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
“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.”
“
“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
“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
“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.”
Chapter 16
“Same M.O., same guy,” Randy said. “Front door locked, nothing ripped off, no signs of struggle. He went out the back.”
Jack walked into the living room. TSD was all over the place, stolid automatons dusting door frames and snapping common areas. Gorgeous morning sunlight poured in through fleckless windows, a mocking affront. Places like this should be dark, sullen, as any place of the dead.
“What’s her—”
“Rebecca Black, thirty-one,” Randy answered. His face told all, a mask cracked by terrible witness. “Paralegal for one of the big firms on the Circle. Good work record, no rap sheet, no trouble. Pest control was doing the complex this morning. They came in with the passkey from condo maintenance and found her.”
Jack’s gaze imagined the killer’s trek, bedroom hall, across the living room, to the slider. “Any TOD?” he asked.
“Beck’s here now. Oh, and the victim’s divorced. We’re gonna—”
“It ain’t the husband,” Jack stated. “We know that.” He made no further inquiries, heading for the bedroom. Karla Panzram followed him in silence.
“You’ll have to bootie up, sir,” a young, brawny uniform told him at the door. “Hair and Fiber’s still working.” Jack nodded. The cop doled them Sirchie plastic foot bags—“booties,” they were called — and two hairnets. Jan Beck did not want her crime scene contaminated by irrelevant hairs and clothing fibers or shoe debris. Jack and Karla put on their booties.
