Paranormal Erotic Romance Box Set (19 page)

Alexander came upon the meeting house, vacant since the
last day Jonas Dashiell walked the stone floor in 1802, and found a large box
made of metal on top of a worm-hole covered table. In it contained the
Formicarius
,
the
Malleus Maleficarum
, diaries and notes from the settlers of the
Witch Colony and Jonas Dashiell’s diary. After a cursory glance of the texts,
Alexander Battle knew he was among kindred spirits. He tucked the box under his
coat to take back to his home in Cambridge for further inspection and set off
back to the boat.

As Alexander made his way back to shore, a great tower of
earth and weeds erected from the ground caught his eye. He chiseled at the
muck, hardened by one hundred years, with the tip of his machete.

White stone, gleaming beneath the dirt, appeared in the
areas he chiseled. Alexander worked to free whatever lay under the thick shell
of soil. And finally, he found a face and Adelaide was freed once again.
Alexander Battle’s fate was sealed.

After making it back to Boston, Alexander marched into the
Provincial Assessor’s office with a fistful of cash and announced his intention
to purchase the land. The Assessor wanted nothing to do with Alexander Battle’s
insane notion of buying the cursed land. He discouraged Alexander from buying
the property, even saying it was not for sale, thinking he’d ingratiate himself
to Alexander’s wealthy and influential father by preventing what the Assessor
thought a most costly mistake. But Alexander would not be swayed.

He told his father of his plan to purchase the land and
how the Provincial Assessor refused him. Mr. Battle was not in the habit of
being refused by anyone and he certainly would not stand for his son to be
refused. Patrice Battle, now a crazed wreck because she lived every day knowing
the monster who was her boy, just wanted Alexander gone and begged her husband
to help her son make his dream a reality. No one said no to a Brahmin and after
the Battle men descended on the Assessor, negotiations were underway for
Alexander Battle to purchase the land.

In the beginning, the Commonwealth rejected Alexander’s
plan. Regardless of Battle’s Brahmin status, those who were well-entrenched in
Boston’s historic government did not want any more witch hysteria entered into
Massachusetts folklore. The government was also concerned that when questioned
about his intended use for the land, Alexander Battle never gave the courts a
clear answer. Alexander once again went to his father and Mr. Battle came up
with a perfect plan.

The Battle men presented the Commonwealth with new plans
for the site. A grand hotel was now the land’s intended use. The Commonwealth
quickly conferred and decided to grant Alexander Battle’s request thinking that
they had something that would not only dispel the curse, but provide
Massachusetts with an economic stimulus.

The Battleroy Hotel, Alexander’s compound of his and Jesse
Pomeroy’s names, was born.

“Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you
pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.”

e.e. cummings

After many stops and starts, ground finally broke on the
Battleroy site in 1890. Fourteen years passed since Alexander drew up the plans
of his dreams and now they were about to become a reality. The Commonwealth was
pleased with the final plans and contracts were awarded to Mr. Battle’s metal
company, Battle Metals and the Quincy Quarries.

Alexander refused any help from his father, other than his
money and Patrice actually funneled money from her own inheritance into
Alexander’s building fund just to make sure that nothing stood in the way of
getting Alexander out of her house. Alexander was now thirty-four-years-old and
showed no signs of leaving the family home. It was Patrice’s secret hope, now
that she and her husband were in their later years, that as soon as the
Battleroy Hotel was built, Alexander would take residence there.

Alexander never ended his wanders and Patrice knew this.
She watched Alexander continue to sneak out of the house in the middle of the
night and every time she read of a child abducted or found murdered in the
area, she knew in her heart that her son was involved. Since the day she found
Alexander’s disgusting treasures, Patrice never stepped beyond the doorway of
Alexander’s classroom, renamed his office as he aged. But when Alexander was
gone, she walked through the back garden toward the freestanding building.

Her heels clicked snappily across the cobblestone path
that she had laid many years before to ensure her brilliant boy had a grand
entrance to his classroom. Her gait slowed and she wrung her now-arthritic
hands as she came upon the door, still as glossy and red as the day it was
painted. She put her hand on the glass door knob, something she had crafted
especially for Alexander in Spain, figurines cast of gold suspended in the
glass of the knob: a book, a ball and a teddy bear. She turned the knob slowly
and steeled herself as the hot air of the room hit her in the face as the door
creaked open.

And when she was hit with the odor, the same odor that she
now associated with her once beloved son, she held her breath to prevent the
smell of rot from infecting her further. She wondered how long it would take
for the distinctive stench of decomposition to waft its way through the
neighborhood. How long would it take before the good citizens of the area to
realize that in her house, a murderer lived?

For all his planning and excitement about the Battleroy
site, Alexander rarely went out there to check on its progress. He communicated
via post with the construction foremen, a burly former criminal by the name of
Thomas Conway who was a friend of Jesse Pomeroy’s brother. Alexander was only
interested in going out when it was completed and he left a strict schedule for
Mr. Conway to adhere to, including specific instructions on how the restoration
of the statue, who Alexander learned through the diaries was called Adelaide,
should occur.

As he was an obsessive and psychotic personality,
Alexander was now consumed with the
Formicarius
and the
Malleus
Maleficarum
, as well as the other texts he brought home with him when he
first visited the land. He became enthralled with the ideas of the men from the
Witch Colony, bolstered by the claims of the
Malleus Maleficarum
, that
all women will become witches if they have the right Devil to inseminate them.

Alexander gazed at his handsome reflection in his mirror
and smiled.

“But for me, who is more of a devil?” he said as he
straightened his tie.

Alexander decided that it was time to pick a bride, a
queen to preside with him over the Battleroy and aid him in his devilish
pursuits.

While Alexander’s tastes always veered toward young male
children, he was intelligent enough, or at least, cunning enough, to realize
that he needed to use someone to put a public facade over his private desires.
For all his insanity, Alexander Battle was not insane enough to believe that
his avarice for bloodlust and young boys would not eventually get him thrown in
the gallows.

But who does a man, who spent much of his life in
solitude, save for a brief span in the company of another psychotic, choose for
a bride? Alexander Battle sought out his cousin, the only child of his father’s
brother David, the beautiful and youthful Athena Battle as the perfect succubus
to his incubus.

Athena Battle was sixteen-years-old at the time of her
courtship with Alexander. When Alexander made his intention known to his
mother, she was horrified. An incestuous relationship between cousins would not
be tolerated in such a wealthy family of stature and civility. However, Patrice
Battle also knew that her monster of a son would only bring more scourges upon
the family if this was not allowed. Better he should putrefy his own home with
his sick, twisted perversions than continue to do so in hers.

Patrice Battle went to her husband and told Mr. Battle of
their son’s wish to marry Athena Battle. Mr. Battle scoffed at his wife at
first, but the old man was in increasingly declining health and no match for
his much stronger and passionate wife. Patrice explained that with his wealth,
Mr. Battle could fix anything. A meeting was arranged between the cousins, a
trick perpetrated on the daft Athena by Mrs. Battle herself.

Patrice arranged a boat trip for Athena and Alexander to
Cape Cod so Alexander could take Athena on a tour of the Battleroy site. It was
assumed that after Athena saw the magnificence of what Alexander built, any
possible reservations the girl had about marrying her cousin would be gone.
After all, Patrice posited, everyone eventually lies down for money.

Alexander continued to send Jesse Pomeroy his money, as he
still received an allowance, and wrote to his incarcerated friend to update him
on the Battleroy’s progress. Alexander told Jesse of the fraud he perpetrated
on the officials of the Commonwealth and of how they bought the story of the
proposed hotel.

He also told his forever friend of his plans to trick his
cousin Athena into marriage by the invocation of the Devil, something he
studied in the
Formicarius
and the
Malleus Maleficarum
. Like
those before him and many after, Alexander Battle did not see the ancient texts
as cautionary tales against witchcraft, rather he used them as instruction
manuals for his own gain.

For all of her beauty, Athena Battle was as stupid as a
sack of tacks. Patrice knew this to be true, as did Athena’s own parents who
wondered how their only child could be such an idiot. Athena’s father realized
that the only hope to carry on the good Battle name was for Athena to marry. It
was this angle Patrice used to convince all parties involved that marriage to
Alexander was the Battle clan’s only hope of continuation. If Alexander or
Athena did not marry, the Battle name died with their children.

In a culture where women were taught to be seen and not
heard, no one was more surprised than Athena’s parents that their exquisite
child did not any suitors. Athena herself was responsible for this problem, for
when she opened her mouth, the sheer stupidity of her words, boggled the minds
of men and women alike. So with much reservation, but knowing the truth as it
was, the Battle family agreed to allow Alexander Battle to court and quietly
marry his cousin Athena.

On the day that she and Alexander sailed to the Battleroy
site, Athena was a flutter of nerves. Her mother warned her not to open her
mouth, lest she ruin the only opportunity that she had to marry. So, Athena
tried to keep quiet and swooned over Alexander’s dashing looks. Alexander was
also excited, but for a different reason.

He held a beautiful curio box under his arm, hand-carved
out of heavy wood and framed with thick-paned glass. Inside the box, wrapped in
sumptuous red velvet, were the ancient texts and diaries. He also included two
additions to the collection. Alexander’s own diary, which he began anew after
his mother destroyed his original writings, was thrown into the box along with
a well-read copy of the
Liber Juratus
, an ancient and valuable grimoire
he purchased from the nefarious stationer in Boston where he purchased the
majority of his pornographic pictures.

The sea was rough the day the Captain brought Alexander
and his intended bride to the Battleroy site. Foreman Thomas Conway was at the
dock to meet Alexander and take him on the grand tour of the building and the
grounds. Alexander was amazed at the work that was completed in the year since
he stepped foot on the land.

The main building, the hotel for all intents and purposes,
was close to completion. A building that spanned several thousand square feet
and ten stories tall, the Battleroy was faced in beautiful Italian marble and
looked like a European castle, complete with beautiful towers, their points covered
in thick copper sheeting.

When they entered the foyer, Athena gasped.

“It’s just like the Parker House!” Athena said.

“Yes,” Alexander said as he looked around the room, “it’s
almost too nice for its purpose.”

Thomas Conway showed Alexander around enthusiastically
hoping his boss was more than happy with the progress. Though everything had
yet to be decorated, Thomas Conway was even himself surprised that the strange,
aloof man was able to pull of such a vision. He and his crew worked around the
clock to ensure the project’s completion and he had more money coming to him
than he made in the previous ten years.

The guest rooms totaled four hundred, with one hundred and
twenty-five designated as suites. Each room had its own bathroom and exquisite
claw-foot tub. The ballroom and dining room took up a majority of the
downstairs space and an enormous wine cellar rounded out the basement area.

Every inch of space in the hotel that was accessible
through common corridors and halls was also accessible through secret panels in
many of the large rooms that led to hidden passages and stairways built between
the interior and exterior walls of the hotel. From the time of his wanders, it
was Alexander’s greatest desire to be able to strike upon anything unseen until
the very last moment. The secret passageways he designed within the hotel
accomplished his desire.

Alexander asked Thomas Conway to show them the library and
he donated the library’s very first editions when he laid his curio box gently
on one of the built-in mahogany shelves.

He was not interested in seeing the offices or any other
utilitarian portions of the hotel and insisted on a tour of the grounds. When
he saw Adelaide in the distance, he ran toward the statue as if she was a
long-lost relative and fell to his knees at her base.

“Beautiful,” he said and kissed her stone feet.

“Alexander, you should make this a rose garden, they have
them all over Europe,” Athena said.