Incubi - Edward Lee.wps (27 page)

"Mr. Carlson was in the unit that liberated Buchenwald," Randy said.

Jesus, Jack thought. No wonder he's so screwy.

"It goes back to what I was saying, about gods."

Gods? "Mr. Carlson, tell me what you saw last night."

"We're all points of force," Carlson answered, smoke drifting smoothly from his nostrils.

"Everybody. We got bodies, sure, but inside, we're all points of force. You can define a point of force as a unit of will. Do you follow me, Captain? What is all of life about? Why are we here?

There is a reason; it's not just an accident, even though that's what most folks think these days."

"All right," Jack ventured. "Why are we here?"

"To prove the nature of our will."

There was something haunting about this man. He spoke softly but with intense deliberation.

There was belief growing deep behind the tattered features and racked body. Jack felt a chill; Carlson seemed to be looking at him with the dead left eye, and seeing something.

"The world is a passion play," Carlson said, "an eternal drama where each actor represents either graciousness or corruption. Bet that sounds silly to you."

"No, Mr. Carlson. It doesn't sound silly at all."

"Gods," Carlson repeated.

Randy leaned against the wall. Carlson was crazy, obviously, but why did his madness seem so effervescent? Jack very much wanted to know. He wanted to see this man's heart, not just the blasted face and blind white eye.

"You got a head here?"

"Sure, Mr. Carlson. Down the hall to the left."

Carlson got up, joints ticking. Yes, Jack thought. He looks like a conquered king. A corporal at the door led the old man to the rest room.

"He's been in Crownsville a bunch of times," Randy explained. "City cops pick him up wandering the docks at 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."

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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 famous cenotes of Assyrian and Mayan cultures were actually incarnation temples, where Ashipu and Toltec priests would surrogate themselves with demons and attempt to inseminate human women. Female bangomas of the African Bantu tribes allegedly incarnated war demons into the bodies of soldiers during battles with hostile tribes, and the Dandis of ancient India used incarnation rites to give flesh to the legion of Asura, demons of vampirism and lycantropy. Apparently demons, regardless of geography, liked to have a little walking-around time on earth. But, Come on, Faye thought impatiently. What about the aorists?

A little more skimming and she found:

numerous records attest that aorists near what is now Erlangen routinely incarnated Narazel with apostate surrogoti, to oversee Black Mass, witness the murder of priests, and participate in orgiastic rites. A Slavic sect regularly incarnated the demon Baalzephon, an incubus, who yearly took a human wife. Baalzephon, who closely parallels many demons of passion and creativity

[see SAKTA, Hindu; TII, Polynesia; LUR, American Indian], was known as "The Father of the Earth." Here the student will discern ritual incarnation at its greatest extremity. The Sect of Baalzephon existed solely to surfeit the demon's thirst for 1) creative stimuli, 2) the visualization of the beauty of women, and 3) intercourse. Baalzephon's passion was apparently unlimited. His impresa, the starred trine or triangle, was said to serve as a lacuna, or physical ingress, which opened annually via a series of precursory sacrifices. Generally three such sacrifices (one for each point of the trine) were implemented as prelude to the final rite, all of which were discharged by Baalzephon himself, incarnated through trained surrogates. Baalzephon could even be incarnated multiply, to increase his stimulus. A fourth sacrifice was later executed upon the trine itself, which allegedly effected a bodily supplantation and granted Baalzephon an actual moment of nonsurrogated existence on earth. This rite, the ultimate form of incarnation, was known to the aorists as transposition.

Faye felt mentally washed out; all this demon stuff was beginning to get under her skin.

Precursory sacrifices, she thought, depressed. Transposition. The aorists believed that their rituals were never-ending. How many people had they murdered through the ages? Probably thousands.

It was madness.

She went up to the small cafeteria and got a cup of strong coffee, trying to free her mind of the undertow of her reading. The librarians still hadn't found the one book she wanted most, The Synod of the Aorists, which had evidently been misplaced during recent renovations. It was the only book on file devoted solely to the practice of aorism and hence probably the only title of its kind in the world. Thus far, though, all this dark stuff murder, sacrifice, incarnation made her feel like a mop in a wringer. Part of her hoped the librarians never found that last book.

«« »»

Patterns, Jack pondered.

The vital element in solving any unusual homicide was pattern. A pattern must be established in order to pursue the perpetrator. Two types of patterns seemed the most viable. Patterns of modus and patterns of psychology. They'd examined the patterns of modus in the Triangle case and had gotten nowhere. The psychological pattern he found much more useful; when you understood the killer, it was easier to get on his tracks. But I've got two killers, he thought at the desk. Maybe four. Maybe more than that. And they all seemed to be committing the same crime not only through the same modus pattern but also through the same psychological pattern. Intuition was important too, but actually all intuitions were preformed through their own pattern of assessment.

Jack was good at assessing things; that's the only reason he wasn't still driving a sector beat and shooting jive with the other uniforms at Mister Donut. He could maturate a workable pattern of intuition out of the assessment of facts.

But neither pattern was working here. What about victim patterns? In his mind he saw triangles, glyphs, and the scarlet word Aorista. The victims had patterns too. Unstructured moral behavior, promiscuity, erotomania, as Dr. Panzram called it sexual patterns. All three 64s were successful, well-educated single women. And still another; they were all looking for the same thing when they died, which meant they lacked the same thing.

Passion. They had everything in their lives but passion.

Now a new pattern had alighted. Susan Lynn wrote poetry. Rebecca Black wrote poetry. Shanna Barrington was an art director. A creative pattern. A general artistic pattern of shared interest.

And stranger, the evidence proved that none of them had ever worked together, gone to school together, or knew the same people. Nor at any time had they ever known each other. Yet the patterns remained.

Bizarre words occurred to him. Similitude. Homology. Parity.

Parallelism, he thought. The patterns of the perpetrators adjoined with the patterns of the victims.