Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee Read online

  She got him out, dried him off, struggled to help him get his robe on. Then she walked him out, step by step, and sat him back down on the bed.

  By then the man felt a little bit better than dead.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "It's all right."

  The news continued on the TV Children snatched in front of a Maryland schoolyard. Federal agents raid an underground fetal brain-tissue lab. A catastrophic-care nurse admits to murdering a six-year-old retarded girl after making a deal with the girl's father to split the insurance money. Rwandan soldiers burn down a United Red Cross hospital, killing sixty.

  "There's evil everywhere," the girl said.

  "I know"

  She turned off the television and sat next to him. "I'm more afraid than you. Do you understand what I mean?"

  Through the fog of alcohol poisoning, the words cut through like a strong beam of light. "Yes. How could I not?"

  "I don't know what's going to happen."

  "Neither do I"

  An audible click as she swallowed. "My water's going to break any day now, maybe any hour."

  The man nodded. He didn't have the heart to tell her what he was already certain of. It will be tomorrow after midnight.

  "I want you to kill me. Shoot me with that gun and leave. I'll forgive you," she said. "So will God."

  "I'm not going to kill you," he croaked. "If I was going to do that, I'd have done it a long time ago."

  She turned off the light. "Then let's go to sleep now."

  He started to get up, but her hand pulled him back. "Sleep here in the bed with me. After all this, everything you've done, don't you think I trust you?" A grim chuckle. "If you wanted to do something perverted to me, you'd have done that a long tune ago, too."

  He settled back against her, drifting. He still felt awful, and knew he would for awhile, but lying with her like that-in perfect trust-gave him a sense of comfort that seemed priceless to him. She fell asleep quickly, while the man was still experiencing the twirls, but after a time they abated. He listened to her breathe, her hand resting on his chest.

  When his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he could see her outline. The breasts settled to one side over the massive belly.

  Before he fell into his own stupor-like sleep, this is what he thought: No, I won't kill you. But I swear to God on High that I'm gonna kill uhatevrr cones out of you ...

  Part One

  Slaughter Night

  Chapter One

  Nine months prrvious.. .

  I

  Faye didn't really know if she dreamed anymore. What went on in her head most of the time seemed like the most vivid nightmares, and nightmares were dreams but she never remembered sleeping. She liked the door locked, though, and she liked the way the moon sometimes shone in through the window at night.

  Faye, do some more...

  If I do anymore IT be wrecked!

  We ... want you wrecked. We want you out of your mind. And you know you like it anyway. You like it all. Let me put it this wary. Unless you're out of your mind, you're of no use to us.

  She sat fat and naked on a red-velvet Edwardian-era couch that she knew cost more than she made in two years. Fat and naked, and sadder now in her stimulated exhilaration than when she was sober and alone. Hildreth was right: this was all she was here for. Groundskeeper? It was a joke; she knew that now I'm their Pillsbury Dough Giri. She was there to be laughed at and abused and humiliated. When they were shooting one of the movies at the house, they called her "The Fluff Pig."

  Brawny men stood on either side, naked and aroused by either Viagra or evil. She took oral turns with them without even thinking, an automatic impulse now. Two rough fingers twirled a lopsided nipple as if taking a screw out of a wall.

  This pig does it DAMN good .. .

  Probably been practicing since she uvs four.

  And instead of crying or screaming or even biting them, Faye chuckled in her throat. It was awful what she'd let them turn her into.

  I'm awful, she thought.

  One man pulled out.

  Stick out your tongue.

  Faye did so, and on her tongue the man placed a heathergreen pill embossed with a Playboy Bunny.

  Another man shoved a bottle at her.

  Swallow. That's something you're good at.

  She slugged the rich wine, oblivious to its faded label: MONTRACHET 1888.

  The stouter voice spoke across the candle-lit room. Janey, why don't you cone over here and indulge Faye with some of your own skills?

  A starkly beautiful woman sat nude in the center of the handmade Kashmiri carpet. She looked up, distracted, as she intricately wielded a syringe, about to inject something into a vein in her foot. Oh, Reginald, please. You know, l only like to play around with hot girls. She's too ugly...

  Oh, I upp! another naked woman consented, eagerly scurrying across. I don't know why, but I've always had a thing for ugly chicks!

  You don't know why? someone else said and laughed. You think maybe being nuts has something to do with it?

  Oh, shut up, Three-Bails!

  The woman crawled between Faye's lumpy, rice-white legs, the workings of her tongue immediate, ravenous. Faye shimmied at the jolt of pleasure. A metallic clicking resounded, the woman's tongue-stud laving up and down over the rings of Faye's forced piercings. More warm, pulsing things filled her mouth, shoved in with no regard. She simply did it, without objection, because she knew it was her only acceptance. So much overwhelmed her now: musky scents, churning sensations, drug toxicity, more groins in her face and more things slipped into her mouth.

  Gentlemen, please. Save it f or later. You mustn't be gmed*

  The men all stepped back in obedience, candlelight flickering on their sweating, muscular chests, prongs of flesh sticking up.

  The other woman delicately raked her tongue-stud a few more times over Faye's labial rings, then tended the exposed clitoris directly.

  Faye was awash in insane pleasures that were about to break.

  Look, she's about to get off.►

  Give her a hit right when she coma.

  Faye's legs quivered as more pleasure surged. She panted, her heart racing. The crack-pipe was put to her lips.

  No, I can't do anymore, she pleaded against the waves of ecstac)

  A lighter flicked, tinted her deranged face. Then a hammer cocked, a gun was put to her head.

  Smoke it all up ...

  Faye inhaled the metal-like fumes as her climax broke. Then she rolled off the couch with a plop, delirious and immobile.

  There. Now the fat sack of shit can't say we never did anything for her.

  Laughter, as Faye lay like a dropped sack.

  The stout voice again: That was amusing, it always is. Let's adjourn now, to the Scarlet Room.

  Svelte, nude bodies traipsed away, bare feet padding, contours of erotic shadows disappearing through the flickers of candle-flame.

  Faye lay drooling, hoping she'd die. She knew what was happening; she knew what it was time for.

  Get out! They're all in the other room!

  That was her instinct, at least, but she knew that such instincts, such as self-preservation, didn't matter much to her now. Back out in the normal world? How long would she last? They'd addicted her to everything by now, to make their human pinata more compliant and more fun to laugh at and piss on and humiliate-all because they were purely and simply evil. She'd last a few days, run out of drug money, take one last look at her crumpled life, and then blow her head off. So what did she have to lose?

  It took a half an hour of breathing deeply and focusing on calming her heart down before she could get up. The candlelight licked over her flabby body; her head still spun but somehow she'd regained some control over movements and train of thought. She'd come all this way. She just wanted to see.

  She wanted to see if it was true and then die.

  What room am I in? She focused her eyes. One of the upstairs parlors, she guessed. She couldn't
even remember. She pushed open high, ingrained doors, teetering in the frame for a moment, then stepping out into the hall. When she got to the banister and looked down, she saw hundreds of flickering dots of lit candles.

  As she trudged for the stairs, her ears detected mutters and sighs and death-rattles. Every so often there came a shriek deep from within the mansion's guts. When she looked in one of the bedrooms, she saw a nude woman hanging from a rafter by a meat-hook caught in the roof of her mouth. She twitched a little, gargling. Someone had carved all the meat off her calves and feet but placed tourniquets above her knees to prevent her from bleeding to death outright. Faye closed the door and walked on. In the next room, three more women lay dead, but not movie girls. They were pale as paraffin, emaciated as if starved, bony pubic bones jutting below stomachs that seemed sucked in. Their throats had all been cut.

  Faye knew where she was going. More atrocities greeted her during her trek. Once her bare foot stepped in a pile of still-warm human innards. A few steps later, something hard and wet printed against her sole: a testicle shucked from the scrotum. At the top step one of the movie girls-one of the few who'd been nice to her, in fact-lay dead and glasseyed, her hip joints broken to spread her legs wider than nature allowed so that the first person to come up the stairs tomorrow would see what had been jammed up into her vaginal vault: a human arm.

  But Faye was beyond being appalled. These were the trimmings of Hildreth's madness, his offering, his gesture of beckoning and worthiness. Faye knew that what he solicited would indeed find him very, worthy. And she knew this too-from this point on, if she continued to search the house instead of escaping, the things offered for her to see would only get worse.

  When she found the door she was looking for, it seemed to be no door at all but instead an oblong orifice rimmed by something lip-like. The drugs made her see things all the time, but was she really just seeing this?

  When she touched what should've been the door frame it was soft, warm, wet. It was not wood.

  Total silence stood before her. More candles flickered here, revealing inklings of the horror that had taken place. She looked, vision surveying Hildreth's precious Scarlet Room, and then she thought: They did it.

  Some of the bodies remained whole, others in pieces. The center of the room was a pile of butchered nudity. Limbs, heads, hands, and feet lay about the bloody accrual in the middle: bodies. Faye could easily see the work-axholes in faces, ax-holes in stomachs. It occurred to her that the bodies had been stacked deliberately for effect: a heaped offering, a plea for invitation. Closer to the door at the rear several buckets lay on their sides, glistening scarlet within. And laying aside was the ax, as if dropped there.

  Leave, she told herself.

  But she couldn't.

  . When Faye finally stepped through inside, something squished, something warm under the bottoms of her feet. At first she thought it must be the carpet soaked from so much blood but a downward glance showed her something else altogether.

  It wasn't a floor she was walking on, it was raw meat, akin to a vast slab of porterhouse. Veins branched out, thick as garden hoses, and she could see them pulsing. Then she stuck her hand out to steady herself against the wall but what her hand touched was not a wall anymore. It was skin.

  Hot, sweating, and flushed, skin full of excited nerves which cringed for sensation. Faye walked along the wall, running her hand, and as she did so it seemed to swell in her wake, as if trying to touch back. She also felt subtle pro- trudements: open eyes, faces, mouths with licking tongues. They blinked at her wantonly. One mouth's tongue desperately shot forward, then the lips sighed and whispered, "Please, please! Let us taste you!"

  Faye's long fat breasts hitched and her flab jiggled when she stepped unbalanced toward the room's center. She needed to see one more thing...

  The other door.

  It stood there, indeed, where it should be. Rimmed with drooling flesh.

  The Rive, she thought.

  Yes, they'd really done it.

  But where was Hildreth?

  Then she looked in there and saw him grinning back.

  The police found her hours later, sitting at the end of the mansion's twisting, mile-long driveway. Gibbering. Naked. Insane.

  Faye sat now much in the same way, only in a different place. No, it wasn't a nightmare. It was worse because it was memory.

  The moon glazed the floor and a wedge of the bed in its soft, ice-like glow.

  Movement caught her eye; when she looked up to the little window, a face peered in. They did often, never smiling.

  The door opened with a heavy click.

  "Come on, Faye. Time for your meds."

  II

  Patrick Willis never traveled on planes. He'd stopped years ago, when his mentalism peaked. It was mostly tactility which triggered him, but packed so close, so close to all those passengers-sometimes it was too much.

  Sometimes it was madness.

  That close to so many auras, he didn't need to touch them: Too often their horrors came to him with hands of their own.

  So it was Greyhound from now on. At least the fares were cheap.

  Half of the East Coast rolled by in the large window, like a bright movie. All that beauty out there, he thought. Then he looked around at the dozen or so passengers sharing the coach with him. Yeah, lots out there but not much in here.

  Several bums, several obese welfare recipients, a stragglehaired twenty-year-old white girl sitting stone-faced beside a grinning black man in his forties. A sleeping drug-addict here, a talkative mental patient there. All hard-luck cases. Mostly people whom life had consigned to society's trenches.

  So where does that leave me? he asked himself.

  Willis looked back out the window. Even looking at people from a distance of ten or so feet could bring on a touch, that is if he looked hard enough. What existed beyond the window was better.

  He hoped to view more of the countryside beyond the glass, but eventually-and as usual-he just wound up seeing more of his own broken life. He'd never been materialistiche'd actually been a good person once. After graduating from medical school, he'd had no desire to pursue a future in private practice-where his additional skills as a tactionist could certainly bring him up to a seven-figure salary in no time. Instead he'd worked at the state health center, helping mostly rape victims and battered women. He'd always been altruistic; working for a much lower salary helping people who couldn't help themselves seemed a noble cause. It let me give something back to the urotid. It wasn't idealism, either. He knew it came from his heart.

  The job lasted five years or so, his "gift"--as with so many others who were psychically inclined-became his curse. He hadn't really even known he'd had it to any extent until he'd gotten out of med school (this mode of psi tended to peak in one's late twenties to early thirties). He'd noticed it, for sure, and always with women, all throughout college and med school. Touching. Any direct skin-to-skin contact. Sex trebled the intensity of what he referred to as a "backwash," and since sex existed as the most direct manner of skin-to-skin contact, Willis' romantic life never got past that first night in bed with a woman. There was always something something awful or dark-that would wash back into his head from hers. Indeed, Willis was cursed.

  But I made it, didn't 1? he reflected now on the rumbling bus.

  By thirty, he knew he'd simply never be able to have an intimate relationship with anyone. He sought his own sexual satisfaction by his own means-as introverted as it seemed-and still did the world some good. This was harder to reckon with sometimes since Willis, by most standards, was an attractive man. At the clinic, his nickname was "Dr. Cutie." But still, he had his resolve, he had his ideals, and he knew that he had genuinely helped a lot of people before he'd lost his license.

  Just don't think about it now, he groaned to himself. And another thing he didn't want to think about was the complexity of what he was encroaching. He'd never even heard of Vivica Hildreth but he most certainly had
heard of her husband's "entertainment" business, T&T Enterprises, and the one other name in the solicitation letter, too. The letter that came with the package read: The object in this box is a bracelet that belonged to a woman named Jane Scharr. Her stage name was Janey Jism, a porn star, obviously. The coincidence was uncanny; Willis was well-familiar with Ms. Scharr's work. The letter continued, Please consider testing your skills on the bracelet. If you decide that you'd like to further investigate the entirety of the night in question, with other professionals in your field, please know that you will be paid ten times the amount of the enclosed retainer. Contact my office if you'd care to proceed further. Travel arrangements and accommodations will be provided. You may keep the retainer regardless of your decision.

  Sincerely,

  Vvica Hildreth

  "Jesus," he muttered now at the memory. Willis' little excuse for an office didn't exactly haul in the money; he was lucky now to make twenty grand a year. Vivica Hildreth's retainer was $10,000.

  What could he do? He needed the money.

  He shook the tiny Express-Mail package once, heard the links of the tiny bracelet rattle a little. He contemplated taking it out of its velvet sack again just to look at it-but rejected the idea at once and just peered inside. It was an attractive bracelet, a silver chain dotted with tiny amethysts. A crystologist would assert that amethyst and silver would protect the wearer from evil. Sure didn't work for her, Willis thought, holding the sack. Sure didn't protect Jane Scharr from anything. When he'd first held it, the day he'd gotten the package at his squalid L.A. apartment, he'd almost fallen on the floor. He'd seen image-fragments of muscular men, their naked bodies glistening as they calmly cut the throats of several women to then drain their blood into buckets. Candles flickering as an orgy ensued, then a tall, lean, and somehow distinguished-looking man axing the sexual participants down, burying the blade one swipe after the next into backs, heads, and groins. And there, in the corner of a room that seemed to be sweating blood, was Jane Scharr aka Janey Jism, oblivious as her drug-glazed eyes looked up from the female crotch she had her face buried in just in time to catch the blade between the eyes. Then, in silent thunks, her hands and feet were summarily chopped off. Her body was lifted up twitching and tossed onto a pile of still more hacked bodies. Meanwhile, the woman she'd been orally indulging picked up her severed hand and used it to masturbate ...