House Infernal by Edward Lee (29 page)

"Yes, or f should say she had some operatives in the
Contumacy stash them."

"Contumacy ... Oh, yeah, like those dudes at the Mutilation Zone, anti-Satan people."

"Exactly. Terrorists in reverse." Alexander slipped one
Hectograph from the pack but held it back without showing it to her. "But first you must understand the next part
of our mission."

Ruth leaned back on the bed, stretching her tan legs as
she yawned. "Sounds like we're spies."

"That's pretty much what we are. We're field agents, so
to speak, for a cause that exists in opposition to the
Mephistopolis and all Satanic endeavors. So-" Alexander scowled when he looked over. "And don't fall asleep,
Ruth! This is important!"

She flapped a hand. "I'm listening."

"There's a Grand Duke here named Aldezhor. He's very
important because he's Lucifer's personal messenger.
Ever heard of the Archangel Gabriel, God's messenger?"

'No."

Alexander shook his head. "Well, this Demon Aldezhor
is the Devil's messenger. And the most important cryptograms in Hell are all delivered by him."

"Aldezhor," Ruth droned.

"It's his job to process all of Hell's most crucial communications without being detected by the Contumacy."

Ruth seemed confused, her fingers laced behind her
head. "That's his job?"

"Uh-huh, and it's your job to wait on him."

Ruth winced over. "What do you mean, wait on him?"

"Wait on him in a restaurant," Alexander said. "And
when you bring them their meals, you take a peak at the
cipher."

Ruth leaned back up, annoyed. "How the hell am I
gonna do that?"

.By distracting them." Alexander cocked a brow at her.
"And I think you know what I mean. I didn't buy you that
racy outfit for nothing. The Tongue-Skirt and Hand-Bra
will make you the most unique waitress in the place ...
those and your overall looks, of course."

"Thanks," she grumbled.

"There's another reason why those clothes will help
out, too, but we won't go into that now. Let's focus on one
thing at a time." He nudged her to regain her attention.
"You see, every day at lunch a Chevalier from the Department of Diabolic Encryptions brings Aldezhor the daily
cipher from Manse Lucifer to Fortress Boniface. And that
next note has something very important on it. Something
we need to know."

Ruth flopped back on the bed, hands over her face. "Oh,
man, this is so confusing! Manse Lucifer? Demons eating
at some restaurant to pass messages? It's fucked-up, man!"

"Just continue to do as I tell you and follow my lead,
and this'll all work out."

"I don't even know what this Aldezhor guy looks like,"
she complained. She was trying to get comfortable on the
odd bed.

"That's what these are for." He held up the pack of Hectographs and showed the top card to her. "When you see
this guy come into the restaurant, you do everything in
your power to get his table."

Ruth held up the card. It looked like a regular color picture from a photo lab but had fuzzy borders, the image having been burned onto some weird photographic emulsion.

Goose flesh rose on her arms when she looked at the
image.

Ahead disproportionately large-and queerly angledjutted from shoulders that were wide yet somehow also
gaunt. Two protrusions curved outward from the slablike
forehead.

Horns, she realized over her fatigue. Sharp ones.

But even more disconcerting than the Grand Duke's
physicality was simply the way it looked: all dark. Not
black, not brown, just ... dark.

"Aldezhor is a Scaedurian," Alexander told her. "That's
a species of Subcarnate."

"It almost looks like he's made of shadow."

"That's because he is, and he also ..."

Alexander's words petered out when he saw that Ruth
had already fallen asleep.

One thing Venetia hadn't taken much of in college was
psych. But her own troubles had sparked her concern,
which led her back to a section of bookshelves reserved
for psychology and psychiatry.

Maybe I'm overreacting, she thought, or maybe it is more
than fatigue... .

One book seemed accessible-Psychiatric Spirituality: A
Guide for Catholic Clinicians. She was hunting for causes of
hallucinatory symptoms, but found mostly incomprehensible psych-speak: ego-syntonic hallucinosis, erotogenic
ideas of reference, ketoacidosis and stage four sleep maladaptations. This is depressing, she thought; the terms all
had definitions that were scary ... and all rooted in forms
of schizophrenia and psychosis. Then she flipped a page
and saw:

Aural Hallucinotic Hypnagogia: The hearing of noises
and/or voices during the semiconscious state immediately preceding sleep. More often, symptoms are connected to stress and fatigue, while the content of the
aural activity may reflect the individual's personal worries. Catholic clinicians are well-used to otherwise mentally healthy patients experiencing aural hypnapompia,
particularly in the twenty- to thirty-year-old age group.
Even the most mentally sound Catholics experience observations and ideas that challenge faith; hence the
symptoms. In fact, all forms of mild hypnagogic and
hypnapompic imagery are periodic and normal, particularly among those who are 1) in the twenty- to thirtyyear-old age group, and 2) on the verge of committing to
a clergy-related vocation.

Venetia nodded to herself. On the verge of committing to a
clergy-related vocation ... That's definitely me. A few of the
last lines in the text seemed most reassuring of all:

Aural Hallucinotic Hypnagogia must never be confused with serious clinical hallucinosis. The "voices"
that the individual hears are merely a form of precursory dream fragments and usually of no pathologic significance.

Venetia sighed in relief. How do you like that? I'm not
crazy. She put the book back on the shelf and looked out
the window. I wonder, though, she thought. Did I ever really believe that two people in Hell were talking to me? The
fact that Thomas Alexander and Ruth Bridges did indeed exist was harder to explain, but still ... I could have
read about Alexander in the Catholic Standard a long time
ago and just forgot. Same thing with the woman. So what if
she only died two days ago. I probably half-heard it on the
news.

When she turned, she noticed the edge of a slip of paper slightly sticking out between other two books. She
withdrew it.

A handwritten note. And ... what is this?

She is beautiful in her skein-weave of darkness. It is
horror which flows through her veins of ghostly dust,
and horror that fills her eye sockets. This is but another
unblessed personage I will be enthralled to meet at the
fortress some day: Pasiphae, the Night-Mother, the SlutMother.

Her pretty feet are but dark fog, her cunt a night-smile.
In her excitement, black milk oozes from her ebon bosom.

She is the Guide, and only she can lead the Privileged
through the labyrinth below the fortress, to the heart of
Satan's endeavor: the Lower Chancel.

Venetia stared astonished at the blasphemous scrawl.
What is this doing in a Catholic prior house? she asked, but
then immediately recalled the secret nature of the man
who built it. Tessorio ... I'll bet he wrote this.

More:

The breeze, over the scarlet night, continues to sigh.
Chatterings from the overseers of the dead? Or messages
from her world, from her black haven in the Mephistopolis?

Oh, how long to join her!

For surely the Slut-Mother, the Guide to the Pith, will
lead me through the Fortress Gates to my lord Boniface.

That name-Boniface-struck a black chord in Venetia's mind. The worst of the anti-Popes, a murderer and blasphemer ... Clearly, Tessorio had a fixation with Boniface:
the unlikely portrait that Dan found in the attic, along
with that macabre sketch. Tessorio had hidden this odd
scribbling amid the books, which begged Venetia to
consider: I wonder what else he might've stashed around
here.

Between two old volumes (Visual Thinking and Preter-
Naturality & The Human Mind) she discovered another
sheet of paper, filled with more handwriting that was undoubtedly Tessorio's. But it wasn't from a tablet; the
scrawl had been written on the back of a yellowed store
receipt. It read:

Begin fast at 6 am on Oct. 30, be sure to bleed yourself.
At midnight, begin channeling incantation.

Channeling? Incantations? This was even stranger than
the first sheet ... until she gave it more thought. All right,
the guy was a nut. He worshiped the Devil as a means of rebelling against the Church. He probably drank a lot and took
drugs in secret. And he believed in crap like this.

And fasting? Bleeding oneself? This was all part of
corny ritualism from the Middle Ages. She also knew
they were techniques involved in inducing trances.

She flipped the paper and read the receipt. It was from a
place called Hull's General Store, dated October 26,1964.

Four days before the thirtieth, and the morning before Halloween.

Tessorio seemed to be preparing for something. Fast ing? Bleeding? A ritual? Venetia wondered with a smile. A
meeting of the coven when at midnight Halloween has arrived.
Venetia knew there was no way she might even partly believe in such things; nevertheless, she had to ask herself,
What was this ritual for? Did it involve "channeling," a means
of receiving information from the dead?

She pushed it from her mind.

"Dinner'll be ready soon, and tonight, it'll be a superb
dinner." The voice startled her. It was Father Driscoll,
emerging from his downstairs office. He rubbed his
hands together dramatically. "God bless your father for
such generosity."

"It smells like Mrs. Newlwyn is broiling some lobsters."

"Yes---God bless him."

Venetia smiled at the priest's overstatement. "You
sound like you've never had lobster."

"On my pay?" Driscoll laughed.

Venetia walked over to join him, yet without thinking
she asked, "When did the actual building of the prior
house begin?"

"November 1964, I believe." He walked by her side
toward the kitchen. "Oh, yeah, now I'm sure that was it. I
remember reading it in my prospectus. Construction began on November first, in fact. All Saints Day."

The day after Halloween, Venetia thought.

Berns dreamed of counterclockwise spirals, and he dreamed
of buckets of blood. The daymare lolled on through his
head such that some aspect of his sleeping psyche feared
he'd dropped into a vortex of mad dreams from which he
would never rouse. The dream was silent, Daliesque, running with stark images and blocked out shades of black.
Colors seemed to bleed.

Behind closed, quivering eyes he was shown rather
than saw rough hands gripping knives that slid through
pale throats to the bone. Nude bodies shuddered as racing hearts emptied their lifeblood through the knife slits. All the while, Berns thought in the grimmest consternation: Where is the blood? What are they doing with the blood?

Words droned in the background like a chant, but in
some language he'd never heard. "Exos spiratum, Lux
Ferre, in aeternum . . . ," then things even less intelligible.

And the final image, crisply erotic, obscene: a woman's
flat abdomen quivering on a table as a tattooist's humming needle inscribed the design in threadlike waves of
crimson-the decorated rectangle with the spiral inside
and arrows pointing inward from three corners, and then
the dream quaked in an eruption of screams. Berns now
saw himself standing naked beside a torrential waterfall of
blood. When he looked down at himself, he saw the same
tattoo on his own abdomen....

Berns woke up at the desk, his face glazed in sweat.
Had he shouted in his sleep? Someone was knocking on
the office door, loud.

"Come in."

The county booking sergeant looked suspicious. "You
all right, Captain?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"I was knocking ... for a while."

Berns admitted it. "I fell asleep. Haven't gotten any
down time for a couple days."

"Sure, sir. But I wanted to let you know that you got a
call-"

An instant image snapped in Berns' mind: the glowing
face backed by bright blond hair. "Is it Venetia Barlow?"
he asked without thinking.

"Who?" Another suspicious frown. "It's a sergeant
from Lubec, Maine. Says its urgent. Line one."

"Thanks," Berns grumbled. "Berns here," he said into
the phone. A flash of vertigo stalled him: the notion of the
strange tattoo on his own stomach as though Berns himself were a member of Freddie Johnson's murder club.
"Sergeant Lee?"

"Yes, sir," came the voice over the line. Lee's tone
sounded hesitant. "I-"

"Something wrong, Sarge?"

A sputter. "I'll just have out with it. I fucked-up, Captain."

Berns' mental gears were just grinding up. "The judge
wouldn't delay Johnson's arraignment?"

"Oh, no, he signed right off on that. Won't matter now,
though. Freddie Johnson is dead."

Berns went rigid at the desk. "How the hell ... Don't
tell me he killed himself."

"He killed himself, Captain. Just like he said he would.
Last night I put a drunk in the lockup two cells down
from Freddie's. He's a regular, you know? Harmless.
Once a month he downs a bottle of Black Velvet and out
go his lights. The guy was passed out all night and all day
today...."

"And?"

Lee gulped through a pause. "I guess he came to andwell, Freddie talked the guy out of his belt and he slid it
across.,'

Shit. Berns wanted to clunk his head against the desk.
But as his emotions simmered, Freddie Johnson's words
came back to him.

When the party's over, it's over...

Susan Maitland had said the same thing, and again,
Berns thought, Suicide pact. Only problem is, Freddie Johnson wasn't suicidal.

"I'm really sorry, Captain," Lee said. "With anyone else
I wouldn't think twice about taking a guy's belt and
shoelaces, but like I said-"