Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee (26 page)

"And you know what, Karen?" his image in the cell
asked. "You're enjoying every moment of their efforts.
Such is the nature of true, unadulterated lust."

Karen watched in horror at what was being done to her, as
the hand gripping her hair twisted tighter. Below, the gargoyle
stooped in the center of the fountain was vomiting blood ...

"It's lust that summons them. Why else would I choose
such a house?"

Karen couldn't cogitate anything he said. Her terror was
burning through her. She screamed loud as a train whistle
when, next, she was thrown to the floor and her ankles were
lashed together by something like slimy rope, and she was
hung upside-down on a hook next to her daughter.

Hildreth smiled, a spoiled light in his eyes. "Mother and
child. How appropriate a homage."

Darlene was screaming first, a pitiable wail of violated innocence. Three-Balls was sawing into the meat of her neck
with the curved knife. The bone-deep wound poured blood
like water from a spigot, emptying into a trough which sat
below them.

"Don't worry, Karen," Hildreth assured. "This is only a
dream that we've hijacked from you. It was your lust that let
us in.

Jaz was cutting into Karen's neck. Strangely she felt no
pain, only the sensation of being emptied.

"It's just a dream, just a dream. Please, Karen. Help me
make my dreams come true."

She twitched on the hook as her blood poured into the
trough.

"Good, good. Spill forth. It's so beautiful, isn't it?"

When there was nothing left, their heads were cut off
and tossed to the floor. Karen could still see, both her and
her daughter's headless bodies hanging above. Jaz and
Three-Balls were running their hands down the bodies,
from ankles to waist, then waist to neck, to squeeze out
every drop.

"Good," Hildreth said. "Now paint the walls with it."

Hildreth carried both heads to a wooden table fitted with
a hand-crank press. Karen could still see as her head was
placed on the pressure plate and the device was wheeled
down and down and down, until the skull collapsed and her
brains were squeezed through her mouth, ears, and nose,
and eventually crushed flat.

The girl was asleep in Clements' bed. The girt, he thought,
frowning at himself. He knew her name now Connie. And
he was even sort of falling for her. A crack-addict, a prostitute.
He laughed at himself. He didn't care. He'd get her off that
shit when this other thing was over. Clements was determined to see it all to an end, even if he had to end it himself. Then he'd get Connie into a long-term rehab, and
didn't care how much he'd have to pay. He was either very
sincere, or the biggest fool on earth.

She'd helped him earlier at the mansion, with his cell
phone on vibrate, watching with binoculars in case Vivica
Hildreth dropped by at the house. She was the only one who knew Clements by sight and hence would know the
man in the exterminator's uniform was really a commen-
dated ex-cop.

In the atrium, while pretending to spray for bugs, he'd
taken the CD's out of the voice-activated digital recorder
that he'd hidden under the couch nearest the center of the
room, and replaced them with blank recordable CD's. He'd
gotten the info on the Hildreth account from the guy who
owned Bayside Pest Control. Clements had been the one
who-with less than ethical means-had busted the cokedealer who'd hooked the owner's daughter. Favor time.

Now all he had to do was listen to five CD's worth of
voice-activated recordings. It was going to be a long night.

Some major conversations took place by the time he got
to the second disc. Nyvysk and the three psychics were all
there now-a real batty bunch. Cosmic rapes, they'd talked
about, as if it were real. Out-of-body experiences. They
were convinced Hildreth was a true satanist and the house
was "charged," whatever that meant. Clements knew they
were coming in advance from the bug he'd gotten into
Vivica Hildreth's penthouse. Two employees of Hildreth's
were there now, too, and so was the writer.

The weak link was the writer.

But not a peep about Debbie Rodenbaugh.

Yes, it was going to be a very long night. Mr. Johnny
Walker Black was there to keep him company, and so was
the Marlboro Man. Maybe, just maybe, one of these kooks
knew about Debbie and what had really happened to her.

The weak link was the writer, he thought again.

Clements looked at the bio pic of journalist Richard
Westmore. He tapped a finger against the photo.

He's the one Igo for, Clements thought.

It was much later that night when Clements heard one distorted voice which seemed to vacillate in and out, and
seemed backed by the most distant shrieks-a voice that
cackled and said: "Clements! Come into our midst and be
one of us! We know you're listening ..."

Westmore felt sick to death.

He sat paralyzed, watching the screen. Oh my dear God.
What a sick, sick world ... How could people do things like
this? What could compel the human will to engage in such
perversion? How could people even be capable of this?

Westmore could only devise one answer.

It was evil. It had to be. It could be nothing else.

Several of the DVD's toward the bottom of the pile
weren't like the others. Not sex frolics with laughable plots
and awful dialogue. These movies were not the fare one
would find in an adult entertainment store.

They were rape movies.

And other things. Beatings. Sadism. Bestiality. The worst
that humanity had to offer was right here for him to see,
compliments of Mr. Reginald Hildreth. Men in masks were
the male participants in these cases, and at least two of them
were Hildreth's boys:Jaz and Three-Balls. Younger womenpresumably prostitutes or homeless women, street waifs-were being beaten and raped before the camera's cold eye.
The women were either gagged, or allowed to scream outright. Often they were blindfolded, to steepen their horror.
There were several DVD's like this, and they were all shot in
locations that Westmore recognized-various rooms and parlors of the mansion.

Another DVD was a genital piercing-or at least that's
what Westmore thought it would be called. A half hour of
footage that was one shot: A woman's splayed pubis. One
piercing at a time, the woman's vaginal opening was closed
by chrome rings stitching the lips together. The woman's
face was never shown, nor was the rest of her body. The
camera never moved.

Westmore was dizzy by the end of it all. It took several
minutes to compose himself, and when he thought he had
himself back together, he got up to leave the office but
found himself bolting for the bathroom where he spontaneously vomited.

Then he walked back down through the dark house to the
South Atrium, a long sightless stare in his eyes, like someone
who'd just left the observation window of an execution.

"You look like you've just seen a ghost," Cathleen said
when he trudged in.

"Maybe he has," Willis said.

The group was all sitting around the conference table. "I
wish I'd seen a ghost," Westmore said, seating himself. "I saw
something a lot worse."

"What are you talking about?" Adrianne asked.

"I've just spent the last couple of hours watching more
of the illustrious productions of T&T Entertainment. Rape
movies.

"T&T never did anything underground," Karen remarked. "It was all licensed and legal pornography."

"This stuff wasn't. It was nauseating. Stuff that Hildreth
made on the side, for kicks, I guess. I'm starting to finally see
the real Hildreth. The guy was sick in the head." Westmore
still felt dried out, abandoned by his own spirit. "Only the
sickest sort of people in the world could find that stuff
arousing. It was criminal."

"Hildreth was a sick man," Nyvysk said. "There are a lot
of Hildreths in the world. It's beyond sickness. They exist
to perpetuate evil. Pornography, rape, degradation--those
are the tools they use to solicit the devil."

Westmore was still too nauseated to reject the theological
inference. The images from the discs--the vacant faces and
pale skin, the screams and the sounds of fists colliding into
flesh-it haunted him at the table. He looked for any distraction ... and found one. Some sort of a large recording
device-the size of a VCR-sat on the table. "What's
that?"

"We had a trespasser," Cathleen said, squeezing lemon
into some iced-tea.

"We're being bugged," Willis added.

Westmore was flabbergasted. "What?"

"That's a CD recorder with a voice activation switch,"
Nyvysk explained. "It's only on when someone's talking, so
each disc can conceivably record everything said in this
room for at least a day. I found it under the couch. It's
hooked up to an RF transceiver that picks up all the sounds
of the room through that microphone." He pointed up toward the crystal chandelier hanging above the table.

A studied squint showed Westmore a tiny microphone
stuck to the bottom of one of the lamp bulbs. "Who was
bugging us?"

Cathleen laughed. "Somebody you let in the house today."

Westmore thought back. "The bug guy?"

"The bug guy," Nyvysk said.

"But he was legit ..."

"If it's anybody's fault, it's mine," Karen admitted. "It
wasn't the guy who usually comes out. I should've called
the company to verify, but I didn't." She paused, to frown at
herself. "I was hungover and I didn't feel like going to the
trouble.

Nyvysk walked to the TV. "It was sheer luck on my part.
I was in the common room checking my own hookups,
when I happened to notice this man walking around down
here over the videocom. So I pushed the record button on
the camera. This is what I saw him doing ..." The TV
winked on, and there it was. "Mike" from Bayside Pest
Control. On the screen he was spraying a line of pesticide
along the molding, when he quickly set his tank down,
glanced around, to kneel at the couch. He slid the recorder
out, replaced some discs, then was back to spraying a minute
later.

"How do you like that?" Westmore said, astonished.
"Why's he bugging us?"

"Maybe he works for Vivica," Adrianne posed.

Mack scowled at the end of the table. "Why would
Vivica bug her own house? I work for her, remember? So
does Karen. If you psychic folks pulled anything funny, one
of us would tell her in a heartbeat "

"Then it's got to be the police," Cathleen asserted.

"That doesn't make sense, either," Westmore said. "The
police have closed the Hildreth case. It was a multiple
homicide/suicide. Everybody's dead. So where's the case?"
but even as he spoke the words he wondered, Maybe Vvica's
not the only one who thinks her husband is still alive ...

"It doesn't really matter who was bugging us, or why,"
Nyvysk said. "It is curious, though."

"Curious?" Mack objected. "This is a little bit more than
curious, I think. It's making me paranoid as shit."

"Nobody's doing anything wrong here," Nyvysk reminded. "We're in the house by invitation of the owner.
No crimes are being committed. To novices, we're just a
bunch of crackpot ghost-hunters and mentalists. It would be illogical for the police to care, to even waste their time."

"Maybe it's a newspaper," it occurred to Westmore.
"That would sell some copies. 'Murder House Investigated
by Famous Psychics."'

Everybody looked at Westmore through a long silence. "I
didn't even think of that," Nyvysk said. "And it's noteworthy that you're the one who suggested it. So tell us, Mr.
Westmore, which newspaper is it you work for?"

"Wait a minute!" Westmore hastened. "I don't work for
any paper now I'm freelance"

"Could be writing a freelance book," Cathleen added.
"It would be a blockbuster!"

My and my big mouth, Westmore thought.

`But again, it scarcely matters as far as I'm concerned,"
Nyvysk said. "There's little need for Mr. Westmore to plant
electronic bugs when he's already in our midst. And it
wouldn't make sense to risk sneaking in an outsider to
change discs when he could much more safely do it himself"

"Thank you," Westmore said, relieved.

Nvyvsk went on, "We mustn't let this bugging incident
distract us from our purpose. Something far more grave
happened today, and we need to talk about it."

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.