by Edward Lee
She felt exhausted now, as her mind strayed over his epigrams. She felt like something taken apart in error and reassembled.
“You did exactly what you had to do to preserve the most vital aspect of truth. You destroyed something that was false. That is what your dream was trying to tell you.”
Veronica gazed at him, damped.
“When the figure of flame entered your dream,” Khoronos went on, “you felt at first afraid. When it touched you, you screamed, yet you admit that those screams were screams of ecstasy. I’ll even dare to say that upon the fire-figure’s touch, you climaxed. Am I right or wrong?”
“You’re right,” she admitted, and this admission came with no reluctance. The fire-lover’s presence had drenched her in sexual anticipation, both times she’d dreamed of it. And when it touched her, she came.
“So what have we revealed?” he asked. “That you’re not selfish but devoted to truth. And in the dream, Jack existed as a symbol of your past.” Khoronos rose from his seat. “The figure of flame is the symbol of your future.”
She felt enlightened now, yet enmeshed with confusion. Suddenly she wanted to plead with him, this doctrinaire, this pundit who had dug into the tumult of her psyche and shown her the most promising image of herself. She groped, speechless, helpless.
“Your future begs your final awakening, Ms. Polk. It begs you to re-embark upon your quest and become what you were put on earth to be. It begs you to discover yourself as completely as you can be discovered.”
“But how?” she pleaded, looking up at him. “I don’t know what to do!”
“As I’ve said, and as you have agreed, creation is born of desire. And what is desire in the uttermost sense?”
“What?” she begged.
“Passion,” came the flat, granite answer.
“Passion for what?”
“Passion for everything.” Khoronos began to walk away, shrinking silently within the room’s enfeebled light. “Delve into your passion, Ms. Polk, and you will discover at last what you really are.”
Chapter 16
“Same M.O., same guy,” Randy said. “Front door locked, nothing ripped off, no signs of struggle. He went out the back.”
Jack walked into the living room. TSD was all over the place, stolid automatons dusting door frames and snapping common areas. Gorgeous morning sunlight poured in through fleckless windows, a mocking affront. Places like this should be dark, sullen, as any place of the dead.
“What’s her—”
“Rebecca Black, thirty-one,” Randy answered. His face told all, a mask cracked by terrible witness. “Paralegal for one of the big firms on the Circle. Good work record, no rap sheet, no trouble. Pest control was doing the complex this morning. They came in with the passkey from condo maintenance and found her.”
Jack’s gaze imagined the killer’s trek, bedroom hall, across the living room, to the slider. “Any TOD?” he asked.
“Beck’s here now. Oh, and the victim’s divorced. We’re gonna—”
“It ain’t the husband,” Jack stated. “We know that.” He made no further inquiries, heading for the bedroom. Karla Panzram followed him in silence.
“You’ll have to bootie up, sir,” a young, brawny uniform told him at the door. “Hair and Fiber’s still working.” Jack nodded. The cop doled them Sirchie plastic foot bags—“booties,” they were called — and two hairnets. Jan Beck did not want her crime scene contaminated by irrelevant hairs and clothing fibers or shoe debris. Jack and Karla put on their booties. If only Dad could see me now, Jack considered, stuffing his 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 o
f 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 Mauléon-Soule, confessed to performing acts of bestiality in the nave at night, reciting satanic incantations before the Cross, raping and strangling prostitutes upon the altar, and sacrificing children to a demon called Alocer. He was said to have taken a particular pride in impurifying consecrates with semen and replacing blessed Mass candles with candles made of baby fat.
Faye rubbed her eyes. This was not what she would call light reading.
Demonic aorism demonstrated an impressive organizational structure. Each sect was governed by a prelate or mastrum, one said of formidable psychic and magical powers. Several apostates operated under the prelate, and from there the rank structure descended to various grades of underlings who carried out insurgent duties. Prelates were thought to be immortal through reincarnation, and purified by each life, while lower members were promised favorable position in Satan’s eternal congregation. Church desecration often served as initiation for new members; as vassals rose in status, assignations rose in extremity: the abduction of children for sacrifice [usually young girls from prominent religious families], the murder of priests and clergy members [priests were routinely sodomized or forced to have sex with sect odalisques before execution], and innumerable other grievous sacrilegious activity — archival documentation proves quite exhaustive and grueling. Poisoning was another activity of choice; aorist “operatives” frequently contaminated consecrants with toxins, sickening and sometimes killing whole congregations during Mass. Catholic records, in fact, indicate a surprisingly intricate use of toxins and narcotics by aorist sects. Pharmacological knowledge during these times was scant; however, one sect vassal apprehended by the Holy Inquisition near Florence told his confessors that prelates possessed “the divine wisdoms of the Lords of the Earth,” and that a demon named Deittueze “gifted mastri [prelates] with sacred knowledge of holy elixirs which blind, kill, corrupt the body, arouse the chaste, or cause to become mad.” Deittueze bears a striking resemblance to an Assyrian demon called Deitzu, the malformed half-son of Ea [the god of the underworld]. Deitzu was a despoiler, an incarnate, and himself “Lord of Amasha,” or cultivator of the flowers of Hell. [See NARCOTICS, RITUAL USE OF]
Aorism, like Babylonian mythology, presents an interesting demographic of worship. Sects worshiped an assemblage of patron anti-saints or lesser demons, and it is through such demons that the aoristae engaged in their most active oblation. In 1390, aoristic activity became so rampant that the Congregation of the Holy Office began to plant its own spies. These attempts failed miserably and with embarrassing promptitude, though a handful of successful infiltrations did help to corroborate the records. One interesting account from the Archives of the Holy Office tells of a young deacon named Michael Bari, who was sent to imposture himself within a sect operating out of Vasr, a large township in what is now western Hungary. Though questionably translated and obviously recounted from a strong Church viewpoint, Bari’s narrative tells of a shocking scene indeed. “The Praeta [prelate] dressed in cope, cassock, and mitre, stood before the Holy Altar, bloody handed in mock profference. Beside him stood two surrogoti [probably higher ranking vassals], naked, betranced, and aroused. Upon the floor they had fashioned their most damnable emblem, the trine, formed of the ground bones of priests, and severed hands of abbots served as the emblem’s stars. They drank gustily of the cup — the Holy Chalice! — which they’d filled with the blood of a prostitute, and then of the paten consumed collops of her sullied privates. The blasphemous communion had then been passed to the rest of their evil congregants, the Praeta incanting divinations in the guttering light, of which I had been blessedly spared for I with a few others bore aside their luciferic black candles, reciting to myself the Prayer of Our Lord… To the altar, a girl of her teens had been fettered, stripped of all garb, and she lay not in horror but in arousal forced into her blood by their demonian elixirs. Then the detestable Praeta intoned words I’d unthus heard — the Devil’s tongue — erecting his red hands. The navis grew hot though it was a chill night, and the air thickened as fevered blood. Then, and most horribly, one surrogot mounted the bliss-shrieking odalisque [one who is abducted for sexual purposes] of which he immediately penetrated her privates right upon the Altar, and the other surrogot fornicated unto her mouth. Here the black congregation, so too entranced by their noxious rootmash [an aphrodisiac, probably a cantharidin extract], began to partake of each other in all manner of indecorousness, laving upon each and other’s privates, and fornicating all manner of orifice, as they called out the name of their most vile Baalzephon. For much time mine eyes remained upon this carnal festival of flesh and profanation; these blasphemers, through the abuse of their bodies and the utterance of the most iniquitous words, rejoiced in the ultimate offense against our Lord — the most unspeakable acts. The vision shall never leave my memory! But later the festivities abated, the offenders exhausted in their Devil’s bliss. Many of the women rose naked in the sordid light, some with bosoms bloodie
d having offered the men to drink, and men crawling off those ignoble companions now too ravaged by sin to rise of their own. I looked again upon the Altar. The drugged odalisque had been taken down and lain within the trine. Now the votaries stood in full attention and silence as the Preata faced them, whispering further abyssal praise to their horrible master. The words, though I did not know them, seemed to arrogate some physical form that I cannot metaphor, and, as the thickened black words emanated from his lips, the two surrogoti…changed. They’d become something more or less than men — hideous misshaped things that could be born only of Hell’s most tenebrous chasms, and released guttural moans from their gnarled and hirsute throats sounds not of men or of anything of the earth. The battered odalisque lay still beneath the monstrous things, the joy of Satan on her dying face. Much blood pulsed awfully from betwixt her splayed legs, and then the first surrogot knelt, its chest like hillocks and its member stout and large as a man’s forearm, and it raised the black dolch up and plunged it down into the young girl’s belly. “Hail, Father!” proclamated the Praeta, and came the response of the nefarious congregation: “Baalzephon, hail!” thus repeated in cadence as the surrogoti completed their evil work. They tore out the girl’s innards and held them ahigh, they beslickened their bodies with her blood, and about their thick necks and members looped her entrails in monstrous glee as the Praeta raised his hands above and exclaimed: “Aorista, Father! Aorista!” Sickened in body and poisoned of mind, I blinked, and in the passing of that blink, the girl had vanished. Three nights later I fled their evil fold and escaped to the Rectory of Maijvo in the west.”
“Aorista,” Faye muttered, and pushed the book away. A ritual that does not end. The young deacon’s account made her eyes hurt, despite its obvious overstatement. It depressed her, though; much of it was probably true. She thought about the convolutions of madness and realized that it was all the same through the ages, then and now, a rite of changing masks over the same face.
