The Minotauress Read online

  THE MINOTAURESS

  Edward Lee

  first edition trade paperback

  THE MINOTAURESS

  Novella Collection

  THE MINOTAURESS © 2007 by Edward Lee

  THE HORNCRANKER © 2002 by Edward Lee

  cover art © 2007 Travis Anthony Soumis

  this electronic edition November 2008 © Necro Publications

  available in a trade paperback

  ISBN: 1-889186-80-5

  originally published in 2008 as a limited edition hardcover

  and deluxe lettered edition hardcover

  book design & typesetting:

  David G. Barnett

  Fat Cat Design

  assistant editors:

  John Everson

  Jeff Funk

  C. Dennis Moore

  a Necro Publication

  5139 Maxon Terrace

  Sanford, FL 32771

  Printed by

  Publishers' Graphics

  Carol Stream, IL

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Wendy Brewer, Dave Barnett, Bob Strauss, Matt Johnson, Dustin La Valley, Monica Kuebler, Mark Justice, Tom Moran, Monica O'Rourke, Erik Wilson, Jeff Funk, Minh, Nanci Kalanta, Terry Tidwell, Michael Pearce, and Paul Legerski.

  For Mike Anthony and Michael Kennedy.

  Let's see you make THIS into a movie...

  THE MINOTAURESS

  PROLOGUE

  The mansion looked haunted, and was even rumored to be, though in truth the things which prowled its narrow halls at night, and occasionally peeked out the dark, heavily draped windows, were all too corporeal. The only ghosts here lurked in the mythic obsessions of the mansion's elderly owner. Since the old gentleman had occupied the house—some forty years—not once had a guest stayed the night... even though, in a sense, he'd had many guests... if you chose to call them that.

  The mansion loomed from a desolate hill surrounded by high but sickly trees and other vegetation which seemed jaundiced, even deformed, this due—according to further rumors—to countless marked and unmarked graves that pocked the proximal land. And to nod toward an elemental cliché, there was an Indian scourge here in 1642, where Governor William Berkley had ordered armed colonists to slaughter over a hundred Powhatans—most of whom were women and children. These unfortunate natives were then buried unceremoniously in a trench beside a brook which ran less than fifty yards from where the mansion's foundation would one day be lain. Periodically, over the next two hundred years, this land was additionally chosen to be the convenient resting place for lynching victims and the worst of condemned criminals, and more interestingly, there was a small fenced graveyard to the east of the house which included the bodies of eleven young women hanged for witchcraft by remnant Puritans in 1689. This graveyard, of course, was officially unconsecrated and so, too, were all of the unmarked graves amid the property.

  The old man liked unconsecrated graves.

  In fact, that's why he'd bought the house.

  ««—»»

  The mansion itself? Three stories but narrow, a tower with a garret at the north corner, great bow windows, parapets, a circular tympanum of stained glass above the front door's stone arch whose glittering mosaic depicted the face of Alexander Seton—the only alchemist in history to successfully transmute lead into gold. Sloping dormer windows topped the mansion's twin wings, and behind these windows more obscurely notorious likenesses could be viewed: stone busts of Count Cagliostro, Dr. Edward Kelly, Emmanuel Swedenborg, and Gilles de Rais. Tin gutters lined the friezes which framed each story, and paired flues sprouted from several chimneys, like horns. Iron cresting rimmed the top garret, and sometimes, in the garret's oculus, candlelight could be seen.

  The mansion, like the land it sat upon, was a cliché, but then so was the old man who owned it. He craved seclusion and antiquities, black moonlit nights, and the paneled rooms within full of the most forbidden books.

  The old man believed in those books, because he knew that the only true force in existence was faith.

  ««—»»

  "Oh, dear," the old man muttered when he saw that the pallid naked girl had shat herself. It happened on occasion; at least half of the girls were heroin addicts. Morphine derivatives routinely caused constipation, but when the owners of said clogged intestines were terrorized enough, it would all come out at once.

  The rich smell rose up in the room, like fog. The old man gagged.

  Oh, God! He rushed to the door and called up the stairs: "Waldo! Come down here, quickly, please!"

  I'm a scholar and a celebrated antiquary, he reminded himself. My station in life exists on too high a level to clean up... accidents such as this.

  The old man looked genteel, like a retired professor or perhaps the owner of a high-end clothier's. Bald on top but neatly thick gray hair below the pate, a long but trimmed goatee, a Lord & Taylor white dress shirt and smart black slacks. Seventy years old but with eyes keen and bright as a teenager's—bright in their hunger for knowledge and their passion for life, and the things he was certain that awaited him after life.

  He was working in the basement just now, though he referred to it as the temple, for in a manner of speaking it was—indeed, a place of revered travail and worship. Facsimiles of Doric columns were present, and six arched doorways lined three of the brick walls; they'd been monumentally difficult to install, given the specifications. Each door showed stains of old brown blood and housed a single, pointed iron spike.

  Several books lay opened on various reading-tables, the one he perused now being Tephramancy, by Christoff Deniere, Glastonbury Abbey Press, 1539. For those unaware, tephramancy was an occult science which involved the use of the ashes of burned human body parts as an activating ingredient of particularized metaphysical rituals.

  Footfalls clunked down the stairs, the door squeaked open. Waldo Parkins had to duck to enter the basement—er, the temple. He could've been a college senior linebacker... that is if he could raise his IQ enough to even get into college. The old man thought of still more clichés when he'd first engaged Waldo's services as manservant. It would've been better had he been named Igor...

  He'd hired Waldo less than a year ago—from local stock—for youth brought the physical strength that the old man had lost. Digging graves and hefting bodies was harder than it appeared, and besides, all great warlocks had apprentices. Where would John Dee have been without Edward Kelly? the old man considered. Indeed, Waldo's 6'4" frame and accommodating musculature fit the bill just fine, that and the ever-crucial weak-mind. See, the weak-minded were much easier to control—yet another cliché. Every thirteen days, the old man revitalized Waldo's Subservience Charm, whose ingredients and procedure he'd obtained while Slate-Writing one Candlemas Eve in a successful attempt to achieve otherwordly discourse with a long-dead French witch named Marguerite Lamy. Ms. Lamy had been burned at the stake in 1534 for casting spells upon the more comely nuns of the Convent of St. Brigitta and inducing them to consort with incubi.

  "What'cha need, sir?" Waldo beamed. "I was upstairs packin' yer bags like ya tolt me." The boy paused, sniffed. "Whew! I smell Number Two... "

  The old man winced when he noticed more feces oozing from the unconscious girl's buttocks. By now, so much had escaped her bowels that it looked like a long brown tail. "I'm terribly sorry, Waldo," the old man fidgeted, "but as you can see, our friend here has... had an accident, and I'm afraid I just don't have it in me to... "

  Waldo smacked a grin. "Don't wanna clean up her shit, huh, sir?"

  "Precisely. So if you don't mind... "

  Waldo didn't mind at all, proof of the Subservience Charm's potency. He leaned over and scooped up the excreta in his bare hands, with no more concern than if he were scooping up popcorn. "What'cha want me to do
with it, sir?"

  Good Lord... The old man opened the iron hatch on the back wall. "In the crematory, if you please."

  Waldo flapped the excrement into the fiery hatch, and continued doing so until it was all up. The old man fervently sprayed a can of Renuz-It Apple Cinnamon Home Fragrance around. Waldo whistled "Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses," then, as he happily mopped up the smears on the floor.

  "Now I'd like you to wash her, please," the old man directed. "These girls are just so foul."

  "Yer wish is my command, sir," Waldo chuckled. The old man shook his head.

  Metal links clinked; Waldo yanked on the pulleyed chain and watched the morbidly naked girl rise in the air, her wrists being cuffed to one end of the chain. Beneath her dirty bare feet the broad-shouldered manservant slipped a washtub. Then he cranked on the faucet, hosed her down, soaped up a car sponge, and began to suds her off.

  Gad, thought the old man. The girl was appalling, pudgy flesh the hue of vanilla ice cream, cellulite-dimpled, and peppered by needlemarks and scabs from abscesses. Her buttocks could've been two twenty-pound sacks of flour pushed together, her pubis a great swatch of dull brown hair that had begun to grow traceably down the insides of her thighs and trailed up to her navel. A preposterous tattoo across her belly read LOVE DEPOSIT in large cursive letters.

  Waldo seemed rapt whilst thoroughly sudsing the caramel smears out of her rump's cleft. Fat, expansive breasts hung unevenly, and one nipple was as big around as a coffee cup's rim, the other but a small puckered oval. The navel looked like a deep finger-hole in raw dough.

  The old man busied himself by arranging the retractors and saw, and securing the proper crucible. He'd already done this once before but he did it again nonetheless, to distract him from the vision of the unwholesome human hulk hanging from the chain. Next, from an armoire, he inspected the glittering surplice which he would wear during the rite: a simple black-dyed cotton smock stitched with sundry gemstones. The stones were worthless to a jeweler, but to a sorcerer?

  They were more valuable than a bucket full of Faberge eggs.

  The power of faith, the old man mused.

  Content, he turned—

  "For goodness sake, Waldo!"

  Waldo was kneeling now, performing fastidious cunnilingus on the suspended girl. The majora looked like a slice of baloney—the "cotto" kind—folded in half. At the old man's objection, Waldo glanced guiltily over his shoulder.

  "What on earth are you doing?"

  Waldo's brows rose. "Well, sir, I'se eatin' me some hair pie. It's a right fun, it is." Waldo's eyes widened in concern. "Ya wanna take a lick, sir? Bet it's been a whiles since ya et a splittail's gash, huh?"

  "Oh, for goodness' sake!" the old man repeated, appalled. "Waldo, she's a prostitute! Do you have any idea how many filthy, immoral men have ejaculated in her orifice?"

  "Orif— Oh, you mean her joy-hole? Well, I guess quite a number but... so what?" His grin flashed back. "Say, sir, can I fuck her in the graveyard and bleed her some, like ya let me do with that last gal?"

  "No, no, that was an oblatory rite, this is for a materialization... ," but now the old man was getting a headache, and it was with further distaste that he noticed what Waldo had been doing while his tongue had ranged the abominable folds. His trousers were open, his hand wrapped around his penis which, like the rest of him, was overly large. This was one unfortunate side-effect of the Subservience Spell: accelerated libidiny.

  "Please, Waldo, try to focus on your task. Don't succumb to diversions of the flesh."

  Waldo's broad shoulders slumped. "Sorry, sir... " He stood up and forced the unsated erection back into his trousers. But suddenly a confusion lit in his eyes. "Sir? What'cha need the splittail fer if you're goin' on yer trip in the mornin'?"

  "That's the surprise, Waldo."

  "Surprise?"

  "Yes. Now that you're done washing our sacrifant, you can go back upstairs and finish packing my bags, and when you're done with that, you can pack your own. You see, Waldo, I've decided to take you to Toledo with me."

  Waldo's face brightened in delight. "Aw, shucks, sir! I'se always wanted to go to Ohio!"

  The old man groaned. "Spain, Waldo. Toledo, Spain. There's a broker of sensitive collectibles there, and I see him every year at this time. You've worked hard during your time under my employ, so I thought you'd enjoy a trip overseas."

  "Shee-it-yeah, sir!" Waldo rejoiced. The boy's twenty-six years of redneck oblivion had never taken him across the Russell County line. "You're a super-cool boss, I'll tell ya!"

  "Actually, Waldo, I'm morose, narcissistic, and boring, but thank you for the compliment." In truth, though, it was not any impression of reward that urged him to take Waldo along. This particular excursion would require him to venture into some of the cryptic city's back alleys which more and more were being overrun by a ruffian element. This year his broker had procured for him a blasphemous 15th Century codex supposedly owned by one of Vlad Tepes' concubines—Canessa—a prostitute and sorceress who had, at Vlad's order, infiltrated a Wallachian monastery and cast, among other things, a Bloodlusting Hex on all of its monks. The hex had proved a whopping success, turning the monastery's contingent of faithful friars into Satan-worshiping madmen who wound up draining the blood of several dozen local children before a tribunal from the Holy See had condemned them and ordered the monastery razed. The codex was a book of intercessions said to conjure a demon named Baalzephon. The old man would also be visiting another dealer—his ossifist of choice—to purchase the pelvic bone of one Saint Radegunde, whose tomb in Poitiers, France, had been plundered by professional grave-robbers-for-hire. The bones of saints, especially those known to have displayed stigmata, were of great value to occultists; when powdered or tinctured they could be used very effectively in smoke-divinations and automatic-writing trances.

  "Run along now, Waldo, and when you're done with the packing you'd best get to sleep. It's a long drive to the airport in the morning."

  "Hot dog, sir! You kin count on me!" And then he turned for the stairs. "I'se going ta Spain... !"

  But before the young dope could fully exit the room, something sparked in his feeble brain. "Er, wait, sir. If I'se goin' with ya on yer trip... who's gonna keep an eye on the house and all yer val-yer-bulls?"

  "That's a good question, Waldo, and very astute of you." The old man's hand bid, first, the hanging girl and, second, the implements on the table.

  "Ooooooh. I git it... "

  "Um-hmm. And thank you for cleaning up the excreta."

  Waldo's jaw dropped. "The what?"

  "Just go finish packing."

  Waldo tramped back up the steps, hooting more exuberance.

  Sniffing apple-cinnamon now, the old man upped the crematory temperature and donned a plastic apron and gloves. That's when the dowdy drug addict regained consciousness. Her sty-flecked eyes fluttered, then shot open to show dulled whites. Dazedly she looked at the old man, then looked around to see herself suspended from the chain. She looked back at the old man and shrieked.

  The old man winced. He deplored loud, sudden noises. "Please, miss. You won't benefit at all by that."

  "You old fuck!" she protested. "You skinny piece of old shit!"

  These protestations did not carry the typical southern accent the old man was used to; instead, it sounded more like Jersey or the Bronx. "Flattery will get you nowhere," he quipped.

  "You tricked me! You were supposed to be a twenty-dollar trick! You-you-you... " The dull eyes blinked in the pudgy face. "You knocked me out!"

  "I congratulate you on your perceptivity."

  She wriggled uselessly on the chain, which only caused her to sway back and forth, pendulum-like. A pendulum of ungainly human flesh with a LOVE DEPOSIT tattoo on a belly busted out with stretchmarks from untold trick babies. "You spinach-chin motherfucker! I knew I shouldn't have gotten in the car with you! You look like my motherfucking grandfather, you dick-suck ass-lick psycho shit-suck ass-bag piss-slit AS
S-motherfucking-HOLE!"

  "You speak with the eloquence of queens, my dear."

  "And-and... you fucked me already, didn't you, you gray-haired bald shit! My pussy doesn't feel right! You fucked me while I was knocked out, didn't you, you sick cock?"

  The old man couldn't resist. "Young lady, I'd sooner admit my penis into the drain-hole of a ghetto dumpster than admit it into that horrific morass you call your vagina."

  She paused in an attempt to comprehend his words, then gave up. "Just let me go, you shit-dick!"

  The old man chuckled. "I would estimate that such an event presents a very low order of probability."

  Her pasty bulk kept swinging. "Where're my clothes!"

  The old man's fine leather shoes tapped across the room's cement floor. He opened the hatch of the Ener-Tek IV crematory, showing the rows of white-hot liquid-propane nozzles kicking out 2,200 degrees.

  "Regrettably, your attire was consigned to the flames... along with what I would approximate to be your last dozen or so meals."