Edward Lee - The Minotauress.pdf - Edward Lee - widez2

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.

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For Mike Anthony and Michael Kennedy.

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

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The Minotauress

(A Novella)

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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 cliche, 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.

Â«Â« Â»Â»

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 cliche, 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.

Â«Â« Â»Â»

"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.

Several books lay opened on various reading-tables, the one he perused now being Tephramancy,

by Christoff Deniere, Glastonbury Abbey Press, 1539. For those unaware, tephramancy was an

occult science which involved the use of the ashes of burned human body parts as an activating

ingredient of particularized metaphysical rituals.

Footfalls clunked down the stairs, the door squeaked open. Waldo Parkins had to duck to enter

the basement er, the temple. He could've been a college senior linebacker...that is if he could

raise his IQ enough to even get into college. The old man thought of still more cliches when he'd

first engaged Waldo's services as manservant. It would've been better had he been named Igor...

He'd hired Waldo less than a year ago from local stock for youth brought the physical strength

that the old man had lost. Digging graves and hefting bodies was harder than it appeared, and

besides, all great warlocks had apprentices. Where would John Dee have been without Edward

Kelly? the old man considered. Indeed, Waldo's 6'4" frame and accommodating musculature fit

the bill just fine, that and the ever-crucial weak-mind. See, the weak-minded were much easier to

control yet another cliche. Every thirteen days, the old man revitalized Waldo's Subservience

Charm, whose ingredients and procedure he'd obtained while Slate-Writing one Candlemas Eve

in a successful attempt to achieve otherwordly discourse with a long-dead French witch named

Marguerite Lamy. Ms. Lamy had been burned at the stake in 1534 for casting spells upon the

more comely nuns of the Convent of St. Brigitta and inducing them to consort with incubi.

"What'cha need, sir?" Waldo beamed. "I was upstairs packin' yer bags like ya tolt me." The boy

paused, sniffed. "Whew! I smell Number Two..."

The old man winced when he noticed more feces oozing from the unconscious girl's buttocks. By

now, so much had escaped her bowels that it looked like a long brown tail. "I'm terribly sorry,

Waldo," the old man fidgeted, "but as you can see, our friend here has...had an accident, and I'm

afraid I just don't have it in me to..."

Waldo smacked a grin. "Don't wanna clean up her shit, huh, sir?"

"Precisely. So if you don't mind..."

Waldo didn't mind at all, proof of the Subservience Charm's potency. He leaned over and

scooped up the excreta in his bare hands, with no more concern than if he were scooping up

popcorn. "What'cha want me to do with it, sir?"

Good Lord... The old man opened the iron hatch on the back wall. "In the crematory, if you

please."

Waldo flapped the excrement into the fiery hatch, and continued doing so until it was all up. The

old man fervently sprayed a can of Renuz-It Apple Cinnamon Home Fragrance around. Waldo

whistled "Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses," then, as he happily mopped up the smears on the

floor.

"Now I'd like you to wash her, please," the old man directed. "These girls are just so foul."

"Yer wish is my command, sir," Waldo chuckled. The old man shook his head.

Metal links clinked; Waldo yanked on the pulleyed chain and watched the morbidly naked girl

rise in the air, her wrists being cuffed to one end of the chain. Beneath her dirty bare feet the

broad-shouldered manservant slipped a washtub. Then he cranked on the faucet, hosed her down,

soaped up a car sponge, and began to suds her off.

Gad, thought the old man. The girl was appalling, pudgy flesh the hue of vanilla ice cream,

cellulite-dimpled, and peppered by needlemarks and scabs from abscesses. Her buttocks could've

been two twenty-pound sacks of flour pushed together, her pubis a great swatch of dull brown

hair that had begun to grow traceably down the insides of her thighs and trailed up to her navel.

A preposterous tattoo across her belly read LOVE DEPOSIT in large cursive letters.

Waldo seemed rapt whilst thoroughly sudsing the caramel smears out of her rump's cleft. Fat,

expansive breasts hung unevenly, and one nipple was as big around as a coffee cup's rim, the

other but a small puckered oval. The navel looked like a deep finger-hole in raw dough.

The old man busied himself by arranging the retractors and saw, and securing the proper crucible.

He'd already done this once before but he did it again nonetheless, to distract him from the vision

of the unwholesome human hulk hanging from the chain. Next, from an armoire, he inspected the

glittering surplice which he would wear during the rite: a simple black-dyed cotton smock

stitched with sundry gemstones. The stones were worthless to a jeweler, but to a sorcerer?

They were more valuable than a bucket full of Faberge eggs.

The power of faith, the old man mused.

Edward Lee - The Minotauress.pdf

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