Incubi

by Edward Lee

  Damn, she thought again. Her breath thinned. Decency told her to leave. This was not what good girls did. Good girls did not spy on people. Go back upstairs, she ordered herself. Go to bed, forget about this. Of course, she didn’t. It was fun, doing something her upbringing had taught her not to do. Just as she thought she’d like to see more, she got her wish. Gilles sat Amy Vandersteen up on the pool ledge. The woman parted her thighs and lay back, paddling her feet languidly in the water as Gilles brought his face between her legs.

  Who’s the voyeur now? Veronica thought.

  Soon the images conspired: the dark, the quiet yard, moans enlaced with cricket trills. Veronica felt hypnotized. Could Khoronos’ admonishments apply here? He’d told her she must examine herself, to pursue truths of her self-identity. Society would condemn this as voyeuristic, perverse. So why am I doing this?

  She contemplated the answer, the truth.

  Because it excites me.

  She let herself…what? Immerse? Confront? No, she injected herself into the fantasy.

  She put herself where Amy Vandersteen lay, her legs draped over Gilles’ shoulders. She wondered if Gilles was as deft of tongue as Marzen. Her imagination said yes. It was her mind that lay back in substitute of her body, and brought Gilles’ mouth to her sex. The visualization made her wet at once.

  Delve into your passion, Khoronos’ words drifted up again.

  When she blinked, they were getting out, standing naked in the moonlit grass; they were drying themselves with big white towels. Marzen’s physique seemed even more magnificent than Veronica remembered, all sculpted muscles and tapered lines, and Gilles too, a more delicate version. Gilles dried Amy, and Marzen dried Ginny, then they switched. Both women looked dizzy in wantonness.

  Then they were coming in.

  Shit! She dashed through the kitchen entrance just as the swimmers entered. The entire house was dark save for the hall light upstairs. Giggles rose, bare feet padded across the carpet. Veronica hid just out of sight behind the kitchen entry. Eventually, naked shapes rounded the lower landing. But there were only three. Ginny and Gilles scampered up the stairs first, followed by Amy Vandersteen. But where was Marzen?

  “Ja, here she is,” came the accented voice. “Our beautiful little peeper.”

  Veronica whirled. “Jesus Chr—”

  Marzen had sneaked up behind her.

  “You like vahtching, ja? You like to see.”

  Veronica could only gaze back. He was a nude shadow, he was huge. Beads of water glittered on his broad chest. This sudden sexual presence overwhelmed her; she doubted she could even speak. The sudden truth relit in her mind: she wanted him again. All of him this time.

  “You must join us, Veronica.”

  No, she started to say. She knew what he meant — an orgy. He wanted her to be a piece of furniture in a game of sexual musical chairs. She couldn’t think of anything less sincere. So why didn’t she protest when he approached?

  His hands pulled up her sundress and skimmed it off. He turned her around, popped her bra, and threw it aside. All this deepened her excitement, the rough yet exacting quickness with which he’d stripped her. Then he knelt and skimmed her panties off.

  He picked her up and carried her toward the stairs.

  She could think of nothing to say to him. She put her arm around his shoulder, felt the hard muscles, the heat of his solid flesh. She felt drifting as he ascended a step at a time.

  When he took her to Ginny’s room, he set her down. She could barely stand, she could barely think past her anticipation. Marzen went to the window, next to Gilles. Ginny and Amy Vandersteen sat on the edge of the bed.

  Khoronos had told Veronica she must delve into her passions, even potential ones. But group sex? Her mind fought with the impulse, and lost. Right now she knew she would do anything for any manner of sexual release. She didn’t know why, she just knew. Anything. Even a five-way orgy.

  “Transposition,” Gilles said.

  “Mein Herz,” Marzen said. “Mein Geliebte.”

  The men seemed very serious. They stood with their arms crossed, staring. Veronica, Ginny, and Amy stared back.

  Ginny moaned. Amy, whose wet white hair looked like a swim cap, discreetly touched herself. Veronica managed to mutter, “What the hell is this? What’s going on?”

  The men were waiting for something. But what?

  “Are you guys gonna stand there all night,” Amy Vandersteen finally said, “or are you gonna fuck us?”

  Both men seemed to frown at the expletive, as though it soiled whatever was taking place here. Veronica could not help but stare at them, at their penises, at their grandiose physiques.

  “None of you are ready yet,” Gilles answered.

  “Not yet ready to transpose,” Marzen added.

  But Veronica knew already, a subtle hot shock in her chest. Self-identity. Discovering oneself as completely as possible. Passion. Even potential ones. Her horniness felt like a trapped animal raging to escape its snare.

  “Before you can learn to love us,” Marzen said.

  “You must learn to love each other,” Gilles finished.

  The two men walked out of the room and closed the door.

  Veronica felt a jolt: a touch. Amy Vandersteen pushed her back on the bed and kissed her on the mouth. Veronica paused, shivered — then she gave in and kissed her back.

  Chapter 19

  To Jack Cordesman, hangovers were a familiarity. His head quaked when he leaned up in bed. Sunlight through the blinds cut into his vision like a razor wheel. He lumbered to the bathroom, thrust his mouth under the faucet, and gulped tap water.

  Then he threw up, another familiarity.

  He could tell by looking at the bed that Faye hadn’t slept with him. What the fuck happened? he wondered. He stumbled downstairs in his shorts, guzzled some orange juice, and threw up again. It was 8:30; he was going to be late. No note had been left on the fridge, and Faye wasn’t here. He tried to think, but he could remember nothing of last night past his sixth drink.

  Birds chirped cheerily on the window ledge. Shut up, he thought. First he called work. “Running a little late.” He tried to sound nonchalant. The desk sergeant didn’t sound surprised. Then he called Craig.

  “Everybody do me,” Craig said.

  “Hey, Craig, it’s Jack. Did I wake you up?”

  “No, I always get up at eight-thirty when I go to bed at four.”

  “Sorry. Look, I need to know what happened last night.”

  Craig serviced a bemused pause. “You got faced. Bad.”

  “How many did I have?”

  “I don’t know. Ten, twelve. I tried to stop serving you but you threatened to shit on the floor and close us down on a health violation.”

  What could he say? Nothing, he thought. Nothing he hadn’t said before. “What happened with the girl?”

  “Faye? Oh, she sat it out — she’s a good girl. At last call you passed out. We stuffed you in the car, drove you home, and dragged you upstairs.”

  “Did she stay? At my place, I mean.”

  “Yeah, in one of the downstairs rooms, I think.”

  “I guess she was pretty pissed,” Jack lamented.

  “If she was pissed she would’ve walked out hours before. Like I said, she’s a good girl.”

  Don’t remind me, Jack thought. “You were saying something before I got tanked. Something about someone looking for me?”

  “Yeah, what’s his name. The guy with the Ivanhoe haircut.”

  “Stewie,” Jack said, like the name was phlegm in his throat.

  “Yeah, that guy.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He said he was looking for you, I said you hadn’t been in. He drank up and left. That was a few hours before you and Faye came in. The candyass left me a nickel tip.”

  That’s Stewie, all right. But what did he want that was so important he actually came looking for Jack?

  Now what? Jack held the phone, his head thumpi
ng through silence. “Look, Craig, I’m really sorry about—”

  “I know. You’re really sorry about getting fucked up and making an ass of yourself in public.”

  “I guess by now it goes without saying.”

  “Of course it does, so don’t worry about it.”

  Jack was grateful for Craig’s barman’s couth — breaking Jack’s balls and being a good guy about it at the same time. “And thanks for helping Faye get my drunk ass home.”

  “Forget it,” Craig said. “Before I go back to sleep, you want some friendly advice?”

  “Quit drinking,” Jack guessed.

  “Hit the nail on the head. And the girl, Faye — she’s a decent kid, and I think she really likes you.”

  “So what’s Craig’s divine advice?”

  “Don’t fuck it up.”

  Jack reflected on the words through the dial tone. He was beginning to wonder what in his life he hadn’t fucked up, and his present hangover only amplified the question. He went up to the shower, not just wondering what the future might hold, but wondering if he even had one.

  * * *

  NARCOTICS, RITUAL USE OF: Medieval counter-worship displays a vast utilization of narcotic substances. In fact, many pre-Christian-era belief systems revered particular entities who supposedly presided over the existence of narcotic properties and pharmacological knowledge, and it is through such demonographies that similar influences probably became insinuated into later Christian counter-worship.

  Boring, Faye thought in her study cubicle. She skimmed down the text, eyeing only for key words of significance:

  known as elixirists, of special note with the aoristic orders of the late 1200s. Here we find an astounding logistic of narcotic manufacture. Drugs were generally used communally, during group rites of Mass, mostly root and botanical derivatives. Prelates often spiked thuribles with a preparation they called “cavernsmoke,” which was said to “fortify the spirit for the service of our lords.” What it really did was extend the initiate’s susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion, increasing the likelihood of the commission of a crime. Cavernsmoke, as it turns out, was a tuber extract of a butyrophenone chemical chain which when induced affects a CNS depression and lowers a subject’s conscious resistance to suggestion. Its chemical constituents are nearly identical to a modern psychiatric drug called Raxidol, which is still used to this day as a therapeutic hypnotic and involves a complicated synthesis process. This is just one example of a long series of sophisticated pharmacologies that included hypermanic drugs, psychostimulants, amphetamines, and opiate-based hydromorphinic pain killers and euphorics used today. One may find this premise very interesting: how did such cults, composed primarily of ignorant peasants living a thousand years ago, develop such a pervasive and comprehensive knowledge of pharmacological science?

  You’re right, Faye rejoined. It is an interesting premise. The aorists were using narcotic technologies that hadn’t even been invented. It explained quite a bit, though — how the prelates were able to influence their subjects so effectively: drug addiction and hypnosis. She skimmed down further:

  to the extent that any ritual occasion demanded the antithetical gesture of sexual sin, which was viewed as a paramount affront to God, the more perverse in nature the greater the homage to Lucifer and his appellate demons. Orgies en masse were common from the earliest times, covenheads making liberal use of crude aphrodisiacs in order to provoke rampant sexual behavior among the congregates. Such substances were largely physical in mechanism, and often quite dangerous: harsh astringents such as bergamot and distilled tarweed roots which irritate mucous membrane linings — such as those of the vagina, the anus, and the urethra — and hence affect an accelerated urge to stimulate the irritated areas via intercourse. The aorists, however, whose pharmacological prowess is aforementioned, used much more sophisticated aphrodisic substances, which might help to explain the ease with which the aorists executed such excruciating sexual acts as bestiality and necrophilia. Somehow, sect prelates managed to isolate narcotic substances that directly affected desired dopaminergic mechanisms in the brain. One chief aphrodisiac compound was known as “rootmash” or “loveroot,” whose formulation required a complex series of distillation syntheses of the tubercore of the stalky pod-bearing black apple plant, or Taxodium lyrata, exclusive to lower Europe. Properly processed, the distilled aggregant when taken internally stimulates an overproduction of certain biogenic amines that regulate sex drive, causing hypersexual impulses, abnormal excitation states, and an aberrant willingness to partake in acts which would otherwise seem unappealing or extreme. This particular extract is classified today as a cantharadine, which is, in pharmacological terms, a cervical-channel dilator and libidinal stimulant.

  Faye reread the passage, then photocopied it. Jack might be very interested in this. 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.