Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee by Edward Lee Read Free Book Online

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.