Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee (27 page)

"So where did this happen?" he asked.

"The inner courtyard." She winced thinking about it. "It
was probably just a dream."

"It was no dream," Cathleen felt confident. Then she
asked a seemingly irrelevant question: "What were you
wearing?"

Karen's shoulders drooped. "Nothing. I was sunbathing.
No one was around so I took everything off."

"Mobilizing imagery?" Nyvysk asked.

"I think so," Cathleen said. "This house is very sexual.
We all felt that the minute we walked in. When I was doing
my alomance in the graveyard, I was naked."

"And when I did my OBE, I was only wearing my bra
and panties. When I came back, they'd been taken off."

Maybe YOU took them of, Westmore had to think.

"Shortly before this happened," Cathleen asked Karen
directly, "were you thinking about anything sexual? Whenever I do a divination, a seance, or try to make a contact, I
think back to some pleasurable sexual experience in my
past, not because I'm trying to summon anything but it
sometimes tunes my psi, makes my receptivity more keen."

"I sort of do the same thing before an OBE," Adrianne
admitted. "I've been orgasmically abstinent for years nowI have to be-but sexual thought always primes my senses,
helps me slip out of my body easier."

Westmore was stupefied by the talk. Orgasmically abstinent? Thinking about sex to summon "psi?"Jesus. This isn't exactly small-talk at a Tupper are party. He couldn't believe this.
And they were all serious.

"What about you, Karen?" Cathleen asked.

"Oh, jeez." Karen-unembarrassible-looked embarrassed; were it not for the tan, she'd be blushing. "Yes, I was
thinking about sex before I fell asleep."

"Sex with anyone in particular?" Willis asked, pouring
himself some lemonade.

"Sex with Hildreth, or any of the men who died here, or
any of the women?" Cathleen inquired.

"God, no! What difference does it make who?"

"Believe it or not," Nyvysk piped in, "it could be important. In a place like this? Some of the most powerful human
emotions are relative to sex-drive, and the same can be true
of any corresponding inhuman emotions, or discarnate emotions. This house is charged which, to you, means it's full of
spirits. Negative spirits, and probably very sexual spirits."

Westmore just sat and listened. Ordinarily he would've
scoffed. But now?

"All right," Karen confessed. "1 was ... fantasizing.
About Westmore."

Now Westmore blushed. That's just peachy ...

No one else was the least bit surprised. They listened,
serious.

"Were you asleep at this point?" Willis asked. He slid the
pitcher of lemonade to Westmore, who noticed that the
man was still wearing jersey gloves.

"It started out with me just thinking ... about sex with
Westmore. Then it changed to one of those things like
you're dreaming, you're seeing the dream, but you're still
awake-"

"Hypnapompia," Nyvysk and Willis said at the same
time.

Or hypnabullshitia, Westmore considered.

"-then I fell asleep and Westmore continued to be in the dream, but ... only for a few moments. Then I was
someplace else. In Hell, I think. Hildreth, Jaz, and ThreeBalls-but they had demon features. They were killing my
daughter, and me."

"The place?" Adrianne asked next. "Was it like a church
made of flesh? Something like that?"

"No," Karen said, lighting a cigarette to dispel her discomfort. "It was more like a prison cell, but there were some
holes in the wall, and through one of the holes, I did see
something like that. A temple that looked made of skin."

"That's what I saw," Adrianne said.

"The Chirice Flaesc," Nyvysk said grimly.

Adrianne was enthused. "That's the term the figure in
my vision used."

"The temple of worship for the Sexus Cyning," the older
man went on. "According to the Morakis grimoires and
other major demonological tomes, it's a church made of
flesh, the nexus for the lord of carnality-"

"Belarius," Westmore uttered, remembering Nyvysk's
explanation in the office. "The demon in the engraving,
and you also have a voice saying that name on one of the
EVP tapes."

"In my dream, Hildreth used that name, too," Karen acknowledged. "This is really scaring the shit out of me
now.

"Hildreth's pieces are starting to fit together." Nyvysk
was absently diddling with his beard. "He may well have
been using this house as a power icon, to revere Belarius.
Belarius is a very sexual demon, and this is a very sexual
house. Orgies, prostitutes, pornography, rape movies. The
sacrifices on April 3rd were sexually grounded." He looked
to Willis. "Your target-object visions the other day. You said
you saw Hildreth?"

"Yes," Willis said. "In the Jean Brohou Parlor, where the
prostitutes were throat-cut." He closed his eyes to pause.
"Hildreth and two men."

"Probably Jaz and that goddamn Three-Balls," Karen
said. "I saw them with Hildreth in the cell, before they
made me look at myself being raped."

"But who was raping you?" Cathleen asked with concern.

"No who, what. They were things. They were like
shadows-"

"Subcarnates," Willis said. "I saw them in my flash too.
Like touching an oily gas is the only way I can describe it."

"And the same kind of things were what molested me
near Hildreth's grave," Cathleen said. "Not a revenant of
Hildreth. They were like ... a pack of monsters that I
could only partially feel. I've been assaulted by subcarnates
before, but never like this."

Westmore interrupted with a smirk. "What the hell is a
subcarnate? A ghost?"

"Actually, no," Nyvysk said, "and utterly confusing to a
novice. A subcarnate is a surviving entity that's trying to become flesh, to become incarnated-but can't because its
physical body is dead."

"Sounds like a ghost," Westmore said.

"Or, if its physical body is somewhere else," Nyvysk
added. "Another plane, perhaps. But you get the idea."

Do I? Westmore thought.

"Strong living human emotions as well as revenant
residue can summon subcarnates," Nyvysk continued.
"And it's really making me think harder about this house."

"Like the house is an antenna," Adrianne posed, "and
Hildreth was tuning it, calibrating it, with more carnality-"

"And eventually ritualized sacrifices," Willis said.

"Yes," Nyvysk agreed. "But I don't really know anything
about the house since Hildreth bought it."

"Mack would know," Karen said.

"Where is he?" Cathleen asked.

"Probably sluffing somewhere," Karen added a pinch of
sarcasm.

"Sluffing? You can't possibly be talking about me." Mack
strode into the room, then switched on a television sports
show "I just got back from that damn locksmith company.
Says Vanni must've quit on him, 'cos he can't reach her."

"Maybe she ... ," Westmore began, but thought the better of it; however, Cathleen finished for him anyway:
"Maybe she saw something here"

Adrianne laughed. "Wouldn't be the first time a subcarnate scared somebody out of a house."

"Anyway," Mack went on, "The guy who owns the lock
place said he'll send somebody else out as soon as he can."

There went Westmore's hopes about the safe. There was
probably something in it that was much more understandable and concrete than ghosts, subcarnates, etc. Something
he could relate to.

"What do you know about the house, Mack?" Karen
asked. "Before Hildreth owned it?"

"Does it have a history?" Nyvysk asked.

"Well, yeah, now that you mention it." Mack sat down at
the table next to Westmore. "It's always had a rep that it's
haunted. In the early 1900's, it was a sort of a lockup treatment center for the Presbyterian church, for sick priests."

"Ministers, not priests," Nyvysk corrected.

"Whatever. These days if a priest or minister gets caught
messing with kids or boffing half the congregation, it's in
Time magazine. But back then it was very hush-hush. One
day the guy'd be in his church doing the sermon and the next day he's history, replaced. They'd shuffle him off in the
middle of the night and stick him here, to give him psych
counseling and keep him away from the public. Evidently,
some of these guys were really screwed up."

"Sex-addiction problems, in other words," Nyvysk augmented.

"Yeah." Mack helped himself to some lemonade, then
propped his feet up on the table. "And during World War
Two, and on into the early 'SOs, the mansion was a bordello.
It stayed open for a long time 'cos the madame had ties to
the cops, cut them in on the profits to look the other way,
even after the murders."

"Murders?" Karen asked. "I didn't know there were
other murders here."

"Yeah, a bunch of them. Especially right after the war.
Guys'd come home from Germany and the Pacific theater,
all boned up and still salty from killing, and they'd get carried away and wound up killing some of the hookers. There
was also a lot of sexual misadventure later, guys getting too
rough with the girls, taking the kinky stuff too far, and some
girls wound up dying."

"Interesting," Nyvysk commented. "More sexuallymotivated murder. A very powerful revenant residue. Sex
truly is a component part of the charge of this mansion.
There's a full century of negative sexual energy here."

"What exactly does that mean?" Westmore asked.

"We think of any so-called haunted house as a `charged'
location. Charges can manipulate the living, especially to
those who are psychically attuned. Take a house where
there's been multiple murders. Those murders leave a
residue, so to speak, of negative energy, in which discorpo-
rates, subcarnates, spirits, etc., gain strength. If a homicidal
person enters such a house, the charge accelerates, becomes stronger. The charge in a house where a suicide occurs becomes stronger when a depressed or suicidal person enters.
And this house?"

"A double whammy," Cathleen said.

"Quite so. Sexually-motivated murder leaves the
strongest charge for they involve two of the strongest human emotions: hatred and lust. Such revenant energy is an
ideal environment for the kind of entities we're experiencing here. It's like a catalyst, a summons of sorts."

Karen's eyes glanced up. "That's what Hildreth said in
my nightmare. He said that lust summons them, and that's
why he chose this house."

"Lust summons who?" Westmore edged in.

"Subcarnates, for one," Cathleen offered. "And potentially any revenant entity. Lust, hate, greed, pride-"

"You're saying emotions like that," Westmore deduced,
"combined with tragedies, sex-crimes, and all that, can turn
a house into a culture dish for ghosts?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes," Nyvysk verified. "And
it's a good bet that Hildreth had a very deliberate and specified purpose in choosing this house and turning it into a
pornography den."

"What purpose?" Westmore asked.

"He was making it into a church of his own," Cathleen
said.

Nyvysk nodded. "A church to worship Belarius."

The next several days passed without event, or at least with
none that Westmore could observe. The only person he felt
close to would be Karen, but even she, now, seemed different. Less animated, low-key, bereft of the sharp sarcasm
she'd been radiating since they met. And since her incident
at the inner court, that overt sexual aura of hers was enfeebled, replaced by a caul. She didn't even dress provocatively
anymore-jeans and a baggy blouse most days. And no
more nude sunbathing.

He wrote productively several hours a day, though he still
wasn't sure what he was writing. But if the others wereand it sounded like they were-then he would have something pertinent to report to Vivica Hildreth. She wants to
know exactly what her husband's last night in this house was all
about.

Now he knew.

It was about Belarius.

But he remembered her most crucial instruction from
the day he'd met her at the penthouse: My husband was
preparing for something he thought would occur in the future. I
want to know what-exactly-it was he was preparing for. And I
want to know when.

What could he have been preparing for? The murders were
obviously a rite of some kind, a sacrifue.

To Belarius?

To trigger something, he guessed. In something so senseless,
it made perfect sense. The key to it all was in Hildreth himself, who-in spite of his wife's conjecture-was probably
dead. That was one grim chore that awaited. Westmore
knew he'd have to go into the woods soon and exhume that
coffin, and he had to do it without anyone else knowing or
else suffer the wrath of Vivica's non-disclosure agreement.
He knew she was much more bite than bark.

Over time, Westmore stumbled upon some channels in
the house that could only be described as secret passageways-he even got lost a few times. One led to the Scarlet
Room, another to the strange, railed walkways suspended
above the South Atrium. A third, behind a curtain in Hildreth's office, led to several very narrow stairwells built behind the walls, which eventually ended in a small
windowless study that seemed embedded in the house,
somewhere on the first floor. The mansion was a strange
place that just kept getting stranger. And over the course of
those days, he'd found more DVD's which he dreaded to
watch but watched nonetheless, hoping for more clues
about the mysterious Rodenbaugh girl. But there were
none. The discs were either more T&T porn frolic or more
nauseating rape and brutality movies. He found a few more snapshots in an otherwise empty bedroom on the first floor,
on a shelf in the closet. The dowdy, overweight woman
he'd seen in the Halloween disc. Faye Mullins, he recalled
Karen telling him. The house janitor. In the pictures, she
posed half-smiling with some of T&T's stars and starlets,
but beneath the smile, he could clearly detect a restrained
misery. The question begged: Where was Faye Mullins on the
night of April 3rd?