Incubi

night. Carlson gives them the spiel about gods and points of force and all that, so they check him in for a standard psych evaluation. He doesn’t take Social Security and he turned down a disability pension from the Army. I kind of admire him.”

“Me too,” Jack concurred.

“Too bad he’s incompetent to testify.”

Jack lit up and blew smoke. “I don’t care about that. I just want to know what he saw. No word salad, no pink elephants or aliens in his pocket. He doesn’t seem to be story-mixing, and he doesn’t seem schizo, does he?”

“No. And that’s what ticks me.”

“Why?”

“Listen to the rest of his story, Jack.”

Carlson teetered back in, his head held up beneath old flowing hair like a mane: pride in ruins.

“Mr. Carlson, when was the last time you ate?”

“I eat three times a day, son. Be surprised what the downtown restaurants toss out. I probably eat better than you.”

Jack recalled his last TV dinner and was inclined to agree. “How about shelter, Mr. Carlson? We have state and county departments that can find a place for you to live.”

“I got a place to live, son. A fine, fine place.”

“Where?”

“The world,” Carlson said with the vaguest half-smile. He lit another of Jack’s Camels and smoked it very methodically.

Jack looked hard at this human wreck, and the only important thing finally hit him. Carlson, though completely destitute, was completely and honestly happy.

“Let’s get back to what you were saying, about gods.”

Carlson nodded as objectively as a cop talking about a bust. “Gods made the world, gave it to us as a gift. Worst thing is most people don’t care; they think they’re the gifts. Makes me feel bad that folks can be so selfish, take all the beauty for granted, everything. Me, I love it.”

“What, Mr. Carlson?”

“The beauty, the joy. It’s all over the place, everywhere you look. Thing is, when you stop looking, you’re finished.”

Jack wanted to ask what this had to do with anything, but he quickly realized that was Carlson’s point. “I think maybe I know what you mean, Mr. Carlson.”

“Hope so, and your friend there too. All of you. I get to walking. Probably walked thousands of miles in my life. And every step I take”—Carlson looked right at Jack with his dead eye—“every single step is a celebration. Every time I put my food down in graciousness, that’s like saying thank you.”

“Thank you to who? To the gods?”

“Yes, son, to the gods. It’s acknowledgment of the gift. Me, I walk mostly at night ’cause night is better, clearer. I gotta see it all to keep my graciousness real. I gotta be in it — the beauty, the gift. The stars, the sky, the way the water sounds slapping the piers, all that. And especially the moon. Sometimes I think the gods put the moon up there so we’d never forget the gift.”

“So you like to walk the docks at night?”

“That’s right. Where the sea meets the land and all that. Where one gift joins another under the light of the moon.” Carlson stubbed out the butt. “Big things, dark. They had no faces.”

Jack’s forehead crinkled. “What?”

“You believe in the gods, right? Isn’t that what you said?”

“Yes,” Jack told him for lack of anything else.

“And if you believe in the gods, you have to believe in their counterparts, right? Can’t have one without the other. That’s the way it is. Reckoning. A point of force is a unit of will. You believe in one, you believe in both. You believe in the gods, you believe in the devils too.”

“Sure, Mr. Carlson,” Jack said, but he thought: What the hell is this guy talking about?

“That’s what I been trying to tell you, son. That’s what I saw coming down that building last night.” Carlson’s dead eye stared. “I saw devils.”

Chapter 25

Faye found two more good sources in the lower level, but still not the one text she wanted most of all. Her attention, though, as she bent over her desk, kept wandering off. She’d read whole passages of Das Grimoire and could remember none of it.

…of calling upon Satan himself to obfuscate detection. Lucifer, as does God, protects the faithful.

The study coves were abandoned; she felt astray down here, abandoned herself in silence. She could guess what it was; her unpleasant scene with Jack. Had she been too hard on him, or not hard enough? Did he know how badly it hurt her to see him like that? He’d said a lot this morning, things that ordinarily would have overjoyed her. He’d asked for a chance, hadn’t he? But circumstance had ruined it all. It always did.

Always, she thought.

The fact was, it hurt too much to care. By now she knew that she loved him — disheveled drunk that he was — but she didn’t know what to do. There was logic and there was hope. Why was it that the two could never meet on common ground?

She closed Das Grimoire; it was either poorly translated or just unreadable. The second text, The Morakis Compendium of Demonology, was apparently an annotation of an earlier text. The printing date was 1957.

SURROGATISM, SATANIC: The process, usually in Black Mass, of the substitution of spirits, not to be confused with invoked possession. This was sometimes sacrificial. It is derived from the Middle Latin sub, in place of + rogare, elect, which implies a discretionary selection of participants. There is some suggestion, according to recent subtranslations of the shelta thari manuscripts recovered in the St. Gall Monastery, that pre-Druidic magi, called Ur-Locs, practiced deistic surrogatism as early as 2500 B.C. The Occupation Registry of Caesar, too, hints suspiciously of similar activity, that seminarial hierophytes [apostate priests] “offered up themselves to the devils so that they may come to the Earth and see the new nemesis with their own eyes.” Most notorious, however, was the subrogatic process of the mid-era aorists of lower Europe, where, according to Catholic transcriptions, praelytes [highest-order priests or prelates] used well-trained surrogates to “give spirit and flesh to the lords of the dark.” Unfortunately, like the Druids, the aorists left no written record of themselves, practicing exclusively sub rosa, and therefore the actual ritual designs of satanic surrogatism remain mostly speculative. [See INCARNATION, RITES OF]

“Okay,” Faye muttered. “Progress.” The stout binding crackled as she turned to the I’s.

INCARNATION, RITES OF: The ritual practice of the physical supplantation or substitution of deities and humans. [From the Late Latin incarnare, to make flesh.] Ritual incarnation seems to be surprisingly widespread yet strangely difficult to trace with much detail. However, most forms of counter-worship have always employed verifiable rites for the incarnation of their gods—

Faye skimmed down; it was a large — and decidedly grim — entry. Many cults supposedly brought demons forth for short periods, to eat. Faye did not need to be advised of the menu. Much evidence suggested that the