House Infernal by Edward Lee (30 page)

"The guy was the town rummy, you've probably
known him for years, and he's never been any trouble."

"Yes, sir. I'll assume all responsibility"

There was no reason to stew over it. "Forget it, and look
at the bright side. One less scumbag in the world is a
good thing. Probably saved the taxpayers a hundred
grand in custody and court costs. We already busted an
accomplice-Freddie's sometime squeeze. The state's interrogating her now-we'll probably get more out of her
than Freddie anyway."

"Good," Lee said. "Now I don't feel so bad. But I do have something for you that might be helpful. We went
over Freddie's room again like you asked and found some
stuff. He hid it pretty well."

"He probably thought you'd stop looking when you
found that forty grand in cash."

"Exactly what 7I thought, but ... well, it's some weird
shit we found."

Berns wasn't surprised. "Like what? Oh, let me guess.
An ashtray?"

"No, but-" Lee paused, as if subtly bothered. "We
found this weird glass bowl-made of black glass-and it
had some burned stuff in the bottom. And a can of
Sterno."

"And the stuff in the bowl wasn't cigarette tar or pot?"

"No way. We're sending it to the state lab but I'm pretty
sure we already now what it is-tree sap."

"Tree sap?"

"That's right, Captain."

"How do you know?"

"Freddie had cut off some branches from a scarlet
sumac tree, brought them into the room, and had them
hanging over a plate. He was collecting the sap. Then I
see this sticky burned stuff in the black bowl-"

"And figure it's got to be the same thing," Berns finished, but just didn't get it. Susan Maitland had referred
to her ashtray as a thurible, which Berns had quickly
looked up in the dictionary. A vessel or censer in which incense is burned, especially during rituals, he recalled.

"That's fucking weird," Berns said.

"Oh, no, Captain. That's not the weird part. It's everything else we found. One of those lined yellow notepads.
The top pages had all kinds of off-the-wall stuff written
on them, all in Johnson's handwriting."

"What did he write?"

"Well, the first sheet was a drawing of that bizarre design that he also had for a tattoo."

Berns felt a stab of queasiness, remembering his dream.

Lee continued, "And the rest? Well, just wait till you
see it."

"Writing?" Berns blinked. "Instructions of some kind?"

"I don't know what it is, Captain. Something in some
foreign language I guess. Looks like Johnson's handwriting, but-"

"A redneck crabber with no education probably doesn't
know any foreign languages."

"Right."

Berns stared at the wall, thinking. Maitland said Freddie
had copied some instructions and left them for her and the
other accomplice. This stuff that Lee found must be the original
copy.

But if they were instructions for ritual murderers, what
use could they be now? The murders already occurred, last
March at the St. John's Prior House... .-

"Do me a favor, Sarge. Before you book those papers as
evidence, I need you to scan them and e-mail the file
down here."

"I've already sent my guy to the county to use their
scanner," Lee said.

"Thanks."

Lee's voice seemed to drift for a moment. "You want to
know what bugs me the most, Captain? Don't know why,
but it just does. When I found Freddie hanging in his
cell..."

"Yeah?"

"He was stone-cold dead but he still had that same
happy-go-lucky grin on his face, gold tooth flashing and
all."

"I believe it. You heard him, though. He wanted to be
dead. 'When the party's over, it's over,' he said."

Lee uttered a dark chuckle. "Well that redneck scumbag ain't partying now."

"Or maybe-he is. In Hell," Berns said and rang off.

The office seemed queerly smaller after he hung up; he
felt encroached upon. Tree sap, he thought, and lit a cigarette. What the hell was he doing burning tree sap in a glass
bowl?

"What is that? Trees?"

"Druid Oak. They use them for the sap," Alexander
said as the chain gang of various Demons and Human
Damned dragged the tree down the noxious street.
"They're taking it there." He pointed to a wide gray
building of uneven bricks, topped by a smoking chimney.
At once Ruth's eyes began to water.

"In Hell, they use Druid Oak and Eldritch Pines. The
counterpart in the Living World are sumac trees and
shrubs, cashew trees, staghorns. It's because the sap is
similar-it's poisonous to varying degrees. Bet your eyes
are watering now, huh?"

Ruth frowned, nodding.

"Remember the Goethe Hall? It's like I was telling you
in Sewageton," the priest went on, thumping forward on
his monstrous legs. "Every District has its own hall of
automatic-writers."

The sign on this building read THE MOZART HALL of
AUTOMATIC-WRITERS.

"Let's go and look in the window," Alexander urged.

Inside were a hundred tables, and at each sat several
scriveners writing manically on pads of parchment. The
room was smoky like a pool hall, and at its center was a
great stone fireplace. An iron cauldron rested above the
flames; within, Ruth could see bubbling sap. The bubbles
broke, releasing the occult fumes to be breathed by all.
Golems guarded each door, their faces of lifeless clay
somehow sentient. Eventually Ruth noted that all of the
scriveners were chained to their chairs.

"The smoke from the sap is a trance-inducer. The
scriveners breath it, and with the help of a variety of
Transpondence Spells and amplified Hex Fluxes, they are
able to maintain psychic contact with counterparts on
Earth, who are breathing similar fumes."

Ruth felt as confused as she was bored. "And whatever
these people here write down-"

"Is simultaneously written down by a Human counterpart in the Living World, mostly cult members and genuine Satanists."

"But what are they writing?"

"Incantation instructions, spell sequences, archival material," the priest said.

"Okay, that's all very fuckin' interesting," Ruth told
him, "but I don't really give a shit. I'm starving. Let's get
something to eat."

Alexander frowned disapproval. "Ruth, this is important.
You need to understand these details. It just so happens that
our entire mission exists because an automatic-writer in
Hell has been delivering instructions to cult members near
the place where Venetia is right now. One of them was the
very same man who built the St. John's Prior House a long
time ago, and he was a Vatican architect."

Ruth tried to act interested. "Like a long distance
phone service..."

"That's right, Ruth. A communication line between the
Living World and Hell."

She followed the sturdy-legged priest, her mind trying
to comprehend all the things she was learning. Leatherwinged birds roved in the bloodred sky. In this collapsing subdistrict, Ruth noticed more homeless bums and
Demons, and more prostitutes. A shapely Lycanymph
with champagne blond fur tapped by on high heels and
grumbled at Ruth.

"Hairy bitch," Ruth sniped. "She's just jealous of my
bod, like that purple asshole at the lingerie shop."

"Keep your voice down," the priest warned. "Don't
start trouble. This isn't the place for it."

Ruth grimaced at a severed face in the gutter, then sped
up when the face grimaced back. "What's so special about
this place?"

"Coleridge Avenue. It's a big dope hub."

"They have drugs here?" she asked with a spark of enthusiasm.

"They sure do, and they're a thousand times more addictive than the stuff in the Living World. One bang and
you're gone for eternity. It used to be Zap was the biggest
drug in Hell; the junkies would inject it straight into their
brains by shoving needles up their nostrils, but that's old
hat now. Look."

Ruth tracked his gaze, to a state shop that read SCALPING ANNEX. Hollow-eyed Human Damned stood in a long
line at one door, while more trudged out of a second door,
only these latter persons left minus their scalps.

"Scalping? Fuck! They're scalped as punishment for
doing drugs?"

"No, no," Alexander explained. "They're selling their
scalps for drug money. Right now the big drug on the
street is L A-that's Lovecraftic Acid. It's so addictive that
they don't even bother keeping the Retox Centers open
anymore. Nobody ever gets off L A. They start by smoking
it, then shoot it, and eventually they sell their scalps to expose the outer-cranial blood vessels. One drop of L A on
an open blood vessel gets you the best high." Then he
pointed to another shop across the street, from which a
smiling She-Demon in a shaggy fur coat emerged.

"Naturally, every Scalping Center has a cloak maker's
nearby. Efficiency in commerce."

ALEXANDRA ROMANOV'S-FURS FOR A SELECT CLIENTELE,
the sign read.

Ruth didn't have to wonder what became of the scalps
once they were sold.

"And there's a long-term L A addict," the priest pointed
out next. "The stuffs wears you out. Lucifer particularly
likes it when Humans become addicted, because then
their misery is eternal."

Ruth gasped when she saw the ramshackle thing sitting
in the alley. It was a man, or at least she thought so, his
scalp long gone. When he looked at Ruth he did so with
empty sockets, so he'd clearly sold his eyeballs, too. Even
his heart was gone, sold for more drugs. Sparrow-sized
mosquitoes crawled over him, siphoning blood, and from
the holes where his ears used to be, thin red-tipped tentacles squirmed. When he opened his mouth to scream, another, longer, tentacle wormed out.

"Let's get out of here!" Ruth pleaded.

"Relax. We're almost there."

"There as in where?"

"The fringes of Boniface Square-the upscale restaurant block." The priest shot her a smile. "Time for you to
get to work."

Ruth groaned to herself. I can hardly wait.

After dinner, Venetia found herself back in the atrium
scouring the bookshelves. Father Driscoll had responded
to her comment at the table about finding strange notes
stashed between some books, possibly written by Amano
Tessorio, like this: "It undoubtedly was," Driscoll had told
her over a chunk of lobster tail shiny with butter. "Tessorio hid lots of notes and scribblings in the books."

"Why would he do that?" she'd asked.

Driscoll shrugged: "Because he was a weirdo closetSatanist who was probably half-insane from tertiary
syphilis."

His response had made her feel naive, but it also left her
curiosity inflamed. What else might the former Vatican
architect have left secreted in the prior house?

At first, the endeavor seemed ludicrous (there were
thousands of books in the atrium, perhaps tens of thousands) but within fifteen minutes-

I don't believe it!

Stuck between two books of essays by Thomas Merton,
she found another yellowed sheet. It read: Ablissa, Eylla,
Azusis, Belith, Gesmary, Tzaella.

Names, obviously. Were they Biblical? How bizarre, she
thought. Then: Another one! but she could only smile at
herself when she discovered an ad clipping from an old
newspaper, which read: COME ONE, COME ALL! TO HOLY
TRINITY CHURCH FOR THE ANNUAL WAMMSPORT CLAM BAKE!
SATURDAY, juLY 14Th, 1975!

I guess I'm getting carried away with this stuff, she thought.

"Wow, I really love those air-conditioners your father
bought us," Dan was saying as he approached.

"He's a generous guy, even for an oddball."

"And that lobster for dinner? That was some spread."
Dan dug some keys from his pocket. He'd removed his
black shirt and collar in favor of a clean T-shirt. "Let's
split. Driscoll wants me to pick up some extension cords,
and ... there's a Red Sox game. He said I could take the
Merc."

Venetia felt disheveled and messy, but.. . I wouldn't
mind getting out of here for a while. "We're going to a baseball game?"

"No, no, it's on TV. There's a bar in town," the seminarist announced with some relief.

"I don't drink. Do you?"

"I have a beer or two-that's no big deal. Besides, Big
Daddy Driscoll said I could."

Driscoll's voice boomed from the upper stair-hall.
"And if Little Daddy Dan gets pulled over in my Mercedes while driving intoxicated, he won't have to worry
about ever becoming a priest."

They both looked up and saw Driscoll smiling down.

"Caught again," Venetia laughed. "You really do have a
big mouth, Dan."

"Tell me about it."

Dan spent the entire drive into Wammsport smirking at
himself. As dusk approached, the air cooled down and the
fading sun painted brilliant orange steamers over the water.
"Driscoll's such a pain in the butt, you know that?" he said
when they parked at the city dock. "Treats me like a punk."

"But it's only because he wants you to become a good
priest," Venetia offered.

Dan was about to gripe further when he did a doubletake. "I don't believe it-come on."

Perplexed, Venetia followed him across the street to a
grocery store parking lot. What's he need here? she wondered, but even stranger was his urgency. In the lot's corner she saw an attractive, thirtyish woman sitting in a
lawn chair before the opened back doors of a step van.
The side of the van read HOLY GROUND HOMELESS SHELTERSHOES, CLOTHING, AND CANNED FOOD PLEASE. The woman in
the chair immediately recognized Dan and stood up.

"What a surprise," came a soft Southern drawl. The
woman was pretty in a startling way: well-curved, leggy,
with a warm smile and aquamarine eyes. Bronze blond
hair streaked with caramel fell over shoulders that were
bare and tan; she wore a string-strapped halter and cutoff
jeans. Lying against the swell of her bosom was a cross.

"Diane, it's so good to see you." Dan hugged her. "I'm
surprised you remember me, as little as I ever saw you."