Something Stinks in Chatsworth
A week later, Heinlen is deep in the Pine Barrens – in Chatsworth – at the front gate of the mysterious Mansion of the late Dame Frederica Goode. As he studies the creepy Victorian structure from afar, he can’t get out of his mind an Edgar Allen Poe story – The Fall of the House of Usher.
Like the House in Poe’s classic story, here’s the same moldy, weedy and overgrown gates, brambles, tree canopies blotting out almost all sunlight. The house hasn’t seen paint in decades. Slate tiles have slipped off the gabled rooflines and the tall, thin windows look filthy. The rounded, classical copper rain gutters are sagging – a few are missing altogether, downspout pipes too. They’ve probably long-since collapsed into the wild bushes and weeds below them.
The arched, oaken double front doors have lost most of their varnish and the exposed wood below is covered in green mold and fungus. A lonely brass door knocker hangs cocked to its left. Scalloped Brass doorknobs, now dark with grime, harken back to a gentler time when architecture emphasized elaborate detail, craftsmanship and finish. When houses were a reflection of their owner’s wealth and status.
Heinlen admires it all – despite its decrepitude. This place must’ve been somethin’ back in the day. Even Markovic, hanging next to Heinlen’s personal Ford Explorer is impressed by the house – but keeping his eyes open for any odd threats that can lurk around its dilapidated facade. The place is evil – and he knows it.
Finally, Leeds pulls down the dirt driveway and parks behind Heinlen’s car. She greets Markovic and Heinlen while she rummages for keys in her pocket.
“See you got yourself a new car, Heinlen– not mooching off Warren Township anymore, eh?”
Heinlen keeps the small talk courteous but brief.
“I’m on permanent leave from Warren pending their processing my pension papers. The Ford is new. I got my mechanic to swap out the standard V6 for a special Coyote V8 Police motor and heavy-duty suspension and transaxle. It’s smokin’ quick.”
Leeds finds the right key and opens a padlock on the chain that’s wrapped around the front wrought-iron gate. She dumps the chain and lock on the ground and pushes open the rusty entry. The squeals and creaks are right out of a horror movie soundtrack. She heads up the cracked slate walkway towards the front door of the house, Heinlen and Markovic a few steps behind her.
Leeds is New Jersey State Police – and she has the Search Warrant documents that her department executed against the property recently. It’s because of her Heinlen and Markovic are legally on the property. They plan to make the most of it.
She deftly navigates up the rotten wooden stairs to the porch, shouting out cautionary warnings to them because she’s been here before.
“The boards are termite-eaten and wet. Watch where you step. The porch is rotten, too. The EMS people almost fell through carrying the old lady out when she took a header down her center staircase. Everything’s in shit-condition…. the whole place has gone to Hell – literally. Follow my lead.”
Leeds turns a key in the front door lock and throws her shoulder into the faded, weathered oak threshold. Its hinges scream a grating, metallic objection.
Heinlen and Markovic follow Leeds from room to room. Old, dingy furniture. Everything smells like a wet dog bed. There’s a Home Depot bucket in the center of a tattered living room, catching dripping water from the ceiling above. Peeling wallpaper droops down the corners of every wall they see. The smell is nauseating – and seems to be getting stronger the deeper they explore the place.
Finally, she leads them down a deep basement staircase and past damp, glistening cellar walls. Water is puddled on the cracked and muddy floor. Electric wiring is draped from above – obviously added after the original structure was completed – powering dangling electric bulbs over their heads.
The place is old. Hundreds of years old.
They come to a steel door – rusted and dripping wet. It looks like the entrance to Hell itself. Leeds pushes against it and it creaks backwards, dirt particles cascading down from rough-hewn beams holding up the roof, covering their clothes with grit. The grime, however, is not the least of it. The smell is now a full force onslaught. Fecal, putrescent vapors waft onto their faces and cling to them like poison gas in the trenches of World War I.
The room beyond is precisely what they expect – a dungeon. There are chains and manacles pinned to the stone walls with huge spikes, rough wood tables swathed in crimson staining – obviously blood and gore – bearing deep hack marks from the bevy of axes and bone cutters hanging on hooks nearby.
The place is an abattoir. A slaughterhouse. Texas-Chainsaw-Massacre level shit.
Against a far wall is a twelve-foot-long cast iron hood on top of a massive rectangular foundation of old, blackened fire bricks. A huge gas pipe feeds into it. It’s like an old iron-lung chamber converted into a giant spit roaster. It was obviously built for one purpose only: to cook human beings.
Markovic opens the heavy lid, pushing it backwards. He instinctively turns when a rancid stench impacts his face. He spins away like he’s been slapped by an evil stinking Genie. The cooking grates are rusted and caked with chunks of flesh – probably human – and the large gas flame burners are piled with putrid mountains of charred fat.
Leeds summarizes the State Police Investigation for them like a tour guide.
“They cooked humans here – and feasted upstairs. To celebrate Satanic rituals. There is a collection of forbidden books in the library with titles like The Malleus Maleficarum, The Necronomicon and Libor Ivonie. Compendiums of Devil Worship and Witchcraft. There’s also a huge Satanic Pentagram cut into the library wood floor with splotches of black candle wax everywhere. They held Black Masses there. The human sacrifices were murdered on an altar before the Pentagram – then taken downstairs to cook.
I’ve got copy of the State Police File in my car for you. Obviously, we’re interested in the victims they killed down here – not necessarily the Vampyre and Satanic angles. There were about fifteen skulls found and piles of femurs, pelvises, jawbones, etc. They’ve been at it a long time.
The old lady who owns this house – Dame Frederica Goode – fell down that grande staircase you saw facing front door entranceway. She broke her hip. Tabernacle EMS took her to Cooper Medical Center in Camden. She was frothing at the mouth and suffering violent seizures by the time they got her to the Cooper Emergency Room. They noticed a gaping tear in her neck that had been crudely sutured with sewing thread when they examined her body. Her blood tests confirmed that she was dying from the dreaded Papua, New Guinea variant of KURU. A virulent spongiform encephalitis that is always fatal and is always contracted by eating the brains of infected hosts.
Turns out that a family of domestic workers born in Papua, New Guinea who were employed by a wealthy Philadelphia family recently died of KURU, also at Cooper Medical Center. The mother, father and six kids – all died of KURU last year.
Their seventh child was not accounted for – a daughter that they’d reported missing to the Philadelphia Police Department. Cops learned that she was abducted by some people in a van days before. A traffic camera caught the girl being dragged into the side door of small commercial vehicle. It then sped away. The crime was never solved.
Our working theory is – Dame Federica here had an underground network who ran a young female slave trade in Philadelphia and picked up the girl. She was cooked and eaten at a Satanic Celebration here – and the participants contracted KURU.
Dame Frederica Goode has brothers – one of whom just died in a private clinic in Switzerland…Geneva, I believe. It’s all very hush-hush. I wouldn’t be surprised if he, too, contracted KURU and was packed off to a secretive medical facility to die far away from prying eyes. A Philadelphia High-Society lawyer and well known “fixer” named Jackson Barnhardt handled the matter. The firm is Kravis, Berkeley & Barnhardt in Center City, Philadelphia.
Cooper Doctors did an autopsy on Frederica Goode’s body. Her brains had liquified from the KURU virus so completely that they were leaking out of her nasal cavity and down the front of her face. Hers was a particularly bad KURU variant. Goode’s remains were shipped – as per United States Department of Health regulations – to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia.
Heinlen and Markovic were never so glad to leave a crime scene. The horror or it and the stench made them physically ill. Heinlen could feel his breakfast hovering in his throat by the time they passed through the outside wrought-iron gate and waited for Leeds to padlock it again.
Heinlen followed Leeds to her police cruiser to get the file she prepared for him. He was genuinely grateful for the professional courtesies she was showing him – and he told her so – but kept it businesslike.
“What’s with the black clothes – you goin’ full Ninja on us?” she asked. While she talked, she handed him a fat file folder, complete with photos.
Heinlen blew off the black clothes comment – he found her sarcasm and familiarity annoying. He asked her what he really wanted to know. What was gnawing at him.
“How did you know to text me about the Vampyre teeth and Oroboros ring at the precise moment you did? It was either a Helluva’ coincidence – or you knew I was talking about you…You got some spooky surveillance third eye on me or what? And yeah – I was talking about you to a Priest. It was enlightening.“
Leeds laughed out loud.
“I knew you were talkin’ shit about me – I could feel it. It’s not spooky voodoo – I have a slight connection to you… to your DNA. Just a little. Enough to get intuitions – but nothing big. I can’t follow you or overhear you – I just get… feelings when I’m being talked about by somebody whose DNA I’ve absorbed…”
Heinlen wasn’t amused.
“What do you mean…DNA you’ve absorbed?”
Leeds laughed at him again. She was taunting him – and enjoying it immensely.
“You forget already, Lover Boy?
During of our wilder sessions together I swallowed a mouthful of your Semen! Got it? Your DNA? A big lover’s treat. Now I can instinctively intuit your psychic frequency – weakly – but enough to sense when you’re thinking about me. …Don’t worry! With you my insight is really weak. Your Semen didn’t pack much of a punch. Besides – the effect fades over time. Now – you gonna’ show me what you’re really packin’?”
Heinlen wasn’t in any mood for more of her crude comments.
“Show you what?”
She was blunt – and profane.
“The blade! The Divine Pigsticker of Simon Magus! WHAT?!!! I can touch your Penis but not your knife? Is that it?”
Heinlen had enough of her vulgarity. There was a time he’d have thought it titillating. But that ship had sailed. He was done.
“See ya’ round, Leeds. And be careful with your intuition. You’re not the only one with special talents.“
*NO PART OF THIS WORK PRODUCT IS AI GENERATED
Copyright, 2026 – Jon & Jedediah Croft
www.bogironfoundry.com
Email: vlchek1@gmail.com
