The Aldridge Horror Ch 01

Prologue

The last acolyte had finally left, not more than half an hour ago, leaving the house to darkness and to him. The lingering devotees had already been gone almost an hour prior to that. The lights had gone out long while the devotees still attended, for the proceedings were to be illuminated only be the flickering lights of a hundred candles, arranged in concentric circles bordering the edges of the intricate engraving carved into and inlaid into the parquet floor of the wide room with its vaulted ceiling upheld by richly carved beams of arched wood.

The air hung rank and thicka with the smell of incense and the odor of blood, sweat, semen, and sexual exorbitance. Even the bittersweet stench of feces could be discerned, for accidents happen, and nothing was to be denied, no act forbidden or repressed. Not on a night like this, not for such a ceremony as this one was to be.

Saint-John pulled the edges of his cowl from his head and inhaled deeply, at once exhausted and elated. The candles burned low, some had expired, but a pale light wavered in the shadows of the vaulted chamber. Saint-John beheld the empty room and smiled wistfully.

He usually found it somehow sad and lonely to linger after a ceremony; life was meant to be lived in the now, not looking behind you in a backward glance, clutching after memories to assuage the pain of the moment. Pain itself was not to be snubbed, and memories, no matter how sweet, paled in comparison to the living moment.

Still. The near past connected to the living moment somehow, and one could be forgiven for lingering in the golden glow of a good experience even when that experience was gone forever, as ineluctably beyond one's reach as the farthest star dying without noise in the infinite vast of the void is from the mind of a dung beetle crushed under the heavy foot of a passing rhino.

Surely there must be some connection, but neither the star nor the beetle knows. Or the rhino, for that matter.

The dung might know.

Or the living universe within the dung.

His head started to ache, one of those splitting headaches he'd suffered from all his long life. A life that had seen the world go from horse to car to airplane to rocket in its lifetime. A life that had witnessed the world at war twice, and had stared with horror at the devastation caused by perverting the natural fabric of the cosmos.

What were his blasphemes in comparison?

And he'd long stopped caring what society or the so-called leaders of society, polite society, good society, thought of his conduct, his lifestyle, or his teachings.

Sighing, Saint-John stepped down from his raised platform behind the altar and walked with slow paces across the floor. A heavy, dragging sound startled him from his thoughts, and he looked up to see the last acolyte standing in the doorway, a stupid expression in his stupid eyes, his mouth hanging open in his mouth-breather way.

Why Saint-John ever recruited the fool, he couldn't say. A soft heart or a soft head led him to make questionable decisions, from time to time. Someone was standing behind his acolyte slouching in the doorway, someone whose shape Saint-John couldn't make out, shrouded as it was in the murky shadows of the corridor leading away from the chapel.

Then the acolyte stepped forward clumsily, the person behind the acolyte came into view, and Saint-John stared blankly at the figure as recognition slowly dawned on the self-proclaimed priest. It was Jan, and it couldn't be Jan.

They had slaughtered her for the ceremony.

Fear gripped the priest's heart, his hair stood on end, his body trembled, and piss ran down his legs.

Jan dropped the dead acolyte to the floor.

"Oh, Vinnie, Vinnie, Vinnie," the sacrificial victim taunted the man. "Did you really think you could get away with this? You foolish, foolish man. And we had such high hopes for you."

The voice coming from the dead woman was not the voice of the dead woman. It wasn't even a single voice but many voices speaking the same words, unified and somehow discordant, unharmonious.

"I, I, I," Lloyd Vincent Saint-John stammered, but his sentence was never finished.

I

Lisa jolted awake, the sudden swerving of Sami's, that is to say, Dr. Kumar's huge black Yukon bumped her head hard against the window, and she glared angrily at the driver from the safety of the back seat. Carla shouted behind Dr. Kumar, and Shayleen, wearing sunglasses against the bright sun of the late afternoon, sat in the passenger seat and pointed at the line of the trees growing up to and over the edge of the narrow highway.

"It went there, y'all. It went behind those trees!"

"Oh my god," Li-wei kept saying, "what was that? What was that?"

The smallest and youngest of the outfit, a true underclassman despite the presence of Carla, she had been consigned to the middle, stuck between Lisa Reynolds and Carla Perez, also an underclassman. But with five years and well over 130 hours under her belt, she felt like and was treated as something of a graduate student.

A piece of luggage, fortunately made of light-weight blue canvas, flew out from the way back, where Shayleen had flung it, prior to the trip, onto the rest of the heavier luggage: big, molded cases with retractable handles and built-in casters. The canvas bag smashed against Li-wei's head. Being filled with notebooks, batteries, flashlights, and an assortment of odds and ends Shayleen thought of at the last moment, it hurt more than harmed, and Li-wei threw the bag without looking behind her, rubbing the back of her head.

"Dammit, Shayleen, what did you put in that thing? I bet I have a concussion now."

Even though she had lived in New Hampshire since an early teenager, her speech carried traces of the far-off East, but for the most part Li-wei's accent settled on the salient Yankee traits of the new country. Hearing her before you saw her made a person think that she must not come from around these parts, but you couldn't quite say where. Then you saw her, and the mystery cleared.

In that vehicle, during that long ride, Li-wei's accent was far from noticeable. Shayleen hailed from the Deep South, from Georgia or maybe Alabama, Sami Kumar from the sub-continent, Carla still went back to East Los Angelas every Christmas, and Lisa Reynold's plain Midwest Iowan accent sounded odd to all the women in the Yukon, although Lisa insisted that she had no accent.

"I'm the only normal person here," she protested.

Shayleen threw her head against the headrest.

"Goddam, y'all. How much longer is this going take? My ass is killing me. I need to get out and walk around."

Dr. Kumar turned and grinned at her doctoral student.

"Fitzhugh's just down the road now. Maybe thirty more minutes away. Not far. Then you can stretch your legs all you want, but only after we get our rooms."

Carla brushed the side of Li-wei's knee with her leg as she stretched, raising her arms in a broad Y, and groaned.

"Dios, I'm so sick of this shit."

Dr. Kumar shook her head.

"You're all worse than my kids. At least they fall asleep. Are we there yet? Are we there yet? I can't believe you're all grad students.

"I'm not," Li-wei chirped in.

"I was asleep," Lisa protested. "Before you almost ran into that -- what was that thing, anyway? A deer? Did you see it?"

Dr. Kumar frowned and shook her head.

"I'm not sure. It crossed the road so fast. It was just a blur, but it scared the crap out of me."

Even though all her students were adults, she didn't like swearing in front of them. It just felt somehow wrong. She didn't swear in front of her children, and she shouldn't.

You're not their mother, Sami, she reminded herself for the umpteenth time. You're just their professor.

"That was no deer," Shayleen pronounced. "I've never seen a deer like that before. It looked like. It looked shaggy. And dangerous. Big and hairy."

For some reason, that made everybody laugh, and that brief threat of tension vanished.

"How big and hairy was it, Shayleen?" Carl asked.

Li-wei broke into shrill laughter.

"How big and hairy? How big and hairy?"

Even Lisa cracked a smile, although she hated that kind of juvenile humor. Infectious, the sudden hilarity swept through the vehicle until Shayleen was shaking in her front seat, pressing one hand against her chest.

"Too big and hairy. Too big and hairy. They all too big and hairy for me."

That brought on another fit of laughter.

Shayleen had been openly gay since high school and had been one of a mere handful of lesbian students who had brought her date to the prom. Now, at twenty-eight, a Ph. D. candidate and one of the brightest graduate students in Edgemar College's history, she found herself well-liked, well-regarded, and even a little looked up to, especially by the younger undergrads.

Dr. Kumar smiled to herself.

She had an eclectic research group, one she picked herself, and she had worried before this trip whether they'd all get along, at least for the duration of the project. You never knew how people would react when they had to be cooped up with each other.

So far, so good, she thought.

***

Terry Holtham stood between the Ionic columns lining the semi-circle porch opening up from the double wooden screen doors of Aldridge House. The doors, painted white like the house itself, held long screen framed by carved wood. In cool weather the heavy, golden brown oak doors behind the screen doors could be left open, allowing a breeze to stir the air of the manor, bringing in the freshness of the outdoors.

This week, however, the summer evenings had been especially hot, and the doors remained closed, allowing the newly installed central air-conditioning to do its job. That installation, along with all the other renovations made to the large house, had cost her foundation a small fortune.

Large house.

At one time it must have been considered imposing, even huge, but in this era of ready-built McMansions and billionaire villas, Aldridge House seemed modest, quaint. Still, a certain something set it apart from the gaudy showpieces of the new gilded age.

The years lay on it, thick like the dust gathering over the clocks, desks, and statuary tucked into every conceivable nook and cranny, thick like the rotting leaves of accumulating over the lawn of the behind the estate, where ancient oaks and survivor elms towered over the edge of the southern boundary. A small pond, fed by a little brook, attracted the pests of the air in the summer evenings, mosquitos, gnats and other flying nuisances, which were eaten by frogs leaping from the banks at the slightest approach of human feet.

The pond brought other visitors, dragonflies and water birds, and Terry loved to go out there, properly drenched in deet, to watch the delicate, silvery blue wings of the dragonflies gliding over the rippling surface of the pond. She'd feed the ducks by tossing pieces of white bread onto the water, and she'd listen to the voices of the small wilderness.

When the summer became too hot, she'd linger in the evening, watching as the shadows lengthened and the grove grew quieter. It was so peaceful, so easy for her to relax in the pleasant coolness of the night, putting away for a few minutes, an hour perhaps, the calls of duty and the unrelenting responsibility of the retreat.

Then she stopped visiting the pond at night, telling herself she was far too busy, that too many demands were put on her for her to be traipsing in the woods at night.

Just this spring, the renovators reported strange accidents and bizarre odors in the east wing, then one of the workers got hurt, badly, and all renovation stopped in the east wing.

The worker survived, but he also lost his right arm close to the elbow.

The worries of the renovation melted into the mists of her daily routines, the cares of operating the women's retreat.

She almost forgot about the occurrences in the east wing.

Until the conference three weeks ago, in early August.

Not a very good time for a conference, most of the attendees were academics or academic types, and many had courses to prepare.

Still, it had been a minor success, that summer's meeting of Forward Women. Not only had she met the usual acquaintances, she had also had been introduced to a number of new professionals. Not the least among them was Dr. Kumar.

It was hard not to notice Dr. Kumar.

She held her 5'3" frame erect, and although her high heels gave her small stature additional height, she didn't need them. Even flat-footed, there was something about her that made her seem taller, more imposing, more substantial than the other women at the conference. Her body carried all the voluptuosity of what Ms. Holtham at first had mistaken for Hispanic heritage.

Wide, round hips matching a wide, round bust.

Terry blushed at the limitations of her waspish heritage.

Dr. Kumar, on the other hand, couldn't have been more graceful. She corrected Terry's clumsy Spanish greeting with a happy smile playing upon her full, sensual lips, the bottom lip protruding slightly further out below the rounding arch of her thick upper lip. Her eyes gleamed with mischief, large brown eyes, the top lids curving in an almond arch while her lower lids ran in a flatter line below, upholding the beauty of her face.

She was altogether alluring and exotic, was Dr. Kumar, and Terry felt plain and diminished standing next to her, although she had gone to her favorite but not regular stylist that afternoon, getting an unusual makeover for the evening. Pierre was good, excellent, an artist of sorts, but he charged exorbitant prices, and Terry Holtham rarely called upon his services.

"Oh, no. No, I'm sorry," she explained. "I don't know Spanish. Hindi or English, I'm afraid. Unless you speak Farsi. I know a little Farsi."

Terry could have just died.

But Dr. Kumar wouldn't hear of it.

"I get Iranians and Russians confused all the time. And please don't ask me to tell the difference between the French and the Germans."

So Terry's blunder had been forgiven, but something in Dr. Kumar's tone told her to watch herself -- and to keep on her toes against making another faux pas.

***

Just then, the sound of tires on the unpaved drive leading to the unpaved parking lot across the wide lawn in front of the estate broke into Terry's revery. The woman straightened herself, smoothed her outfit (a simple cream-colored blouse over loose, pale blue slacks), and strode across the lawn to meet the small group emerging by slow degrees from the Yukon, de-cramping as they stretched their stiff young limbs after the long ride.

Tall, stately sugar maples, crowns long and tapering slightly towards the top, bordered the edge of the lawn, partially concealing the parking lot from the view of the front of Aldridge House. The green leaves and yellow flowers of spring were over, and the sunset hues of the turning leaves of fall were months to come. Yellowish, pale green foliage now offered the lawn shade from the summer sun.

Only where the gnarled, knotty trunks of loose and peeling bark supported the massive crowns could the vehicles of visitors be seen pulling up on the loose gravel drive, crunching the pebbles and rocks beneath their tires. Terry Holtham stood a moment behind one of the trunks and hesitated.

She stiffened at the sight of the four twenty-somethings. It had been decades since she'd been that young herself. She admonished herself for never being able to feel comfortable around youth. She told herself that her organization needed to hear the voices of the young, that it absolutely needed to attract young people, young women, to its cause if it was to endure another century. But it did no good. She felt strange and out of place, and she never knew quite what to say to the young.

She admired Dr. Kumar's aplomb, the way she could laugh at something the tall Black girl said as she stretched her long, muscular legs, leaning her torso against the Yukon and stretching her Achilles tendons behind her one by one like an athlete.

Dr. Kumar glimpsed Terry, and Ms. Holtham, feeling like she had just been caught, jolted out of her thoughts and walked forward from the shadow of the maple trees. Dr. Kumar smiled broadly at the chair of Forward Women.

"Why, I declare, Ms. Holtham, you haven't changed a bit since I last saw you!" she said.

"Dr. Kumar," Terry replied, "It's so amazing to see you again. It seems like it's been..."

Terry's voice trailed off in the realization that it had only been a few weeks since the conference and that she had somehow missed the professor's humor.

"Please, Terry. It's Sami. I don't even like my assistants to call me Doctor. Unless, of course, they screw something up."

Sami scowled at Li-wei, but Li-wei stood behind the Yukon, helping Carla and Lisa fetch luggage and bags. Shayleen strode forward with her right hand extended.

"Hey," she said with a bright smile. "I'm Shayleen. And don't believe a word of what Dr. Kumar said just now. No one in our group calls her Sami."

Dr. Kumar tensed and frowned, but whether from Shayleen's repudiation of her good nature or at hearing her name uttered on the lips of a mere underling was a matter of doubt.

"Thank you, Shayleen," she said. "I'm sure the other girls need help."

"I'm sure they do," Shayleen replied. She made no movement to leave, and Dr. Kumar let the issue drop.

Terry's hand had been in Shayleen's grip the whole time, a surprisingly strong grip, but not a squeeze. Not uncomfortable. But not pleasant either.

"It's a pleasure to meet you," she declared. "Welcome to Aldridge House! Have you learned anything about the place yet?"

Shayleen released Ms. Holtham's hand.

"Only what Dr. Kumar told us. Oh, we looked it up on the Internet. Oddly enough, we couldn't find anything. Aside from the fact that it used to belong to Lloyd Vincent Saint-John years ago, way back when my grandma and grandpa listened to him."

"Oh, there's so much more than that business. Besides, most of what's been said of the Saint-John years has been vastly exaggerated."

Terry's eyes briefly met Shayleen's, but the older woman quickly looked away, glancing first at Dr. Kumar, then at the three young ladies carrying what looked to be the entire contents of the Yukon on their backs and in their arms. A blonde grad student -- Terry assumed all Dr. Kumar's assistants were grad students -- coming up from behind barreled into Shayleen, who jabbed her peer with her left elbow.

"Hey, watch it."

"Hey watch it yourself. Some of us are working here."

The exchange held more annoyance than rancor, and Terry smiled that smile which tried to hide the uncomfortable awareness that she was out of the loop and superfluous. A middle-aged and disregarded bystander of youth. It rankled, and it stung.

She had been young once -- and something of a vixen when she put the effort into it, and in those days she often put the effort into it.

Why not? It was fun.

"Don't let me stop you," Shayleen exclaimed, but the blond had already pushed by her, sweeping with her luggage towards the front doors of Aldridge House.

Dr. Kumar interrupted Shayleen's conversation with Terry.

"Oh, for god's sake," she said, "Lisa has no idea where to go, Terry. If you don't take her by the hand, she'll just barge into whatever. That's what she does, you know. She barges."

Dr. Kumar pulled Terry away from Shayleen, pushed her arm through Terry's elbow, and dragged her in tow to catch up to Lisa halfway across the lawn already. Carla and Li-wei followed behind, with Shayleen bringing up the rear, carrying no luggage at all.

Let the underlings do it. She was only a year away from her doctorate.

End of Chapter One