Incubi

long hair into his net.

Karla Panzram was smiling. “Do hairnets make you feel emasculated, Captain Cordesman?”

“Shut up, Doctor,” Jack replied. “As long as they don’t make me wear panties, I’ll be fine.”

What they stepped into then was not a bedroom. Bedrooms were where people slept, dreamed, made love, got dressed in the morning and undressed at night — bedrooms were where people lived. They walked, instead, into a charnel house. Jack’s vision swam in red; he needed to look at nothing in particular to see it. It was simply there — the red—unveiled and hovering. The red figure lay within red walls, red wrists and ankles lashed to the red bed.

Karla Panzram said nothing, made no reaction, and Jan Beck, too, tended to her grisly business denuded of emotion. The spindly woman jotted down ITDs — incremental temperature drop — every five seconds at the sound of a beep, reading digital figures off a Putfor Mark II contact thermometer which had been adhered just below Rebecca Black’s smudged throat. The device, zeroed at a mean of 98.6, gauged how quickly the epidermal temperature decayed.

“Hello, sir,” Jan Beck said without looking up. She wore red polyester utilities, foot bags, acetate gloves, and a hairnet. So did the two techs who roamed the floor on hands and knees with illuminated CRP magnifiers. Polyester was less inclined to drop fibers, but on occasions when that happened the bright red material was easily spotted and rejected as fiberfall. “Feel free to look around,” Jan Beck invited. “But please do not approach the contact perimeter.”

Jack was staring at the back wall. “I need TOD, Jan.”

“Give me a sec.” She punched a thirty-second drop-reading into an integrated field thermometer/barometer made by the same company. The figures were accurate to within 1/100 of a degree. Then she said, “Ballpark, between twelve-thirty and two-thirty a.m. I’ll have a better number for you once I get her into the shop.”

Jack nodded, thinking of the tedious protocol that awaited. Canvass the complex. Check taxi logs and newspaper vehicles. Interview every neighbor. The same thing all over again.

Lampblack and anthracene smudged the door frame, drawer lips, dresser tops, even the toilet seat. The sink drain in the bathroom had been removed; so had the toilet and sink and bathtub handles. The toilet roll and tissue box lay in evidence bags, awaiting iodine fuming. Everything in the wastebasket had also been bagged. Essentially, TSD had dusted, bagged, fumed, or removed all the sundries of this woman’s life. Soon the woman herself would be in a bag.

Jack lowered his gaze and looked at what lay on the bed.

Who knew what she’d looked like in life? In death, she was a red mannequin, tied up, gutted. Her belly had been riven, organs teased out and arranged about her on the mattress. Duct tape covered her eyes, sealed her mouth. Again the scarlet ghosts of the killer’s affections remained: lip prints about her throat, fingermarks about her breasts. Blood had been smoothed adoringly over the inner thighs and down the sleek legs. There were even lip prints on her hands and feet, under the arms, along her sides — myriad red smudges. Rebecca Black had been dressed in kisses of blood.

A massive wet spot darkened the red-stained sheet between her legs. Jack thought of a great fleeing spirit.

Then Karla Panzram muttered: “Oh, no.”

Jack turned. It was just like Shanna Barrington. Odd prismoid configurations muraled the walls along with jagged red glyphs. The three-starred triangle had been drawn above the headboard.

Above it were the words HERE IS MY LOVE.

And below it: AORISTA!

There was something else, on the opposite wall:

PATER TERRAE, PER ME TERRAM AMBULA!

But Karla Panzram was squinting at the red glyphs, moving from one to the other, scrutinizing them.

“What?” Jack asked.

The psychiatrist’s voice echoed flatly in the cramped room. “This is a different killer,” she said.

“Bullshit!” Jack yelled.

“Look at the juncture angles, and the stress marks in the strokes. You can see the delineation’s where the blood dried.”

“So what!” Jack yelled.

“The person who did Shanna Barrington was left-handed,” Karla Panzram said. “The guy who did this is right-handed. There’s no doubt whatsoever. You’ve got two killers executing the same M.O.”

* * *

The book, entitled Ordinall of Demonocracy, bore a printing date of 1830, published privately in London by a supposed mystic named, oddly, Priest. Faye Rowland scanned half the tome before she found:

fornication in the name of Lucifer, Black Mass, and human sacrifice. Sacrifice in particular was thought not only to appease the higher demons but also to spiritually and physically fortify the activists themselves. Most offensive of such blasphemous activism were the Cotari and the Aorists.

Faye had prowled the lower levels with her stack permit and stumbled upon several more obscure tomes. Many titles in the listing weren’t there, and some that weren’t in the listings surprised her. Next she checked a reasonable translation called Dictionaries de Dieu, by someone named Christoff Villars. The pub date was 1792, yet the translation date was 1950. She looked up aorist and found nothing. Then she looked up cotari:

COTARIUS: A nomenclatic title referring to the covenhead or sect leaders of any particular anti-Christian faction. The cotarius was the denominational clergy of Satan’s worshipers. Its most powerful members were supposedly blessed by the demons themselves.

Hmm, Faye thought. It would not be topics that would lead her toward specifics, but words, terms. What she’d found out yesterday about the aorist sects was all general. She needed exactitudes. Next she opened the Annotative Supplement to the Morakis References. These were a series of texts on all manner of the occult, and though the source was untraceable — no one, for instance, knew who Morakis was or when he lived — the information had been deftly translated and was surprisingly well maintained. Faye wanted the other volumes of the regimen but so far she’d only found this supplement. She looked up cults and found:

CULTUS OF LUCIFER: Religious sectarianism, diabolism, and organized counter-Christian worship revolving around the devil or devils. Such activities predate modern records; little specific is known of their origins. All religions since earliest times have had their counter-religions. Satanism was the peasant’s religion, a reaction to the oppression of the Roman Catholic Church. Regrettably, most literary viewpoints up until the last century are clearly Catholic viewpoints and, hence, misleading as to true sociological objective. We do know, however, that the furthest extremities of such satanic culti — known as aorism—

Paydirt, Faye thought.

— proved a formidable revolutionary foe to Christian thesis in the Middle Ages; the aoristae burned churches, murdered priests, sacrificed children, etc., without reservation, under the acceptance that the worst atrocities they could commit against God would better commend their favor in the eyes of Satan. Aorist activity rose to epidemic proportions in the fourteenth century, particularly in France and the Balkan provinces. Aoristae frequently operated covertly, planting “spies” among the apprentice clergy, who would secretly defile consecrates before Mass. Holy vessels were purloined at night for demonic rituals and replaced by morning, especially chalices and fonts. Raiments, likewise, were secreted out of the church and worn by high sect members during orgiastic rites, and hung back up for the priest for the next day’s services. One such agent, posing as a verger in Mauleon-Soule, confessed to performing acts of bestiality in the nave at night, reciting satanic incantations before the Cross, raping