Free The Teratologist by Edward Lee

he say? Systematized evil? Was the angel deliberately being obscure?
    “ Some things you just gotta find out for yourself,” the angel said.
    “ What about Farringworth?” Westmore nearly pleaded. “You’re confusing me. I don’t know what you mean.”
    Did the shadowed outline look more grainy?
    “ Check it out.”
    “ Why are you telling me this?” Westmore asked next.
    A floating laugh. “I’m just the messenger. Mine is not to wonder why. God wants me to come to you so I come to you. Yeah, God works in fucked up ways—He sure as shit does ’cos that’s the only way you have even the most irreducible chance of getting the big picture.”
    Westmore’s eyes felt propped open by hooks.
    The angel was dissolving. “I have to go now, but before I do, I’m going to tell you something. Do you want to hear it?”
    Westmore gulped, nodded.
    “ It’s a secret.”
    “ Tell me.”
    The angel was discomposing in the dark. “If you take the impetus behind the desire to be good, and the impetus behind the desire to be evil—if you put them both together and look at them very closely…you’ll see.”
    “ See what?” Westmore croaked.
    “ They’re the same.”
    The angel was gone.
     
     
    (VI)
     
    Two men in a room. Night. Quiet.
    “ The hydrocephalic died,” Michaels said. “And the priest had a heart attack.”
    “ Take care of it.”
    “ I already have.”
    Farringworth sat in a robe of scarlet satin, sipping with little interest from a glass filled with Montrachet 1918. His gaze alternated from the computer monitor to the great bow window, which framed the darkness, tinged in moonlight. Another of his speculative moods, pondering. Michaels knew it was his master’s way of dealing with his despair.
    “ Further appropriations shouldn’t be difficult.”
    “ No, they won’t be. They’re being pursued as we speak,” Michaels assured.
    Farringworth had the volume turned down on the monitor; he was gloomily watching a variety of clips. First, Betty, stumps reeling in orgasmic jubilation as a Unitarian minister fastidiously fucked her. Next clip: the program director for the United Way, slavering as he performed cunnilingus on an eighteen-year-old girl with Downs’ Syndrome, prognathism and cutaneous facial horns. Next clip: two deacons from the Baton Rogue Church of Christ, masturbating rabidly into the face of a woman with a congenital sternal and a genetic defect known as coalition of the bowel. She’d been born with no exterior rectal vent; instead the bowel emptied into the vaginal canal. The camera zoomed closer to her splayed legs as if on cue, as she, in less technical terminology, took a giant spectacular shit from her cunt.
    “ You’re definitely getting your investment’s worth from the Metopronil. They want to do it. Anything, with anyone, for sexual release,” Michaels observed.
    But Farrington seemed bored, or forlorn.
    He switched to the next scenario, the live camera in the Angels’ room. Both monsters slept serenely, entwined in each other’s arms amid shining white sheets.
    So that’s it, Michaels thought. He should’ve known.
    “ I’ll have them one day,” Michaels,” the billionaire said very softly. “They’ll love me one day.”
    “ I’m sure they will,” the attendant replied for lack of anything else, but he was thinking, Yeah, and I’m sure God will be stopping in any time now .
    He’s insane.
    Michaels was startled by his employer’s next sudden gesture. Just as the attendant had finished the sarcastic thought, Farringworth looked up at him with something like a reproving glare. But a moment later, his eyes went sad again and returned to the monitor.
    “ And what about our two guests?”
    Michaels hated to be the bringer of bad news, but he still wasn’t worried. “We’ve already contained Bryant. And, well, don’t be alarmed, but—”
    Farringworth snapped up another sharp glare.
    “— The photographer isn’t in his room.”
    “ What?”
    “