Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee (23 page)

Westmore had nothing else to do. Except begin writing
whatever it is I'm supposed to write. "Sure."

"Let's go upstairs to the Scarlet Room."

Mack jerked a more concerned glance at them this time.
"You guys got balls going in there at this hour."

"Why, Mack?" Nyvysk challenged.

"It's creepy enough during the day You wanna give
yourself nightmares, go ahead."

Westmore followed Nyvysk up five winding staircases.
From behind, in the meager light, the man looked like a
hulk with the long hair and wide shoulders. Each floor
seemed darker, more grainy, with a soundlessness that somehow seemed beyond silence.

"Are you a believer yet, Mr. Westmore?" Nyvysk asked,
back still to him. The low voice echoed.

"I'm open minded," Westmore answered. "But I haven't
seen any ghosts yet."

"What about Mack? He thinks this is all a joke that he
can ride along on."

Westmore shrugged. "He's Vivica's errand boy."

"Is that all, though? I don't know. He appears to have
been close to Hildreth, too. He knows all about the house."

"Then he's the family errand boy, I guess. I don't much
care about him if you want to know the truth. I don't think
he likes anybody here, just pretends to be cool."

"Maybe he's Vivica's spy."

Well, that would be me, actually. "Maybe. Or maybe he's just
maintaining security like he said, to make sure we don't
trash the place. This house and everything in it must've cost
twenty million."

Nyvysk turned up the next landing, to the fifth. "I don't
trust Mack."

"You trust me enough to tell me that?"

"Yes," he said, lower. More to himself: "You might be the
only trustworthy one here."

Westmore appreciated the remark but not too deeply.
Nyvysk could easily be playing him, just as anyone could
here. Westmore was totally blind in the thick of it all. But
the implication struck home. Something about this place or
these particular people-or both-ignited quite a fire of
suspicion. He wished he could tell Nyvysk he intended to dig up Hildreth's grave tomorrow ... but thought the better of it.

He knew he couldn't tell anyone that.

Maybe Pivica's the one being played. By Mack, or even
Karen...

"Here we are." Nyvysk stopped, seemed unsettled. Just a
heavily molded door stood before them. On the floor were
three cylindrical implements fronted by grills, that looked
like fancy air-purifiers.

"What're those?"

"They're gauss sensors, the newest generation. I need you
to arrange them in the room, three wide positions, facing
each other. They're a little weighty-they have portable battery packs that I have to charge every day. But when you're
done-" He picked up a roll of cable on the floor. "Plug this
into the jack on the videocom, please. It shouldn't take more
than a few minutes."

"Piece of cake." Westmore picked up the devices and
wire. Nyvysk opened the door, then stood back. "Aren't
you coming in?"

Nyvysk shook his head.

Westmore's brow lowered. "Something wrong?"

"I'll tell you when you're done. I can't go in the room."

Westmore entered, not at all reading the other man's suddenly weird attitude. Whatever. He didn't care. He wanted
to see the infamous Scarlet Room.

Low lights from electric wall fixtures filled the room
with a solemnness. This is it. All those people murdered by Hildreth and his boys. In a second, he understood Mack's observation about the room: even someone who didn't believe in
the supernatural would be bothered by coming in here.

But why hadn't Nyvysk come in?

Everything was red. Furniture, carpet, wall-coverings. Odder was the room's center, which stood empty, where
one would expect to find more furniture. Stillness surrounded him with the flickering, tinted light.

He arranged the gauss sensors as instructed, then connected
the end-cable to the corn-jack. There. Big deal. I'm done.

The deepest impressions set in when he crossed the carpet again to get back to the door, his belly flipflopping.
There were bodies lying here, and parts of bodies, he thought.
Three weeks ago, the carpet I'm walking over was drenched in
blood. When he was back in the hall, he felt normal again.

"All set up?" Nyvysk asked.

"Yeah. Don't you want to go look, make sure they're in
the right position?"

Nyvysk shook his head again.

Westmore lit a cigarette, looked at the man. "I didn't
mind doing it, but ... you could've done it just as fast as
me. How come you didn't want to go in the room?"

Nyvysk nervously pushed his hair back, led them both
back toward the stairs. "I'm too afraid to," he finally said.

Westmore considered the man's size and constitution.
"Come on. You don't look like the kind of guy who's
afraid of much. What, the ghosts?" Westmore smiled.
"There weren't any in there that I could see."

"Let me play some of these EVP's for you," was all
Nyvysk said.

Back in the communications room on the third floor,
Nyvysk quietly addressed his equipment, and seemed to be
clicking on sound files on the big computer. "Listen. These
are some voices that were picked up in one of the parlors."

Westmore put an ear to the speaker. He heard nothing
but dead air at first. Then:

A scratchy voice from far away, a woman's: "Look."

Another woman: "Who're they?"

Several seconds of silence, then a man's voice: "I wanna
cut something up."

Westmore fingered his chin. "Interesting."

"Here's one from the stairwell hallway leading to the
stairs to the first floor."

Westmore listened intently, fascinated. He heard faint
thumping, like someone walking in a stagger. "Where's my
knife?" a man said.

A woman: "I think you left it in the bucket with the
blood."

"Where's Jaz?"

"He's bringing the heads down when he's done fucking...

Westmore backed up from the speaker. "When were
these recorded?"

,>
"T

He recalled the name, too, from his shocking conversation with Karen. Jaz. One of Hildreth's porn guys.

"I've got a dozen or so of these just from today" Nyvysk
said. "You don't need to hear them all but you get the idea.
Oh, and I know what you're thinking. Recordings are
pretty weak proof of a haunting."

"That is what I'm thinking. That stuff could easily be
created or staged."

"Of course, it could. But we're not looking for proof
anymore; we're confident that the house is charged. From
our point of view, these messages serve as an information
source. It doesn't matter if you believe it. We do, so we're
proceeding in a practical manner."

Of course. Westmore was the outsider here. "But I'll also
admit, if those recordings are for real-it is a big deal."

"From your standpoint, yes. You've never experienced
anything like this before. But from a psychic standpoint, or the standpoint of a technician such as myself-we've heard
things like this a million times. We're not surprised at all."

"So what's this got to do with you being afraid to go into
the Scarlet Room?"

Nyvysk clicked on another file.

"Rejoice in him, rejoice in what awaits," a tiny voice
whispered after some silence. "Rejoice and join hands with
us...

The voice sounded male, with an obvious middle-eastern
accent. "Like this place, my love never dies. I love you."

Westmore leaned closer.

"I await you, Alexander. Don't make me wait too long."

"Who's Alexander?" Westmore asked.

"Me," Nyvysk said.

Westmore stared at him.

"And the voice is that of a twenty-year-old Kurd exorcist
named Saeed. I fell in love with him, so to speak, in Iraq,
twenty years ago."

"So, uh, you're-"

"I'm gay, if you will. I don't believe that God has a problem with that but the Catholic Church certainly does,
which is why I stepped down from the priesthood a long
time ago. But to this day, I haven't broken my vow of
celibacy."

Here was a bombshell.

"Everyone in this house has a secret, Mr. Westmore. I
suspect that you do too. At any rate, the young man on that
recording from the Scarlet Room has been dead since the
day I met him. I was supposed to see him later that day, but
I didn't at the last minute, a moral reluctance, I guess. He
was murdered by muggers, waiting for me in an alley near
what was once the market square of the ancient city of
Nineveh."

Jesus, Westmore thought.

Nyvysk was showing him out. "There's no reason for
you to stay here, the tapes are all similar, if not grim. Tomorrow I'll have the ion-sensors working. I'm sure you'll
be fascinated by the results."

Westmore took his word for it. He'd be going to sleep
soon, and he didn't need those voices in his head. "Let me
check on the locksmith while we're up here," he said, looking for a distraction. Secrets, he thought. Yes, he supposed
there were all kinds of secrets around here.

In the office, there was no sign of Vanni. "I wonder
where she is." The safe in the wall remained closed.

"Where is this safe?" Nyvysk asked. "I haven't even
seen it."

Westmore pointed. "Talk about a secret. It was hidden
behind two paintings and an armoire."

Nyvysk looked down at the two frames leaning against
the wall, and picked up the engraving. "Oh, this is very interesting right here."

..w?„

"It appears to be an original work by a German engraving artist named Stettin Albrecht. He was known to dabble
in the occult and make custom engravings for rich satanic
societies."

"Why's he important enough for Hildreth to hide his
picture?"

"Nobody knows how for real Albrecht was, but it's fairly
certain that his patrons weren't for real, not genuine satanists,
in other words. The idle and very debauched rich just going through the motions because a `satanic' orgy was more
interesting than regular orgies. These societies merely
looked for an alternate excuse for sex, pretending that their
satan-worship was their under-the-table revolution, their rebellion against a very oppressive Church. So Albrecht was
hired by these people to render portraits of Lucifer and the
other demons. If this is original, it may be worth low six
figures

Westmore shook his head at the engraving. "I don't
know from engravings, but it doesn't look that good to me."

"No, Albrecht wasn't known for any great skill or talent,
he was essentially a hack with tin plates and a burin-tool.
The conditions and age of the piece is what warrants a high
sale price. But-" Nyvysk's eyes poured over the plate. "I
doubt that its value to a collector was why Hildreth purchased it."

"What, then?"

"This is ... troubling."

"I don't understand."

"Look at the engraving within the engraving." Nyvysk's
big finger pointed.

"A monster, it looks like," Westmore said.

"Not a monster, a demon, and this seems to be the only
artistic rendering of it. Albrecht would typically be hired to
depict the more well-known demons such as Asmodeus,
Baal, and the like. The same way artists at fairs do portraits
of famous baseball players. They don't do many thirdstringers, do they? This demon here, I mean. Is much more
obscure in the realms of the occult."

Now he pointed to the caption: MY SELF AS I DARE
TO REFASHION THE COUNTENANCE OF MY VISION: BELARIUS.

"Belarius?" Westmore thought back to old lit classes.
"That name rings a bell now that I think of it. A character
in Shakespeare, right? Cymbeline?"

"I'm afraid this Belarius is quite different from Shakespeare's amorous warlord. Belarius was Lucifer's first servant in Hell, and, according to the compendiums, Lucifer rewarded Belarius for his loyalty. He was made the Sexus
Cyning, which is very old-English for something like the
Lord of Lust, the magnate of sex, something along those
lines. If Lucifer is the Prince of Darkness, Belarius is the
Prince of Carnality."

Nyvysk set the frame back down, sullen. His eyes had
widened in some knowing dread.

"What's wrong now?" Westmore asked, irritated by the
man's sudden crypticness. To him, a demon was a demon.
Like Roman gods and other nature-symbols of mythology.

"Follow me."

Nyvysk took him back to the communications room. He
clicked on another voice file. "This is from the parlor
where the prostitutes were beheaded."

Westmore could only hear a barely audible drone, like listening to a blank tape with the sound all the way up.

Then he heard it, a single group of heavy syllables
through a warbling, suboctave voice: "Belarius ..."

"Call it," Diane said.

"Heads," Jessica answered. She knew her luck. She
caught the coin and frowned. Tails. I lose.

Diane was polite enough not to laugh out loud. "Tough
luck, sister. This is what we get for dropping out of high
school."

"Yeah."

"You get to wash the Sack!"

That's what they'd dubbed Faye Mullins. The Sack. Because that's what she looked like.

Diane was just getting off-shift. "At least she shouldn't
be acting nutty today. Didn't make a sound all night. The
Prolixin hit her hard this time."

"You probably slipped her a double dose just to keep her
quiet during your shift," Jessica suspected.

"Me?" Diane's grin sharpened. "That would constitute
an extreme occupational dereliction. Of course, if you
think I do stuff like that, you can turn in a written complaint to the ward director."

Jessica got the joke. They all did it sometimes, they had to.
Some of these patients just took too much out of you, and
no one gave a crap about them anyway. They were lost and
had somehow landed here. The families paid the in-patient
bills to keep them shut away. Out of sight out of mind.

But Jessica wondered who was paying the Sack's bills. No
living relatives were listed on her admittance form. Doesn't
matter to me, she realized. 1 just get paid to wash their dirty butts.