Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee (3 page)

Brawny men stood on either side, naked and aroused by
either Viagra or evil. She took oral turns with them without
even thinking, an automatic impulse now. Two rough fingers twirled a lopsided nipple as if taking a screw out of a
wall.

This pig does it DAMN good .. .

Probably been practicing since she uvs four.

And instead of crying or screaming or even biting them,
Faye chuckled in her throat. It was awful what she'd let
them turn her into.

I'm awful, she thought.

One man pulled out.

Stick out your tongue.

Faye did so, and on her tongue the man placed a heathergreen pill embossed with a Playboy Bunny.

Another man shoved a bottle at her.

Swallow. That's something you're good at.

She slugged the rich wine, oblivious to its faded label:
MONTRACHET 1888.

The stouter voice spoke across the candle-lit room. Janey,
why don't you cone over here and indulge Faye with some of your
own skills?

A starkly beautiful woman sat nude in the center of the
handmade Kashmiri carpet. She looked up, distracted, as she intricately wielded a syringe, about to inject something into
a vein in her foot. Oh, Reginald, please. You know, l only like to
play around with hot girls. She's too ugly...

Oh, I upp! another naked woman consented, eagerly scurrying across. I don't know why, but I've always had a thing for
ugly chicks!

You don't know why? someone else said and laughed. You
think maybe being nuts has something to do with it?

Oh, shut up, Three-Bails!

The woman crawled between Faye's lumpy, rice-white
legs, the workings of her tongue immediate, ravenous. Faye
shimmied at the jolt of pleasure. A metallic clicking resounded, the woman's tongue-stud laving up and down
over the rings of Faye's forced piercings. More warm, pulsing things filled her mouth, shoved in with no regard. She
simply did it, without objection, because she knew it was
her only acceptance. So much overwhelmed her now:
musky scents, churning sensations, drug toxicity, more
groins in her face and more things slipped into her mouth.

Gentlemen, please. Save it f or later. You mustn't be gmed*

The men all stepped back in obedience, candlelight flickering on their sweating, muscular chests, prongs of flesh sticking up.

The other woman delicately raked her tongue-stud a few
more times over Faye's labial rings, then tended the exposed
clitoris directly.

Faye was awash in insane pleasures that were about to break.

Look, she's about to get off.►

Give her a hit right when she coma.

Faye's legs quivered as more pleasure surged. She panted,
her heart racing. The crack-pipe was put to her lips.

No, I can't do anymore, she pleaded against the waves of
ecstac)

A lighter flicked, tinted her deranged face. Then a hammer cocked, a gun was put to her head.

Smoke it all up ...

Faye inhaled the metal-like fumes as her climax broke.
Then she rolled off the couch with a plop, delirious and immobile.

There. Now the fat sack of shit can't say we never did anything
for her.

Laughter, as Faye lay like a dropped sack.

The stout voice again: That was amusing, it always is. Let's
adjourn now, to the Scarlet Room.

Svelte, nude bodies traipsed away, bare feet padding, contours of erotic shadows disappearing through the flickers of
candle-flame.

Faye lay drooling, hoping she'd die. She knew what was happening; she knew what it was time for.

Get out! They're all in the other room!

That was her instinct, at least, but she knew that such instincts, such as self-preservation, didn't matter much to her
now. Back out in the normal world? How long would she
last? They'd addicted her to everything by now, to make their
human pinata more compliant and more fun to laugh at and
piss on and humiliate-all because they were purely and simply evil. She'd last a few days, run out of drug money, take
one last look at her crumpled life, and then blow her head off.
So what did she have to lose?

It took a half an hour of breathing deeply and focusing
on calming her heart down before she could get up. The
candlelight licked over her flabby body; her head still spun
but somehow she'd regained some control over movements
and train of thought. She'd come all this way. She just
wanted to see.

She wanted to see if it was true and then die.

What room am I in? She focused her eyes. One of the upstairs parlors, she guessed. She couldn't even remember. She
pushed open high, ingrained doors, teetering in the frame
for a moment, then stepping out into the hall. When she got
to the banister and looked down, she saw hundreds of flickering dots of lit candles.

As she trudged for the stairs, her ears detected mutters
and sighs and death-rattles. Every so often there came a
shriek deep from within the mansion's guts. When she
looked in one of the bedrooms, she saw a nude woman
hanging from a rafter by a meat-hook caught in the roof of
her mouth. She twitched a little, gargling. Someone had
carved all the meat off her calves and feet but placed tourniquets above her knees to prevent her from bleeding to death
outright. Faye closed the door and walked on. In the next
room, three more women lay dead, but not movie girls.
They were pale as paraffin, emaciated as if starved, bony pubic bones jutting below stomachs that seemed sucked in.
Their throats had all been cut.

Faye knew where she was going. More atrocities greeted
her during her trek. Once her bare foot stepped in a pile of
still-warm human innards. A few steps later, something hard
and wet printed against her sole: a testicle shucked from the
scrotum. At the top step one of the movie girls-one of the
few who'd been nice to her, in fact-lay dead and glasseyed, her hip joints broken to spread her legs wider than nature allowed so that the first person to come up the stairs
tomorrow would see what had been jammed up into her
vaginal vault: a human arm.

But Faye was beyond being appalled. These were the
trimmings of Hildreth's madness, his offering, his gesture of
beckoning and worthiness. Faye knew that what he solicited
would indeed find him very, worthy. And she knew this too-from this point on, if she continued to search the
house instead of escaping, the things offered for her to see
would only get worse.

When she found the door she was looking for, it seemed to
be no door at all but instead an oblong orifice rimmed by
something lip-like. The drugs made her see things all the
time, but was she really just seeing this?

When she touched what should've been the door frame it
was soft, warm, wet. It was not wood.

Total silence stood before her. More candles flickered
here, revealing inklings of the horror that had taken place.
She looked, vision surveying Hildreth's precious Scarlet
Room, and then she thought: They did it.

Some of the bodies remained whole, others in pieces.
The center of the room was a pile of butchered nudity.
Limbs, heads, hands, and feet lay about the bloody accrual in
the middle: bodies. Faye could easily see the work-axholes in faces, ax-holes in stomachs. It occurred to her that
the bodies had been stacked deliberately for effect: a heaped
offering, a plea for invitation. Closer to the door at the rear
several buckets lay on their sides, glistening scarlet within.
And laying aside was the ax, as if dropped there.

Leave, she told herself.

But she couldn't.

. When Faye finally stepped through inside, something
squished, something warm under the bottoms of her feet.
At first she thought it must be the carpet soaked from so
much blood but a downward glance showed her something
else altogether.

It wasn't a floor she was walking on, it was raw meat, akin
to a vast slab of porterhouse. Veins branched out, thick as
garden hoses, and she could see them pulsing. Then she stuck her hand out to steady herself against the wall but what her
hand touched was not a wall anymore. It was skin.

Hot, sweating, and flushed, skin full of excited nerves
which cringed for sensation. Faye walked along the wall,
running her hand, and as she did so it seemed to swell in her
wake, as if trying to touch back. She also felt subtle pro-
trudements: open eyes, faces, mouths with licking tongues.
They blinked at her wantonly. One mouth's tongue desperately shot forward, then the lips sighed and whispered,
"Please, please! Let us taste you!"

Faye's long fat breasts hitched and her flab jiggled when
she stepped unbalanced toward the room's center. She
needed to see one more thing...

The other door.

It stood there, indeed, where it should be. Rimmed with
drooling flesh.

The Rive, she thought.

Yes, they'd really done it.

But where was Hildreth?

Then she looked in there and saw him grinning back.

The police found her hours later, sitting at the end of the
mansion's twisting, mile-long driveway. Gibbering. Naked.
Insane.

Faye sat now much in the same way, only in a different
place. No, it wasn't a nightmare. It was worse because it was
memory.

The moon glazed the floor and a wedge of the bed in its
soft, ice-like glow.

Movement caught her eye; when she looked up to the little window, a face peered in. They did often, never smiling.

The door opened with a heavy click.

"Come on, Faye. Time for your meds."

Patrick Willis never traveled on planes. He'd stopped years
ago, when his mentalism peaked. It was mostly tactility
which triggered him, but packed so close, so close to all
those passengers-sometimes it was too much.

Sometimes it was madness.

That close to so many auras, he didn't need to touch them:
Too often their horrors came to him with hands of their own.

So it was Greyhound from now on. At least the fares
were cheap.

Half of the East Coast rolled by in the large window, like
a bright movie. All that beauty out there, he thought. Then he
looked around at the dozen or so passengers sharing the
coach with him. Yeah, lots out there but not much in here.

Several bums, several obese welfare recipients, a stragglehaired twenty-year-old white girl sitting stone-faced beside a
grinning black man in his forties. A sleeping drug-addict
here, a talkative mental patient there. All hard-luck cases.
Mostly people whom life had consigned to society's trenches.

So where does that leave me? he asked himself.

Willis looked back out the window. Even looking at people from a distance of ten or so feet could bring on a touch,
that is if he looked hard enough. What existed beyond the
window was better.

He hoped to view more of the countryside beyond the
glass, but eventually-and as usual-he just wound up seeing
more of his own broken life. He'd never been materialistiche'd actually been a good person once. After graduating from
medical school, he'd had no desire to pursue a future in private practice-where his additional skills as a tactionist could
certainly bring him up to a seven-figure salary in no time.
Instead he'd worked at the state health center, helping mostly rape victims and battered women. He'd always been altruistic; working for a much lower salary helping people who
couldn't help themselves seemed a noble cause. It let me give
something back to the urotid. It wasn't idealism, either. He knew
it came from his heart.

The job lasted five years or so, his "gift"--as with so
many others who were psychically inclined-became his
curse. He hadn't really even known he'd had it to any extent until he'd gotten out of med school (this mode of psi
tended to peak in one's late twenties to early thirties). He'd
noticed it, for sure, and always with women, all throughout
college and med school. Touching. Any direct skin-to-skin
contact. Sex trebled the intensity of what he referred to as a
"backwash," and since sex existed as the most direct manner
of skin-to-skin contact, Willis' romantic life never got past
that first night in bed with a woman. There was always
something something awful or dark-that would wash
back into his head from hers. Indeed, Willis was cursed.

But I made it, didn't 1? he reflected now on the rumbling
bus.

By thirty, he knew he'd simply never be able to have an
intimate relationship with anyone. He sought his own sexual satisfaction by his own means-as introverted as it
seemed-and still did the world some good. This was harder
to reckon with sometimes since Willis, by most standards,
was an attractive man. At the clinic, his nickname was "Dr.
Cutie." But still, he had his resolve, he had his ideals, and he
knew that he had genuinely helped a lot of people before
he'd lost his license.

Just don't think about it now, he groaned to himself. And
another thing he didn't want to think about was the complexity of what he was encroaching. He'd never even heard
of Vivica Hildreth but he most certainly had heard of her husband's "entertainment" business, T&T Enterprises, and
the one other name in the solicitation letter, too. The letter
that came with the package read: The object in this box is a
bracelet that belonged to a woman named Jane Scharr. Her stage
name was Janey Jism, a porn star, obviously. The coincidence
was uncanny; Willis was well-familiar with Ms. Scharr's
work. The letter continued, Please consider testing your skills
on the bracelet. If you decide that you'd like to further investigate
the entirety of the night in question, with other professionals in
your field, please know that you will be paid ten times the amount
of the enclosed retainer. Contact my office if you'd care to proceed
further. Travel arrangements and accommodations will be provided.
You may keep the retainer regardless of your decision.

Sincerely,

Vvica Hildreth

"Jesus," he muttered now at the memory. Willis' little excuse for an office didn't exactly haul in the money; he was
lucky now to make twenty grand a year. Vivica Hildreth's
retainer was $10,000.