The Teratologist

by Edward Lee

  “You’re too much of a pain in the ass,” Bryant replied. “And you know something? I really don’t like your face.”

  Snap!

  Clink!

  Bryant put a bullet in the center of Michaels’ chest. I’ll get Farringworth to open the door, he resolved. After I kneecap the son of a bitch.

  He was about to leave when he felt something tugging his pants cuff. It was Michaels, still alive but not for long, blood looping out of the bullet hole that pierced his aorta.

  “What do you what?” the journalist asked.

  Michaels couldn’t answer in voice. His arm slowly rose, his index finger extended. The Englander was pointing at the monitor in Sato Masaaki’s room.

  All Bryant could do was stare.

  It looked like Masaaki’s room had filled with light.

  (XVI)

  Bryant practically trampled the dying manservant as he burst out of the security room and sprinted down the hallway. Outside Masaaki’s room the light was eating through the cracks in the doorway, blackening and searing away the paint on the opposite wall. As Bryant reached the door a piercing scream blasted his eardrums and sent shivers rattling up his vertebrae. Someone in that room was in indescribable agony. The smell of burnt hair and flesh came wafting from within, roaring in Bryant’s nostrils and churning the bile in his stomach. The journalist paused just beyond the door and leaned against the wall, listening to the shrill cries of pain and struggling to overcome his fear and nausea. He stuck a hand tentatively into the blistering light emanating from the doorway and felt a heat that tightened his skin and opened his sweat glands but thankfully didn’t burn.

  “Thank heaven for melanin.” He thought as he prepared to wrench open the door and empty the gun into Farringworth.

  Bryant had never killed anyone. His parents had moved him out of Oakland to Santa Cruz California when he was only six years old to ensure that he’d never have to. Now here he was, crouching in a hallway with a loaded gun about to murder a madman in order to prevent him from becoming God. And if that light was what he feared it was, than he’d be killing the man in full sight of the all-mighty.

  “This just can’t be happening.” Bryant shook his head and chuckled to his self as he looked down at the automatic pistol in his hand.

  “What the fuck am I doing here?” A day ago he didn’t even believe in God. Now he was about to meet him face to face.

  Slowly he turned the doorknob as his heart trip-hammered in his chest and his body trembled as if it had been doused with ice water and plugged into a light socket. Bryant took a deep breath, clicked the 9mm Beretta off safety, and prepared to yank open the door when it exploded from within and a body came crashing through it, landing in the hallway in a steaming heap. Bryant looked down at the man who was covered in blisters and third degree burns, his penis a blackened stump that looked more like a spent match then human flesh. It was Sato Masaaki.

  “Evil. It’s all evil!” the Buddhist said through cracked and scalded lips, staring mesmerized into the white-hot conflagration inside the room. The moisture on his retinas was boiling and sizzling as he continued to peer into the light. Bryant shielded his eyes and stepped into the room.

  It took a moment before he could see anything at all. Then his eyes located Farrington who was standing up shouting jubilantly as semen erupted from his rigid penis in a copious spray. His ejaculate bathed the enraptured visage of a gelatinous misshapen blob of a woman who sat beneath him with her face turned up toward his and her tongue outstretched to receive his seed like some twisted communion. Farrington’s eyes were fixed on another woman across the room from which the light seemed to be emanating. Her body looked like someone had wrung it out like a dishrag. Her limbs curled and twisted like crazy straws. But she was giving birth to something, something too big for her vaginal passage that was tearing her apart in its haste to be born. The being seemed to be composed of pure light.

  “God! God has come!”

  Bryant heard Farrington shout excitedly.

  “That—that can’t be God. No fucking way God would split someone apart like that.” Bryant thought as the entity tore its way out of poor Sharon, cauterizing the huge avulsion it ripped in her torso as it shrugged out of her flesh like a diver crawling out of a wet-suit, turning her twisted body inside out. The light was so brilliant that Bryant could feel it burning his skin.

  Bryant was struck dumb by the scene. He didn’t know what he’d expected to find when he busted into the room but it was definitely not this. He stood rooted to the spot with the Beretta pointed uselessly at the floor. The blazing phosphorescence seemed to be consuming the entire room. The walls, ceilings, floor, the entire mansion disappeared like a desert mirage leaving only the light, as spectacular as an exploding star. It was as if the sun itself had come down from the heavens and into the room with them. Bryant continued to stare. His mind unraveling as logic failed him, unable to reason away what was so clearly beyond reason.

  (XVII)

  Farrington stumbled forward, knocking the fat limbless woman aside as he approached the light and fell to his knees in awe. This was it. This was what he’d been working so hard for all these years. Finally, God had come. His head filled with a universe of colors as starlight washed over him and into him.

  “It’s so beautiful! My God! Finally! You have come!”

  The billionaire trembled with delight as he narrowed his eyes against the searing glare, trying to glimpse the entity within.

  “I AM ALL! I AM EVERYTHING! I AM THE TRUTH!” The voice shook the room and seemed to vibrate through every molecule.

  “Show yourself! Let me see you!” Farrington shrieked as his tear ducts emptied and the tears sizzled down his cheeks.

  Gradually, the startling pyrotechnics died down. Farrington squinted through the diminishing light and his mouth widened in a perfect O as the scream ripped its way up from his diaphragm and the shadow within the light revealed itself.

  The entity materializing before him could not have been God. Nothing in or in sight of heaven could have been so profane and hideous. The monstrous thing was a chaos of limbs and mouths, genitals of every sex and species, and suppurating orifices with purposes that seemed beyond appetite or reproduction. Tentacles stretched out in all directions from its bloated body feeding down into the earth and off into the distance. Farrington’s eyes followed one fat slimy appendage, which lead from the hideous thing directly into the top of his own skull.

  “W-what are you?” Farrington whispered, utterly appalled at the abomination he’d invoked. He could now feel the creature’s tentacle crawling around between his thoughts. It’s presence felt more familiar than alien. He felt no pain as if it had not been suddenly thrust there but had always been there and only just now revealed.

  “I AM LUST. I AM AVARICE. I AM GREED. I AM LEVIATHAN!”

  Its voice was a chorus of roars and hisses, howls, moans, and screams. Every sound that had haunted man’s nightmares since he shivered in dark caves still only dreaming of fire. The light was now completely gone and in its place was a dank humid fog that seemed to coat everything with a sweaty film as if the creature was emanating some foul noxiousness.

  “YOU CALLED ME AND I HAVE COME.”

  “But…but I didn’t call you! I called for GOD!” Farrington shrieked, delirious with fear.

  “GOD? BUT I AM GOD. I AM THE GOD OF MAN. NOT THE CREATOR BUT THE INNOVATOR. ALL THAT MAN HAS WROUGHT HAS BEEN WITH MY INSPIRATION. I AM EVIL AND MANKIND IS MY INSTRUMENT.”

  An endless sea of mouths smiled out at Farrington from the creature’s enormous bulk and tongues slithered out to lick the thing’s vulgar lips. Farrington felt the tentacle move inside his head as the thing leaned in close.

  “LET ME SHOW YOU WHAT I AM.”

  And Farrington saw…

  Teenagers mugging old ladies to buy drugs. Kids even younger murdering other adolescents over gang turf. Prostitutes swapping diseases with sex-addicts in dank alleys and semen-stained motel sh
eets. Rapists plundering and bruising the loins of screaming victims. Sexual predators using surrogate penises of sharpened steel to open the tender flesh of their dying lovers. Pedophiles abusing children. Terrorists bombing embassies. Satanists sacrificing babies. Murderers, cannibals, thieves, wife-beaters, drug-dealers, every manner of evil in the world, all with this demon’s tentacles manipulating it, orchestrating the madness. Perhaps God valued freewill, if there truly was such a thing, but to this creature man was little more than a marionette, a toy for its perverse amusements.

  Farrington was impressed. This was not God but it was something much better. This was a different type of perfection. Perfect evil. Something the billionaire understood and even more, could emulate. He didn’t have tentacles with which to fiddle with the minds of humanity but he had other resources, money, computers, an entire global network. His control could easily surpass that of the creature who stood before him now. But it wouldn’t help him to turn the angels. For that he needed more power. He needed the ability to control minds and wills as this creature obviously could.

  “Show me how,” he said.

  (XVIII)

  Westmore had no idea what he was walking into. He’d been just a few doors down releasing the religious leaders from captivity, at least the ones not already enthralled by the Metopronil, when he’d seen the light explode down the hallway and heard that voice like the shrieks of the damned. He knew right away that Farrington had unleashed something and it damned sure wasn’t God. He unlocked the last door and turned to race toward the cacophony when he was nearly trampled by two seven-foot albinos.

  The platinum-skinned giants tore past him and charged into the room where the light had already extinguished itself. Westmore recognized them from Bryant’s description. The angels. He gripped the axe in his hand and ran after them, afraid of what would happen to Bryant if he were in that room alone with the owner of that horrible voice and those two colossal twins.

  The photographer had only taken a few steps when the angel appeared before him again looking even more scruffy and unkempt than before. His five o’clock shadow was now becoming a full beard. The Bob Dylan look-a-like cast him a look that could only be described as panic. It was terrible to see on a being that was immortal. If he was afraid than Westmore should have been terrified.

  “Hurry!” the angel shouted.

  A flood of horrible images flooded through his mind the force of them staggering him and nearly knocking him to the floor. He saw a world where rape, murder, and torture were canonized and innocence and love was just a memory. It was the world that Farrington would bring about. Westmore steeled his resolve and ran past the charred body of a naked Asian man and into the room. As he ran past him, the little Asian man’s eyes opened and stared right into his.

  “Hurry!” the monk croaked out in a hoarse ragged bark and then he shuddered and his eyes closed again. Westmore was sure the man had died. He stepped inside what remained of the room just as Farrington seemed to be intercoursing with a demon that looked like some type of anemone that had floated up from the bottom of the sea. Bryant was standing a few feet away with a gun in his hands pointed at the demon and a look on his face that suggested his consciousness had fled his body. Westmore grabbed him and shook him.

  “James! James wake up! You have to shoot Farrington! You have to kill him!”

  The angels had launched themselves at the demon and were tearing into it with their long spiraled nails. Their nails snapping even as they rent through the thing’s flesh. They sank their teeth into it and began ripping chunks out of it. The creature howled in pain. Then Westmore saw what they were trying to do. They were trying to sever the tentacle that led from the creature into Farrington’s head. Westmore charged with the axe and began hacking away at it as well.

  “James! James! Wake up!”

  A thick black goop sprayed out of the creature with every swing of the axe and it fought back, filling his head with the most vile and horrible images. His stomach rolled and he pitched forward and projectile vomited in a spray that flew almost into the hallway. But he continued to swing the axe.

  “I see! I see!” Farrington shrieked as the demon filled his head with the knowledge of perfect evil. The fat limbless woman who had been sucking down his seed was now cringing away from him trying to back her way out the door. Farrington grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back over to him. He dug his fingers into her skull and it began to crack. Blood poured from her nose, ears, mouth, and even her eyes as he ripped her head in half and dashed her gray-matter onto the floor at his feet. Then the angels attacked him.

  Giving up on cutting through the demon’s coarse limb, they tackled Farrington and began trying to sever the man’s head from his neck and shoulders using only their teeth.

  Westmore jumped down and raised the axe above his head ready to cleave the billionaire’s head in two when gunshots rang out and the man’s chest exploded. Westmore looked up and saw his partner standing above him pointing the gun down at Farrington and pumping bullet after bullet into his torso.

  “I saw it. I saw what he was trying to become. I don’t know how but I could see it all.” Bryant hovered above the dead billionaire still aiming the 9mm down at him as if expecting him to get up again. “It was so horrible, man. You don’t know what he would have become. I had to kill him. I couldn’t let him…it was just so terrible, so evil.”

  “I know, man. We all saw it. It’s okay. You had to kill him.”

  Bryant suddenly remembered the demon and turned to empty the rest of his clip into the hideous thing but it was already crawling away as smoke and flames ate their way through the floorboards and began to consume the house.

  “Shit! I almost forgot about the fire! This whole place is about to go up!” Westmore shouted as he ran for the door where smoke had already filled the hallway. A wall of fire was inching its way down the hall cutting off their retreat.

  “Oh shit we’re trapped! Watch out!”

  Farrington wasn’t dead yet. His body was changing, breaking down and reforming, morphing into something that resembled the demon they had just chased away. A nest of tentacles wormed their way out of his ruptured chest and stomach reaching out for Bryant and the two twins. The twins bared their teeth like wild animals snarling in fury. Bryant turned and fired. One bullet slammed into Farrington’s throat, tearing out his larynx and lodging in his vertebrae, then the gun dry-fired on an empty chamber. Farrington smiled. He picked the young journalist up with one of his serpentine appendages and tossed him out into the hall, into the fire.

  “Nooooo!”

  Bryant’s body sailed past and Westmore rushed to rescue him. He pulled Bryant free of the flames just as the man began to scream.

  “He’s still alive! He’s still alive!” Bryant was in a near panic.

  “Nothing we can do about that now. We’ve got to get out of here. The entire mansion is burning down!”

  They looked back into the room and saw Farrington rise up and spread his arms wide to embrace the twins. Tentacles exploded from every surface that would permit them, growing longer and thicker. He smiled as the angels rushed into his arms and then began to cry out as they sank their teeth into him. The three of them fell to the ground struggling, trying to kill each other. Westmore grabbed Bryant and they both sprinted down the hallway away from the flames.

  “There’s a pool down at the end of the hall. It has windows in there that we can break. We can get out that way.”

  Behind them they could hear the billionaire screaming for his life as the angels tore into him and the fire spilled into the room. The fire continued down the hall, licking at their heels and roaring in their ears as it sucked the oxygen out of the air and scorched their lungs. They ripped open the door to the poolroom and fell through it just as the flames had begun to blister the skin on their backs.

  There was no time to try to break out one of those Lexan windows. There were no more bullets in the gun and nothing else in the poolroom would ha
ve been strong enough to shatter them. Bryant and Westmore dove into the pool as the poolroom door exploded and a burst of super-heated air came blasting in.

  They could still hear Farrington’s screams as they sank beneath the chlorinated water. The angels were tearing him apart and what they didn’t destroy the fire certainly would. Nothing could have survived that inferno.

  (XIX)

  The water was getting warmer. There were no flammable surfaces within the poolroom, which was covered from floor to ceiling in 17” Gialo Antiqua marble tiles imported from Italy preventing the fire from spreading right to the pool’s edge, but the rest of the estate was burning down and the water temperature was quickly reaching the boiling point.

  The windows exploded from the heat. The two journalists leapt up out of the pool and ran for daylight as fast as they could. Their skin blistered as the intense heat seared their flesh. Their eyes watered, obscuring their vision. They closed their eyelids and dove headfirst through the shattered windows.

  Westmore crashed through a row of shrubbery and rolled out into the big circular driveway where the limo that had brought them to this madhouse still sat. He looked around him for Bryant but the man was nowhere to be found. Then he looked back up at the window he’d just leapt through and saw Bryant still crouched on the window ledge…wrapped in tentacles. He saw the reporter’s eyes bulge out of their sockets and his brains squirt out of his ears when the tentacles constricted and his bones snapped and collapsed, his body being slowly crushed.

  “James! Noooo!” Westmore cried out as Bryant was dragged back into the flames. Moments later the entire mansion collapsed.

  (XX)

  It had been more than a year since Westmore had been back to the site where the Farrington mansion once stood. In that time he’d been besieged with requests for interviews about the murderous zealot and exorbitant offers for the purchase of his pictures of the mansion and its activities. He’d refused them all. He couldn’t bring himself to profit in anyway from what had taken place here. And more than that, he didn’t want that madman’s story told. That’s why he had brought them there in the first place, to tell his story, that’s why Bryant had died. He didn’t want to give that lunatic the satisfaction. He would take the tale to his grave instead. Still, there was one last photograph he wanted to get. It would be the only one he’d ever publish involving this place.