Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee (13 page)

Westmore was intrigued by the information. "He wanted
you for something else? What?"

"I'm not sure. Imagery, I think. He was always talking
about imagery, the imagery of the flesh, the energy of
lust-a stimulated environment. It sounds crazy, doesn't it?"

"Sure, and he was crazy."

"I don't know about that."

"You just said he was evil, he was a psychopath."

"Neither of those things has to mean he's crazy. He
was ... something else. You'd have to have been there to
get it. I guess Three-Balls and Jar got closer to that part of
him-the men."

"But they're all dead now. No one left to tell the tale."

She didn't say anything, her sullenness casting a shadow
over her.

"The imagery of the flesh?" Westmore went on. "A
stimulated environment? Sounds crazy to me. What's all that
mean?"

"Only Hildreth knew"

"Yeah, but what do you think?"

"All I can say is, wait till you get to the house. Wait till
you've spent your first night in that place." Her voice
roughened. "It'll start to seep into you."

He didn't want to press her anymore; he'd burn her out.
The subject by now had drained her, and probably just kept
reminding her of what she walked into on April 3rd. Instead, he said, "I'm looking forward to it. You've got my curiosity stoked."

More silence. Westmore let it go. Strip malls and traffic
passed in a blur. He tried to relax, tried to clear his mind
and closed his eyes to the sun.

Miles later she laughed faintly and said, "Earlier you
asked me if I was psychic."

"Yeah?"

She was pulling up now, onto a long wooded road.
"I'm not, but the people you're about to meet are."

After her shower in one of the luxurious third floor suites,
Cathleen walked the grounds. She'd always thought of herself as practical in such situations but now ... she felt uncomfortable. She didn't tell anybody-she'd feel weak and
silly, and she mustn't present that appearance. But she could
feel it; she could feel it on her skin:

There's something about that house.

Standing in the sun, she glanced back at the mansion. A
car engine could be heard, then she saw a black convertible
cruising up the road to the outer court before the front
doors. For the hell of it, she quickly plucked some petals off
a lone rhododendron and dropped them in the grass between her feet, keeping her eyes on the car. It was an ancient but simple augury dating back to the Aztecs. If two or
more petal-stalks pointed away from her, that was considered a positive omen; if they pointed toward her: ill omen.
She took her eyes off the car and looked down. Oh, great,
she thought. The stalk of each petal pointed toward her.
She squinted a last time at the car and thought she saw a
blonde woman driving and a man with glasses in the passenger seat. I wonder who they are ...

Cathleen was multifaceted; she was "into" many things.
Personally, she considered herself a medium-since she'd
long ago abandoned further pursuits in telekinesis--but she
also possessed other sensitivities: crystology, divination,
palmistry. At the height of passion-or lust-she could read thoughts. But she was mainly a medium-nothing very
complicated. Sometimes things came to her. Sometimes
they acted through her.

She worshiped God and Buddha, Nergal and Ra, Mohammad and the Earth Mother ... because she knew they
were all the same.

Her only major problem was sin ... but that was another
story.

God, it's beautiful, she thought, traipsing past the grounds
proper. The mansion behind her, she proceeded into the
woods, barefoot, a pale-lime sundress hugging her body. The
sun played in her blonde hair but its heat dropped drastically
when she stepped past a bordering weeping willow that
must've been a century old. She didn't notice a single palm
tree up here on the hill, just hundred-foot pine trees and the
sprawling willows whose branches hung draped with Spanish moss. Deeper in the verge of woods she found herself
walking on beautiful beds of wildflowers-carpets of pyxies and pink and white malts of arbutus. Look at me, I'm the
Nature Girl, I'm the happy sprite of the forest, she thought, and
then she thought: Fuck! when her bare foot landed on a
stem of sand spurs. She hopped away, feeling ridiculous, to
lean against a tree and pick them out. God, those things hurt!

Beyond, the forest seemed to grow more dense, kudzu
and other vines stretching across trees like twisted cordons.
The forest's aromas enticed her but at first she didn't see a
point in going on-the vines too thick, the overgrowth too
wild, but then she noticed a pass, and what seemed to be a
gate.

perhaps her inclinations had brought her here, for she
wasn't just out for a walk.

She was looking for something.

This isit...

The oblong shape of land looked carved into the forest's
denseness: a graveyard. A spiked iron fence encrusted with
rust formed the perimeter. Uneven ranks of stones pegged
the rust-covered ground. Some stones dated back to the
mid-1800s, while the markers in the rear appeared to be a
haphazard cuttings of granite with hand-chiseled names
that could no longer be read. Cathleen crunched back to
the furthest corner, and noticed a date from the 1600s.

This place went WAY back.

She wondered what else did.

Back toward the front she found what she'd come for.

REGINALD HILDRETH read the new but simple
black-granite. D: 4-3-2004. Cathleen wasn't puzzled by the
exclusion of a date of birth. Hildreth liked to keep people uaon-
dering, she suspected. A phony. It was the house that bothered her, not the man-at least at this point.

I came herefor this, so let's do it, she told herself. She knelt
six feet from the stone, set her bag down. From the mansion's pantry she'd brought some things, and she removed
one now: an egg. Nothing special, just a Grade-A Large, no
doubt from the nearest grocery store. With a sandstone
spike--a relic given to her from an archaeologist-she
gently tapped each end of the egg, breaking a hole. Then
she tipped her head back, brought the egg to her lips, and
blew. Its contents splattered upward in a plume, then the
plume inconveniently landed in an angled line to her right.

Half-aced, she realized. She believed in divination and
had used it successfully many times, but she knew she still
hadn't acquired the right frame of mind. I'm not taking it
seriously.

She stood up and tapped another egg with the countersink-like nail of sandstone. Then she thought about ...

Sex.

She closed her eyes and filled her mind with it, imagined
herself naked and sweating and mad with lust as some faceless man pushed her knees back to her shoulders and penetrated her right here in the woods, her bare rump grinding
in the dirt. She imagined his weight pressing down, his skin
sliding against hers. The simple image excited her in seconds; she felt her nipples tingle as if tweezed by hard fingers. She began to feel flush. Sexuality was her charge-it
stoked her predispositions. It solicited the spirits.

Sweating and short of breath now from all the lust in her
head, she kept her eyes closed and blew the insides out of
the egg, aiming toward Hildreth's grave.

When she looked, she couldn't believe it.

The viscid plume had flown wildly to her right, au iy
from the grave.

"Okay, okay," she whispered to herself. "Time to try an
alomance." She stood up, looked without much concern toward the pass which led to the graveyard. She saw no one.

Then she pushed off her shoulder straps and let the sundress fall to the ground, totally naked beneath. Her innerself felt something stir at once, something beyond her.
Seikthas or lieppya,-benevolent spirits which inhabited
trees or congregated near graves-or simple curious wraiths
attracted to her sudden nudity. Ghosts, or even buoyed
souls. It didn't matter what; she knew something was there
because she could feel it in her blood.

From her bag she withdrew three more things: a cigarette
lighter, a two-by-two-inch square of aluminum foil, and a
small baggie containing some sea salt.

"Damn," she was caught by surprise. A sudden breeze
blew the piece of foil away. It landed ten feet from her.

Without even thinking, she looked at it, held her breath
for a moment, and willed it back. As if blown by an identical reverse breeze, the foil sailed back into her hand.

It was easy. It wasn't even something she gave much
thought to anymore.

All right ...

She formed the foil into a crude cup, then sprinkled a
pinch of the salt into it. She cleared her mind of distractions, walked slowly around the cemetery grounds. She
thought only of physical desire, and spirits. She was beseeching them, drawing them out. Her feet crunched quietly over the underbrush. Her skin shone in a mist of sweat,
and she felt her heartbeat pick up, and as she walked she
brushed the tips of her fingers up her thighs. Over her
stomach ...

She returned to the foot of the grave, focused, pin-point.
Her bare breasts rose and fell with her quickened breaths.
Envisioning herself on the supplication platform of the
highest ziggurat, she whispered a prayer to Ea, the god of
the sky and of forests, then held the lighter flame beneath
the foil cup of salt.

The salt crackled minutely, began to sputter and burn.
Great Ea, she thought. Hear me ... When a pale tendril of
smoke rose from the cup, Cathleen inclined her head and
inhaled it.

She fought not to cough, held it in. But before she could
search her mind for a portent-

Something grabbed her. Not hands, not a person, but
something only semi-palpable, as if she'd been seized by the
air. When she snapped her eyes open, she saw only a tullelike veil of black. Mesoplasm? she wondered, not afraid yet.
She'd be afraid in another moment. Whatever it was, it
lacked luminosity so it couldn't be spirit-based. What is
that? she thought peering into it.

Then she could see nothing; her eyes seemed to close on
their own, that or something like a hand slipped over them. Chuckling tittered about her head, dark, throaty noises of
glee, but they were muffled as if through closed mouths.
Then, blind, she was jerked off her feet, back arched, tousled
around. Now she was afraid. She tried to scream and release
the salt-fumes in the same action but-

Not fast enough.

Something slammed her chin up, something else pinched
her lips closed, then something like an awful mouth full of
dead breath but totally lacking substance sealed over her
nose and sucked all the fumes out of her.

More guttering laughter flitted around her and the ghostmouth sucked and sucked, stealing all that was left of her
breath and everything that breath contained, harder and
harder until she grew numb and the reversed pressure
threatened to collapse her lungs.

When it was finally released, she was slammed down hard
on her bare back. Had she been hovering in mid-air? The
back of her head hit the ground so hard her consciousness
drained. She still could see only blackness, but then that
blackness grew even darker. She felt things feeling her,
pinching her nipples, plying her breasts and buttocks like
dough. Some intricate force yanked her naked legs out
straight by the ankles and wishboned her quivering legs, and
then more things began to play with her sex, and that's
when she passed out.

When Cathleen awoke, she found herself sprawled on her
side, arms disarrayed, one leg kicked forward. Bits of leaves
and twig fragments flecked her blonde hair. As her consciousness rekindled, she had the sense of rising rapidly from
an abyss full of hot, black water.

Oh ... shit ...

She lay still for a moment, catching her breath, exhausted. When she glimpsed a ladybug crawling up one breast, she
flicked it off and then noticed the faintest bruises, fingermarks, but they seemed much longer than any conceivable
fingers. Trace bitemarks on her abdomen and thighs, and
one nipple had a threadlike black and blue ring, but again,
the mark seemed a much wider oval than human dentation.
She knew instantly what had happened:

Para planar rape ...

She maintained her objectivity, though; she'd seen all this
before, and had even experienced it a few times, her excessive
sexuality seeming to taunt wayward spirits more than most.
The only thing that bothered her, though, was the emotional
aftereffect. She didn't feel raped or exploited or victimized.

Jesus, I'm so screwed up in the head ...

She felt satisfied, her rampant yearnings for ecstacy and
release fully satiated. Then she thought:

Hildreth.

It had to be. It had all happened right at the foot of his
newly dug grave.

Or so she thought.

When she sat upright to brush the forest debris from her
bare skin, she expected to find herself facing Hildreth's
black gravestone. Instead she found herself outside of the
cemetery altogether, ten feet at least past the iron fence.

To the extreme right of the grave.