Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee (29 page)

A warm breeze touched her hair. She looked over her shoulder to gauge the position of the couch, then agreed
with herself: If someone--or something-were standing in the
clearing tQ the cemetery, they could look up here and see the couch.
They could see me ...

That's what she wanted.

Only the dimmest lamps lit the room from behind. The
day-couch sat in wait for her, for it was on those velvet, buttoned cushions that she would lay when she put herself into
theta-sleep.

But she still wasn't quite ready.

She went back into the sitting room, stepped out of her
jeans and panties, then walked to the bath.

A spectacular claw-and-ball-footed bathtub sat beneath a
curtain ring. The tub itself was made of stainless brass and
the tulle curtain glittered from pockets of semi-precious
gems. Cathleen turned on the shining faucet and began to
fill the tub with cool water. She added High John shreds,
jasmine and poppy oil, and lavender extract; she wanted the
scent on her clean skin, which was said to arouse male
revenants, particularly those guilty of sexual crimes when
alive. At the side of the tub she also placed a tiny vial of pulverized pontica stone-a stunning aqua and vermillionwhich she would rub over her skin after the bath. She
wasn't sure if this actually enhanced trance-reception, but it
was a long accepted practice through the ages, so she always
did it just in case.

The water was lukewarm. Perfect, she thought. She must
clean herself first, then go out to the couch and induce the
trance. She lowered herself down into the strangely fragrant
water and at once felt ... luxuriously lewd. She was already
priming herself in her mind, by exciting her body.

Her eyes closed. The water licked her body from all
around. She thought only of dense, pure physical passion, of lust unrepentant and unreserved. Beneath the water her
hands stroked upward, over her thighs, over her sex, up her
belly, around her breasts. When her fingertips pinched her
nipples, she moaned. She pinched and twirled the little nubs
of flesh till she squirmed from the delicious discomfort,
harder still till she ground her teeth, and her feet churned
under the water. The impulse was almost irresistible, then:
to bring her hand to her sex and masturbate, to get herself
off right now. But she didn't. She wouldn't let herself.

Her lust was the summons, and she was summoning them
right now, or at least she hoped.

When she couldn't stand it anymore, she stood up in the
tub. Her desires agonized her now, but that's how it needed
to be. It was time to go to the couch and induce the trance,
and when she pulled the ornate shower curtain back-

Her breath locked in her chest, like a hot stone. She
couldn't even scream.

Three things stood around the tub: gaseous black shadows,
like clouds of soot. But they were alive. They had no eyes
yet they looked at her just the same, their auras even blacker
than their subcorporeal bodies. Cathleen could tell what
charged those auras: the most driven, demented lust.

Discorporates, she realized in her speechless terror. The
things from the cemetery ...

They were on her at once, their pad-like hands felt like
globs of hot lard. But when she shoved out at them to push
them away, her own hands disappeared into the black fog of
their bodies. She was up-ended in a split-second, held
upside-down by her ankles, then her head and chest were
lowered into the water.

The fat hands gripped her body as surely as metal clamps;
Cathleen couldn't push up, couldn't even flail in defense.
Her face pressed helplessly against the bottom of the tub and she could feel one of them taking her from behind. She
was methodically penetrated and humped. Her brain began
to fizz out, her lungs expanding. When she was about to
lose her air and inhale her first breath of water-

She was yanked out.

"Let her get a few breaths first," a voice ordered. "Then
do it again."

Cathleen was too panicked to think, just a basic instinct
to drag in a lungful of air and close her eyes, as she was
plunged back down into the water. Now it was another one
of them taking her--they were taking turns, using her body
as well as her horror. By the third plunge, she was beginning
to simply give up.

Heartbeats away from dying, she was yanked up again, but
this time they didn't re-submerge her. She hacked out splats
of water as she was carried aloft out of the bathroom. Her vision was so dimmed by oxygen depletion that she could
barely see at all when she opened her eyes. Her drenched body
was dropped on the couch before the open French doors.

One of the things was pointing to her.

What are they doing? she thought.

Another had the tiny bottle of pontica dust. It was emptied onto her face and bosom and dropped to the floor.

Now they were all pointing at her.

Her heart was still racing, her lungs frantically expanding
and contracting, but once some semblance of reason returned to her, she knew what they wanted her to do.

They WANT me to do it, she realized. They WANT me to
induce a trance ...

Cathleen let herself go lax on the couch, her bare breasts
glittering blue and red from the dust.

She began to put herself into theta-sleep ...

Cod, I know that what I am is part of You. Rekase me in the
midst of this evil place and keep me safe ...

Adrianne let the Lobtogaine seep into her brain, then her
nerves. She'd secured herself in the suite she'd used the
other day-the room where she'd been molested while outof-body. The drug's lull took her, a wicked treat like the
most selfish sex, then her bare stomach and legs tightened,
and her face began to swell and give off heat, and that was
when Adrianne slipped out of her prone body ...

She floated upward, a balloon of consciousness and sight.
What she was now-a contained spiritual entity-moved
forward with a thought, and she was soaring through the
ether of the plane she now existed in. She passed through
doors and walls. She didn't even have to first go to the
Scarlet Room to get to where she wanted to go. Perhaps
she wasn't even going there at all. Perhaps she was being
taken.

The Temple of Flesh, the Chirice Flaesc ...

This citadel for the thing called Belarius throbbed before
her beneath the black moon hanging in a blood-red sky.
Veins in the structure's columns and walls of living, skincovered meat beat faster as her presence was detected. Adiposians stood like sentinels of rendered fat, guarding the
temple's colonnade. Their eyeless faces looked up when
Adrianne hovered closer, and so did the structure's adjunct,
the Fallen Angel called Jaemessyn, a being with a stunning
humanish body but demonic arms and legs grafted on by
some infernal surgeon. His face seemed grand yet hideously
blank, until he looked up at her and gave away an expression
like approval in his large, supernaturally blue eyes.

"The traveler returns to us," the light-like voice bid to
her. He'd been previously occupied, slowly strangling a female imp who hung limp as an empty coat in his grasp. The
five penises that were the fingers of his other hand throbbed
erect as they stroked the naked breasts and belly of his victim. That's when Jaemessyn noticed Adrianne; the She-Imp
wasn't quite dead when he cast it to the floor like a handful
of garbage.

"We're glad you've returned," he said. "And the Lord of
this place is pleased."

I want to see the Lord of this place, she said back to him in a
thought.

"And you shall. I promised you last time, and I never
break my word."

The monstrous hand opened toward the temple's closed
double-doors. In the door's seam,Adrianne detected fluttering, dark light. The doors began to slide open with a wet
fleshy smacking sound.

"Welcome," Jaemessyn said. "I know you want to see the
Sexus Cyning."

Belarius, Adrianne remembered. Hell's monarch of lust .. .

She floated in with no fear. Bodiless, they couldn't hurt
her. Only her psyche was vulnerable, and Adrianne had a
strong psyche.

The configuration inside reminded her of the De Rais
Chapel back at the mansion, only everything here was
forged of living meat: the pews, the nave, the altar and presbytery. All that flesh surrounding her shined from profuse
sweat, networks of veins standing out, filled with hot blood.
Severed hands in organic sconces flicked from fingertips lit
like wicks. Throughout, the airless temple smelled like
fresh, raw meat.

Her spirit-vision glanced about; there was no sign of the
temple's overlord. However, at the structure's deepest recess-

"And there's someone else you want to see," the Fallen
Angel added.

-she noticed someone lying prone on the high altar of
flesh.

It was human, not demonic. It was a man.

Hildreth, she recognized at once.

He lay in a cloak, atop the altar's offertory slab. Pallid,
eyes closed.

Motionless.

Is he dead? she wondered.

"He's never been more alive," Jaemessyn informed her.
"But like you, his soul is temporarily vacant from his body.
His soul is somewhere else .. "

The mansion, she realized, but before she could calculate
anything further, something shrieked in her mind, bolting
her with a psychic shudder.

Something shot about the nave, something terrified, and
Adrianne knew exactly what it was.

It was the spirit-vessel of another soul, a human out-ofbody just as Adrianne was. Adrianne could see it above her,
darting back and forth terrified, and she could tell it was a
much weaker consciousness than herself-the sign of an
untrained experient.

Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, she tried to calm the other
vessel and rose upward, but then her own conscious was
nearly shot out of the nave by a burst of unadulterated, fullscale terror, and the other vessel's voice shrieked to her:

"Adrianne, my God help me help me!"

Adrianne easily recognized the psychical voice. It was
Cathleen.

I must be cauterized by now, Willis thought. He wasn't being
incapacitated by what he'd been seeing through his
"touches" tonight, awful as those sights may have been. In
any number of rooms, or any number of specific targetobjects, his mind-sight kicked right in and showed him: visions of murder, satanic ritual, and the most perverse sexual
activity. Lots of blood, decapitation, torture. Nyvysk was
right, he thought after leaving one of the parlors where
women were blindfolded and raped by men in black hoods
and cloaks. They were paying reverence to something here.

This . . . Belarius .. .

In a fourth floor suite, Willis picked up a woman's hairbrush and was sequently jolted by the image of a naked
young woman on an altar, in a mom shellacked by blood.
Not one of these porn girls, either, nor one of the ravaged
prostitutes; she looked wholesome and very normal. A
peaches-and-cream complexion, long simple chestnut hair.
She didn't fit in with any of the others, not the look, not the
air. She looks innocent. He picked up a frilled pillow off the
canopied bedstead and saw her again, her face pinched and
tossing in the grips of a nightmare. And again, in the hall,
when he ran his ungloved finger against the paneling, he
saw her body being carried by several naked men, but Willis
couldn't tell if she was unconscious or dead.

I wonder who the hell that was ...

He saw remnants of Hildreth all over the place, too. Generally standing poised and very still, watching with great attention. Looking at something as if to appraise its value of
worthiness for whatever nameless purpose. Regrettably,
though, Willis often saw exactly what it was Hildreth was
looking at: either a debasing sex act, an overt orgy, or some one being butchered. In one particularly disturbing vision,
he saw a dowdy overweight woman with dead eyes injecting drugs into her arm while one of Hildreth's grinning
porn-boys held a cocked revolver to her head.

It was insidious. Everything.

This house truly is a place of the devil.

But even on Willis' strongest day, he couldn't take much.
The impact was simply too draining. He wandered alone
down the main hall of the fifth floor. He passed the Scarlet
Room but didn't enter; he'd already tried several [actions
there but didn't see anything. Some rooms, like some objects, were only charged at certain times of the day, generally closest to the time that the target-event had occurred. I
think I'll just call it a night. Most of his tactions had been
very clear-and the group would be interested in that-but
there was really nothing new to report. He was hoping to
see something that might tell them something new.
Tonight, though, was just more of the same. More murder,
more degradation and sickness. The entire house was sick.
He knew he couldn't stomach anymore tonight.

On the third floor, he saw a light from an open door, and
heard someone tapping on a keyboard. Willis was a loner,
but he didn't necessarily like being alone all the time. The
house made him feel more isolated, and now, at night, something about it seemed to press down on him. He walked
into the room.

"Oh, so this is the office," he said when he saw Westmore
typing on a laptop. "How's it going?"

"I'm not sure." The writer chuckled. "I'm not even sure
what it is I'm supposed to be writing."

"Same here, different process." Willis walked around, eyeing the room's impressive relics. "I was hired to come here
and look for things ... but I don't know what those things are." Willis lit a cigarette when he saw Westmore light up.
He noticed a pile of DVD's on a fancy table inlaid with ingots of gold. "What's all this?" he asked.

"A bunch of porn, stuff that Hildreth's company produced. After about five minutes, stuff like that's all the
same.

Willis said nothing of his disagreement. As a sex-addict
whose psychic skills prevented him from touching women,
he'd long ago become something of a porn addict. More
lonerism. Just knowing what was on the discs gave him an
anxious urge to watch some of them. But he didn't want to
let on-for just as he was sure of his dependency, he was
doubly ashamed of it. He turned away from the pile. His
eyes fell on the recessed square in the wall that contained
the safe.