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Less Exalted Tastes

by Gemma Amor

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John Guthrie stood at the end of a long gravel driveway and stared in unadulterated joy at the largest mansion he’d ever seen. In the meagre light of an autumn day, the scrolled corbels, smooth limestone ashlar, and innumerable sash windows of the house shone with promise, a promise picked out in high relief by a fleeting sun that occasionally fought its way through heavy, rain-laden clouds. A storm was coming. The trees around him rustled with a quiet anticipation that he, in his excitable state, could not hear.

All John Guthrie could hear was the sound of money singing.

He wet his lips, looked again at the sales pamphlet he carried. The name of the property was typed out in bold capitals: “THE ROOST”. Beneath, a cut-and-paste history lesson. John had skimmed it twice already. Formerly a Bishop’s Palace, now privately owned, The Roost was built in 1770, after the great famine. It was sold by the church ten years later to an Anglo-Irish absentee landlord who chose to reside in England, leasing the house to a cruel and entitled plantation owner called Edward Daly, who regularly beat and abused the slaves he brought with him until the master of the house was, in turn, beaten to death one night by the members of a secret peasant society from a nearby village called the “redboys” (owing to the fact they wore red smocks whilst out on nightly raids). These vigilantes had been angry with the extortionate rents Daly’s landlord had enforced upon purchasing the estate. Daly was strung up by the neck over the front door of The Roost with his own whip, breeches down around his ankles. The men and women he’d enslaved ran like water down a pane of glass, fleet-footed and full of terror through the shadows of the grounds, silently and swiftly making their bid for a life away from the wants and needs and tempers of a man who had no right to their freedom.

After that, the house fell into disrepair and remained abandoned for decades. Perhaps this is why it escaped the “house burning mania” of 1919, when hundreds of Irish country houses were destroyed during the War of Independence. Not much point burning down something that was already a ruin.

Eventually, the estate was auctioned off to a wealthy family from New York whose descendants still lived there today. As far as John could see, the current generation had not invested in repairs or upkeep of any sort, preferring to exist in a much less exalted state than he would have considered tenable for such famously affluent people.

Not that John Guthrie cared about any of this, even after a third reading. All he knew was the building was well-situated near a major road, and ideally suited to development. He could easily slice The Roost up into at least ten apartments, perhaps more at a squeeze, all of which would make him a pretty pot in monthly rent. City folk would eat them up, he knew it. He’d market the place as luxury living, scrub the controversial stuff from the history of the house with tactful marketing copy.

John blew his cheeks out and wriggled his fingers around the edges of his pamphlet. If he could land this, he was pretty sure he was about to make a fortune.

But first he had an appointment with the owner, a certain Miss Valerie Compton Dubois. John had heard a fair amount of gossip about the current mistress since the house went on the market: Miss Dubois was rarely seen in public, was extraordinarily difficult to get hold of via any of the usual modern communication methods, and seemed to pride herself on being unpredictable and capricious. John figured he knew what was behind her behaviour: shame. Pure and simple. How could it be anything else? All that old money, frittered away. Certainly not spent on maintaining the vast pile of bricks and mortar before him. Miss Dubois had created nothing beyond a legacy of debt and decay, and the beginnings of the end of her dynasty.

John could fairly smell the sad scent of rotting lucre from where he stood, some distance off.

All of which meant he had the advantage, if he could leverage it properly. He could knock the asking price right down. He had no qualms about doing so. It was good business.

He walked up the drive and made notes on the edges of his pamphlet in red biro. Driveway resurfaced. Tree surgeon. New perimeter wall and fencing. Security gates.

The Roost, which sat in a tree-choked enclave of giant oaks, seemed in far better condition at a distance than it did up close. The closer he got, the more his heart sank. The west wing of the mansion had subsided considerably. John could see several large structural cracks in the masonry, along with a sagging roof right at the very end of the wing, a sure sign of rotted joists. He wondered how bad the rooms were in that section. The whole place would need gutting, shoring up, stabilising, new foundations dug and re-laid, definitely new roofing, window casement replacements, guttering, a new heating system, wiring, plumbing, sewage cisterns…he started totting up the costs on the back of the pamphlet. As he did so, he felt a spot of rain on the back of his hand. Looking up, he saw birds flying low and quiet, settling in huddled clumps on the chimney stacks of The Roost. He wondered how much bird shit was blocking up the chimneys and added bird-guards and repellents to the itinerary of repairs.

After a moment’s pause, one more thing: landscaping. He was referring mostly to the gardens flanking each wing of the house, which were overgrown playgrounds for rampant weeds, brambles, nettles, and bracken. Here and there he could make out the foliage-shrouded forms of statues. Other things lurked in the brambles: a crumbling fountain, an ornamental obelisk with the tip snapped off, a weird, alien-looking plant with giant, purple, globe-shaped seed heads.

He finally reached the front porch, feeling somewhat exposed.

Intimidated by the sheer size of the property up close, John took a moment to gather himself before ringing the doorbell, and in doing so, saw he was not alone. A window cleaner was climbing up a ladder set up to one side of the porch, squinting up glumly at the task he had ahead of him: hundreds of small, lead-lined panes of glass.

John waved ‘hello’ in a cheery show of false sympathy, thinking to himself: this is what fucking happens when you don’t try hard at school, matey boy. You end up as a window cleaner. The cleaner did not wave back, having his hands full.

John rang the doorbell. He was not good at waiting, but forced himself to be patient. There were no lights to be seen inside the house despite the gathering darkness of the day. In fact, apart from the window cleaner, there were no visible signs of life anywhere. Doubt pricked him. Was the owner even in? His secretary had written ahead to confirm his appointment, so she’d better fucking be in. Written and posted a letter, with a postage stamp and everything, like it was 1922, instead of a hundred years later.

His bell remained unanswered. Uncertainty and annoyance took a firmer hold of his guts the longer he stood there.

No matter, he told himself, as calmly as he could. Perseverance was the name of the game. His future lay in this house, he could wait right here until fucking nightfall if he had to. He rang the bell again, more insistently this time.

Nothing.

He began to play a game with himself, imagining what he would do with the money he was going to make. What would he buy first? A new car, definitely. Trips to the casino, maybe rent a suite in Monte Carlo and fill it with coke and champagne and women who liked the finer things in life, women who were willing to lick his balls and chase dreams with him: dreams of cold, hard cash. With money it was easier to enjoy beauty, everyone knew that. He would buy a piano or something, fuck girls over it until he got raw.

He abandoned the doorbell and reached for the large knocker mounted upon the door itself. It was painfully cold to the touch, a great brass clapper fashioned into the head of a greyhound with a jagged bone in its jaws. He lifted and dropped it, and it crashed against the door as loud as a gunshot, the hinge nipping his finger. He yelped, sucking at a blob of blood that welled up instantly.

The window cleaner, who was yet to clean any windows, laughed.

“It got me, too!” he called, waving a steaming flask at John.

John scowled.

The man shrugged in a good-natured way, whatever, pal, and poured himself a coffee whilst balancing on top of his ladder like a lunatic.

John glared in hate at the still closed door.

Why was no one answering?

Talk about taking the wind out of his sails. He had even planned his opening speech, miming a firm handshake and confident smile in his bathroom mirror this morning. Anger grew within.

“Hey!” he called out to the window man. “Are they even in? Is it worth me looking round back?”

The window man chuckled ruefully. “I wouldn’t. Bloody great pack of dogs tied up round there, hiding in the brambles, tried it myself. Nearly got my dick chewed off. Just have to wait, they’re a bit slow, but they’ll get to you eventually.”

John knocked again. The enthusiasm leaked out of him like air from a punctured tyre, but he was not leaving until he got what he came for. What he was owed.

The door opened.

A mere crack. But it opened.

“Ah!” said John, excitedly.

“Yes?”

John gawped. He found himself looking through the crack into the huge dark eyes of a girl who could be no older than fifteen, sixteen at a push. She was unusually tall and extraordinarily beautiful. Unconventional? He couldn’t think of the right word, and suddenly felt flustered. She was so young. He had expected…what had he expected? A butler? A housekeeper? Or the owner herself.

The girl regarded him coolly. John felt sweat pop out upon his top lip. He just barely stopped himself from saying “Is your mother home?” and snapped his mouth shut, resisting the urge to push his way inside without introduction.

Behind the girl, an enormous staircase was just visible at the end of a dark entry hall clad with damp-stained velvet wallpaper which curled away from the sodden plaster beneath in long, unappealing strips. Portraits of stern, be-jewelled people stared at him in an unfriendly manner from the shadows. He couldn’t be sure but he thought he heard the low rumble of a dog growling from somewhere behind the girl.

Best not go in uninvited, he thought, remembering what the window cleaner had said about the dogs round back.

John fumbled for his card and handed it through the ungenerous gap between the door and his person.

“I have an appointment,” he managed.

The teenager took the card and vanished, closing the door in his face.

When she reappeared fifteen minutes later, the girl opened the door properly this time, with a sudden, graceful movement. John fell through it in relief, the gloom of the interior swallowing him hungrily.

He took a moment to adjust to the darkness.

He was inside. Inside!

First mission accomplished. Now, he could finally get a good look at the place.

He craned his head back and stared.

He never thought, after almost three decades of selling properties of all shapes and sizes to people who didn’t know what they were being sold, that he would be excited by a building ever again. Over the years it had become increasingly difficult to feel strongly about anything, but the sheer scale of The Roost made him lightheaded. A once-gilded wooden ceiling soared thirty feet, if not higher, over his head. Huge window casements lined the whole floor, letting in weak, filtered light at intervals where the curtains, sagging from their rails and hooks, refused to close properly. The acoustics betrayed how much space John would have to work with, even as his eyes struggled with the unreliable lighting: every tiny movement he made came back to him as an amplified echo. Marble and wood and stained glass and cool granite gave the place a sepulchral air.

But it wasn’t just the size of the house that made John feel a little weak at the knees.

It was the decor.

Like the portraits on the walls he’d spotted earlier. Up close, they displayed an assortment of characters who all shared the same high cheekbones, dark eyes, and large build that could have been mistaken for an artist’s style choice were it not for the girl who stood before him, looking as if she’d walked fresh out of one of the paintings herself. Family resemblance, he thought, trying not to gawp too obviously.

Beyond the physical similarities, there was a thematic approach to the portraits that made John suddenly very uncomfortable.

Because the family, in their various generational iterations, had a rigorous and rather morbid fascination with death. Or, more specifically, with hunting and killing things.

Take the portrait on his immediate left, for example, of a young boy. A blood-soaked frilly lace ruff encircled his neck. In a ring-encrusted hand, he held what looked like a freshly harvested heart, which dripped onto the blue satin of his attire. His face was smeared with blood from nose to chin, and his eyes seemed very dark above the red. He was baring his teeth. John could see blood and gristle caught between the boy’s incisors.

In the next painting along, a woman wore a velvet dress, corset open at the front, pale breasts spilling out, one nipple free. She rested a loaded crossbow on her shoulder, and a dead pheasant with a bolt sticking from under its wing was draped across the other. The head of the pheasant was missing. The woman’s cheeks bulged, and John realised she was chewing on it like a gobstopper. Her free hand had disappeared beneath her cascading silk skirts. John cleared his throat when he realised why that was.

He started to feel faintly sick. He looked at another painting, hoping to see something more staid, formal, proper. Instead he saw an elderly gentleman with a large floppy cap savagely dicing a hare upon his knee with a ruby-encrusted dagger. The man was smiling happily. In another painting, a young girl, similar in age to the one who stood nearby, cradled a cloth-wrapped bundle to her chest. The cloth had once been white and was now soaked crimson. The girl’s face drooped in sadness. Her tongue protruded from between wet lips to capture a single bead of blood that stained her chin.

John blew out his cheeks and shook his head. Then, he noticed the staircase.

It was monstrous, an enormous, carved, polished, twisted leviathan that dominated the entrance hall. The mouth was as wide as John’s own dining room, easily. The marble-capped steps that led upwards were a livid grey, and the surrounding wood was walnut, glossy and darkened over the years by generations of hot hands sliding up and down the banister, shaping the wood under constant caresses. John could see birds of prey, game, deer, boar, and hundreds of grimacing greyhounds carved into the bannisters and railings with an astonishing attention to detail. The whole staircase was, in fact, a sculpture, a shockingly realistic hunting scene. Here and there the heads of mauled pheasants hung, necks loose and limp. A rabbit’s frantic wooden eye gazed at him, pleading for rescue. A roe deer and its baby ran for their lives, heads craned forward in desperate exertion as they were chased by the hounds. John could almost hear the dogs baying and the deer coughing in terror. At the very bottom of the staircase, the rearing form of a defiant stag formed the foot banister. Its wickedly sharp antlers were chipped and scarred, but deliberately so. This was a fighting stag. Rampant, saliva dripping from slack jaws, it fought like a king for its life, three hounds hanging from it, teeth and claws ripping at tender hide, their collective weight bringing the beast down in agonisingly slow motion. The stag, defiant to the very last, roared at the indignity of its violent death captured permanently in solid wood.

John raised his eyebrows.

He made a small note on his clipboard.

Dismantle and replace staircase.

The house was, surprisingly, much warmer inside than out, and filled with a cloying smell of incense, wood smoke, furniture wax, dried lavender, and the faint underlying odour of damp and wood rot. The back of John’s throat tickled. He could use a glass of water but knew better than to ask.

‘Impressive,’ he said weakly, waving at the staircase and the paintings.

“Mother will see you now,” the girl replied, sounding amused. She turned on her heel and disappeared into the interior of the house.

John hurried after her, unwilling to be left alone in the violent hallway. He followed the girl through a long gallery to the left of the staircase, across several once lavishly decorated rooms facing out to the rear of the property. The windows in these rooms were choked with brambles, some of which had forced their way into the house through broken panes of glass. The window cleaner had a hell of a job ahead of him.

John tried hard not to stare as the girl walked in front of him, moving as if she were not made of flesh and blood, but rather smoke and warm air and shadow. The nape of her neck was long and smooth, and shockingly available. His fingers twitched every time he looked at it, and he began to sweat in earnest. She gave off a deep musk as they moved along. Motes of dust hung in the rare shafts of light that crossed his path. He sneezed, violently, feeling as if he was sickening. He’d spent too fucking long hanging about in the cold, outdoors. He needed to go home and to bed. Or have a long, protracted wank. Or both.

First, he had a fortune to make.

They stopped after a convoluted trek up and down and around and along spaces of all types and descriptions: galleries, stairways, halls, alleys, landings, until John found himself in a room decorated entirely in scarlet, a room so completely saturated in red that the woman waiting for them inside melded almost entirely into the walls. The only parts of her immediately visible were her hands and head, for she was wearing red too. Upon realising she was there, John immediately all but lost her again. Searching, his eyes were drawn eventually to two enormous mirrors hanging on opposite sides of the room, which threw backwards and forwards the framed image of a beautiful creature standing in her domain, crushed-berry lips and heavily lidded eyes watching him from further and further away, striking visage vanishing eventually into two tiny specks that he strained to see. There were thousands of her, he realised, and every single one seemed to be judging him with measured, amused intent.

A profoundly beautiful woman of indeterminate age, DuBois wore corseted red satin that trailed behind her like a mediaeval ball gown, and carried herself with the self-same possession, coldness and entitlement that her predecessors on the walls down in the hallway had. Again, the family likeness was clear. John had a sudden vision of her chewing on the mutilated carcass of a pig, sucking on ribs enthusiastically. He felt something strange stir inside him, and cleared his throat aggressively, responding to the woman’s scrutiny the way he always did when he was in the presence of true wealth, of class. He became servile, ingratiating, pulling himself into the smaller type of man he knew old money appreciated.

“Good morning.” He approached across the deep-pile carpet and held out his hand, not expecting the woman in red to shake it. “We have an appointment. My name is John. I’m the buyer?”

She continued to observe him for a second or two, then smiled radiantly, moving to meet him halfway. Her skirts billowed about her, hissing. She was very tall, towering above him at easily six foot four, five, if not more.

“Of course,” she murmured. “My daughter gave me your card.”

He swallowed.

Eyes on the prize, John. Eyes on the prize. Do not get distracted. She needs something from you, not the other way around.

She offered him some tea and dispatched her daughter to fetch it.

Silence stretched as the adults faced each other. John, who felt smaller and more hideous by the second, found himself ogling. She didn’t seem to mind, tilting her head back, squaring her shoulders. Preening like a purring cat. Her dress was not a costume or style choice, but a genuine antique, thin in places where the fabric had worn through. The lace gathered at her sleeves and neckline was yellowed, ragged, nevertheless highlighting slender, long-nailed hands and full, high breasts between which a gigantic ruby pendant hung. John wondered what it would feel like to have the weight of that ruby on his face as he licked at her chest, then shook himself.

DuBois spoke.

“So, John Guthrie. You want to buy my house.”

Her accent gave the simplest of words a ceremonial drawl. It had a strange effect on him. He felt dizzy. He sat heavily upon a low velvet couch nearby. It was as much as he could do to lift his pamphlet to fan himself.

The mistress of the house watched as John struggled for conversation. He realised her right hand was fiddling with the jewel around her neck, occasionally brushing against one or the other of her breasts. She was drawing attention to them, on purpose.

Christ, he thought, frantically trying to get a grip. Christ.

The daughter came back with tea, placed it on a table in front of him. It had a bitter taint that lingered, but did the trick. He sobered up somewhat and attempted to bury himself in formalities.

“Miss DuBois. Can I ask…” His collar felt too tight. He pulled on it with a crooked finger. “What exactly were you hoping to make from the place? Pricewise, I mean.”

DuBois flashed perfectly white, wide teeth, lowering herself down onto the couch beside him. She reached for his hand, sitting so one warm leg brushed against his through the fabric of her dress. She playfully pulled a pen from the collar of his jacket where he had it clipped, and proceeded to write an eight-figure amount indolently, in flowing script, across his palm with the pen.

Her touch, hot and direct, undid his thin resolve to be professional. He stammered as he looked at the number tattooed into his skin. It felt like foreplay. She wanted so much money. He admired her gall. He found, with horror, that he was nursing the very obvious beginnings of an erection. This discovery made him leap from where he sat and retreat awkwardly to a safer place on the other side of the room. The DuBois musk followed and wrapped around him like a warm scarf. He turned away, subtly rearranging himself whilst feigning interest in the red wallpaper lining the chamber. He forgot, however, about the two giant mirrors that broadcasted his every movement a thousand times over and froze with his hand on his crotch as he realised the women could still see him.

“How many rooms did you say there were?” he asked, high-pitched voice tinged with panic.

The woman and her daughter laughed, compounding his humiliation.

“Would you like a tour?” DuBois countered.

John considered refusing her, but found himself oddly enraptured, once again trailing around the house like a suited, stocky ghost as DuBois pointed out galleries, parlours, bedrooms, bathrooms, dining rooms, a ballroom, a vast kitchen, gables, buttresses, and beams that could squash him in an instant if they ever fell, and more than one looked as if it were about to. Everything mouldered, hung loose, lay broken, stained or scarred. There was art in every corner, upon every surface, but all of it was debased, twisted, the stuff of nightmares. John tried not to see it, tried to focus on the work that needed to be done to the house. The costs mounted up the further he walked, his discomfort intensifying with each step. Every now and then DuBois brushed his hand with hers, or leaned upon his shoulder, or bumped up against him, heightening his anxiety. How desperate she must be, trying to seduce him, undermine him so he wouldn’t fuck her over with his low offer. It was so blatant. He could see exactly what she was up to.

As more rooms revealed themselves, as more demented paintings and tapestries and figurines and ornaments burned into his brain, he began to panic in earnest without really knowing why. He should be the one with all the power, here, yet he felt like one of the animals in the portraits downstairs. Prey, soon to be caught and dismembered. He imagined DuBois hacking his ear off at the root with a silver table knife, nibbling at it as she side-eyed the artist from her canvas stage. The sudden vivid imagery terrified and turned him on, which in turn terrified him again.

What the fuck is wrong with me? he thought.

Had there been something in the tea?

DuBois led John to the very top of the mansion and through a tiny gallery, stopping outside an oak door thickly studded with iron bolts, which was initially hidden behind an enormous threadbare tapestry. Stitched into the tapestry: the image of a face, eyes rolled back in their sockets. An embroidered hand extracted brain matter from a pair of nostrils with a hook, just as the Egyptians did with Pharaohs before burying them, only this person was not dead, suffering eternally rendered in millions of tiny, silken stitches.

Ms DuBois swept the tapestry aside and hooked it back. John asked her why the door was hidden. She placed her hot hand over his eyes by way of reply. He did not flinch at her touch.

“Don’t look,” she whispered. Her fingers pressed into his face, exerting extraordinary pressure. She led him forward through the door. Somewhere in the bowels of the house, dogs began howling and barking, dozens of them. John’s feet click-clacked reluctantly across hard, slippery flooring, and he almost slipped several times, but his captor kept him upright.

At last, maybe because she felt tears on her fingers, she stopped, uncovered his eyes.

John gasped.

He stood in a bedroom dominated by two things: a colossal four-poster bed made up with crisp white linen and red velvet pelmet and drapes, and, surrounding the bed, an eerie, silent crowd, formally arranged, a monumental marble audience assembled to watch a show not yet begun.

Statues.

Dozens of them, in a shocking, macabre array of positions and actions. It was like looking at a posed riot, a violent bacchic frieze. He was reminded of the paintings of hell he’d seen in an art book in the school library once.

“What is this?” he was unable to stop staring at the bed, even though, or perhaps because, it was the most innocuous thing in the room.

DuBois let out a long, lingering sigh.

“My passion,” she replied. “This is my gallery.”

The statues were exquisite and disgusting. They displayed acts of violence so specific that John felt his focus turn inward, attempting to escape. But there was no getting away, because he was unable to close his eyes even as he attempted to shut down his mind.

The sound of baying hounds grew louder. The pack were moving through the house.

None of that mattered when art like this existed.

There were men and women alike, all naked, captured in every horrific pose imaginable. Some looked to be his age, some older, bent with time. DuBois herself featured in these acts many times over, in various different iterations. Sometimes watching, sometimes participating, sometimes fornicating or perpetrating, sometimes…

Feeding.

A cameo player in her own vision, each brilliantly rendered version of her marble-white, impassive, perfectly motionless. Stone hounds frequently accompanied her in her adventures, sometimes as accessories, sometimes as tools.

The combination of sadism and artistry on show in the bedroom was more than John could bear. He tried one last time to move his body, to turn away, but DuBois gripped him by the chin with extraordinary strength and escorted him around the room to survey the statues more closely. John had no choice but to let himself be led.

“This is a particular favourite of mine,” the mistress of the house said, stopping by an individual statue set slightly apart from the crowd. John saw a young boy grimacing in disbelief as he hacked the head of another man off with a serrated knife, into a waiting burlap sack. A marble replica of DuBois craned her head over the pair, one palm extended to catch beautifully sculpted, snow-white blood as it spurted from the man’s throat. Stone greyhounds licked at the gore pooling on the ground. The statue-boy looked accusingly at John, hating the only warm, pink, innocent man in the room.

“I’d like to leave now,” John said, but DuBois continued to hold him tightly in her grip, steering him to another statue.

Here was an elderly woman curled into a ball, arms wrapped about herself. On the floor beneath, her entrails spilled out like pale snakes, coiled and looping across the pedestal the statue was carved upon. A pair of marble scissors rested, abandoned, nearby. Dogs fought over her intestines like they were chew toys, playing tug of war with them. DuBois was nowhere to be seen in this sculpture, but in the next grouping of figures, John saw three bug-eyed men fighting, pulling at hair and skin with nails and teeth, ripping each other apart like…

A pack of hounds set upon a fox.

The baying grew louder.

DuBois’ likeness was behind the fighting men, resting on an upturned log, her large skirts hitched, one hand enthusiastically working the exposed slit between her stockinged legs, which she’d torn a hole in. John realised, on peering more closely, that she was not pleasuring herself with her own fingers, but with a bare bone, the same size and shape as a finger bone.

One of the fighting men had an index finger missing, John noted as DuBois led him on with a small, knowing smile. The tips of her two front teeth protruded ever so slightly from her top lip, coming down to poke the soft skin of her chin.

Next, John was shown a marble body kebabbed upon a skewer, horizontally mounted arse to mouth. The body was being rotated by a kind-faced woman who wept as she turned the handle of a spit. Marble flames licked at the human meat above. John wondered, distantly, who carved these statues. They were beautifully rendered, every wrinkle, every fold of skin, every hair life perfect. Some of the figures had been draped with real jewellery, watches, and even a pair of glasses perched upon the sharp polished nose of a man who looked remarkably like his solicitor, although John had never seen his solicitor naked.

He realised he was being led through the statues directly to the bed, where a hummock in the linen became more obvious. He had not seen the lump from a distance, perhaps because the bedding was so white. DuBois undressed herself slowly as they moved through the assembled sculptures, her hand deftly unlacing her own corset with practised ease.

“What’s in the bed?” John managed to ask, as his thighs bumped against its side. The hummock was the same size as a person. It moved slightly and made small noises of fear. John could see the linen moving up and down in small, panicked bursts.

“Art is best when derived from reality,” DuBois said, stepping out of her dress entirely. Now completely naked, she was magnificent. Her skin was covered in strange red symbols, arcane and indecipherable to John.

“And an artist is happiest when using live models,” she continued, smiling at someone over John’s shoulder. That musky smell drifted into his nostrils again.

He shuddered as unexpected hands caressed him from behind.

DuBois climbed onto the bed and pulled back the sheets.

The window cleaner, bound, stripped of his overalls, lay terrified beneath. Next to him, a series of instruments. Stone maker’s tools.

Standing on the other side of the bed, a large block of marble.

No, make that two.

The women of The Roost came to stand together, tall, impassive, bare skin gleaming, eyes filled with fiery longing. The daughter picked up her tools, and dogs poured into the room, overwhelming the space with their noise and stink as they milled about excitedly.

“What would you have them do, Mother?” the young sculptress asked, and the window cleaner, in full and complete comprehension of his fate, began to scream.

John felt heat rising from around his feet.

The deal, he realised, as sharp, wicked things were placed in his hands, had been done, long before he’d even arrived.

John could no longer hear money singing.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 949

November 15th 2024

Less Exalted Tastes by Gemma Amor

Narrated by Barry J. Northern

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart with audio by Chelsea Davis

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Welcome to PseudoPod, the weekly horror podcast, folks. I’m Alasdair, your host and this week’s story is part of our regulat Anthology and Collection showcase and comes to us from the excellent Gemma Amor and first appeared in the 2024 collection All Who Wander Are Lost.

Gemma Amor is a Bram Stoker Award nominated author, voice actor and illustrator based in Bristol. Her debut short story collection Cruel Works of Nature came out in 2018. Other books include Dear Laura, White Pines, Six Rooms, Girl on Fire and These Wounds We Make. She is the co-creator of horror-comedy podcast Calling Darkness, starring Kate Siegel, and her stories feature many times on popular horror anthology shows The NoSleep Podcast, Shadows at the Door, Creepy, The Hidden Frequencies and The Grey Rooms. She also appears in a number of print anthologies and had made numerous podcast appearances to date.

Your narrator this week is Barry J. Northern, a long time friend and contributor of Escape Artists. He created the show, Cast of Wonders, before it became part of the EA family, ran the Cast Macabre podcast, which now only exists in internet history, and wrote the Pseudopod episode Corvus Curse.

 

So knock on the door and stand well back, because whether you want it to or not, it’s already open and inside, the truth is waiting for you.

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Gemma’s a good friend of mine and her work is always something I really enjoy spending time with. I just finished her astonishing SF novel Total Immersion and the emotional honesty and clear view that makes that so unforgettable is present by the bucket load here too. But here she does something more structurally rigorous and colder that helps the story immensely.

This is, for me, a story about a war between predators and only one of them knows it’s a war until it’s far too late. Straight away there’s an element of horror there as it becomes clear this isn’t a fair fight. Then she flips things the other way as you realize that John Guthrie is about as close to a perfect definition of a modern parasite as you can get. His greed masks the danger he’s in. His contempt tells us where he thinks he is on the food chain. The ending shows us both the lie in that.

But Gemma isn’t close to done, and as the story goes on we can see just how stark the lines are. John is New Money, Valerie Compton Dubois is impossibly old money. John has come to the house with something to prove, Valerie is simply delighted to get to practice her art again. Old Money vs New Money. Tenant vs Buyer. Man Vs Woman. Human Vs…well that’s up to us. The height and the supernatural grace of the Dubois women speak to an inhuman element. But the art in the house speaks to a different one. One that’s both more mundane and more horrific. John’s fetish is money, and the final line referencing the fact he can’t hear it sing anymore speaks to that. The Dubois family fetish is brutality, and this is a blood and gore soaked freak flag they are letting fly as high as it’s gore-encrusted form can carry itself. That staircase, that explosion of contained, sustained eternal brutality is one of the most unsettling things I’ve read about in a long time.

There’s also the way Gemma hides the knife in this story. If you grew up in the UK or Ireland then sooner or later you went to a gallery or house with this sort of art. Not quite so brazenly brutal, but there’s a constant, contained violence in a lot of the art in places like this. Dark acts depicted in dark rooms, the wood stained with the lives of the people who commissioned it, or lived it. The past is always there, just under the surface. The Dubois family celebrate it. In doing so they also reveal what we think are the final two levels of horror in the story. The house being Irish, and the name Dubois not, pencils in a tense, crackling line of colonisation. Oddly rich immigrants never get the same treatment as poor ones, they can buy their way in and then, in this case, feather their nests with their victims.

A house celebrating violence and the predators who still live in it are both female. Dubois’ physical size, her good natured charm, her old fashioned outlook and her fondness for blood all mark her out as someone entirely outside Guthrie’s experience and that last one is key. The manly man who sneers at the window cleaner dies next to him. The developed planning to chop history up into condos is rendered into a piece of art by the very people he’s seeking to exploit. The crude, lewd tastes of John Guthrie, the less exquisite tastes replaced by far more pleasing ones. Property may be theft, but murder can be art.

 

Incredible work, thanks to all.

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Join us next week for The Slow Music of Drums by A.C. Wise, narrated for us by our own Wilson Fowlie. And PseudoPod wants you to remember What do we care for bread and circuses? The manthing’s suffering is assured, regardless.