“I’m ready,” Jack said.
“Charlie probably has a magnificent physique. We know he’s attractive in a general sense; Shanna Barrington was an attractive woman. But I also suspect he’s obsessed with his own physique.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Charlie’s obsessed with female beauty. Seeing is as important to him as doing. This is a commonplace trait for sex killers on a fantasy borderline. It’s called bellamania or beau-idée-fixe. He’s seeking an ideal of female beauty in his victims. Therefore he must be beautiful himself or else he won’t be worthy to offer — and to sacrifice — his victim’s beauty to whatever structural basis his ritual exists in. Physical beauty is what propels him. His victim’s and his own.”
Jack stubbed his butt. “Sounds pretty complicated.”
“Actually it’s not. Like I said, it’s a commonplace trait. It’s something to consider, at least.”
Magnificent physique, Jack pondered. At least no one will be accusing me of the murders.
The phone shrilled, like a sudden alarm.
“Cordesman. City District Homicide,” Jack answered. But he felt sinking even before the voice replied.
“Jack?” It was Randy. The pause told Jack everything, its emptiness fielding a root of dread. Aw, Jesus, Jesus…
“We’ve got another one,” Randy said.
Jack scribbled down the address. “I’ll be there in ten,” he said. He hung up. All he could see for a moment was red.
“Come on,” he said to Karla Panzram.
“I know,” Khoronos claimed. “I heard you screaming too.”
But how could he have? Veronica knew he hadn’t been in the house when she had her nightmare. He couldn’t have heard.
“But it’s something else that’s bothering you,” he observed.
She’d come in after leaving Amy at the pool. Instead of finding Khoronos, he’d found her in the library. She hadn’t asked where he’d been all night, though her curiosity still itched. “You look…discomposed,” he’d said almost immediately. “You look separated from yourself. Why?”
The living room was quiet, dark. Khoronos’ presence made her feel sequestered. “I can’t work,” she said.
“Before you can be one with your art, you must become one with yourself.”
Why did he always suggest her spiritual self was not intact? It seemed like a distant insult. “Tell me what to do,” she said half sarcastically. “You have all the answers.”
“The answers are within yourself, Ms. Polk, but to reveal them you must realize the full weight of the questions. You haven’t done that, you never do. You have profound convictions about your art, but you haven’t applied that same profundity to yourself. This, I believe, is your greatest failure.”
She felt like shouting at him, or giving him the finger. Who the hell was he to imply her failures?
“Your sense of creation runs deep, so why does your sense of self remain so impoverished? Synergy, Ms. Polk, must exist between the two. What you create comes from you, yet if you don’t know yourself, how can you expect to create anything of worth?”
Veronica couldn’t decide if that made sense.
Then he said: “What are you running from?”
She sat back in the couch and frowned.
“Synergy is balance,” he continued. “It’s equanimity between what we are and what we create. Do you understand that?”
“No,” she said.
“All right. Creation is born of desire. Do you agree?”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“To know ourselves as artists, we must know our desires first. Any desire, even potential ones. Desire is the ultimate stimulus of what we are creatively, and the authenticity of the impetus can only dawn on us through an unyielding love of ourselves.”
Veronica contemplated this, then thought of what Amy Vandersteen and Ginny had said at the pool. They were all saying the same things. Suddenly Veronica felt like the child among them.
“But the root.” Khoronos lifted a finger. “We must now reveal the root of the impediment.”
“Fine,” she muttered. She felt stupid, inept.
“Tell me about the nightmare you had.”
Her face blanked. At once the images lurched back, and when she squeezed her eyes shut the nightmare only came more precisely into focus. She saw it all again, in razor-sharp, searing imagery.
“Tell me everything,” Khoronos said.
She spoke in the darkest monotone, the voice she heard didn’t even sound like her own; it was someone else’s, some dark confessor removed from her. The voice recounted everything, every detail of the dream, like sludge pouring out of her mind into the blackest fosse. The confession — and that’s what it was, really — seemed to gnaw the flesh off hours.
At the monologue’s end, Khoronos smiled, or seemed to. “Dreams are the mirrors of our souls. They tell us what we don’t realize about ourselves, and often what we don’t want to realize. Dreams make us confront what we refuse to confront.” His eyes assayed her. “You feel guilty. That’s what’s obstructing your work. That’s what you’re running from. Guilt.”
“Bullshit,” Veronica replied.
“You don’t know what to do,” he professed. “So your dream has told you. Your dream has shown you the answer.”
“The dream hasn’t shown me anything,” she dissented. Her temper seemed to pulse, testing itself.
“The dream is the answer, Veronica. The figure of Jack isn’t really Jack; it’s a symbol of the love of your past, a death symbol.”
“Meaning my past is dead,” she stated rather than asked to emphasize her sarcasm.
“Exactly,” he said.
Veronica smirked.
“But you don’t want to confront that. It makes you feel guilty, because when you ended your relationship with him, you hurt him. Society teaches us not to hurt people. When we hurt people we produce a negative reflection of ourselves. You feel that selfishness is what compelled you to break up with Jack. Am I right or wrong?”
Veronica gulped. “You’re right.”
“You’ve been taught that selfishness is bad. You ended your relationship because of selfishness. Therefore, you are bad. That is your conscious conception of the entire ordeal.”
“All right, maybe it is!” she now succeeded in raising her voice, “Maybe I am bad! Maybe I’m nothing but a selfish bitch who shits all over people! So what?”
Khoronos sat back and smiled. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
But Veronica wouldn’t hear of it. She stood up quickly, pointed her finger like a gun. “I know what you’re going to tell me, goddamn it! You’re going to tell me some egotistical garbage like the true artist must be selfish in order to produce true art! You’re going to tell me that art is the pinnacle of culture and the only way to achieve it is to completely disregard other people, and it’s okay to disregard other people because art is more important!”
Total silence distended the wake of her outburst. She trembled before him, heat reddening her face.
“It’s not my intention to tell you any such thing,” he responded. He seemed lackadaisical, even amused. “Sit back down, Ms. Polk. Collect yourself, and we can go on.”
Veronica retook her opposing seat. Her heart slowed back down.
“What we’re really talking about here is conception and misconception. Art is the ultimate proof of mankind’s superiority, not politics, not feeding the poor and disarming the world of its nuclear weapons. Those are but mechanics. The sum of the parts of all mankind, all that we have risen to since we crafted the first wheel, is what we create to symbolize what we are.”