Read Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee for Free Online

bright
smile since she'd sat down. "It's good to see you, though. I
didn't mean to run at the mouth. I know you don't like to
be bothered and to chat much and all that. It's just nice to.
.. sit next to someone I know"
    "Yes, it is, and it's good to see you too," Adrianne replied.
    Cathleen let out a long breath, rubbed her eyes. "God... "
    "Rough night?"
    "Yes," was all Cathleen said.
    A stilted stewardess squawked through the always ignored pre-takeoff safety instructions. Adrianne let it go
out the other ear, preferred the steady whine of the turbine.
She didn't care where the exit door was because she genuinely wasn't afraid to die. She knew there was a Heaven
because she'd gotten to see it several times.

    And once she got to that house in Florida, she wondered
if she'd get to see Hell.
V
    Clements couldn't say why he would describe the mansion
in this way; it was just a feeling in him, a throb in his gut.
    The mansion looked maniacal.
    Its front must've been fifty yards long. Gray stonework
raised the outer walls five stories. The severely inclined roof
was covered with gray slate, gutter lines and parapets running
with intricate cut-iron crestings. Even the drainpipes and
rainwater heads sported pointed arches and fleurs-de-lys.
    All gray.
    If disconsolation had a color, this was it.
    The front existed as a plane of gun-slit windows with
pointed-arch transoms and filled with lead-lined stained
glass, most of the panes of which looked black. Two cylindrical brick chimney stacks poked up atop the center rampart, like horns.
    Clements shivered.
    "You don't mind if I coke up, do ya?" the girl asked. She
held up a crack pipe.
    Clements' eyes bolted from his binoculars straight to her
face. Just the idea soured him, made him want to rage.
"Yeah, I mind very much."

    "Because it's against the fuckin' law."
    "So is picking up hookers."
    His lips pursed. He'd never hit a woman in his life but just
that second, without thinking, he felt the impulse to crack
her across the face as hard as he could. "That's different-"
    "Oh yeah," she laughed, slipping the pipe back into her
shorts.
    "The people you buy that from are the same people selling it to nine-year-olds on playgrounds. The same people
who want to keep the poor stuck in their ghettos, the same
people who've enslaved you. And you know what, those
people buy their supply from cartels in South America who
give hundreds of millions of dollars to the people who
brought the World Trade Center down and killed four
thousand some odd people. So just think about that. Any
time you buy yourself a twenty-rock, a penny or two of that
twenty goes to psychos who love to murder women and
children."
    She didn't listen to half the diatribe, her bloodshot eyes
looked back out into the night.
    Clements brought his own eyes back to the Zeiss binoculars, watching the front of the house. The sun was going
down now, painting the front face of the edifice with edges
of orange, as if its framework were aflame. Soon, he suspected, the outdoor floodlights would come on. If they
didn't, Clements also had an infra-red monocular and a
Unerd low-light scope. He wanted very much to see if the
men brought anything out.
    "Who're those guys?" the girl asked.
    Clements had forgotten her name because they were all
the same: Snowdrop, Teardrop, Candy, Kitty. He wasn't even
doing a trick tonight; usually he paid more attention. "Fu migators," he answered, still staring at the house through the
bright, infinity-shaped field.

    "So you're waiting for them?"
    ,.Yes
    " ?"
VVhy
    "You ask too many questions."
    She was a half-starved urchin like most of them but beneath the hollows of her cheeks and sunken eyes and the
zero body fat physique, she hadn't lost all of her looks yet.
Tramp appeal, was how Clements thought of it in his own
mind. He just had a thing for it, like the girl's own addictions only his wasn't smoked out of a pipe. He couldn't
help it. He was always good to