The Minotauress полностью

THE MINOTAURESS

Edward Lee

THE MINOTAURESS © 2007 by Edward Lee

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Wendy Brewer, Dave Barnett, Bob Strauss, Matt Johnson, Dustin La Valley, Monica Kuebler, Mark Justice, Tom Moran, Monica O'Rourke, Erik Wilson, Jeff Funk, Minh, Nanci Kalanta, Terry Tidwell, Michael Pearce, and Paul Legerski.

For Mike Anthony and Michael Kennedy.

Let's see you make THIS into a movie...

THE MINOTAURESS

PROLOGUE

The mansion looked haunted, and was even rumored to be, though in truth the things which prowled its narrow halls at night, and occasionally peeked out the dark, heavily draped windows, were all too corporeal. The only ghosts here lurked in the mythic obsessions of the mansion's elderly owner. Since the old gentleman had occupied the house—some forty years—not once had a guest stayed the night... even though, in a sense, he'd had many guests... if you chose to call them that.

The mansion loomed from a desolate hill surrounded by high but sickly trees and other vegetation which seemed jaundiced, even deformed, this due—according to further rumors—to countless marked and unmarked graves that pocked the proximal land. And to nod toward an elemental cliché, there was an Indian scourge here in 1642, where Governor William Berkley had ordered armed colonists to slaughter over a hundred Powhatans—most of whom were women and children. These unfortunate natives were then buried unceremoniously in a trench beside a brook which ran less than fifty yards from where the mansion's foundation would one day be lain. Periodically, over the next two hundred years, this land was additionally chosen to be the convenient resting place for lynching victims and the worst of condemned criminals, and more interestingly, there was a small fenced graveyard to the east of the house which included the bodies of eleven young women hanged for witchcraft by remnant Puritans in 1689. This graveyard, of course, was officially unconsecrated and so, too, were all of the unmarked graves amid the property.

The old man liked unconsecrated graves.

In fact, that's why he'd bought the house.

««—»»

The mansion itself? Three stories but narrow, a tower with a garret at the north corner, great bow windows, parapets, a circular tympanum of stained glass above the front door's stone arch whose glittering mosaic depicted the face of Alexander Seton—the only alchemist in history to successfully transmute lead into gold. Sloping dormer windows topped the mansion's twin wings, and behind these windows more obscurely notorious likenesses could be viewed: stone busts of Count Cagliostro, Dr. Edward Kelly, Emmanuel Swedenborg, and Gilles de Rais. Tin gutters lined the friezes which framed each story, and paired flues sprouted from several chimneys, like horns. Iron cresting rimmed the top garret, and sometimes, in the garret's oculus, candlelight could be seen.

The mansion, like the land it sat upon, was a cliché, but then so was the old man who owned it. He craved seclusion and antiquities, black moonlit nights, and the paneled rooms within full of the most forbidden books.

The old man believed in those books, because he knew that the only true force in existence was faith.

««—»»

"Oh, dear," the old man muttered when he saw that the pallid naked girl had shat herself. It happened on occasion; at least half of the girls were heroin addicts. Morphine derivatives routinely caused constipation, but when the owners of said clogged intestines were terrorized enough, it would all come out at once.

The rich smell rose up in the room, like fog. The old man gagged.

Oh, God! He rushed to the door and called up the stairs: "Waldo! Come down here, quickly, please!"

I'm a scholar and a celebrated antiquary, he reminded himself. My station in life exists on too high a level to clean up... accidents such as this.

The old man looked genteel, like a retired professor or perhaps the owner of a high-end clothier's. Bald on top but neatly thick gray hair below the pate, a long but trimmed goatee, a Lord & Taylor white dress shirt and smart black slacks. Seventy years old but with eyes keen and bright as a teenager's—bright in their hunger for knowledge and their passion for life, and the things he was certain that awaited him after life.

He was working in the basement just now, though he referred to it as the temple, for in a manner of speaking it was—indeed, a place of revered travail and worship. Facsimiles of Doric columns were present, and six arched doorways lined three of the brick walls; they'd been monumentally difficult to install, given the specifications. Each door showed stains of old brown blood and housed a single, pointed iron spike.