Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee Read online

  More darkness sifted into Adrianne's mind. "She committed suicide last Christmas. She couldn't walk, had no sensation on the left side of her body for the last two years."

  "Oh, God. I'm sorry."

  "She was greedy. She was too into the power trip, and maxed herself out. But she was the best in the world."

  "Now you are."

  "Uh-uh. You should see some of the kids they're bringing in now. There's one boy who's only fourteen and he can... " but Adrianne cut it off there. She knew she was talking too much.

  "Sorry. I shouldn't have pried." She shot the first bright smile since she'd sat down. "It's good to see you, though. I didn't mean to run at the mouth. I know you don't like to be bothered and to chat much and all that. It's just nice to. .. sit next to someone I know"

  "Yes, it is, and it's good to see you too," Adrianne replied.

  Cathleen let out a long breath, rubbed her eyes. "God... "

  "Rough night?"

  "Yes," was all Cathleen said.

  A stilted stewardess squawked through the always ignored pre-takeoff safety instructions. Adrianne let it go out the other ear, preferred the steady whine of the turbine. She didn't care where the exit door was because she genuinely wasn't afraid to die. She knew there was a Heaven because she'd gotten to see it several times.

  And once she got to that house in Florida, she wondered if she'd get to see Hell.

  V

  Clements couldn't say why he would describe the mansion in this way; it was just a feeling in him, a throb in his gut.

  The mansion looked maniacal.

  Its front must've been fifty yards long. Gray stonework raised the outer walls five stories. The severely inclined roof was covered with gray slate, gutter lines and parapets running with intricate cut-iron crestings. Even the drainpipes and rainwater heads sported pointed arches and fleurs-de-lys.

  All gray.

  If disconsolation had a color, this was it.

  The front existed as a plane of gun-slit windows with pointed-arch transoms and filled with lead-lined stained glass, most of the panes of which looked black. Two cylindrical brick chimney stacks poked up atop the center rampart, like horns.

  Clements shivered.

  "You don't mind if I coke up, do ya?" the girl asked. She held up a crack pipe.

  Clements' eyes bolted from his binoculars straight to her face. Just the idea soured him, made him want to rage. "Yeah, I mind very much."

  "Because it's against the fuckin' law."

  "So is picking up hookers."

  His lips pursed. He'd never hit a woman in his life but just that second, without thinking, he felt the impulse to crack her across the face as hard as he could. "That's different-"

  "Oh yeah," she laughed, slipping the pipe back into her shorts.

  "The people you buy that from are the same people selling it to nine-year-olds on playgrounds. The same people who want to keep the poor stuck in their ghettos, the same people who've enslaved you. And you know what, those people buy their supply from cartels in South America who give hundreds of millions of dollars to the people who brought the World Trade Center down and killed four thousand some odd people. So just think about that. Any time you buy yourself a twenty-rock, a penny or two of that twenty goes to psychos who love to murder women and children."

  She didn't listen to half the diatribe, her bloodshot eyes looked back out into the night.

  Clements brought his own eyes back to the Zeiss binoculars, watching the front of the house. The sun was going down now, painting the front face of the edifice with edges of orange, as if its framework were aflame. Soon, he suspected, the outdoor floodlights would come on. If they didn't, Clements also had an infra-red monocular and a Unerd low-light scope. He wanted very much to see if the men brought anything out.

  "Who're those guys?" the girl asked.

  Clements had forgotten her name because they were all the same: Snowdrop, Teardrop, Candy, Kitty. He wasn't even doing a trick tonight; usually he paid more attention. "Fu migators," he answered, still staring at the house through the bright, infinity-shaped field.

  "So you're waiting for them?"

  ,.Yes

  " ?" VVhy

  "You ask too many questions."

  She was a half-starved urchin like most of them but beneath the hollows of her cheeks and sunken eyes and the zero body fat physique, she hadn't lost all of her looks yet. Tramp appeal, was how Clements thought of it in his own mind. He just had a thing for it, like the girl's own addictions only his wasn't smoked out of a pipe. He couldn't help it. He was always good to them, and always dropped them off where they wanted, and he even paid a little more than the going street price for services, which was low anyway. Street whores were his jones.

  She rubbed her upper arms, itching for the pipe. "Look, you gave me a hundred for an hour, and that's good money but-" She pointed to the clock in the dash. "you've got fifteen minutes left so if you want any action on that c-note, we better get started."

  He put the glasses down a moment to light a cigarette. "I told you, this one's not a trick, I just want you to talk." He looked back to the house. "About there."

  "I've seen you cruising all the time but you've never picked me up. Then the other chicks tell me you're a great john-"

  He almost laughed. "Thanks"

  "Now you got me and you don't want nothing."

  "I just want to know about the house, and the girl in the picture."

  "I told you pretty much everything... " Her attention seemed to slip. "How did you even know I'd been to the house in the first place?"

  Clements spewed smoke, ghost-like, out the window. With no breeze at all, it seemed to hover as it spread--2 disembodied face looking back. "One of the other girls told me.

  "Which one?"

  Clements sighed. "Teardrop, Snowdrop, Candy-something like that."

  "Well, I told ya, I saw the girl, Debbie, one time."

  "This girl?" Clements made her clarify and showed her the picture again. "You're sure?"

  Her eyes dragged back. Now she had her hands on her knees, rocking them back and forth. "Yeah."

  "What was she doing? Was she doing sexual stuff?"

  "Nope. It was weird. So many people walkin' around in there naked, or barely wearing anything, but then I saw her come down the hall, wearing business-chick stuff."

  "Was she affiliated with the Hildreth's porn business?"

  "I don't know."

  "You see her do drugs?"

  "No. Not the one time I saw her. One of guys was taking me and the other girls-"

  "The other hookers?"

  "Yeah, he was taking us to our room. He called it the something-or-other parlor; it had a name, a lot of them rooms did, and it was upstairs on the third floor. Then the girl--Debbie---stops us and asked if we needed anything. Seemed kind'a nice. She brought us some bottled water, and that was it. That was the one and only time I saw her."

  "How many times were you in the house total?"

  "Six, seven."

  "How'd you hear about the place, the gig?"

  "Brandy."

  One of the three, Clements realized. One of the three who got their throats cut. He snorted a laugh. "You're a lucky girl."

  "I know I was supposed to be there that night but I was in county detent. A plainclothes U.S. Marshal busted me on 34th Street. Can ya believe it? And I'd have been there, too, in a heartbeat. Something even told me in my gut-had a bad feeling, you know? Told me if I worked 34th Street, I'd get busted. And look what happens. I spend the night in jail, and my three friends get killed." She glanced anxiously back out the window, not at the house, at the night. "Maybe there really is a God"

  Clements dragged his cigarette. "Yeah. Maybe there is." When he looked back in the binoculars, he kept talking. "What were you saying earlier, about another door, a special entrance?"

  "It's way over on the side, it was between two windows, and didn't really even look like a door. That's where they'd park the limo, and
it was a different road to the house, not this main drive out here."

  Hmm, he thought. "I didn't know that. I'll need you to show me that access when we leave."

  "Yeah, sure, when we leave in-" She looked at the dash clock again. "-in five minutes. But that side door? It wasn't just the hookers they'd bring in that way, it was everyone."

  "I wonder why."

  "I don't know Maybe they were worried about someone watching the house."

  "Why would someone watch the house?"

  She stopped wagging her knees enough to laugh. "Man, what are you doing?"

  "Oh, yeah," he muttered behind the binoculars. He had to think a minute to get his mind back on track. The girl was distracting him---scratching at that innate, desperate lust-but he was determined not to do that tonight. This was his investigation. This was business. "Everyone, you said? I heard the movie girls lived in the house."

  "They did, the guys too. But whenever they'd go out, I mean. Sometimes they'd go out to dinner downtown, and that side door's where they'd leave and come back in later."

  "I guess they just didn't want anybody seeing," Clements said.

  "Sure, whatever. Hey, man, your time's up. Take me back now. A deal's a deal. I'll show you that other road out of here through the woods, but I need to get back."

  Clements gave her another hundred. "I want you with me for another hour. I want to wait till the fumigators leave."

  "Oh, man, come on!" she objected.

  Clements didn't get it. "That's two hundred bucks I've given you for two hours. You're not going to make that much on the street on a week night. What are you complaining about? You don't have to strut for it, and you don't have to sweat cops."

  Now she was squeezing her knees till her knuckles turned white. "I'm going nuts here, man. Don't you understand?" For a moment it looked like she would break out into tears. "I'm a crack addict. I gotta fire up."

  Clements smirked, as much as he truly felt sorry for her. It wasn't the users, it was the dealers, the suppliers. Line them all up against the wall and machine-gun the motherfuckers. I'll even volunteer to mop up the blood...

  "Outside," he said.

  In a half-second she was out of the car. He could hear her lighter flick.

  Movement caught his eye in the binoculars. Finally, they're done! He squinted. The sun was gone now and just as he'd suspected, the outside floodlamps flicked on. Four weary men in hazmat suits came out of the house. Damn, nobody carrying anything, but then what did he expect? Dead bodies? The police took all of those. Some occult relic? No, they'rejust there to fumigate the house. The four sat on the long stone front step, and Clements was curious about their facial expressions when they pulled off their gas masks. Deadpan. Faraway eyes. None of them were even talking.

  "Looks like your guys are out," the girl said when she got back in the car. She sat in her stifled, keyed-up bliss.

  "Yeah. You should see their faces. They all look really disturbed. Something about that place must've really spooked them."

  "You don't have to tell me about that. It's the creepiest place I've ever been in my life. Just walking around inside."

  "Yeah?"

  "Like walking around a graveyard where all the bodies were just buried a day ago. I sure as shit never want to go in there again."

  I do, Clements thought. He'd already been in once.

  The fumigation crew was just sitting there. Maybe they're not done, he considered. Of course it would be a big job, and he presumed that Vivica Hildreth had paid them big money. Were they waiting for someone else? No, he was certain there'd been only four of them, just after the clean-up crew had left.

  "So it was pretty much just orgies going on there, huh?" he continued to prod.

  "I mean, I guess. That's what it sounded like. Lot of hootin' and hollerin'. Big party going on somewhere-downstairs."

  "Maybe they were shooting movies for the porn company."

  "Maybe. With all the naked people walking around, I can believe it. Really good-looking people too. Most of the men were all buffed up, and the women? There were beautiful women all over the place, not junkies, either. These girls were tan, implants, great bods. Shit what I wouldn't give. And they seemed normal too, party girls, sure, but not whacked out. At first I thought they were just big-money call girls, but then I started hearing about the porn company that Hildreth owned. Then the last few times I was there..."

  "What?"

  "Shit, we could see them walking around, me and the girls I was there with. We'd open the parlor door a crack and look out. Really freaky shit-satanic stuff."

  This verification perked Clements up. "Why do you say that? Did you see them doing an occult rite, a black mass, something like that? Why exactly do you think it was something satanic?"

  "The girls, man. The way they looked."

  "But you said they looked normal. Beautiful, like pin-up girls-,,

  "Yeah, earlier. But later on, after midnight, we'd look out that door, and none of the lights were on anymore. Just candles. All through the foyer and downstairs. And the girls would walk by our door sometimes. Black lipstick, black fingernails and toenails. It looked like fuckin' Halloween, man. Oh, and the piercings."

  "What piercings? Body-piercings, you mean?"

  "Yeah. One time-the last night I was there-one of the girls saw us looking out so she stood there and kind of giggled, and posed for us. Her nipples, bellybutton, and cht were pierced with rings, and hangin' off each ring was a lit tle black upside-down cross. Earrings like that too." The prostitute rubbed her face. "Now, if that ain't fuckin' satanic, I don't know what is."

  Clements nodded; it was a fulfilling enlightenment. And he'd seen a pilfered autopsy report on a few of the girls: they'd all had piercing holes in their nipples, navels, and clitoral hoods.

  "Did the people at the house-these men-put piercings on you and the-" He stopped, almost having said, And the other crack whores?---but he recovered. "Your three friends?"

  "Hell no, man. I mean, we would've done it probably,'cos Hildreth was payin' out the an, plus all the crack we could smoke while we were there. With these guys? It was strictly scat stuff with them."

  "Scat?" Clements didn't know the term, which surprised him. Given his experience, he thought he'd heard all the darkest and most obscene street slang and underground lingo that was out there.

  She sighed, her bony shoulders dipping in what could only have been shame. "The gross stuff. Golden showers, Hershey showers-hell, one night they gave us each a spoonful of this awful tasting shit and made us puke on each other."

  Clements felt crushed by a sudden press of darkness in his heart. How could people do that? What could possibly be the turnon in watching a bunch of desperate girls shit and piss and mmit on each other? What mental perception could urge a very rich man to manipulate a group of victimized drug addicts to do these things? Clements was beginning to see that answer more and more.

  Maybe it really was evil.

  Her final note was worse.

  "Oh, and animals, too," she said.

  Clements spewed more smoke out the window, numbed.

  Her tone of voice was turning brittle, sardonic with resentment and self-loathing. "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking how could she do disgusting shit like that? Only a complete loser, a complete white trash piece of shit could do stuff like that... "

  He turned and grabbed her shoulder. "That's not what I'm thinking. Nothing like that at all. All I'm wondering is what kind of piece of shit could make somebody do stuff like that." He kept staring at the house. "And you know what? I wish I'd been there that night because I would've gone in there and killed them all, and I wouldn't care about taking the rap. It'd be worth a death sentence to take out a bunch of scumbags like those guys." Yes. He really could've done it.

  The girl was wiping tears out of her eyes, the meager remnants of the real her-the real person with a soul and a life and dreams-leaking through the rents that the world had carved into her.

/>   "Tell me about Hildreth. How many times did you see him?"

  "Five, six," she said. "Just coming and going. It was the other guys I saw all the time, the beefcake guys. Hildreth was always nice to us, even though we knew what he was all about before long."

  "So something else was going on in the house, while you girls stayed upstairs?"

  "Yeah. Some kind of freaky ritual, I guess."

  "But you and the others never went to one of the rituals?"

  "No. Never. They kept us upstairs for their little pregame show or whatever you want to call it. The men'd all stand around and watch while we did the scat stuff."

  "And then you'd-"

  She knew what he was going to ask. "No, that's the weird part. Hildreth and his guys never laid a hand on us, never wanted us to get 'em off. They'd all just stand around, buck naked, watching. We'd do it with men sometimes, just not Hildreth's men. They'd bring people in-crackheads, bums, rednecks all fucked up on PCP-and those guys would do us. A lot of times it was just plain rape. These guys would smack us around and rape us, while one of Hildreth's people would film it. It was pretty sickening sometimes, but the rock was so good-all we wanted when we were done. You'd have to be hooked to know what I mean. And the whole time, Hildreth and his guys would watch. Sometimes they'd say weird shit, like we were being seasoned. We needed to be debased. How do you like that shit? I remember one night one of these boneheads looked at me and said `You're not soiled enough yet.' Then he-" Her eyes went back to the window, as if there were safety out there. "Then he brought in a goat."

  Yes. Clements knew that he could easily have killed them all. Just walk in there with the Remington ... and start pumping. He needed to change topics, for this one, as informative as it may have been, was making him too depressed. "And the pay waste

  "A grand apiece, each night, for each of us. And all the crack we could smoke before sundown. When we were done doing the scat stuff, Hildreth would bring in a bond of it, like someone would put out a bowl of fuckin' afterdinner mints. They'd go downstairs for their little devil party and we'd sit up in the parlor and crack it up till dawn. Someone'd drive us back in the limo in the morning."