to churn at first, like something alive. Her heart
was racing-Calm, calm, calm, she ordered herself-and her
hands shook. When the rush of adrenalin began to dissipate,
subtle pains became apparent. Her nipples felt chewed on,
her stomach and thighs bitten. And something worse:

Her sex ached.

When she pressed her hands down against the mattress,
they flinched back. The bed was drenched. Most experients
perspired heavily during a jaunt, and Adrianne was no exception. But this?

I couldn't possibly have sweated this much ... could I? she
wondered, patting more of the mattress. It squished, as wet
as if whole buckets of warm water had been dumped on it,
and on her. Or perhaps something else had.

When she finally leaned up and looked down at herself,
she thought very dismally: Oh, no ...

She lay nude on the wide bed. She wasn't positive but she
was almost certain that she'd been wearing her bra and
panties when she'd begun.

"Here comes somebody," Clements said, eyes pressed to the
binoculars. "Who the hell ..."

"It looks like another van," the girl said. She squinted
more out of boredom than interest. "Maybe it's another
workman."

"No, not now Vivica had the place cleaned up before any
of that crowd arrived. You saw them, the fumigators, the
disposal crew There were more last week. Painters, paperhangers, carpet-layers. I don't know who the hell this is. And
at this hour?"

The girl squinted through the windshield and shrugged.

The girl called herself Teary but she'd eventually told
Clements her real name: Connie. Twenty-five years old but
looked thirty-five. She'd been addicted to crack since she
was fifteen, when she first started turning tricks. It had been her mother and step-father who'd hooked her and put her
on the street. Clements' attraction to such girls was pretty
concrete-something about the look and the attitude, the
late-night car-rides, prowling around alleys and looking for
that image in his headlights. They were all the same, except,
evidently, this one. He was starting to actually like her.

He'd paid her again just to drive out here with him, for a
closer look at the hidden access-road, which was where they
sat parked now Since that first night he'd picked her up, he
hadn't laid a hand on her.

"It's a locksmith," he said, finally getting a glimpse of the
van when it turned into the mansion's front floodlights.

"Guess they need something open," Connie remarked.
But she looked out the open passenger window instead as if
studying the forest might take her mind off how badly she
needed to light her pipe. She brushed a straggle of hair off
her brow. "When are you gonna tell me what you're doing
out here? You just sit here, watching. Hildreth is dead. Everyone who was there that night is dead. There's nobody in that
house right now who had anything to do with Hildreth-"

"Actually there is. A woman named Karen Lovell, who
did all the paperwork for T&T Enterprises, and a guy
named Mack Colmes, who works for Hildreth's wife-"

"Okay, great, but neither of them were in the house on the
night of the murders. So what are you doing out here? I know
it's got something to do with that girl in the picture-"

"Debbie Rodenbaugh, yes."

"She sure as shit ain't in there, and you said she wasn't
one of the bodies. She probably split when all the shit went
down. What good is sitting out here going to do?"

"I'm ... not sure," Clements admitted.

Connie squinted out of her withdrawal for enough time to really look at Clements. "She's not the daughter of a
client, I don't believe it-"

"It's true." Clements shrugged. "Her parents hired me
over a year ago to keep tabs on her once she started working for Hildreth-"

She chuckled. "Yeah, and junkies never lie. I think I
know what it is. She's some young chick you had the hots
for, fell in love with-"

Now Clements laughed to himself. "No, nothing like
that at all. I never even met Debbie Rodenbaugh."

"I don't get any of this. You rich or something?"

"Not really. I have a pension from the Navy and retirement from the police department. I've been a private investigator for two years--something to do."

"I ain't complaining," she said, scratching her knees.
"This is three nights in a row you're paying more than I'd
make on the street, and you don't even want any action."
She sighed and looked at him again. "You're such a nice
guy, which is weird. Most johns are pricks."

Clements' brow rose.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said, half-heartedly. "You're offended if I call you a john?"

"No," he answered. How could he be? He'd picked up
countless hundreds of prostitutes in his life.

"Lotta time tricks and cops call me a whore, and you
know what? It doesn't piss me off because I know that's
what I am."

The comment barbed him. It was tragic how she had no
positive concept of herself and never saw anything beyond
this in her future. "I'm a john-I admit it. A bigtimejohn."

"Then how come you never buy any action from me? I
know you trick all the time with the other girls on the street."

"Let's talk about something else."

"Okay. What time is it?