The Teratologist (14 page)

The platinum-skinned giants tore past him and charged into the room where the light had already extinguished itself. Westmore recognized them from Bryant’s description. The angels. He gripped the axe in his hand and ran after them, afraid of what would happen to Bryant if he were in that room alone with the owner of that horrible voice and those two colossal twins.

The photographer had only taken a few steps when the angel appeared before him again looking even more scruffy and unkempt than before. His five o’clock shadow was now becoming a full beard. The Bob Dylan look-a-like cast him a look that could only be described as panic. It was terrible to see on a being that was immortal. If he was afraid than Westmore should have been terrified.

“
Hurry!” the angel shouted.

A flood of horrible images flooded through his mind the force of them staggering him and nearly knocking him to the floor. He saw a world where rape, murder, and torture were canonized and innocence and love was just a memory. It was the world that Farrington would bring about. Westmore steeled his resolve and ran past the charred body of a naked Asian man and into the room. As he ran past him, the little Asian man’s eyes opened and stared right into his.

“
Hurry!” the monk croaked out in a hoarse ragged bark and then he shuddered and his eyes closed again. Westmore was sure the man had died. He stepped inside what remained of the room just as Farrington seemed to be intercoursing with a demon that looked like some type of anemone that had floated up from the bottom of the sea. Bryant was standing a few feet away with a gun in his hands pointed at the demon and a look on his face that suggested his consciousness had fled his body. Westmore grabbed him and shook him.

“
James! James wake up! You have to shoot Farrington! You have to kill him!”

The angels had launched themselves at the demon and were tearing into it with their long spiraled nails. Their nails snapping even as they rent through the thing’s flesh. They sank their teeth into it and began ripping chunks out of it. The creature howled in pain. Then Westmore saw what they were trying to do. They were trying to sever the tentacle that led from the creature into Farrington’s head. Westmore charged with the axe and began hacking away at it as well.

“
James! James! Wake up!”

A thick black goop sprayed out of the creature with every swing of the axe and it fought back, filling his head with the most vile and horrible images. His stomach rolled and he pitched forward and projectile vomited in a spray that flew almost into the hallway. But he continued to swing the axe.

“
I see! I see!” Farrington shrieked as the demon filled his head with the knowledge of perfect evil. The fat limbless woman who had been sucking down his seed was now cringing away from him trying to back her way out the door. Farrington grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back over to him. He dug his fingers into her skull and it began to crack. Blood poured from her nose, ears, mouth, and even her eyes as he ripped her head in half and dashed her gray-matter onto the floor at his feet. Then the angels attacked him.

Giving up on cutting through the demon’s coarse limb, they tackled Farrington and began trying to sever the man’s head from his neck and shoulders using only their teeth.

Westmore jumped down and raised the axe above his head ready to cleave the billionaire’s head in two when gunshots rang out and the man’s chest exploded. Westmore looked up and saw his partner standing above him pointing the gun down at Farrington and pumping bullet after bullet into his torso.

“
I saw it. I saw what he was trying to become. I don’t know how but I could see it all.” Bryant hovered above the dead billionaire still aiming the 9mm down at him as if expecting him to get up again. “It was so horrible, man. You don’t know what he would have become. I had to kill him. I couldn’t let him…it was just so terrible, so evil.”

“
I know, man. We all saw it. It’s okay. You had to kill him.”

Bryant suddenly remembered the demon and turned to empty the rest of his clip into the hideous thing but it was already crawling away as smoke and flames ate their way through the floorboards and began to consume the house.

“
Shit! I almost forgot about the fire! This whole place is about to go up!” Westmore shouted as he ran for the door where smoke had already filled the hallway. A wall of fire was inching its way down the hall cutting off their retreat.

“
Oh shit we’re trapped! Watch out!”

Farrington wasn’t dead yet. His body was changing, breaking down and reforming, morphing into something that resembled the demon they had just chased away. A nest of tentacles wormed their way out of his ruptured chest and stomach reaching out for Bryant and the two twins. The twins bared their teeth like wild animals snarling in fury. Bryant turned and fired. One bullet slammed into Farrington’s throat, tearing out his larynx and lodging in his vertebrae, then the gun dry-fired on an empty chamber. Farrington smiled. He picked the young journalist up with one of his serpentine appendages and tossed him out into the hall, into the fire.

“
Nooooo!”

Bryant’s body sailed past and Westmore rushed to rescue him. He pulled Bryant free of the flames just as the man began to scream.

“
He’s still alive! He’s still alive!” Bryant was in a near panic.

“
Nothing we can do about that now. We’ve got to get out of here. The entire mansion is burning down!”

They looked back into the room and saw Farrington rise up and spread his arms wide to embrace the twins. Tentacles exploded from every surface that would permit them, growing longer and thicker. He smiled as the angels rushed into his arms and then began to cry out as they sank their teeth into him. The three of them fell to the ground struggling, trying to kill each other. Westmore grabbed Bryant and they both sprinted down the hallway away from the flames.

“
There’s a pool down at the end of the hall. It has windows in there that we can break. We can get out that way.”

Behind them they could hear the billionaire screaming for his life as the angels tore into him and the fire spilled into the room. The fire continued down the hall, licking at their heels and roaring in their ears as it sucked the oxygen out of the air and scorched their lungs. They ripped open the door to the poolroom and fell through it just as the flames had begun to blister the skin on their backs.

There was no time to try to break out one of those Lexan windows. There were no more bullets in the gun and nothing else in the poolroom would have been strong enough to shatter them. Bryant and Westmore dove into the pool as the poolroom door exploded and a burst of super-heated air came blasting in.

They could still hear Farrington’s screams as they sank beneath the chlorinated water. The angels were tearing him apart and what they didn’t destroy the fire certainly would. Nothing could have survived that inferno.

(XIX)

The water was getting warmer. There were no flammable surfaces within the poolroom, which was covered from floor to ceiling in 17” Gialo Antiqua marble tiles imported from Italy preventing the fire from spreading right to the pool’s edge, but the rest of the estate was burning down and the water temperature was quickly reaching the boiling point.

The windows exploded from the heat. The two journalists leapt up out of the pool and ran for daylight as fast as they could. Their skin blistered as the intense heat seared their flesh. Their eyes watered, obscuring their vision. They closed their eyelids and dove headfirst through the shattered windows.

Westmore crashed through a row of shrubbery and rolled out into the big circular driveway where the limo that had brought them to this madhouse still sat. He looked around him for Bryant but the man was nowhere to be found. Then he looked back up at the window he’d just leapt through and saw Bryant still crouched on the window ledge…wrapped in tentacles. He saw the reporter’s eyes bulge out of their sockets and his brains squirt out of his ears when the tentacles constricted and his bones snapped and collapsed, his body being slowly crushed.

“
James! Noooo!” Westmore cried out as Bryant was dragged back into the flames. Moments later the entire mansion collapsed.

(XX)

It had been more than a year since Westmore had been back to the site where the Farrington mansion once stood. In that time he’d been besieged with requests for interviews about the murderous zealot and exorbitant offers for the purchase of his pictures of the mansion and its activities. He’d refused them all. He couldn’t bring himself to profit in anyway from what had taken place here. And more than that, he didn’t want that madman’s story told. That’s why he had brought them there in the first place, to tell his story, that’s why Bryant had died. He didn’t want to give that lunatic the satisfaction. He would take the tale to his grave instead. Still, there was one last photograph he wanted to get. It would be the only one he’d ever publish involving this place.

Richard Westmore crept tentatively through the rubble and ash that was all that remained of Farrington’s estate. He made his way to the place where the freaks had been kept, where indescribable atrocities had transpired and there, just where the angel had told him it would be, bloomed a white lotus. Westmore looked up at the sky as the sun peeked through the clouds. He smiled and wiped the tear from his eye then he knelt and snapped a picture.

THE END

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About the Authors

EDWARD LEE has had more than 40 books published in the horror and suspense field, including CITY INFERNAL, THE GOLEM, and BLACK TRAIN. His movie, HEADER was released on DVD by Synapse Films, in June, 2009. Recent releases include the stories, “You Are My Everything” and “The Cyesologniac,” the Lovecraftian novella “Trolley No. 1852,” and the hardcore novel HAUNTER OF THE THRESHOLD. Currently, Lee is working on HEADER 3. Lee lives on Florida’s St. Pete Beach. Visit him online at:

http://www.edwardleeonline.com

WRATH JAMES WHITE is a former World Class Heavyweight Kickboxer, a professional Kickboxing and Mixed Martial Arts trainer, distance runner, performance artist, and former street brawler, who is now known for creating some of the most disturbing works of fiction in print.

Wrath’s two most recent novels are PURE HATE and YACCUB’S CURSE. He is also the author of SUCCULENT PREY, THE RESURRECTIONIST, EVERYONE DIES FAMOUS IN A SMALL TOWN, THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND SINS, HIS PAIN and POPULATION ZERO. He is the co-author of TERATOLOGIST co-written with the king of extreme horror, Edward Lee, ORGY OF SOULS co-written with Maurice Broaddus, HERO co-written with J.F. Gonzalez, and POISONING EROS co-written with Monica J. O'Rourke.

Wrath lives and works in Austin, Texas with his two daughters, Isis and Nala, his son Sultan and his wife Christie.