Incubi

Chapter 15

“You should have heard yourself,” Amy Vandersteen said.

And Ginny: “Yeah, we thought someone was murdering you.”

The entire account made Veronica feel foolish. They were seated now at the big breakfast table by the pool deck. Last night Ginny and Amy had shaken her awake; she’d been screaming. Even now the nightmare lay like bilge in the bottom of her mind: Jack’s corpse making love to her, ejaculating maggots into her sex. At once she felt pale, and pushed her breakfast away.

Ginny delved into her plate of cantaloupe, pineapple chunks, and cottage cheese. Amy Vandersteen picked at hers. “This stuff tastes awful,” she remarked of her carrot juice. Veronica agreed.

“But you know,” Ginny commented, “we’ve only been here a few days, and I feel a thousand times more creative. Don’t you?”

“Not really,” Veronica said.

“I’m always creative,” Amy Vandersteen asserted.

Ginny ignored her. “It’s the environment, I think. Good food, clean air, serenity. It purifies the soul.”

“Where were you all day yesterday?” Veronica asked.

“That’s what I mean. Creativity. I was just making some notes for my story, but all of a sudden I felt — don’t know — elevated, I guess. I just started writing. Next thing I know it’s midnight. I’d wound up writing the entire first draft.”

“I did some sketches,” Veronica said lamely. Two nights in a row she’d dreamed of the fire-figure, and she was determined to paint the mood it evoked, the emotion that the figure courted. Passion — pure, unadulterated. It was this same figure of flame, in fact, that had saved her from the nightmare of Jack. She hadn’t been able to tell Ginny and Amy that those final screams, just as the figure had touched her, were not screams of horror but of ecstasy. She felt driven now, as an artist, to translate that ecstasy onto the canvas. But how?

The Ecstasy of the Flames, she thought. The project enthralled her. So why couldn’t she get started?

She decided she’d talk to Khoronos about it.

“I’m not hungry,” Amy Vandersteen complained. Abruptly she stood and slipped out of her terry robe. The white bikini against her white flesh made her look nude. Immediately she dove into the pool. The tiny splash swallowed her.

“Asshole,” Ginny muttered.

“Last night she was freebasing coke,” Veronica recalled.

“I did it a few times several years ago until a med student I was dating showed me all these research articles on it. Long-term use deregulates your sex drive, sometimes permanently. If there’s one thing I can’t live without, it’s my sex drive.”

“She said Khoronos doesn’t own the house; it’s some friend’s of his. Oh, and she said he’s from Yugoslavia.”

Ginny grinned. “I wonder if he’s hung.”

“I’m serious. Isn’t this whole thing a little funny to you?”

“Funny like how?”

“I don’t know. He invites us to this retreat, but we barely ever see him. Yesterday he and his two sidekicks were out on ‘business.’ They didn’t get back till past midnight. Business, till midnight? Don’t you think that’s strange?”

“No. He’s an eccentric.”

“And where does he sleep?” Veronica kept on. “I only counted five bedrooms. Me, you, Amy, Marzen, and Gilles.”

“Oooo, what intrigue,“ Ginny mocked. “Five bedrooms, six people. I could write a best-seller. Hasn’t it occurred to you that this is a very big house and that there are probably other bedrooms in it? Or do you suppose Khoronos sleeps in a coffin?”

“Shut up, Ginny,” Veronica suggested.

“You’re just frustrated ’cause you’re not getting any work done. It happens to me all the time. I’ll get a block and my mind wanders. But the best way to cure a creative block is to work your way out of it. Forget about things that don’t matter. Forget about the bedrooms, for God’s sake. Just get to work.”

Veronica didn’t know whether to be mad or concessive. Ginny was probably right.

“And now that I’ve said that,” Ginny added, wiping her mouth with a napkin, “I must get back to my typewriter.”

“How are things going with you and Gilles?”

Ginny shrugged. “I haven’t seen him. And that’s good, because I’m too busy with my work right now.”

“Too busy?” Now Veronica could’ve laughed. “Yesterday you said you might be in love with the guy. Today you’re too busy?”

“Art is the ultimate conceit, Vern. When people become more important to you than what you create, you’re a phony.”

Veronica glared.

“Later, kid,” Ginny said, and walked away.

The impression left her steaming. More guilt? More jealousy? Ginny was in control of her creative life. Veronica, suddenly, was not. Why? she questioned herself. Was it true that selfishness was prerequisite to true art?

“Hey, Amy,” she abruptly called out. “Can I ask you something?”

Amy Vandersteen’s wet, white head bobbed in the water. She swam enfeebled, dog-paddling. That’s what she looked like just then, a skinny wet dog in the water. “Sure, sweetheart.”

“Is selfishness prerequisite to true art?”

Amy stood up in the low end. Her wet bikini top clung to her small breasts like tissue, showing dark, puckered nipples. “Honey, let me tell you something. True art is selfishness.”

“That’s the most egotistical shit I’ve ever heard,” Veronica countered.

“Of course it is.” Amy Vandersteen grinned like a cat, hip-deep in the water. “And that’s my point. You’re either a real artist with real creative focus, or you’re a fake.”

Veronica’s fuddled stare fought to stray but couldn’t. Her eyes stayed fixed on the slim, sneering figure in the water.

“Which are you, Veronica? Real or fake?”

Veronica stomped off. The worst question of all followed her like a buzzard: Was she more infuriated with Amy Vandersteen or herself? Behind her, the snide woman began to clutzily backstroke across the pool, laughing.

Passion, the word popped oddly into Veronica’s head. The heart. Khoronos’ words. Real creativity is rooted in the heart.

She jogged back to the house, to look for Khoronos.

The alarm clock clattered in Jack’s head. He turned, groped about the covers. Faye was gone, but her scent lingered on the pillow.

He got up, showered, and dressed, amazed as well as baffled that he had no hangover. Hangovers had gotten to be something he could count on — not having one nearly made him feel estranged. And now that he thought of it, he hadn’t had a drink in over a day.

Downstairs, he chugged orange juice, grimacing. A fruit magnet pinned a note to the fridge door. Gone to LOC, call you later at your office. Faye. Short and sweet. He wondered how she felt about things now. I slept with her last night, he fully realized. They’d kept their promise, they’d just slept. Did she regret it now, post fact? Jack hoped not. It had been nice sleeping with her, it had been soothing and unstrained and very nice. He’d wakened several times to find themselves entwined in one another. She’d murmured things in her sleep, nuzzling him.

He drove the unmarked to the station, whelmed in thought. Yes, he liked Faye Rowland a lot, and he was attracted to her. Yet the idea of sex with her almost terrified him. He thought of the proverbial bull in the china shop: having sex with Faye would shatter whatever strange bond existed between them. Jack liked the bond.

Besides, sex would remind him of Veronica.

The substation’s clean, tiled floors led him to his unclean, cluttered office. But before he could enter, the black mammoth bulk of Deputy Police Commissioner Larrel Olsher rounded the corner. “How you coming on the Triangle case, Jack?”

“Making some progress,” Jack said.

“Well, make more progress. You ever heard that shit runs downhill?”

“The axiom rings a bell, Larrel.”

“Let me just say that the people upstairs eat a lot. Pretty soon I’m gonna have to carry an umbrella, if you catch my drift.”

“Noted,” Jack said.

“How’s the state researcher working out?”

“Good. She’s only been on it a day and she’s already digging up a lot of stuff. She’s trying to get a line on the ritual.”

Olsher’s eyes thinned in the frame of the great black face. “How come you don’t look hung over?”

“Because I’m not.”

“Keep it that way, Jack. And get a haircut.”

“Which one?”

“That joke’s older than my grandmother.”

“Yeah, but it’s not as close to retirement as you. Har-har.”

“You look like something that walked out of Woodstock.”

“My hair is my strength, Larrel. You know, like Samson.”

“Samson doesn’t work for this department, and if you don’t bust the Triangle case, you won’t have to worry about hair regulations anymore. If you catch my drift.”

“Noted,” Jack repeated. Who tinkled in his cornflakes? he wondered.

Olsher began to thump off. “Oh, and you have a visitor.”

Jack went into his office. Dr. Karla Panzram sat primly before his desk, her nose crinkled above a Styrofoam cup. “I helped myself to your coffee,” she said. “It’s terrible.”

“Bad coffee fortifies the soul.” Jack poured himself a cup. “I’m living proof, right?”

Karla Panzram offered the most indecipherable of smiles. “I just stopped by to tell you I finished checking the recent psych releases and background profiles. Nothing.”

“I figured as much,” Jack said, and sat down.

“I’m getting some feedback from some of the out-of-state wards and lockups, too. But don’t get your hopes up.”

“I never get my hopes up, Doctor. It’s always the outer angles that let us into a case like this. But at least we know more about our man, thanks to you and TSD, and we’re getting closer to the ritual element. Knock on wood.”

“That’s Druidic.”

“What?”

“Knocking on wood. The Druids believed that knocking on wood appeased the gods and brought luck to the faithful.”

“I better start carrying a two-by-four around. No wonder things haven’t been going well.”

Karla Panzram crossed her legs. “How are the other things going?”

Jack wanted to frown. “What do you mean?”

“I think you know. You’ve been in the office several minutes already and you haven’t even lit a cigarette.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” Jack said, and lit a cigarette. “But believe it or not, I haven’t had a drink in over a day.”

“Good. You’ve decided to quit?”

“No. I’ve just been too busy to drink. Besides, my liver is like the Rock of Gibraltar.”

“Oh? A healthy male liver weighs three pounds. The average alcoholic’s liver weighs fifteen. Alcohol clogs the hepatic veins with cholesterol; the liver distends from overwork.”

“I’ll keep that in mind when I order my next Fiddich.” Jack snorted smoke. He didn’t like the idea of having a fifteen-pound liver. “Did you come here just to tell me about livers?”

“No. I have an additional speculation about Charlie. It didn’t occur to me until last night.”

“I’m ready,” Jack said.

“Charlie probably has a magnificent physique. We know he’s attractive in a general sense; Shanna Barrington was an attractive woman. But I also suspect he’s obsessed with his own physique.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Charlie’s obsessed with female beauty. Seeing is as important to him as doing. This is a commonplace trait for sex killers on a fantasy borderline. It’s called bellamania or beau-idée-fixe. He’s seeking an ideal of female beauty in his victims. Therefore he must be beautiful himself or else he won’t be worthy to offer — and to sacrifice — his victim’s beauty to whatever structural basis his ritual exists in. Physical beauty is what propels him. His victim’s and his own.”

Jack stubbed his butt. “Sounds pretty complicated.”

“Actually it’s not. Like I said, it’s a commonplace trait. It’s something to consider, at least.”

Magnificent physique, Jack pondered. At least no one will be accusing me of the murders.

The phone shrilled, like a sudden alarm.

“Cordesman. City District Homicide,” Jack answered. But he felt sinking even before the voice replied.

“Jack?” It was Randy. The pause told Jack everything, its emptiness fielding a root of dread. Aw, Jesus, Jesus…

“We’ve got another one,” Randy said.

Jack scribbled down the address. “I’ll be there in ten,” he said. He hung up. All he could see for a moment was red.

“Come on,” he said to Karla Panzram.

“I know,” Khoronos claimed. “I heard you screaming too.”

But how could he have? Veronica knew he hadn’t been in the house when she had her nightmare. He couldn’t have heard.

“But it’s something else that’s bothering you,” he observed.

She’d come in after leaving Amy at the pool. Instead of finding Khoronos, he’d found her in the library. She hadn’t asked where he’d been all night, though her curiosity still itched. “You look…discomposed,” he’d said almost immediately. “You look separated from yourself. Why?”

The living room was quiet, dark. Khoronos’ presence made her feel sequestered. “I can’t work,” she said.

“Before you can be one with your art, you must become one with yourself.”

Why did he always suggest her spiritual self was not intact? It seemed like a distant insult. “Tell me what to do,” she said half sarcastically. “You have all the answers.”

“The answers are within yourself, Ms. Polk, but to reveal them you must realize the full weight of the questions. You haven’t done that, you never do. You have profound convictions about your art, but you haven’t applied that same profundity to yourself. This, I believe, is your greatest failure.”

She felt like shouting at him, or giving him the finger. Who the hell was he to imply her failures?

“Your sense of creation runs deep, so why does your sense of self remain so impoverished? Synergy, Ms. Polk, must exist between the two. What you create comes from you, yet if you don’t know yourself, how can you expect to create anything of worth?”

Veronica couldn’t decide if that made sense.

Then he said: “What are you running from?”

She sat back in the couch and frowned.

“Synergy is balance,” he continued. “It’s equanimity between what we are and what we create. Do you understand that?”

“No,” she said.

“All right. Creation is born of desire. Do you agree?”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“To know ourselves as artists, we must know our desires first. Any desire, even potential ones. Desire is the ultimate stimulus of what we are creatively, and the authenticity of the impetus can only dawn on us through an unyielding love of ourselves.”

Veronica contemplated this, then thought of what Amy Vandersteen and Ginny had said at the pool. They were all saying the same things. Suddenly Veronica felt like the child among them.

“But the root.” Khoronos lifted a finger. “We must now reveal the root of the impediment.”

“Fine,” she muttered. She felt stupid, inept.

“Tell me about the nightmare you had.”

Her face blanked. At once the images lurched back, and when she squeezed her eyes shut the nightmare only came more precisely into focus. She saw it all again, in razor-sharp, searing imagery.

“Tell me everything,” Khoronos said.

She spoke in the darkest monotone, the voice she heard didn’t even sound like her own; it was someone else’s, some dark confessor removed from her. The voice recounted everything, every detail of the dream, like sludge pouring out of her mind into the blackest fosse. The confession — and that’s what it was, really — seemed to gnaw the flesh off hours.

At the monologue’s end, Khoronos smiled, or seemed to. “Dreams are the mirrors of our souls. They tell us what we don’t realize about ourselves, and often what we don’t want to realize. Dreams make us confront what we refuse to confront.” His eyes assayed her. “You feel guilty. That’s what’s obstructing your work. That’s what you’re running from. Guilt.”

“Bullshit,” Veronica replied.

“You don’t know what to do,” he professed. “So your dream has told you. Your dream has shown you the answer.”

“The dream hasn’t shown me anything,” she dissented. Her temper seemed to pulse, testing itself.

“The dream is the answer, Veronica. The figure of Jack isn’t really Jack; it’s a symbol of the love of your past, a death symbol.”

“Meaning my past is dead,” she stated rather than asked to emphasize her sarcasm.

“Exactly,” he said.

Veronica smirked.

“But you don’t want to confront that. It makes you feel guilty, because when you ended your relationship with him, you hurt him. Society teaches us not to hurt people. When we hurt people we produce a negative reflection of ourselves. You feel that selfishness is what compelled you to break up with Jack. Am I right or wrong?”

Veronica gulped. “You’re right.”

“You’ve been taught that selfishness is bad. You ended your relationship because of selfishness. Therefore, you are bad. That is your conscious conception of the entire ordeal.”

“All right, maybe it is!” she now succeeded in raising her voice, “Maybe I am bad! Maybe I’m nothing but a selfish bitch who shits all over people! So what?”

Khoronos sat back and smiled. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

But Veronica wouldn’t hear of it. She stood up quickly, pointed her finger like a gun. “I know what you’re going to tell me, goddamn it! You’re going to tell me some egotistical garbage like the true artist must be selfish in order to produce true art! You’re going to tell me that art is the pinnacle of culture and the only way to achieve it is to completely disregard other people, and it’s okay to disregard other people because art is more important!”

Total silence distended the wake of her outburst. She trembled before him, heat reddening her face.

“It’s not my intention to tell you any such thing,” he responded. He seemed lackadaisical, even amused. “Sit back down, Ms. Polk. Collect yourself, and we can go on.”

Veronica retook her opposing seat. Her heart slowed back down.

“What we’re really talking about here is conception and misconception. Art is the ultimate proof of mankind’s superiority, not politics, not feeding the poor and disarming the world of its nuclear weapons. Those are but mechanics. The sum of the parts of all mankind, all that we have risen to since we crafted the first wheel, is what we create to symbolize what we are.”

“What’s that got to do with conception?” Veronica objected.

“Everything,” he said. “What you conceive of as selfishness isn’t selfishness at all. It’s truth.”

“Truth?” she queried.

“You ended your relationship with Jack in pursuit of your inner sense of truth. You only think it was selfishness because you don’t fully understand yourself. It’s truth, Ms. Polk, not selfishness.”

She felt exhausted now, as her mind strayed over his epigrams. She felt like something taken apart in error and reassembled.

“You did exactly what you had to do to preserve the most vital aspect of truth. You destroyed something that was false. That is what your dream was trying to tell you.”

Veronica gazed at him, damped.

“When the figure of flame entered your dream,” Khoronos went on, “you felt at first afraid. When it touched you, you screamed, yet you admit that those screams were screams of ecstasy. I’ll even dare to say that upon the fire-figure’s touch, you climaxed. Am I right or wrong?”

“You’re right,” she admitted, and this admission came with no reluctance. The fire-lover’s presence had drenched her in sexual anticipation, both times she’d dreamed of it. And when it touched her, she came.

“So what have we revealed?” he asked. “That you’re not selfish but devoted to truth. And in the dream, Jack existed as a symbol of your past.” Khoronos rose from his seat. “The figure of flame is the symbol of your future.”

She felt enlightened now, yet enmeshed with confusion. Suddenly she wanted to plead with him, this doctrinaire, this pundit who had dug into the tumult of her psyche and shown her the most promising image of herself. She groped, speechless, helpless.

“Your future begs your final awakening, Ms. Polk. It begs you to re-embark upon your quest and become what you were put on earth to be. It begs you to discover yourself as completely as you can be discovered.”

“But how?” she pleaded, looking up at him. “I don’t know what to do!”

“As I’ve said, and as you have agreed, creation is born of desire. And what is desire in the uttermost sense?”

“What?” she begged.

“Passion,” came the flat, granite answer.

“Passion for what?”

“Passion for everything.” Khoronos began to walk away, shrinking silently within the room’s enfeebled light. “Delve into your passion, Ms. Polk, and you will discover at last what you really are.”