Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee (24 page)

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,
hitch 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.

"They did that," Faye gibbered. "They did it."

"Who did, hon?"

"Belarius and his friends, in the Chirice Flaesc."

Jessica gagged through the rest of her work.

"It's coming again ..

"What's coming, sweetie?" Jessica asked if only to distract
herself.

"The Chirice Flaesc-"

Jessica stared.

"end Belarius. Soon."

Faye giggled faintly, grinning upward with a toothy
mouth. She parted her legs more.

Jessica groaned. Yes. She wished very much that she had
stayed in school.

Westmore awoke groggily at about 9 a.m., squared beams of
sunlight cutting into the atrium from odd, high windows. He'd slept dreamlessly. It took a while before the morning
cogs began to turn, and he remembered everything that had
happened yesterday.

Belarius, he thought.

It was nearly as eerie now as when he'd heard the strange
name on the tape.

I don't believe in demons, he reminded himself, gathering
his toiletries from the small cabinet in his cubicle. In a
Marriot-Courtyard robe he'd pilfered years ago at a writers
convention, he used the large bathroom by the kitchen,
showered, shaved, and dressed. Then he was ready ...

But for what?

He considered calling Vivica but thought better of it.
Later, when I have something to tell her.

In the office, he typed some notes into his laptop for a
few hours, then it occurred to him as an afterthought: The
safe! But when he looked, the safe was still closed, and there
was no sign of the locksmith. Mack had still been watching
television when Westmore had gone to sleep. Had she
opened the safe and reported to Mack? He looked down
from the window and saw that her truck was gone. He had
to know

Back in the atrium, he could hear at least one of the men
snoring; he guessed most of this crowd were late sleepers.
Then one of the women-Adrianne, he thought-murmured anxiously in her sleep: "No, no!"

Nightmares.

He found Mack's cubicle and tapped on the edge of the
partition. "Mack? Hey, Mack?"

"Huh?"

"Sorry to wake you up but what happened with the girl
from the locksmith's?"

A grunt and a cough, then Mack came through his cubi cle's privacy curtain clad only in boxer shorts. He palmed
sleep out of his eyes. "Shit, I don't know. Is she still here?"

"The safe's still shut and her truck's gone."

He went to the bay window and winced when he pushed
the drapes back, letting in a block of sun. "Shit," he said
again. "Maybe she's not done. Maybe she's coming back."

"Or maybe she just couldn't open the son of a bitch. She
did say no guarantees."

"Did you see her at all last night?"

Mack was clearly only half awake. "Well, no. I mean, not
later."

"Look, man. What's the scoop with her?"

"Huh?"

"Last night you said something like she was good at more
than locks. What's the scoop with that?"

Mack signed in a grog, then shrugged. "I did her, man. I
told you she was hot for me."

Unbelievable. "You had sex with the locksmith, you're
saying?"

"Yeah. She came on to me, know what I mean? And she's
a hot number, too. Killer tits." Mack dragged his feet toward
the kitchen, still rubbing his eyes. "Did you put coffee on?"

Westmore shook his head. Mack was probably about
twenty-five. Kids, Jesus. They have sex with people like it's
changing channels on a television. Westmore considered his
own morality. Or maybe I'm just getting old ...

"Yes, I think her name's Vann. She came here about ten
o'clock last night," he said later to the man on the phone.
He'd called the locksmith's. "Did she say if she's coming
back to finish the job?"

The man seemed duped. "I- There's no invoice in the
nightbox, and-" A pause"... the truck's in the lot.
Lemme get back to you, sir."

"Sure." Westmore hung up, astounded. Mack gave her a
thousand bucks to open the safe and she walked of with it? Good
help was hard to find. Maybe she had opened the safe and
found a lot of money in it. Westmore wondered.

He walked outside into the blaze of the day. Adrianne said
she saw some can on the property ... One seemed abandoned, she'd said, in the woods. Westmore was determined
to find it, if it was to be found at all. She'd said she'd seen it
during an out-of-body experience, which couldn't have
sounded more hokey. There was quite a bit of hokeyness
around here but the thing that bothered Westmore most was
the casual if not bored regard the "psychics" maintained for
each other. None of it's pokey to them. It's commonplace. It was
like a bunch of Olympic weightlifters hanging around each
other. Nobody was the least bit impressed that they could
all bench four hundred.

An opening in the woodline led him down a brambled
path. Gnats flitted annoyingly around his head as wigs of
Spanish moss brushed his shoulders. The graveyard, he
thought. And here it was, iron-crested fence and all. He noticed a broken eggshell and piece of burned aluminum foil
at the foot of Hildreth's tombstone. She said something about
divination, he remembered. Westmore knew nothing about
that save for folklore about people finding water with
forked branches.

He looked down at the grave and thought very resolutely,
I'm going to have to dig this up. It would be no easy task and
Westmore was a soft-handed writer, not a ditch-digger. And
IT have to do it on my oum, can't let the others know.

But not now. There were still preliminaries. Back out on
the open property, he began to bake in the sun. The annoying
gnats turned into more annoying mosquitoes. At the opposite end of the property, after a sweat-seeping walk, he found a scratch of a foot-trail that stopped at a cramped clearing
overhung by tree limbs. Lizards scattered when he wedged
his way through brush. Facing him, dusted by pollen, was a
relatively new jet-black Miata with a walnut-brown convertible top. Westmore's first impulse, for whatever reason, was to
look inside for a dead body, but the vehicle's two bucket seats
sat empty. The glove box revealed no tide or registration. He
jotted down the plates and walked around back, found two
long tire ruts, and followed them a hundred yards down the
mountainous hill that the mansion had been built on. The
heat teemed; spider-webs broke stickily over his face. Christ,
it's like a rain forest! Soon, though, the tire ruts emptied onto a
wider dirt mad that seemed to lead all the way down the hill.
To the main road? he questioned. It had to be. But there was
no reason to follow it all the way down.

At least he'd found the car in the woods ... which made
him wonder. How the hell did Adrianne know about it unless
she'd really had one of these OBE's? Westmore could scarcely
grasp the concept much less have faith in it.

Oh, well.

He walked back to the house, smoking in spite of the
heat and frowning at himself for wearing long pants on a
day like this. Back at the courtyard, he spotted a man getting
out of a van and approaching the front door. The locksmith?
he thought.

No. BAYSIDE PEST CONTROL, the van read.

"Can I help you?" Westmore asked when he got to the
porch.

Hair cut very short reduced the obviousness of a bald
spot. Dark moustache. The man looked in his late-50s,
starting to lose a battle to middle-age. Typical workman's
utility dress, a nozzled cannister of pesticide sling over his
back. "Hi, I'm Mike, from Bayside. Is Mr. Hildreth in?"

Westmore didn't know what to say. No, but there's a high
likelihood that he's in a hole in the ground a couple hundred yards
from here. "I'm afraid he isn't."

"I'm here for your routine 30-day service."

"Come on in. I'll get Karen." He took the guy inside and
down the long hall to the atrium. He knew it was nothing
but he also didn't want to give some guy free-reign in a
house full of treasures. He tapped on the end of Karen's cubicle. "Karen?"

Eventually, a flattened voice said: "Aw, fuck. My head's
about to explode."

"The exterminator's here. I just wanted to make sure it's
cool to let him in the house."

A groan. "Aw, shit. Uh ... That's not supposed to be till
the first of the month, I think. What company?"

"Bayside Pest Control."

"That's them. It's Jimmy, right?"

Westmore's brow arched. "No, a guy named Mike."

Cot springs creaked. For the briefest moment, when her
hand parted the curtain, Westmore could see in the gap that
she wore nothing but rose-red panties. Large white breasts
blared from the impressive tan of her shoulders and abdomen, delineated by razor-sharp tan lines. Then she stuck
her head out and closed the curtain around her neck.
Bloodshot eyes squinted to the door. "You're not the regular guy. Where's Jimmy?"

"Jimmy Parks is in Key West, ma'am," Mike said. "Two
weeks off. I'm filling in for him. Your next spraying isn't
scheduled till the first, but they sent me out a little early to
pick up some slack. Feel free to call my manager, Mr. Hol-
sten, to verify."

"He's fine," Karen said, then disappeared back inside.

"Go do your thing," Westmore told the guy.

"Thanks for your time. I won't be more than an hour.
It's just a perimeter spray."

The guy got to it, slowly spraying a line of clear fluid
along the baseboards.

Westmore went back to the office, immediately got online. He ran the Miata's tags on the DMV website, paid
$7.95 on his credit card, and got the owner's name. Damn.
Doesn't do me any good. The vehicle was owned by Reginald
Hildreth. The only thing left to do was go back into the
heat and get the vehicle-identification number off the dashboard, if it was even marked on the dashboard, because not
all cars did that now. It might be on the engine someplace.
But then he thought: Insurance! He searched several oak file
cabinets until he found a group of folders that appeared to
be household. Records, receipts, warranties, etc. One folder
read: CAR INSURANCE. The receipt for the last biyearly insurance receipt was right on top. Jesus, this guy
oumed a lot of can! Over a dozen were listed, including a
Rolls Royce Silver Shadow which cited the primary driver
as Vivica Hildreth.

Eureka! he thought next. A black convertible with the
same tag number was there.

PRIMARY OPERATOR: DEBORAH ANNE RODENBAUGH.

There were five Rodenbaughs in the phone book. Westmore called them all. Three answered and had never heard
of Deborah Rodenbaugh. The fourth was a message: "Hi,
this is Peter Rodenbaugh. If you have a legitimate reason to
want to talk to me, leave a message. And if you're one of
those goddamn telemarketers, eat shit and die and don't
ever call this fucking number again because I hate all you
annoying pains in the ass. If I need something, I go to the store and get it. I don't need you assholes ringing my fucking phone twenty times a day trying to sell me cruises or
aluminum siding or satellite tv or basement waterproofing
when I don't even have a fucking basement. I rent an apartment, dickheads. I don't need any of that bullshit you're
trying to sell for some pissant commission. Do the world a
favor, all of you moronic, lazy, unmotivated, no account
motherfucking telemarketers: Get a real job." Westmore,
laughing, left a message, eventually got a hold of the resident who'd never heard of Deborah Rodenbaugh, either.
The fifth number was disconnected.