Edward Lee - Incubi

“What’s that?” Olsher asked.

“His soul.” Jack drew smoke deep into his chest. Red , he thought. In his mind he saw red. “This guy left his soul all over the walls of that girl’s bedroom.”

It stuck in his mind — a memory more persistent than the others. He didn’t know why then, but he thought he did now. Perhaps it had been the present telling him something about the future, an eager specter whispering in his ear, saying, Listen, Jack. It’s really you they’re talking about. Listen. Listen…

A month ago? Two? He wasn’t sure. They’d gone out to eat somewhere — McGarvey’s, he thought — and then had stopped for a drink at the Undercroft. Veronica seemed particularly content; she was used to their relationship now, comfortable with it. She accepted it as part of her.

Jack, too, was very happy that night. It was a combination of complacencies. He’d just gotten a raise and a letter of commendation. Veronica had just sold two more paintings and had been interviewed by Vanity Fair . Their lives, together, were stable. They were happy, and they were in love.

That was the sum of the combination: love. It was his love that made him happy.

Romantic affection sometimes seemed silly, but that made him happy too. Just holding her hand, or the easy way their knees touched when they sat. How she unconsciously touched him when she talked. These were subtleties, yet they were also anchors, weren’t they? Verifiers. More little pieces of their love.

There’d been many nights like this, but this one stuck out because of something that happened later. As the evening wound down, some guy from the state film institute came in and introduced himself to Veronica. His name — if Jack remembered right — was Ian. He was young and had just graduated from film school; he was currently directing an independent movie, some avant-garde sort of thing. Very quickly Ian and Veronica got into a very heavy discussion. It didn’t bother Jack, giving some of his time with her to someone else; it seemed important. Instead, he yacked with Craig about beer, women, and the Steelers.

But something bothered him. He found he couldn’t help keeping an ear on Veronica’s conversation. She and this Ian guy seemed to be talking about the function of fear in art.

What’s fear got to do with art? Jack wondered.

“Like Argento and Bava,” Ian was saying, “it’s all a system of psychological symbols.”

“And Pollock and de Kooning,” Veronica said, sipping a Sapporo.

“Exactly! Using objective structural standards as a method of subjective conduction.”

“Looking in the mirror and seeing someone else’s face.”

“Or no face at all,” Ian postulated.

“Ah, so you’re an existentialist,” Veronica assumed.

“No, I’m just a director. The only honest creative philosophy is no philosophy. Truth is all that motivates me— human truth.”

Sounds like a bunch of gorilla shit to me , Jack thought.

“And you view truth through its correlation to human fears,” Veronica stated rather than asked.

“Yes,” Ian said. “Our fears make us what we are. Every action generates a re action. Fear makes us react more than anything else.”

“Wait a minute, pal,” Jack interrupted. “You’re saying that fear is the only truth in life?”

Ian’s eyes sparkled. “Yes, I think I am. Fear is the base for everything else we want to be truth. Even our joys are created out of inversions of our fears.”

“That’s a load of shit.”

“Jack!” Veronica snapped.

“But he’s just proved it himself. His reaction to our discussion has created a denial. His fear that we might be right.”

Jack felt fuddled.

“For a short time in my life,” Ian explained, “I went on a hiatus. I knew I could never be creatively complete until I had identified my greatest fears. So that’s what I did, I went looking for the things that scared me the most.”

“What were the things?” Veronica asked.

“There were only three,” Ian said. “Drugs, greed, and love.”

Love , Jack thought. Cigarette smoke smeared the sunlight in his office window. The sudden recognition numbed him. Fear. Love . Was one really based upon the other? Now he knew why that night stuck in his mind. It was a portent, a mirror to the disheveled future he was sitting in right now. Ian had been right. Jack’s love — now that he no longer had Veronica to give it to — scared him to death.

Fear is the base for everything else we want to be truth , Ian had said.

Love , Jack thought.

Then he saw another, closer memory. In red:

HERE IS MY LOVE

“I just talked to Beck in Millersville,” Randy Eliot said.

Jack hadn’t even noticed the entrance of his partner. Randy, in a sharp gray suit, was helping himself to Jack’s coffee. When he turned, he stopped. “Christ, Jack. You look like—”

“Like I slept in a cement mixer. I know. Olsher just got done doing the plunger on my ass. Thinks I’ll fuck up the case.”

Randy stayed comment and sat down.

“Let me ask you something, as a friend,” Jack said. “Do you think I’m slipping?”

“Anybody who brews coffee this bad must be good for something.” Randy dropped his cup in the trash. “You want the truth? You drink way too much, and you’re too impressionable.”

“Impressionable? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t let go of things. Like Veronica.”

Jack smirked. “Who asked you anyway?”

“You did.”

“Well, next time I ask, don’t answer. What’s that about Beck? I thought you were running down the Bayview girl.”

“I am, and we’ve dug up plenty of shit. Name’s Shanna Barrington, thirty-two, single, no roommates. Got an art degree from St. John’s, worked for an ad agency off the Circle, one of the big ones. She started in the business as a commercial artist…”

Jack remembered the pastels and watercolors on the walls.

“Got promoted to senior art director last year, pulling almost seventy K. Good job record, good credit…”

“But?”

“Mary Poppins she wasn’t.”

“Guys, you mean?”

“All kinds. She was a dance-club queen. Neighbors say she’d come home with a different guy every night. Hung out at a lot of the ritzier places downtown. The resident manager got tons of complaints about her; she was a screamer. A few of the downtown barkeeps gave us the same story. She’d meet a guy, tag him in the sack the first night, then—”

“Next day she’s sick of him,” Jack finished. “She’s out looking for someone new. It’s a common cycle. Lotta girls that age get that way because they’re afraid they’re losing it…” Then he paused, thinking. What? Afraid . Fear. Again, he thought of Ian. “They go hypersexual because they never get the kind of emotional attention they need. So they replace it with physical attention. It gets to be a compulsion. They don’t feel real unless they’re getting laid by a different guy every night.”

“A girl can make a lot of enemies doing that. All she’s got to do is burn the wrong guy…”

No , Jack thought. Not this one . The feel was all wrong, and so was the evidence. Shanna Barrington was not murdered as a result of her promiscuity. She was chosen because of it .

“What were you saying about Beck? She find something?”

Randy nodded, then patted his hair, which was his own compulsion. “The victim had an address book in her nightstand. There were over a hundred names and numbers in it.”