Incubi

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.

* * *

Jan Beck handed Jack a strip of multicolored paper — the source spectrum from a mass photospectrometer. Under it Jan had written:

3-[-3-(p-hydrophenyl)-4-chloroxyiphone]-3’-disodium-edetate.

“That’s the stuff,” Jan said. “The chemical designation.”

“And you found it in the bloodstreams of both girls?”

“Yep. Too bad it’s meaningless.”

It was 7 p.m. now; Jack and Faye stood in the TSD main lab, where they’d arranged to meet after Faye got out of the Library of Congress. Neither had mentioned Jack’s drunken foray of the night before.

“Meaningless?” Jack countered. “It’s our biggest lead. Once you identify it by name, we can nail down a geographic scheme. Whoever’s making it or selling it can lead us to the killer.”

“Killers,” Jan Beck reminded. “And that’s the problem. I don’t know if I can identify it by name.”

“You said it’s not in the CDS and pharmaceutical indexes, right?” Jack asked. “That knocks out about ten thousand possibilities.”

“So what? They’re U.S. indexes. It could be a foreign pharmaceutical. It could be homemade.”

These revelations did not enthuse Jack. He tried to sort his thoughts, smoking. “How much time, Jan?”

“Cold? Weeks.”

“I don’t have weeks.”

Jan Beck laughed. “Captain, unless you can give me something to go on, I’ll have to catalog every index one at a time.”

“Here’s something you might be able to use,” Faye Rowland interrupted. “I found a bunch of stuff today about drug use among the aorist sects.” She riffled through a sheaf of Xerox sheets. “They used lots of drugs during their rituals; one of them was an aphrodisiac called rootmash. They made it by distilling the pods of a plant called blackapple.” She scanned her underscores. “Taxodium lyrata is the botanical name. The book said it was a cantharadine, whatever that is.”

“Cantharadine,” Jan said to herself.

“Sounds like you’ve heard of it,” Jack said.

“It rings a bell. Give me that.” Jan took Faye’s papers and began to walk away toward her index library.

“Where are you going?”

“You gave me something to go on, so now I’m going to go on it.”