House Infernal by Edward Lee (10 page)

But maybe he's got a point.

Maybe she really should live her life some more before
stepping into the nunnery.

Other than in dreams, she'd had one orgasm in her life,
and it remained a sensation she'd never forget. That
party ... Just a typical college mixer, and they were always on the tame side anyway. In a Catholic university?
She'd been nineteen at the time, and decided to attend
only to talk to people and blow off a little steam after acing a 400-level Latin exam. She couldn't blame alcohol because she didn't drink-ever-and at the party it had
been diet sodas exclusively. She hadn't seen the couple on
campus before, even though they'd claimed to be
seniors-a lie, she found out later. As the party wound
down, Venetia realized she'd been enjoying the conversation with them-the girl a shapely, well-tanned blonde,
and the guy a broad-shouldered jock with a delicate
smile. They'd been discussing Immanuel Kant's EightBall Theory and whether or not his "Transcendental Doctrine of Method" had as much practicality for the
twenty-first century as it had for the eighteenth. The conversation had been invigorating.

Until about 2 A.M.

That's when Venetia had begun to feel sick.

Her knees felt rubbery, and her thoughts seemed to
swirl in her head. "I don't know what's wrong with me,"
she murmured, bracing herself against the wall. The
blonde took her arm: "Post-exam fatigue, hon. We all get
it. You cram for a week straight, take the test, thenpow-it hits you all at once."

The guy took her other arm. "We have to go now anyway, but we'll walk you back to your dorm."

They took her to a van instead. Venetia had passed out,
and when she'd choppily regained consciousness, she
found herself sprawled naked on an air mattress, while
the equally naked blonde was performing cunnilingus on
her. Though Venetia's brain remained in a half-stupor, her
body felt gorged by excited blood, breasts heaving, nipples tingling. When she'd seized enough cognizance to
look down, she saw her own hands clasped to the back of
the blonde's head, as the most delicious sensations began
to crest. "Please, please . . . ," she murmured, all the
nerves in her groin squirming for some incomprehensible
release. At the same time, the jocky guy found her nipples
to suckle. He was shirtless but still had his pants on, and
when he grabbed Venetia's listless hand, he put it right to
his crotch. The swollen bulge throbbed but felt unyielding
as the end of a broom. "That's great, baby," he whispered
in a voice as sweet as his counterfeit smile. "Let me take it
out for you...." But at the same time the blonde's deft
skills brought Venetia to a back-bowing crescendo. Her
orgasm didn't merely occur, it detonated, and then every
nerve in her body began to spasm in an unloading of
pleasure that she could only describe as unearthly.

"It's our turn now, right, baby?" The blonde grinned up
between her legs. "You've been double-teamed before,
haven't you?"

Somehow the climax had purged whatever chemical it
was that they'd put in her soda. When she looked aghast
to the guy, he was taking off his jeans.

Venetia never uttered a sound. She was up in a whir,
dredging her clothes off the van floor, tumbling out, and
running away.

"Oh, come on, hon," one of them said. "It's all in fun...."

She dressed herself as she ran, however clumsily,
through the empty parking garage, which happened to be
just a block away from the entrance to her campus. The
last she ever heard from them was the chirp of tires when
the van sped down the ramp.

To her disbelief, outrage never occurred to her. It was
confusion. Technically a date rape, she knew, just one that
hadn't progressed to completion. And she also knew this:
That sort of stuff happens every day, but it's a lot worse than
what I got. Instead of feeling traumatized, she thanked
God that she'd wakened when she had, and she even
prayed that her assailants would find grace someday.

It was confusion that wracked her most of all. The climax
had boggled her entire psyche. Even as she walked humiliated and barefoot out of the empty garage, her nerves
thrummed in the post-orgasm. She'd left her bra and panties in the van, which left the tight jeans to cosset her bare
pubis, and the ironic St. Gregory T-shirt titillated her nipples back to being gorged. The confusion arrived when all
of those pleasurable sensations collided with her guilt.

She'd waited until after her orgasm was over to bolt
from the van.

Did I do that on purpose? she'd asked herself a million
times since then. She'd never told the police because rape
would've been all but impossible to demonstrate. Anyone
could've slipped something into her drink, and with no
penetration, no semen? Not in this age of slickster lawyers,
she realized. Instead of the police station, she'd gone to
the confession booth, where an overbearing priest had
scolded her for going to "parties full of nonbelievers" but
said that her tardiness in leaving the van had been innate,
not premeditated. "In the eyes of God, my child, you are
still pristine," he'd said.

That's what Venetia wanted to be, but now, as she stood
in her sterile bedroom at a dust-filled prior house, she admitted it. I did, damn it. I waited on purpose ... because I
wanted to come.

Yet she had been drugged-there was no doubt.
Roofies, chloral hydrate, or whatever-it scarcely mattered. Such drugs affected judgment and artificially hindered inhibitions. Since she hadn't taken it willingly, she
couldn't blame herself-and neither can God ... In fact, it
had been the only time in her life that she'd passed out.

Until today.

The spell at the convenience store. The voice, the rising
pain in her head. I collapsed. I was out cold. My father had to
carry me out of the store. She could still barely believe it. She
felt fine now, but what might the cause have been, and the
same bizarre voice that had ruptured her sleep last night?

A flashback? Was it possible for that sort of drug to-produce temporary hallucinations that could recur? Venetia
had never read anything indicative of that, but then she'd
never researched it very much. Don't worry about it....

She let the memory leave the room with her gaze. She
was looking out the open window at scrubby grounds
and tufts of unmowed onion grass that crawled up the
hill to the woodline. She muttered, "What a mess. Can't
decide what's uglier-the prior house or the land it's on."
Just as ugly was the old redbrick supply shed or something way out in the back.

She brushed her hair out before the mirror and decided
to leave the clip off. Seeing now how Mrs. Newlwyn and
her daughter were dressed, Venetia's own appearance
made her feel on the dorky side; with her blond hair unfettered she at least felt less parochial. When she left her
room, a large, ornately framed oil painting stopped her
halfway along the stair-hall.

The canvas was the largest of any upstairs, a yard by
two feet. Dark colors and a sepulchral background
seemed to thrust the painting's subject forward in a manner that seemed almost multidimensional: an elderly
white-haired man, jowly, hard-eyed and scowling outward. He wore a cloaklike cope of some plush scarlet fabric, with a white liner. The black shirt beneath was
buttoned to the top and joined by a Roman collar.

You have a good day, too, buddy, Venetia thought. Though
the man in the portrait didn't exactly look hateful, his was
clearly the most dour representation in the house. Who is
this crabby old guy? At first she thought it might be the architect Amano Tessorio, but then doubted it when she recalled Driscoll's reason that the statue of the man was
never even delivered. Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be too cool to
hang a painting of a heretic in a Catholic service building.

A clattering startled her from downstairs, and a man's
testy words: "Aw, damn it..."

Venetia looked over the stair-hall rail and saw a trim,
thirtyish man in white painter's pants and a T-shirt dragging a cumbersome drop cloth across the atrium. He
seemed to be walking on it more than moving it.

"Hi," she said.

He looked up as if distracted, short black hair and a
face that was jovial and serious at the same time, like the
class clown who always managed to get good grades in
spite of his chicanery. He seemed to pause after focusing
on her, and Venetia got the impression that he may have
found her attractive.

"Dan, I presume? The seminarian?"

He stood erect, leaving the drop cloth. "Actually, I prefer seminarist, but you can just call me lackey, like Father
Driscoll. Dan Holden, at your service, Miss-"

"Venetia Barlow."

"Oh, yeah," Dan said, enthused. "The girl from
Catholic U?"

"That's me."

"Driscoll told me we'd have a real-live theologian on
our crew."

"Well, you're a theologian, too," she reminded him.

"Not really. If you want to know the truth, the real reason I'm studying to become a priest is because, well"-he
offered his paint-streaked arms-it's easier than being a
painter. Anyway, it's nice to meet you, Venetia."

"You need some help with that?"

"No thanks. We're going through these things like
they're a dime a dozen. But you can help me set the table
for dinner later if you want."

"I'd be happy to." For a moment, it was Venetia who
paused at a distraction. What a good looking guy.... "Oh,
but let me ask you something. Do you know who this portrait's of?" She thumbed behind her. "The scowling old
man in the red cope?"

"That would be Prior Russell Whitewood. Looks about
as friendly as a mad dog, huh?"

Venetia laughed. "At first I thought it might be Tessorio. . . ."

Dan grinned. "No, I'm afraid Whitewood's not that notorious. Whitewood ran the prior house for twenty
years."

"Is he the previous prior, who retired recently?"

The question caused Dan to arch a brow. "He's the previous prior, all right. But what makes you think he retired?"

"Father Driscoll told me."

Another cocky grin. "Figures. He doesn't want you to
get the heebie-jeebies."

„What?„

"Whitewood didn't retire. He..." Dan wiped at a paint
splotch on his arm. "How do I say this without sounding
overdramatic? Uh, Prior Whitewood disappeared without
a trace, within a shroud of mystery."

Venetia squinted. "You're not serious?"

"Perfectly serious. Well ... maybe the 'shroud of mystery' is an exaggeration, but, yeah, he walked off the job,
disappeared. It was last spring."

Venetia subconsciously fiddled with a strand of hair.
Disappeared? "Then why would Father Driscoll-"

"He told you Whitewood retired because it was easier,"
Dan said. "He didn't want to give you a reason to have
second thoughts."

"About what?"

"About helping us get the prior house back in shape.
He couldn't get any local theology students to join up for
extra credits. Why? Because they were all in the area, so
they knew what happened." Dan looked at her more intently. "Driscoll didn't tell you about the murders either,
did he?"

"Murders?" she questioned with enough volume to
cause an echo. "People were murdered here?"

"Two of them-two women. And one of them was a
nun. They were murdered right here in this building last
March. Whitewood ran off a few days later."

"So he was the perpetrator?"

"No, no, but he was a suspect until they found him. He had an alibi, is what I heard. The cops say it was just a
couple of creeps all crazy from drugs."

But Venetia's thoughts were blaring. This explained the
new top-notch locks and Driscoll's emphasis on security.
But why would he he to her, and to her parents? "That's
outrageous for him to conceal that."

"Well, it sounds more sensational than it actually was.
People get killed in random murders every day. It just
happened to be here on that day."

" I know that, Dan, but still..." She looked around and
immediately felt a chill. "It's just quite a shock, you
know? I haven't even been here two hours and now I'm
being told that there were murders here."

Dan's grin turned sour. "And, if you're the squeamish
type...,.

"Yeah?"

"One of the victims was a devout churchgoer, a laywoman named Lottie Jessel. She was killed in the old accounting office, down here."

What was he working up to? "And the other victim?
The nun?"

"Her name was Patricia Stevenson." Dan shrugged uncomfortably. "And she was murdered in your bedroom."

The Angels, Boniface thought. How I long to see them ...
squirming ... ready to burst:.. .

He and High Priest Willirmoz had already descended
the narrow obsidian corridors deep below the Fortress, yet
even beneath all of this netherworldly rock, they could
hear the ceaseless screams resounding from his courtyard
above. The precursory executions had commenced-to
keep the air saturated-and they would transpire without
abatement until it was time.

"We're so deep now," the Exalted Duke whispered.
Was he afraid of his own catacombs? Of course not, he
was merely nervous, even in the cloak of all that hellish
power.

"Indeed, my lord. On the cusp of Lucifer's blessing ...
Deep

It was the esteemed She-Demon, Pasiphae, who led the
Duke and his High Priest through the twisting undercrofts. Only she knew the way, which provided an effective
defense mechanism against intruders. In the torchlight,
Boniface let his gaze suck up the sight of her nude, jet-black body-breasts jutting and perfect, legs, waist, and contours
all bereft of error. Yet these features could've been composed of wet pitch, for it was not flesh that she was made
of, but the ichor of Hell. The black body shined, gleaming.

Officially, Pashiphae was the Night-Mother and Queen
of the Labyrinth. She commanded the Minotaurs and
Minotauresses, who solely existed to guard these deep
warrens.