Incubi

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.

Chapter 20

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.