Millstone - Novel 02

All Rights Reserved © 2021, Rick Haydn Horst

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

IMPORTANT:

Be sure to read the 16 chapters of my the first novel in this series:

Millstone Novel 1

before you read this one!

CHAPTER THREE

Millstone's Sources

Bare as You Dare Day had arrived, a Franklin Funday that took place the second Saturday of July every year, and it's exactly what it sounds like. The freedom of expression in Franklin was almost sacrosanct, and the city had a sizable number of nudists who went without clothing, weather permitting, of course. Bare as You Dare Day was to celebrate the beauty of the human body without shame, and for us to show solidarity to one of our often-maligned groups who just wanted to live their lives in peace like the rest of us.

All the other groups had their days of celebration as well, for example, May 22 was World Goth Day. The LGBTQ+ pride parade took place on the third Saturday in June, International Fetish Day was the third Friday in January, and so on.

Bare as You Dare Day had events that took place in the adults-only Roman Park, the city's largest park at 100 acres. It had a serpentine brick wall surrounding most of it with two entrances made to resemble triumphal arches. It held the city's open-all-hours indoor public pool in a stunning neoclassical edifice of enormous proportions.

Tucker started the Bare as You Dare Day challenge the day of Winter's housewarming--the Hanging of the Chimney Hook--because he and I have one thing in common. In our youths, our prodigious endowments made us feel self-conscious by other people's reactions to it. Independent of one another, we had concluded we should hide them behind long shirttails. But Franklin was not the outside world; we would not have the problem with it there that we had elsewhere. So, we had begun tucking our shirts, allowing ourselves the privilege that most every other man took for granted of not giving a fuck if anyone noticed, and that was a huge step for us. However, the Bare as You Dare Day challenge, as well-intended as it may have been, was too much too soon. Tucker came to me earlier in the week informing me that he reconsidered the whole thing. The idea of showing himself in such a public locale, surrounded by thousands of people carrying their cellphones with high-definition cameras and 4K video at the ready like a hounding horde of prospective paparazzi, scared the hell out of him. I commended him for his willingness to admit his limitations. For myself, as Max pointed out, I had a need to keep a low profile due to my witness protection, and Special Agent Thomas Sawyer of the U.S. Marshals would probably frown on that kind of exposure. Emiliano Vianello's recognition of my face notwithstanding, if most people couldn't recognize my face, that wouldn't mean they couldn't recognize my peace pipe; its size is particularly uncommon. And in my sexual need over the years, I had enjoyed the talents of a profusion of pole-smokers who would have had intimate knowledge of my anatomy. Of course, that wouldn't mean we had to hide entirely, but just avoid well-lit locations where hundreds of photos at various angles by different people would make it harder to dismiss the images as anything more than photoshop. For as much as Max loved the idea of us joining the events at the park on Bare as You Dare Day, he said he couldn't enjoy them without me. I really hated to disappoint him like that.

When I awoke Saturday, the sunlight from the east side of the building had brightened the sky enough to give the room a pleasant morning glow. Our bodies and sheets had reached the coolness that came with a satisfying slumber, inviting us to remain there, allowing the day to slip away with little notice or concern.

As we tended to arise before dawn by the alarm, I allowed Max a few more minutes repose as I indulged myself in the experience of a few rare domestic joys. He lay asleep facing me, his golden blonde hair in a handsome display of the manly morning tousle that I found so adorable. In his stillness and steady breath, my eyes lingered upon the lips that I had kissed so many times. In the daytime, those lips would speak to me words of love, compassion, and encouragement, and in the night, they had begun urging me never to stop with a whisper of my name.

Max had not known my previous name, and I wondered how long it would take before he grew curious enough to ask. He assured me that he would never make the mistake of calling me that anywhere but in our most secluded and pleasurable moments. It became our little secret, a name he would call me when he felt the most connected to me, and I longed to hear it. Knowing what it meant, the sound of it lingering on those lips as they spoke that little four-letter name expressed all I needed to know about us.

With a sudden deep breath, his eyes opened, and there's nothing quite like the feeling of seeing the man you love smile at you the moment he awakens--another domestic joy denied by the morning alarm. He said nothing, pulled me to him, and we rolled until he had me beneath him where he wanted me. He moved my hardening appendage up my body between us where I would be most comfortable. I almost spoke, but he silenced me with a kiss and placed his finger to my lips with a slight shake of his head. I smiled, withheld my "good morning," and played his little quiet game.

Our exhaustion the previous evening prevented us from anything more than removing our clothes and climbing into bed, so I knew what he wanted. Neither of us liked too many hours passing without my cock in his mouth at least once, and while we couldn't always make that happen, he would take a slurp of me as often as possible.

As his hands massaged the shaft, he engulfed the head with his mouth, making love to my schlong. That morning, it was all about the cock, the fact that I was attached to it was a bonus. He bobbed his head on my knob, slid his lips over the shaft, and his talented tongue, where most of the magic happened, cast its spell over me, and within minutes, I was feeding my muscular man his favorite protein shake. Afterward, he hovered over me, kissed me, and we greeted one another with a "good morning."

My first cousin once removed, Albert Sawyer, who lived across the hall, had a date the previous evening, so he had company that morning, and as it was Saturday, Tucker would spend a leisurely breakfast with Wade, so Max and I ate alone. By nine o'clock, we were cleaning up discussing the Vianello situation.

"I've given it some thought," I said, "I think Vianello must know everything. I look different enough to fool most people, but he recognized me without having met me. The significance of him even bothering to approach me says something, but I'm not sure what, and that worries me."

"He seemed friendly," said Max. "He asked us to call him Emil. Would someone act so cordial if they meant any harm?"

"That's hard to say; I'm sure it's happened before. You know, Thomas Sawyer told me they sent me to Franklin because it was someplace the mafia wouldn't go. I guess that's out the window."

"Nicolo Vianello is a New York mob boss with a gay brother who lives in Franklin," said Max. "That's why he's here."

"You don't think that Emil's just here for his son Bravo?"

"Oh, come now, have you no gaydar at all? I think both Emil and his son are gay.

"I don't think I have gaydar," I said.

"Well, maybe, that will develop over time. So, you've not changed your mind about meeting Emil tonight at the Belcaro."

I shook my head. "I need answers for my own peace of mind."

"Oh, good. If we can't bare as we dare today with the masses, perhaps, we can tonight with a smaller crowd."

Tucker left that morning to take possession of his new Jeep and the department called Detective Edgerton to a crime scene. He called us at 10:30 about the case of blue murder, inviting us to consult.

The village of Gothwick stood in an area that the previous inhabitants of Franklin had allowed to dilapidate, drawing more of the unsavory elements of society. From what we heard; one would have avoided walking down the street in the middle of the night anywhere there. However, an ongoing reclamation and revitalization effort had turned what was once a dangerous and seedy area into a place that someone would feel proud to call home. When we arrived, we had reached the vehicle barrier on the outer edge of the village, so we walked to our destination. We noted the parking structure we utilized even had a gothic flair with its pointed archways and black metallic railings.

Gothwick had pedestrianized and paved with cobblestone much of the village. They had already lain the stones for the main thoroughfare of Walpole Avenue and all its side streets for several blocks in every direction.

People strode about their business dressed in various modes of goth and gothic attire before public buildings whose Victorian Era façades looked right out of a Dickens or Stoker novel. No detail was overlooked, even every window in sight utilized the period-appropriate, smaller panes of glazing, but sandwiched between two larger panes of plate security glass, providing the Victorian aesthetic with a level of precaution that would still satisfy an insurance company. One thing struck me about it all, though, rather than using various treatments to provide the buildings with an aged appearance, everything looked relatively new, as it would have been 150 years earlier. I guessed that they wanted it to age naturally over time.

From the map on Max's phone, we found Gothwick Cemetery, a few blocks off Walpole Avenue located between a housing area and the 80 percent finished, gothic cathedral inspired by Notre Dame in Paris. Since people were leaving the area, the Catholic Church couldn't afford to complete or maintain it, so they abandoned it in the early 1990s. The property was sold to the city during that area's most derelict era.

Like many cemeteries throughout the world, a wall enclosed this one, but through the gate, we could see many mature trees and several thousand above-ground vaults visible in a pre-parceled, well-maintained space that could easily hold over a million internments on its 120 acres. It seemed clear that the planners of the cemetery intended it as a long-term plan for Franklin County, which could take a couple of hundred years to fill.

We found the entrance to the cemetery at the cut-off corner of the property. It sat within sight of the unfinished cathedral, providing a gothic-ruin-like quality to the atmosphere. One of a couple of uniformed officers greeted us at the gate barring entry to the crime scene. He told us we would find the mausoleum where the path before us named Eternity met the junction for the paths of Chaos and Harmony.

I held Max's hand and we strolled the pebbled pathway with the tread of our feet, the occasional bird, and the light breeze rustling the leaves of trees as the only sounds. Having reached that point more than three football fields lengths into the cemetery, there stood the largest and most prominent mausoleum located in the center of an oversized, raised platform of octagonal shape. The structure, made of some gray stone and 30 feet tall and 40 feet in diameter, appeared to me like the fully rounded apse of a cathedral built with a series of buttresses and all the necessary trappings of Gothic architecture.

However, as attractive as we found the mausoleum, it couldn't hold our attention. Similar in position to the numbers on a clock face, seven elongated stone vaults surrounded the building on the octagonal platform's flat sides about 30 feet from the building. We stood on the three steps that led to the top, where the eighth one at 6 o'clock should have been. Upon the first vault to our right, near the mature Dragon's Blood Tree, sat a larger-than-life, white granite statue of an attractive naked man crouching down, and on his back, he displayed an enormous, elegantly crafted set of bronze bat wings. Max and I studied the eye-catching piece for a moment. By the statue's appearance, I sensed the being had just landed, and having flown a great distance, he paused to catch his breath, the chiseled features of his face expressed his fatigue, and his eyes stared intently at the door of the mausoleum before him.

"Beautiful, isn't he?" said a somber feminine voice. The intrusion into the silence startled both Max and me; we spun toward the sound. "He's the first of our seven fallen watchers," it said. "I suppose we'll have to install the second one now." The woman stood in the shadows near the door and seemed reluctant to step into the light to show herself fully.

"Who are you?" I asked as we approached the shadowy form.

"I'm Twila Korbell, but you might hear the others refer to me as Ms. Renfield."

She opened the door and entered the mausoleum, so we did likewise. The interior showed that it had no windows, but enough light emanated from the fixtures in the dome-like ceiling and walls to see well once Twila closed the door behind us, shutting out the sunshine. It lasted only a moment, but I got a better look at Twila. At about 35 years old, she had straight, tawny hair, a beautiful face, pale skin, and light-colored eyes. Her tan pants and cream-colored button-up told me that she wasn't goth. In the center of the room lay a stone staircase built into the sides of a wide circular shaft that spiraled downward.

"Don't you want to know who we are?" asked Max, his voice echoing off the stone surrounding us.

"I know who you are," she said in a smooth, breathy voice. "You're the private dicks looking for Officer Sawyer." Twila gripped the wrought iron handrail as she descended, and we followed.

"Detective Edgerton isn't here?" I asked.

"He left about 15 minutes ago; he said that someone found a body in a motel on the other side of the city."

"Another body?" asked Max.

"When it rains, it pours, eh, fellas?"

The voice was Albert Sawyer's, my first cousin once removed, and came from 350 feet below us. When we reached the bottom of the staircase, Albert stood there looking official in his usual leather police uniform, but we had foregone our customary hug as the magnificent room had us distracted.

During our years living in the City of Franklin, Max and I had come across many unusual places and complicated circumstances. It took time to learn the full story behind where we were, but I'll try to condense it. Throughout the 20th century, Gothwick was known by the more banal name Franklin Heights, a middle-class neighborhood with a lot of nuclear families, away from the more coveted neighborhoods like those that became Estonia, Queensbury, and Adriatica located on "the other side of the bay" as the locals called it. Franklin Heights held the families of businessmen and the people who kept Franklin functioning as a city.

During the boom time in the early part of the 20th century, in Franklin's determination to "Keep Up with the Jones's" of other cities that people viewed as modern, the city started an effort to have its own subway system. The spending for it got out of control, and when the stock market crashed in 1929, that effort died as unceremoniously as the men who jumped to their death from the rooftops of downtown buildings. So, the lengthy tunnels sat un-railed and unused, languishing underground for decades. After the Second Red Scare of the 1950s, and when the fallout shelter craze began, someone got the bright idea to enlarge some areas of the tunnels and utilize them as the city's underground bunkers in the case of a nuclear attack. They located one of them at the subway station in Franklin Heights.

After many years, a group of seven Elder Goths, known as The Fallen Watchers, bought the land that contained the entrance to the subway, including the subway station turned nuclear bunker. They also purchased its neighboring park from the city when it went up for sale (a popular hangout for drug addicts in the past), and they bought several adjacent properties with dilapidating buildings and abandoned houses. They razed all the buildings and turned the whole 120 acres into an asset for the non-profit organization they formed called Gothwick Cemetery, licensed by both the state and local government. Their intention was to create a cemetery with beauty on par with the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. They started selling grave plots and utilized the revenue to build the walled enclosure for the property, to build the mausoleum over the underground entrance, and to improve the underground space. Through the non-profit, they rented the underground bunker to themselves for a profit-making vampire goth nightclub called The Crypt. The high rent they paid to the non-profit was utilized to improve the cemetery, to assist with paying for elaborate above-ground vaults and statuary for those who couldn't afford it, and for the completed renovation that we stared at just then in awe.

They restructured the entire underground interior, removing two suspended floors that had divided the height of the room by thirds. Seeing it as we saw it then, I couldn't imagine the space the elders had purchased from the city, but 12 years of hard work and vision had us enveloped by a voluminous room that once just held the platforms where one would catch the non-existent subway train (the recesses in the floor for those were filled in). They had lined the room in Corinthian columns about 80 feet tall. Their heights led the eye upward to the breathtaking fan vaulted ceiling that stretched the full length of the room, 100 yards long and 35 yards wide. If we hadn't a job to do and a body to see, I felt I could have stood there for hours, my attention lost to anything, but the delicate shadows cast by the intricate stones laid on the ceiling above us with spiderweb-like precision and artistry. The walls, where some designs might have had towering tracery windows, they had covered in blood-red velvet draperies to help absorb the music they played during the night hours. In various strategic places stood spiring electric candelabras, and massive chandeliers hung from the ceiling. A series of carpets covered the floor in most areas and upon them, they placed Victorian-era lounges and other seating. And finally, upon that seating sat three women and three men, all wore robes or dressing gowns, and all were weeping.

"Who are they?" I asked.

Twila said, "They're Pascal and the five remaining Elder Goths of the nightclub's coven of vampires."

"Vampires...," said Max. "It's daytime. Shouldn't they be in their coffins?"

"They were," said Albert. "We woke them when we got here, and they were none too happy about it, but once they discovered why, they've been like that."

"They loved Barty very much," said Twila. "We all did."

"From left to right," said Albert, "that's the couple Genevieve Beausoleil and Pascal Cochet, Cyra and Yvonne Beausoleil are also a couple, and so are Wren and Fabrice Beausoleil. Beausoleil is their coven surname taken from the original elder's birth surname, Nathanael Beausoleil. He died three years ago from heart disease. The statue you couldn't have missed on the surface sits on his tomb and the artist made it in Nathanael's likeness. None of these people are biologically related. They all claim to have last seen the victim, Bartholomew Beausoleil, well before 4:00 a.m. when the club closed, and everyone went to their rooms. They all give one another an alibi."

"What do you do here, Ms. Korbel?" I asked.