"Sandler was married," Fischer said. He paused, went on. "His childhood is a blank except for isolated incidents. At five he hanged a cat to see if it would revive for the second of its nine lives. When it didn't, he became infuriated and chopped the cat to pieces, flinging the parts from his bedroom window. After that, his mother called him Evil Emeric."
"He was raised in England, I presume," Barrett interjected.
Fischer nodded. "The next verified incident was a sexual assault on his younger sister," he said.
Barrett frowned. "Is it all to be like this?"
"He didn't live an exemplary life, Doctor," Fischer said, a caustic edge to his voice.
Barrett hesitated. "Very well." he said. He looked at Edith. "You object, my dear?" Edith shook her head. He glanced at Florence. "Miss Tanner?"
"Not if it will help us understand," she said. Barrett gestured toward Fischer, bidding him continue.
"The assault put his sister in the hospital for two months," Fischer said. "I won't go into details. Belasco was sent to a private school - he was ten and a half at the time. There, he was abused for a number of years, mostly by one of the homosexual teachers. Belasco later invited the man to visit his house for a week; at the end of that time, the retired teacher went home and hanged himself."
"What did Belasco look like?" Barrett asked, attempting to guide the course of Fischer's account.
Fischer stared into his memory. After a while, he began to quote: " 'His teeth are those of a carnivore. When he bares them in a smile, it gives one the impression of an animal snarling. His face is white, for he despises the sun, eschews the out -of-doors.
He has astonishingly green eyes, which seem to possess an inner light of their own. His forehead is broad, his hair and short-trimmed beard jet black. Despite his handsomeness, his is a frightening visage, the face of some demon who has taken on a human aspect'"
"Whose description is that?" asked Barrett.
"His second wife's. She committed suicide here in 1927."
"You know that description word for word," said Florence. "You must have read it many times."
Fischer's smile was somber. "As the Doctor said," he answered, "know thine adversary."
"Was he tall or short?" asked Barrett.
"Tall, six-foot-five. 'The Roaring Giant,' he was called."
Barrett nodded. "Education?"
"New York. London. Berlin. Paris. Vienna. No specific course of study. Logic, ethics, religion, philosophy."
"Just enough with which to rationalize his actions, I imagine," Barrett said. "He inherited his money from his father, did he?"
"Mostly. His mother left him several thousand pounds, but his father left him ten and a half million dollars - his share of the proceeds from the sales of rifles and machine guns."
"That could have given him a sense of guilt," said Florence.
"Belasco never felt a twinge of guilt in his life."
"Which only serves to verify his mental aberration," Barrett said.
"His mind may have been aberrant, but it was brilliant, too," Fischer went on. "He could master any subject he chose to study. He spoke and read a dozen languages. He was versed in natural and metaphysical philosophy. He'd studied all the religions, cabalist and Rosicrucian doctrines, ancient mysteries. His mind was a storehouse of information, a powerhouse of energy." He paused. " A charnelhouse of fancies."
"Did he ever love a single person in his life?" asked Florence.
"He didn't believe in love," Fischer answered. "He believed in will. 'That rare vis viva of the self, that magnetism, that most secret and prevailing delectation of the mind: influence.' Unquote. Emeric Belasco, 1913."
"What did he mean by 'influence'?" asked Barrett.
"The power of the mind to dominate," Fischer said. "The control of one human being by another. He obviously had the kind of hypnotic personality men like Cagliostro and Rasputin had. Quote: 'No one ever went too close to him, lest his terrible presence overpower and engulf them.' His second wife, again."
"Did Belasco have any children?" Florence asked.
"A son, they say. No one's really sure, though."
"You said the house was built in 1919," Barrett said. "Did the corruption start immediately?"
"No, it was innocent at first. Haut monde dinner parties. Lavish dances in the ballroom. Soirees. People traveling from all over the country and world to spend a weekend here. Belasco was a perfect host - sophisticated, charming.
"Then - " He raised his right hand, thumb and index finger almost touching. "In 1920: ' un peu,' as he referred to it. A soup��
on of debasement. The introduction, bit by bit, of open sensuality - first in talk, then in action. Gossip. Court intrigues.
Aristocratic machinations. Flowing wine and bedroom-hopping. All of it induced by Belasco and his influences.
"What he did, in this phase, was create a parallel to eighteenth-century European high society. It would take too long to describe in detail how he did it. It was subtle, though, engineered with great finesse."
"I presume that the result of this was primarily sexual license," Barrett said.
Fischer nodded. "Belasco formed a club he called Les Aphrodites. Every night - later, two and three times a day - they'd hold a meeting; what Belasco called his Sinposium. Having all partaken of drugs and aphrodisiacs, they'd sit around that table in the great hall talking about sex until everyone was what Belasco referred to as 'lubricous.' Then an orgy would commence.
"Still, it wasn't exclusively sex. The principle of excess was applied to every phase of life here. Dining became gluttony, drinking turned to drunkenness. Drug addiction mounted. And, as the physical spectrum of his guests was perverted, so, too, was their mental."
"How?" asked Barrett.
"Visualize twenty to thirty people set loose upon each other mentally - encouraged to do whatever they wanted to one another; no limits set but those of imagination. As their minds began to open up - or close in, if you like - so did every aspect of their lives together. People stayed here months, then years. The house became their way of life. A way of life that grew a little more insane each day. Isolated from the contrast of normal society, the society in this house became the norm. Total self-indulgence became the norm. Debauchery became the norm. Brutality and carnage soon became the norm."
"How could all this . . . bacchanalia take place without repercussions?" Barrett asked. "Surely someone must have - what's the expression? - blown the whistle on Belasco?"
"The house is isolated; really isolated. There were no outside telephones. But, just as important, no one dared to implicate Belasco; they were too afraid of him. Once in a while, private detectives might do a little probing. They never found a thing.
Everyone was on their best behavior while the investigation was taking place. There was never any evidence. Or, if there was, Belasco bought it."
"And, during all this time, people kept coming to the house?" Barrett asked, incredulous.
"In droves," said Fischer. "After a while, Belasco got so tired of having only eager sinners in his house, he started to travel around the world enlisting young, creative people for a visit to his 'artistic retreat - to write or compose, paint or meditate.
Once he got them here, of course - " He gestured. " Influences."
"The most vile of evils," Florence said, "corruption of the innocent." She looked at Fischer almost pleadingly. "Had the man no trace of decency at all?"
"None," said Fischer. "One of his favorite hobbies was destroying women. Being so tall and imposing, so magnetic, he could make them fall in love with him at will. Then, when they were in the deepest throes of adoration, he'd dump them. He did it to his own sister - the same one he'd assaulted. She was his mistress for a year. After he rejected her, she became a drug addict and the leading lady of his Little Theater Company. She died here of an overdose of heroin in 1923."
"Did Belasco take drugs?" asked Barrett.
"In the beginning. Later on, he started to withdraw from all involvement with his guests. He had it in mind to make a study of evil, and he decided that he couldn't do that if he was an active participant. So he began to remove himself concentrating his energies on the mass corruption of his people.
"About 1926, he started his final thrust. He increased his efforts at encouraging guests to conceive of every cruelty, perversion, and horror they could. He conducted contests to see who could come up with the ghastliest ideas. He started what he termed 'Days of Defilement,' twenty-four-hour periods of frenzied, nonstop depravities. He attempted a literal enactment of de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. He began to import monstrosities from all over the world to mingle with his guests -
hunchbacks, dwarfs, hermaphrodites, grotesques of every sort."
Florence closed her eyes and bowed her head, pressing tightly clasped hands against her forehead.
"About that time," continued Fischer, "everything began to go. There were no servants to maintain the house; they were indistinguishable from the guests by then. Laundry service failed, and everyone was forced to wash their own clothes - which they refused to do, of course. There being no cooks, everyone had to prepare their own meals with whatever was at hand -
which was less and less, because the pickups of food and liquor had dwindled so much, with no acting servants.
"An influenza epidemic hit the house in 1927. Believing the reports of several of his doctor guests that the Matawaskie Valley fog was injurious to health, Belasco had the windows sealed. About that time, the main generator, no longer being maintained, started functioning erratically, and everyone was forced to use candles most of the time. The furnace went out in the winter of 1928, and no one bothered to relight it. The house became as cold as a refrigerator. Pneumonia killed off thirteen guests.
"None of the others cared. By then they were so far gone that all they were concerned with was their 'daily diet of debaucheries,' as Belasco put it. They were at the bottom by 1928, delving into mutilation, murder, necrophilia, cannibalism."
The three sat motionless and silent, Florence with her head inclined, Barrett and Edith staring at Fischer as he kept on speaking, quietly, virtually without expression, as though he were recounting something very ordinary.
"In June of 1929, Belasco held a version of the Roman circus in his theater," he said. "The highlight was the eating of a virgin by a starving leopard. In July of the same year, a group of drug-addicted doctors started to experiment on animals and humans, testing pain thresholds, exchanging organs, creating monstrosities.
"By then everyone but Belasco was at an animal level, rarely bathing, wearing torn, soiled clothes, eating and drinking anything they could get their hands on, killing each other for food or water, liquor, drugs, sex, blood, even for the taste of human flesh, which many of them had acquired by then.
"And, every day, Belasco walked among them, cold, withdrawn, unmoved. Belasco, a latter-day Satan observing his rabble. Always dressed in black. A giant, terrifying figure, looking at the hell incarnate he'd created."
"How did it end?" asked Barrett.
"If it had ended, would we be here?"
" It will end now," Florence said.
Barrett persisted. "What happened to Belasco?"
"No one knows," said Fischer. "When relatives of some of his guests had the house broken into in November of 1929, everyone inside was dead - twenty-seven of them.
"Belasco was not among them."
