Beastly House

Chapter 1

The stench of Death was unbearable. Rotting corpses turned to soup under a merciless sun. Flies fattened with abandon on a feast of filth, swarming in a frenzy of activity. The smell of excrement from the dying, purging themselves should have scorched his nostrils, but he did not have time to notice. The constant barrage of shells from the enemy made it impossible to hear what the soldier beside him was saying, if the soldier beside him roused himself to say anything at all.

Grim hopelessness lived in the trenches with the war-weary soldiers. In the No Man's Land between the Germans and the Allies, there lay an impossible tangle of barbed wire and pitted earth. He was doomed inside this inner ring of hell.

A corpse arose from the muck, his shallow, metal helmet cocked sideways on his head. Both eyeballs lay on withered cheeks, dangling and sightless, swinging from black–veined ropes like two dripping baubles with cloudy lenses in the corrupt air. Ribbons of flesh fell from the blackened palms that lifted to a godless sky. An evil grin spread across the ghastly, blue face, and then, the soldier heard the screeching voice from the jaws of Gehenna gleefully screech, "Gas! Gas! Gas!"

He awoke screaming, drenched in sweat.

* * * * *

The B.S.T. Leigh House sat on the edge of a large lake, dour and grand, and planted on its foundation as firmly as if it had existed there for a thousand years. The one hundred and sixty room, three-story mansion, cottages, and outbuildings were constructed in the Mediterranean style, and they would have looked more at home in Florida where new oceanfront estates were being erected faster than bacon fat pops in a hot skillet. But still, the massive house looked impressive, and smugly superior, as it sat beside the dark, azure waters of Lake Winston.

The apricot stucco facade, topped with brown terracotta roof tiles, needed only a few palm trees to complete the vision, but no well-bred palms would ever deign to survive the colder climates of New England. So, the architect artfully utilized what he had at his disposal to lend an exotic ambiance to the residence: arched windows, curved balconies, and imported fountains. All of it substituted for the absence of a tropical locale. Somehow, he had been successful, for there was something mystical and foreign about the estate, an oddity that the original owner had found enchanting.

B.S.T. Leigh House took its name from the family who first inhabited it: Bernard, Syble, and Therese, Bernard's step-daughter. Therese was dead and so was Bernard. The widow, Syble, found no happiness in the place. It was filled with too many ghosts.

Syble sold the estate to a group of buyers, who immediately opened an exclusive sanitarium for wealthy socialites looking for a place to hideout, dry out, or ride out some storm in their lives. Mrs. Leigh boarded her private Pullman car and rode the rails south to another mansion, somewhat smaller and easier to maintain.

The sanitarium had been operating for five years. The exclusive jitter joint was jokingly referred to as 'Beastly House' by both staff and patients and that was the name that stuck to it like gum to the bottom of a shoe.

Across the vast, shimmering midnight-blue waters of Lake Winston stood several newly-built mansions, evidence of the nouveau riche flaunting their recently acquired wealth. The newcomers were trying mightily to rise to the status long enjoyed by the old moneyed families of the area. Those who had lived there for several generations scoffed at such audacious displays suddenly cropping up along their waterfront and looked down their noses at their second-class cousins, so conspicuously trying to claw their way to the top rung.

It was one thing for old money to fly in the face of the common man, but when coarse upstarts did it, the whole drama took on the look of a New Orleans madam dressed in minks, diamonds, and pearls sitting in a box seat at the opera, reeking of cheap toilet water and hurling obscenities at the mezzo-soprano.