Free The Teratologist by Edward Lee Page A

You needn’t worry. He’s probably stumbling around here drunk. My men aren’t back yet from disposing of the priest and the child.”
    It was Michaels’ good fortune that looks couldn’t kill.
    “ We’ll find the photographer,” the Englander assured. “It’s impossible for him to get out of the house.”
    Farringworth’s reply sounded like the worst omen. “It better be.”
     
     
    (VII)
     
    Westmore regained consciousness, oblivious. He lay beneath the table, cloaked in darkness, and at first he could remember nothing. His thoughts ticked along with the clock.
    An angel, huh?
    Surely, he’d passed out from too much scotch, and dreamed the whole thing, but even in the dim moonlight streaming in through the French doors, he could see the bloodstains on his shirt. He’d hit his head against the edge of the armoire, but his head didn’t hurt at all. He felt at the wound and there was no wound.
    He dragged himself up, pressed the stem of his watch to light the dial. 4:12 a.m. He fingered his top pocket for a cigarette yet found the pack empty. Maybe the angel ripped off all my cigarettes, he thought as a joke. But he wasn’t laughing. On the immaculate tile flooring before the door, a cigarette butt lay, as if flicked there.
    What could he tell Bryant? Nothing. I had a hallucination, I had a hallucination. I was drunk. I hit my head but the cut must be on my scalp; that’s where the blood came from. And it was me who flicked the cigarette butt on the floor. It was not a foul-mouthed, wingless angel in a black t-shirt. It was not.
    He felt sick now but not from drinking. It was his heart that felt sick. It was the vibes. He was not acting on cryptic messages from a hallucination of an angel, but he felt he had to do something.
    Check it out, the mirage had said.
    Westmore took a deep breath, took a few steps to see if he could walk, then felt his way out of the room toward the stairs. Words like leaves blowing through gutters haunted him up to the second floor landing: An aggrandized affront. Systematized evil. And: Heavy shit’s going down in this house.
    “ Forget it, forget it,” he mumbled to himself. “Just…find Bryant.”
    He didn’t even know exactly why he needed to find Bryant. It was just an inclination, perhaps one rooted in uselessness. Westmore felt perplexed and useless. And scared. He didn’t really trust anybody on the face of the earth—he’d spent his entire life trusting the untrustworthy, a fool—and he didn’t even now at this point if he trusted himself, especially shit-faced.
    But he trusted his inclinations. He trusted the vibes.
    “ Bryant?” he kept his voice down when he opened his partner’s bedroom door and looked in.
    The room was a shambles. Bryant wasn’t there.
     
     
    (VIII)
     
    “ You weren’t easy to subdue.”
    The accent rang: British. Bryant’s head rang, too. Felt like somebody hit him in the head with a hammer. Damn… Acidic splotches of memory—like bile in someone’s throat—kept slipping up. Several men, he recalled. They’d come into his room when he was asleep.
    “ You put up quite a fight,” Michaels said, looking down.
    Bryant remembered more. Thrashing. After the fight, the room was wrecked and Bryant was straitjacketed.
    And here he sat, unable to move against the canvas constraints, in another room. Not the bedroom he’d been shown.
    It was a horror show. It was a room of freaks. Bryant was speechless, at first not even believing his own eyes.
    A bright room, with bright overhead lights. Were multiple cameras mounted in the ceiling? He thought so. And there were…things. Pale, quivering things…
    “ This is where we do it,” Michaels said. “It is from this room that Mr. Farringworth puts forth his challenge to God.”
    Bryant thought he might throw up when he took his first look. There were several beds arranged about the room, and on each one lay some twisted, naked form—some biological accident. It took him a moment to