Incubi - Edward Lee.wps (21 page)

You're right, Faye rejoined. It is an interesting premise. The aorists were using narcotic technologies that hadn't even been invented. It explained quite a bit, though how the prelates were able to influence their subjects so effectively: drug addiction and hypnosis. She skimmed down further:

to the extent that any ritual occasion demanded the antithetical gesture of sexual sin, which was viewed as a paramount affront to God, the more perverse in nature the greater the homage to Lucifer and his appellate demons. Orgies en masse were common from the earliest times, covenheads making liberal use of crude aphrodisiacs in order to provoke rampant sexual behavior among the congregates. Such substances were largely physical in mechanism, and often quite dangerous: harsh astringents such as bergamot and distilled tarweed roots which irritate mucous membrane linings such as those of the vagina, the anus, and the urethra and hence affect an accelerated urge to stimulate the irritated areas via intercourse. The aorists, however, whose pharmacological prowess is aforementioned, used much more sophisticated aphrodisic substances, which might help to explain the ease with which the aorists executed such excruciating sexual acts as bestiality and necrophilia. Somehow, sect prelates managed to isolate narcotic substances that directly affected desired dopaminergic mechanisms in the brain. One chief aphrodisiac compound was known as "rootmash" or "loveroot," whose formulation required a complex series of distillation syntheses of the tubercore of the stalky pod-bearing black apple plant, or Taxodium lyrata, exclusive to lower Europe. Properly processed, the distilled aggregant when taken internally stimulates an overproduction of certain biogenic amines that regulate sex drive, causing hypersexual impulses, abnormal excitation states, and an aberrant willingness to partake in acts which would otherwise seem unappealing or extreme. This particular extract is classified today as a cantharadine, which is, in pharmacological terms, a cervical-channel dilator and libidinal stimulant.

Faye reread the passage, then photocopied it. Jack might be very interested in this. Willingness, she thought.

Her eyes were beginning to blur too much squinting at too much fine print and intaglio. She went outside for some air, taking a bench amid the hustle of the city. Two blocks past the Capitol she could see an adult bookstore. Skin flicks and politics, she mused. There were five hundred murders per year in this city, most drug-related. The Cultus of Crack, the Cultus of Lucifer, she considered. She wondered how much different the two were when you got right down to relativity. Evil for evil. It's all the same, just different colors.

Then she wondered about Jack. Evil wasn't just relative, it was far-reaching, obscure. Jack was a good man, and these same evils regardless of face were destroying him. Part of Jack infuriated her, the zeal with which he pursued his own ruin. Another part of him she thought she could love.

A trash can bore a black sign: Silence=Death, a maxim of the gay world. Under it someone had markered, The sodomites are being judged. Faye wondered about her own cosmic verdict, when she herself would be judged. Who will judge me? she asked no one in particular. Where will I go? To the grave? To hell? Reborn as a centipede?

She was not religious, despite a vigorous upbringing in the Church. "People were meant to be together in the eyes of God," she remembered from the last sermon she attended about a decade ago. She also remembered her mother once saying: "Not being truthful is the worst sin."

There was good and there was evil, Faye simplified. People were meant to be together in the eyes of God. But who was God? An idea? A serene-faced man with flowing white hair and beard in the sky? It didn't matter who or what He was. He was proof that the body of mankind sought to reject evil. Faye wondered where that left her.

The fresh air did not enliven her. It made her, in fact, feel keenly sullen. If not being truthful was the worst sin, what in her life had she failed to be truthful about?

She went back into the Adams building and reread the entries she'd circled on her latest bib printout:

James I of England, Daemonologie, Edinburgh, 1597.

Murray, M., The Witchcult of Western Europe, London, 1921.

Morakis, D,. The Synod of the Aorists [place and date of reprint and translation unknown.

Pamphlet format; rare].

"That's my baby," she whispered, eyeing the last entry.

She stared for a moment, chilled. It was more than these tomes that awaited her, she knew. It was evil too.

It was Baalzephon.

| |

Was it a dream?

A slit of sunlight through the curtain gap bisected Veronica's face in a nearly perfect state of congruity. She opened her eyes, looked to either side, and gasped.

The three of them lay entangled, nude, in Ginny's bed. Amy Vandersteen hugged Veronica's hips.

Ginny slept higher, with an arm and leg draped. Very slowly, then, Veronica remembered...

Holy shit, she thought.

She tried to chronologize. She'd worked late into the night. She'd gone downstairs and eaten.

She'd spied on Ginny and Amy in the pool with Marzen and Gilles. Then...

Holy shit, she thought again.

The two men had instigated the whole thing; they'd seduced them, then left them alone with their desires. It was the intensity of the desire that Veronica remembered most. She'd been dizzied by it, driven, and so had Ginny and Amy. They'd made love to each other all night. They'd done everything conceivable to each other, and some things not. They'd drawn each other's passions out to scintillating threads, each a probe of desire and real flesh exploring every facet of every sensation. They'd opened up their passions and delved.

Veronica couldn't have felt more confused. Was it honesty that had compelled her to participate, or subversion? But she didn't feel subversive. She thought about what Khoronos had said. In a sense, all of life was an experiment of revelation, of experience.

Of passion, she added.

Should she feel dirty for having embarked on this adventure, or should she feel blessed?

The erstwhile images replayed in her mind, a vivid assemblage of diced sights, sounds, sensations. The overall memory lost all basis of order; the night had passed frenetically in a meld of moving bodies, moans and caresses, breasts in her face and legs wrapped around her head.

Veronica had made a terrain of herself for the others to investigate, and they'd made the same of themselves for her. Their time together had been measured not in minutes, but in human scents and flavors, the heat and the weight of flesh, and one orgasm after the next.

Lust, she thought now, in bed with her two new lovers. But lust hadn't been behind any of it. Lust was greed, using another person's body for a singular gratification. Passion was the difference mutuality. Veronica had found as much pleasure in giving as taking. That fact, and its irrevocability, made her feel purified.

Amy Vandersteen stirred. Veronica closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep. The director quietly slid out of bed. The door clicked open, then clicked shut.

The notion was difficult to pinpoint, but it almost seemed as though Amy had been summoned awake.

Summoned by what?

Veronica slid out from Ginny's embrace, careful not to wake her. She cracked the bedroom door and peeked out. Amy was tiptoeing naked down the dark stairs. Veronica slipped on Ginny's robe, wondering. Then she edged out toward the landing.

First light had not yet worked its way inside; downstairs was filled with soft, grainy dark. The house was so silent Veronica could hear herself blink. Amy Vandersteen seemed to be kneeling, searching for something under the couch downstairs. Her pale nakedness made a ghost of her in the murk.

What is she doing? Veronica thought, peering down.

Seconds later, she knew.

It was a tragic sight. The orange glow of the lighter gave it all away. It tinted the room and cast a desperate halo about Amy's coiffed head. Her face looked pinched shut as she sucked on the tiny pipe, answering the summons, the call of her curse.

Veronica could not remember the last time she felt this sad. Addict, croaked an unholy voice in her head. In the slender woman's desperation, Veronica glimpsed all the woe of the world.

Amy sucked the pipe dry, then lay back. If she'd been oblivious, that would've made it more reckonable. But the look on the woman's face told the whole truth. Hers was a countenance not of euphoria, but of slowly creeping horror. Tears ran down her cheeks as she rode the wave of her high. The glint in her wide-open eyes shone with pure ruin.

Veronica's heart felt squeezed up into her throat.

She went back to the bedroom and looked out the window. What could she do to help Amy?

Nothing, she answered. The image remained, an equally sad truth.

Sunlight struggled to reach above the treetops. It was as though this remote pocket of the earth were flinching against the sun, quailing to keep its veil of night. Did I dream? she wondered. Her memory flinched too, against splinters of images, colors, heat. Yes, she had dreamed...

The fire-lover had come yet again, her suitor of sleep. It had caressed her with its flames, kissed her, penetrated her. In her sleep she'd wrapped her legs about its blazing torso and...

The memory scalded her. Bliss. Sheer erotic bliss.

Goose bumps slid across her skin. She glanced about, hunting for a distraction, when her gaze plopped onto Ginny's little desk.

Scribbled notes and correction tapes cluttered around the typewriter. A small stack of sheets had been turned upside down Ginny's work in progress. One sheet hung out of the typewriter's platen in plain sight. Impulse, not premeditation, urged her to read: a harrowing spangle of moisture and muse. His gaze swept her away to lush, uncharted planes, chasing her like a sleek bird

"Get away from that!"

Oops. Shamed she turned slowly around, looking down.

"It's creative respect, you know." Ginny was sitting up in bed, glaring. Somehow anger prettied her face. "It's an unwritten code. One artist never looks at another artist's work without permission. You know that."

"I know," Veronica peeped. "Sorry."

"Then why did you do it?"

"It was just sitting there. My eyes kind of fell on it. I only read a little."

"How would you like it if I went into your room and looked at your stuff without you knowing?

Huh?"

"I said I was sorry. Jesus."

Ginny glanced away. Her hair lay tangled about her face in strings. "Where's Amy?" she asked.

"Downstairs. She's freebasing again."

"That's too bad." Ginny's sharp smirk saddened. "She's an asshole, sure, but she's got a lot of talent and a lot of good ideas. What a waste."

It was a cold way to abridge a human life, but it was true. It was a waste. How many great artists had destroyed themselves with drugs?

"A waste of a lot of passion too."

Veronica glanced up. "What?"

"She's a wonderful lover."

She looked back down again, too quickly. She knew Ginny would get around to it eventually.

"Well?" Ginny asked.

"Well what?"

"Observations, comments... Conclusions?"

"About last night, you mean?"

"No, Vern, about last Fourth of July. You know what I mean."

Veronica refaced the window, anything to avoid Ginny's prying gaze. What should she say? What could she say, in truth?

"Did you like it?"

"Yes," Veronica said.

"Do you regret any of it?"

"No, but it still bothers me. The whole thing was premeditated. Those guys manipulated the hell out of us."

"Bullshit, Vern." Now Ginny sat on the bed's edge, uninhibitedly naked. "That's a cop-out. We can't blame others for what we do."

"It's not a cop-out," Veronica objected. But why did she feel so defensive? "You've got to admit "

"Be real. No one forced you to do what you did last night. No one manipulated you. What happened, happened because we allowed it to. You're repressing yourself, Vern, which is exactly what Khoronos is trying to teach you not to do."

Veronica's anger began to unreel. "I'm repressing myself? I spent most of the night with my face between your legs, and you call that repression?"

"It's repression because you don't have the courage to admit your own motives for doing it."

"Oh, I see. I'm a lesbian but I'm just not admitting it."

Ginny shook her head; she smiled dismally. "You really can be stupid when you try hard. Sex has nothing to do with any of this. Don't you listen to anything Khoronos says?"

"What is he saying, Ginny? Since I'm so stupid, tell me."

"He's saying that we have to shed our repressions in order to maximize ourselves as artists. Not just sexual repressions, but every repression in regard to every aspect of our lives. To be everything we can be as artists, as creators, we must "

"I know," Veronica sniped. "We must delve into our passions."

"Right. And it's true. Because that's all that creativity is founded in. Passion."

Passion for everything, Veronica finished in thought. Her petty anger was gone, spirited away.

She looked down at her shadow thrown across the floor. She thought of herself as two separate entities, one of flesh, the other of shadow, her id, perhaps. That was where her passions lay, in her shadows, and that's what Khoronos meant yesterday when he'd spoken of her failures. She was keeping her passions in shadow. She must illuminate them to become real.

"Come back to bed," Ginny said.

"I " Veronica faltered. "I'm not tired."

"Neither am I."

Veronica let the robe slide off her shoulders. Then she was getting back into bed with her friend.