The House

by Edward Lee

  "Well, uh—"

  Rocco nodded, put an arm around Leonard's shoulder. "Here's why you shouldn't be thinkin' that, kid. This place is the sticks, and I mean Sticks City. There ain't nothin' out here, no stores, no towns, no buses—nothin'. You're over twenty miles away from the closest road off the county emergency route. Nobody even drives past this place 'cos there ain't nothing to drive to, so you can forget about hitchin' a ride. A couple miles over the hill, yeah, there's a town but it's one of these fuckin' Amish towns or Quakers or some shit. About a hundred of 'em and they never leave. They got no phones, no cops—shit, kid, these flakes don't even have cars. They ride around in horse and buggies like a bunch of little assholes dressed up like pilgrims, and they live in this compound you can't even get into. They won't even talk to ya. So let's just say that you do decide to hoof it 20 motherfuckin' miles to the main road. You won't get nowhere. You leave, we'll find you. You could bury yourself in the woods and we'd find you. You could put on some of that scoober stuff like that French guy on TV Jock Gusto and you could swim to the bottom of the fuckin' sea, and we'd find you. That last asshole, the guy before you? He got all the way back to New York. And you know what happened?"

  "You, uh, found him?" Leonard guessed.

  "That's right, kid, we found him. And we did a job on him Rocco Style. In the cutting room there's a can marked Asshole. Watch it tonight, first thing. And any time you even think about splitting, you watch it. Got it, kid?"

  "Uh, yes, Mr. Rocco."

  "Good. Awright. We're out of here. Oh, and sorry about your ball, kid, but—hey—that's the way it is. It ain't our fault the world's so fucked up, right, Knucks?"

  "Right," Knuckles studiously replied and got into the Cadillac. The big V-8 gunned up. Then Rocco got in the passenger side and put down the power window. "Later, kid. We'll be back next Friday with the horse."

  Leonard stood and watched them drive away.

  He stood there for a very long time.

  ««—»»

  When he went back into the house and sometime, perhaps hours, later, he found the aforementioned plastic film can, labeled Asshole. He loaded it up on the RealView hand-crank and watched.

  He didn't have to watch long to get the gist.

  On screen, a long-haired man lay lashed naked to something like a workbench in a room with stained walls and...drop cloths on the floor. Blood gushed from his mouth as another man wearing a rain poncho and a ...Lyndon Johnson mask was silently smacking a hammer into the long-haired man's—Asshole, from here on—mouth. Asshole flinched and quaked. Lyndon came around to the f.g., now brandishing a knitting needle, which he quite abruptly jammed into Asshole's penis via the ingress of the urethra. His hips bucked and bucked as the knitting needle was jammed down and down until it was gone save for the shiny cap on the end. Sewing needles then were placed almost daintily one by one into Asshole's clenched testicles. One after another, until the gonads more resembled some kind of sci-fi porcupine. Next another, much bigger man in a poncho entered the frame. He was wearing the rubber Spock mask. A fileting knife was produced, and then Spock began, with much technical dexterity, to slough strips of skin off Asshole's chest, abdomen, and legs. Shortly thereafter, Asshole died, but not before Spock had just as dextrously cut off his face.

  Leonard snapped off the editor's lamp.

  He just stared for a while.

  He felt numb.

  He felt unreal.

  He needed to get out again, out into fresh air. Not to escape, mind you—after witnessing Asshole's cinematic demise, Leonard heeded Rocco's warning well. He wandered the yard in moonlight, strayed past the small empty stable and then the dog pens. Within the latter, several skinny, mange-flecked dogs—a collie, a mongrel, and a German Shepherd—raised their heads from sleep and looked at him, their tongues hanging out. Leonard looked back in complete incomprehension. Here are my stars, he realized in a slow jolt. I want to make movies, and here is my cast... Moments later, the dogs lowered their heads and went back to sleep, unimpressed by the new director of the production house.

  Then a hand touched his shoulder and a stonelike voice cracked, "Sinner, repent ye of your sins. For we, the vassals of God, know what it is you are doing here."

  ««—»»

  The time it took Leonard to shriek and piss his pants seemed like a full five minutes when actually it only consumed perhaps a few seconds. He spun around, eyes locked open and his heart hammering, to face a broad-shouldered figure standing in the dark.

  "Huh—who are you!" Leonard wheezed.

  The figure stepped forward into moonlight. '50s or '60s, it seemed, and a stern, work-weathered face with narrowed eyes full of contempt. The man's voice had sounded solid yet eloquent, like an evangelical fire-and-brimstone preacher, and his attire presented a parity. It's one of the Quakers, Leonard realized, or whatever they were. Rocco had mentioned a secluded township just over the hill. And the man looked the part: slacks and jacket made of what seemed black sack sloth, a starched white shirt and painfully stiff collar, a black string for a bow-tie, and black hand-cobbled shoes. He even wore an austere black brim hat, and looked just like Ernest Borgnine in Wes Craven's Deadly Blessing, not that Leonard himself could make such a simile, for that particular film would not be made for several years. Nor could he possibly know that the film would star a wan young blonde named Sharon Stone, and provide the only decent role in her forthcoming megastar career, but that was beside the point.

  "Yuh-you're one of the Quakers from down the hill," Leonard jabbered when his heart rate went back down.

  "Lord on high!" the man cracked back. "We are not any foolhearty Quakers! We are the Epiphanites!"

  "Uh, sorry," Leonard apologized.

  "And I am the Rector Solomon come to warn ye to keep thy distance from our little circle of God, sinner!"

  Even Leonard had to raise some objection now. "Excuse me? You don't even know me, so how can you judge me a sinner?"

  "Blast ye and your kind—all sinners and offenses against God in your devilish machines and evil electric light!" At the pause of Solomon's rock-hewn voice, the night around them fell dead silent. Then the rector's callused finger pointed at Leonard like a pistol. "We shant be tainted by your luciferic pleasures, and I warn you to never venture into our humble midsts! We embrace a life of poverty just as our Saviour did! So keep away from our fold."

  And with that, the roughened Epiphanite turned and began to walk away as quickly as he'd arrived. But something irked Leonard, and he felt he had no choice but to inquire.

  "Wait, er, sir? Mr. Solomon?"

  The stern man turned, his face tensed to crevices like cracks in a dried creekbed. "That's Rector Solomon, of the Blessed Order of Epiphanites!"

  "Uh, right, Rector Solomon," Leonard faltered. "But I was wondering—" Indeed, Leonard was, due to the Rector's initial comment. How could this man know what this house really was, and what took place here? Had he snuck up here one night and looked in the windows? Had he talked to the long-haired man—Asshole—whom Leonard had replaced? And if so, what consequences might be present?

  "What did you mean when you said...you knew what we were doing up here?"

  The narrowed eyes raged back. "Evil is blind and dense! That we reckon you and your kind is my meaning, young sinner! The ungodliness of your lightbulbs and radios and television sets! The smile of satan in your motor-cars and aeroplanes! The evil—the pure and undiluted devil-bred evil, young man!—of your ovens and your washers and your toasters!" The rector turned and began to stomp down the weedy hill, waving a white-cuffed arm. "So stay thee behind us!"

  Leonard watched after him for a moment, perplexed. "Well how do you like that?" he muttered under his breath. "Toasters are evil."

  ««—»»

  Leonard almost appreciated Rector Solomon's peculiar intrusion, for it served to divert from the impact of his predicament. Later, he roamed the house without much purpose, just to walk, just to keep moving. If he kept moving he would b
e less prone to think very deeply and hence calculate this very incalculable situation.

  In the first bedroom on the left, he was punched in the face by a stench. He flicked on the light, gagging, and saw the bloodstained drop cloths, the bloodstained work bench, and a bloodstained knitting needle on the floor. At least the body had been removed. In the corner, like an unnoticed scrap, lay something that resembled a crinkled piece of fried eggroll wrapper. Leonard left the room when he realized it was a slough of desiccated human skin.

  Another bedroom stood completely empty, while another whose floor was also covered by plastic drop cloths, reeked of oaty excrement and dank animal smells. Leonard backed out.

  In the last bedroom, he found the girls. They lay blissfully unconscious and curled up amongst one another on a bare, stained box-spring. Two stubby candles were lit, filling the room with flutters, and on the floor lay tell-tale spoons, rubber tubes, and narrow hypodermic needles. "No, daddy, don't!" Snowdrop blurted in her narcotized sleep. Then Sissy lolled up on an elbow, her near-dead eyes awake.

  "Welcome to hell," she slurred and collapsed again.

  Leonard blew the candles out and left, closing the door behind him.

  ««—»»

  Suffice it to say, in summation rather than exposition, it was the aforementioned sequence of events that had supplanted Leonard to the current ordeal. The events had begun roughly ten months ago, and in those ten months he had used his prowess for motion photography to produce several dozen short films, or "loops," as they were called then, about twenty minutes each on an edited sixteen-millimeter master. Vinchetti aka "Vinch The Eye" was very pleased with the quality of Leonard's work as Rocco generally brought mentions of praise on his Friday night arrivals. Ninety percent of the works Leonard produced involved the sexual congress between animals and humans, namely Sissy and Snowdrop, who by some mode of miracle managed to stay alive for the entirety of those ten months. Dog flicks, donkey flicks, horse flicks, and pig flicks comprised the mainstay of Leonard's cinematic repertoire, and compilations thereof, and it was Leonard who devised snappy titles such as Rebecca of Horse-Fuck Farm, Barnyard Babes, Makin' Bacon, Doinkin' Donkeys, Horsin' Around, etc.

  As for the human element of these endeavors, it was generally Sissy who got the hardest end of the business as her cohort Snowdrop spent more time unconscious than awake. Poor Sissy. She was a trooper, though, a woman of considerable capability. For reasons Leonard never quite understood, pornographic cinema demanded one immutable priority: the externalization of the act, or what Rocco referred to as "The Wet Shot" or "The Money Shot." I.E., the displacement of the male ejaculant onto some aspect of the woman's physical geography. When the male contributor was human, this was an easily procured feat. An animal, however, proved much more difficult, yet it was here that Sissy excelled. Often the climactic requirements struck Leonard as disgusting to the point of absurdity. For instance, once Rocco and Knuckles had brought up a beautiful white Palomino stallion, and Rocco had demanded a "bagged shot." Leonard didn't even know what he meant but alas Sissy, the veteran, did. After performing preliminary fellatio on said steed and then adroitly achieving several positions of intercourse, she knelt up under the creature, slid back the sheath over the penile bone and then covered said penile bone with a clear plastic bag. Vigorously, then, and with learned skill, she manually masturbated the horse until such a time that it spent itself into the bag, providing a volume of cloudy, water-thin horse sperm that must've equaled something like eight ounces. That was a trick in itself but what Sissy did next took all trophies. "What, uh, what now?" Leonard asked, camera still running. Sissy made no verbal response. Instead she shrugged, she sighed, and she upended the bag into her face. Most cascaded down her small-breasted chest, yet enough was caught in her mouth to appease the camera. Leonard, belly roiling, zoomed in on Sissy's face whereupon she swallowed to end all doubt.

  "All in a day's work," she croaked, then hurried to the fungus-streaked bathroom to vomit.

  ««—»»

  Such was the lion's share of Leonard's duties. What he'd always wanted: the director's chair. But it was also his job to process all the footage and then edit the "final cut" which provided the 16mm master that Rocco would pick up and turn in to the lab for mass duplication. About three-quarters of everything Leonard shot would later be cut; it was with the big Sankyo editor that hundreds and hundreds of feet of basic footage would be distilled down to the 20-30 minute master-cut. Leonard took pride in his editing, and he was very good at it. So what if this was animal pornography? The job should still be done right, he affirmed, and it wasn't like he had anything else to do.

  And it was late one night during one of these editing sessions that Leonard noticed something very startling...

  "Oh my...God," he muttered. Leonard cut the SLOW-FORWARD switch to STOP and blinked. He stared momentarily at the Sankyo's bright 9-by-11inch viewing screen. Did I just see a...

  He blinked again, his mind holding.

  The screen glowed in a brilliant green landscape of rolling hills—the hills, in fact, just behind the house out back. The mule flick Rocco ordered this week was in the can—and very much at the expense of Sissy and Snowdrop's hands and knees—whereupon Leonard had gone outside to shoot some title footage. Animal flick notwithstanding, it was a nice touch: rolling green hills and distant farmland. But now that he had the footage in the editor, he noticed this:

  At the far left corner of the frame, a woman's face could be seen peering over an unruly hackberry hedge.

  "Am I seeing things, or is there a face in the frame?"

  Suddenly Leonard felt like the disconsolate photographer in Blow Up. "Oh, man," he thought. An interloper had strayed unseen onto his exterior set! Thank God the Sankyo had a heat-guard; he kept the frame frozen, then put a Leica 1x1 magnifier over the tiny, grainy face behind the hedge. A pretty face, for sure: oval and nearly cherubic, bright, inquisitive surf-green eyes. What Leonard couldn't figure, however, was the thing she was wearing on her head, not a hat, but a white cotton bonnet sort of thing, tied under the chin. Like something a pilgrim would wear.

  He blinked further, gritting his teeth as he focused, and that's when the Sankyo's heat-guard gave up the ghost. The frame darkened, then bubbled, then burned.

  And it was gone.

  "Yes, I must be seeing things," he tried to convince himself. It was easier to believe that, though deep in his heart he suspected it was fantasy. Who could this person be, and what was she doing?

  "No. I'm starving, I'm tired, and I've been held prisoner for months. It was nothing but hallucination..."

  Fine. But one thing still bothered him. The strange tie-down bonnet that the hallucination wore on her head. Yes, it did indeed look like something a pilgrim woman would wear.

  Or perhaps an Epiphanite.

  ««—»»

  Sometimes "kinks" were required. These did not involve animals but instead an extreme manner of human participation. Sometimes the humans were Rocco's Mob pals, sometimes they were degenerates, or "stunt cocks," either paid or coerced to partake in the cinematic festivities. One night Rocco trooped in with all ten members of The Crew. "It's the Champagne Special tonight, kid. Get your camera." A Champagne Special, yes, but no bottles of Perrier-Jouet were in evidence. Instead, all members of the crew quite roughly fornicated with Sissy and Snowdrop and, at the proper moment, ejaculated into a champagne flute. After all of the boys had spent themselves—twice in some cases—there was a formidable accumulation of sperm in that glass. "Down the hatch, bitch," Rocco instructed of poor Sissy, handing her the flute. Leonard zoomed in as Sissy swallowed the entire contents of the glass in one gulp. Then "shower" loops: men urinating on the gals, into their mouths, into the vaginas. The "piss enema" provided a favorite variant: some gentleman voiding a full bladder into one of the girl's rectal vaults, after which she—usually poor Sissy—was required to pose for Leonard's camera as she displaced the urine from her bowel in a spectacular gush. Tame, though, c
ompared to the "scats," which required the girls to eat human and/or animal excrement...

  Leonard, gratefully, had only had to film one "nek" flick in his career as underground pornographer. When one of the more attractive prostitutes on Vinchetti's "circuit" had died—be it via overdose or strangulation for "holding out," turning "CI" (Confidential Informant) or, indeed, dropping "dime" (the running of one's mouth to authorities)—the corpus delectus was expeditiously brought to the safehouse and several "stunts" would have sex with it. Rocco was always one of the stunts, donning the rubber Lyndon Johnson mask to conceal his identity. Pissing, shitting, and ejaculating on women was not technically illegal. Fucking a corpse, however, was, violating federal law and most state annotated codes as a first- or second-degree felony via some term such as gross sexual malfeasance or non-consensual congress. Leonard had filmed it all, though, like the obedient director he was, as Rocco and several other masked stunts had had a grand old time making whoopie with the dead woman. Afterwards, they left, ordering Leonard to bury her in the yard.

  Leonard had seen some "wet" flicks in the previous film-maker's inventory but thankfully he'd never had to shoot one himself. A "wet" flick was a film involving extreme sadism. "White" meant fake, and "wet" meant real. This was a grainy, poorly lit feature in which a skinny young woman was stripped and hung by lashed wrists from a hook on the wall. A staunch implementation of torture was then purveyed: needles in the breasts, in the nipples, in the clitoris, like that. Not exactly Thoroughly Modern Millie. While watching this particular feature, Leonard at least was able to convince himself that it couldn't possibly get worse but of course he was very wrong.