Edward Lee - Incubi

Not her own face at all.

It was a devil’s face.

“Jesus Christ!” Faye exclaimed. “Where have you been?”

Jack looked up from the kitchen table, startled. “I—”

“I’ve been sitting in that goddamn bar for hours.” She set her briefcase on the table, less than gracefully, and sat down. “We didn’t know where you were.”

“I just got back,” he said meaninglessly.

“From where? Another bar?”

“No,” was all he said.

Lay off , she thought. The last thing he needs right now is you yelling at him. “I was worried, that’s all,” she said more quietly. Did that sound trite? Did that sound girlie? “I heard about what happened, Jack. About the case. I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.”

Jack shrugged. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. It doesn’t matter. I was burned-out and out of control, and they needed someone to blame the no-progress investigation on when the press got wind of the case. Two birds with one stone.”

“What are you going to do about—”

“About my drinking?” He smiled forlornly. “Quit. No choice. And, no, I haven’t had anything today.”

“I wasn’t going to ask that,” she said.

He held the odd, skewed smile and lit a cigarette. “There’s this snide chump named Noyle running the case now. He’ll probably abandon the ritual angle as a basis of the investigation.”

“In other words, I’m out of a job.”

“Looks that way. I’ll find out tomorrow. Just give everything you’ve got to him, and that’ll be it.”

That’ll be it . At least she’d gotten to do something different for a few days. “Craig said he saw Susan Lynn’s murderers.”

“Yeah,” Jack acknowledged, “and he must’ve also told you that they were in the bar several hours but no one remembers their faces.”

“Uh-huh. That’s interesting. I found out some more stuff today. The aorists believed they were the devil’s greatest disciples. Satan supposedly blessed the faithful. The sects even had litanies and prayers of protection that they recited before they went out and did their deeds. There’s a lot of documentation that you might find amusing.”

“Why?”

“From what you just said, Craig can’t make a description of the killers, even though he was in the same room with them for hours. Remember our deacon spy, Michael Bari? He lived with the aorists for weeks, but after he escaped, he couldn’t remember any of their names, descriptions, where they lived. He couldn’t even remember which church they used for their rituals. There’s a lot of similar testimony in the Catholic archival records of the late 1400s, when Rome made a serious effort to infiltrate the sects.”

Jack tapped an ash. “Kind of makes you wonder.”

“And there’s more. Several of the Slavic cults, like the one Michael Bari infiltrated, worshiped the incubus Baalzephon, the demon of passion and creativity. Baalzephon seems to have direct counterparts in other demonologies, some dating as far back as 3500 B.C. You name it, the Aztecs, the Burmese, the Assyrian Ashipus, even the American Indians and the Druids — they all recognized an incubus demon who presided over human passion and creativity, just like Baalzephon. It says somewhere in the Bible that evil is relative. Well…they weren’t kidding.”

Jack seemed depressed now, either by the complexities of Faye’s research or by the fact that he’d been dropped from the Triangle case. Perhaps she shouldn’t even be mentioning it now. “Baalzephon,” he muttered, indeed half amused. “The Father of the Earth. I wonder where these people came up with this stuff.”

“It was all counter-worship,” she said. “Stuff they invented as a spiritual revolt against their oppressors, the same old story told different ways down through the ages. Same thing as Santa Claus.”

“Yeah, but Santa doesn’t generally eviscerate women,” Jack pointed out. “What about this incarnation business? Did you find out anything more about that?”

“A little. The aorists paid homage to their apostate demons by sacrifice and incarnation — in other words, substituting themselves through surrogates. This gave the demon a momentary opportunity to be flesh on earth. Baalzephon’s sects went further, though. They practiced sacrificial incarnation rites year round as a general homage. But once a year they executed a more specific rite that involved selective sacrifices. They believed that the triangle was a doorway, or something like an interplanar dumbwaiter. They’d do three incarnation sacrifices first, girls who would please Baalzephon specifically — passionate, attractive, and creative girls — then they’d sacrifice a fourth girl right in the triangle. This possibly triggered a nonsurrogotic incarnation—”

“Baalzephon himself makes an appearance, you mean.”

“Yes, to bless his worshipers in the flesh and to have intercourse outside the territory he’d been condemned to for eternity. This was the ultimate slight to God, a demonological loophole. The end of the rite was called the ‘transposition,’ where the fourth victim transposes into Baalzephon’s space.”

“You mean…”

“The fourth victim physically enters Hell through the impresa. I haven’t found out exactly why, but one of the texts mentioned that Baalzephon likes to take a human wife on a yearly basis.”

Jack winced. “This is some crazy shit, Faye.”

“Sure it is. And the craziest part is that your killers are doing the same things that Baalzephon’s sects did six hundred years ago. It’s almost to a tee.”

Jack brewed on it awhile. Then, perhaps unconsciously, he mumbled, “Devils.”

“What?”

“We had a second witness, a dock bum. He said the killers leaving Susan Lynn’s condo were devils. Not men. Devils.”

“I wouldn’t put much stock in a bum’s observations.”

“I’m not. It’s just that this case gets freakier and freakier.”

He was brooding again, rubbing his face in what he felt was his failure. But that wasn’t all; Faye knew that. She’d known it the instant she stepped into the kitchen.

“But there’s something else bothering you, isn’t there?” she asked. “It’s not just the murders, and your being dropped from the investigation. There’s something else.”

Jack looked up at her.

“Tell me,” she said.

He told her everything then, and the details he’d never mentioned. He told her how this Stewie person had come to him with his worries, how Veronica had seemingly disappeared. He told her about this “retreat” she’d gone on at some rich dilettante’s estate, and how he’d broken into Veronica’s apartment, and a friend’s, to try to find out exactly where they were. He told her about the directions he’d found.

“And you’re going to go there,” Faye said rather than asked.

“I don’t know. It’s not my business, really. I should just give the directions to Stewie, let him go.”

“You should go,” Faye said. It was very abrupt. But what would possess her to say that, to encourage this man, who she possibly loved, to seek out a woman who had rejected him? The past always hurt — this Faye knew from experience. Perhaps she felt complicit with him.

The following silence made her uncomfortable. An inkling told her to leave. Just get up, say goodbye and good luck, and leave. But she couldn’t. Veronica had left him. Faye would not, even if her presence meant nothing.

All she wanted was to do something for him.

What, though?

“What do you want out of life, Jack?” she asked.

“I don’t know. A drink would be a good start.”

“I’m serious.”