On Tuesday morning, Camilla went down into the kitchen to make breakfast for herself and Agape; as she did so, she thought about all the incubi and other 'ghosts' (if that was what they were) who'd been visiting and fucking her in her dreams. The night before, she'd set up psychic barriers that were more selective in whom they blocked out; these new barriers allowed only Miles Holland, Dr. Davis, and M. Larre to come in. Those three incubi gave her another good gang-bang, and before going into the kitchen, Camilla had just replaced her come-stained bedsheets.
Still, she was worried: if Mrs. Holland's ghost was able to use Nigrovum to kill Miles in his sleep, what if she were to try to do the same to Camilla, in revenge for fucking her husband and having her die in her car accident? From then on Camilla would have to be extra careful with vengeful spirits.
When she'd come home on Monday night, she went straight up to her bedroom, leaving her father to continue drinking undisturbed in the living room; so he never saw her new look, with all black hair and black eyes. She had been tempted to get him stoned again and have him make love with her, but she didn't want to press her luck: she would wait a week or so, satisfying her insatiable lust with her profs instead, before daring to commit incest with him again. She was hoping that morning to surprise him, and maybe even excite him, with her new look, since she knew he had a thing for black-haired, black-eyed women.
He came into the kitchen and saw her.
"Camilla?" he said in surprise. "Did you dye your hair?"
"Yeah," she lied, turning to face him. "Do you like it?"
"Yeah, but...wait a minute. Your eyes, too. Are you wearing coloured contact lenses?"
"Yeah," she lied again. "Do you like them?"
"Well, no, to be honest. I've always loved your baby blue eyes, sweetie."
Frowning in disappointment, she said, "But I thought you like women who look like this."
"On your mother, I liked it. On Carrie, I like it. But you're my
daughter
." He put his arm around her and kissed her on the cheek. However innocent this affection may have been, he felt a strange psychic sensation when touching her, a vaguely sexual feeling. Not wanting at all to acknowledge it, he felt drops of sweat running down his brow. "You don't need to change your looks just for me: I love you just the way you are."
"Oh." Pouting, she bowed her head and pretended to remove cosmetic contact lenses from her eyes. She used Nigrovum to make her eyes temporarily look blue again. "There, is that better?"
"Much better," he said. He would have asked why she wanted to look like women he found sexually attractive. That sexual psychic feeling he'd just had when hugging her, as well as the memory of the strange goings-on during his parties with her, made him not want to ask why, for fear of what her answer would be.
**************
Later that morning at York, she was in class for her Introduction to the Modern British Novel course. Her lecturer was Dr. Abruzzi, a tall, thin man in his early fifties. He wore a dark blue suit, and his hair was more grey than black; but to Camilla, he was very good-looking, and she unzipped her jeans and fingered herself while he quoted a passage from the end of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
.
"'So I love chastity now,'" Abruzzi quoted, "'because it is the peace that comes of fucking. I love being chaste now. I love it as snowdrops love the snow. I love this chastity, which is the pause of peace of our fucking, between us now...'"
While she loved the eloquent way her teacher spoke, she was also intrigued by his blunt use of profanity in the classroom.
This is the first time I've ever heard a teacher swear in class,
she thought;
you're a bad boy, Dr. Abruzzi.
Psychically sensing that he liked bad girls, she knew how to act when she had a chance to talk with him.
She had intended, even during the previous week, to do her cat moves on him after class; but he was always too busy with other students' questions to be free for her to get to him. She would have used Nigrovum to make everyone go away so she could be alone with him, but she'd recently noticed that using too much Nigrovum at one time tended to dilute its power, and tire her out.
When his lecture ended, she was determined to go after him as he left. When she was in the hallway with him, however, something else took her attention away from him: the screams of female students in a nearby ladies' room. Camilla went in to see what was wrong.
As soon as she saw what all the commotion was about, she buckled and fell to the floor; she lay there in a fetal position, fighting back the urge to vomit. Stuck on a wall in a toilet stall was Akemi's dead body: she'd used Nigrovum to stick herself there after slashing her wrists and carving 'CAMILLA' on her chest! Her bloody knife lay on the floor by the toilet.
The other girls in the washroom commented.
"How could she have done that?" one girl asked. "Carve someone's name on her chest, and take the pain without fainting. And who's Camilla?"
"And how'd she stick herself to the wall like that?" another girl asked.
All abilities one acquires when having Nigrovum in one's blood, as Camilla knew. She correctly inferred that Akemi knew one of Camilla's classes would be near this washroom; Akemi used Nigrovum to have everyone ignore her corpse in the toilet stall until Camilla was in the area. That way, Camilla would see the scene of the suicide for herself. She still lay on the floor, coughing and barely succeeding in her efforts not to throw up. Her whole body shook.
Noticing her particularly intense shock, the first girl squatted down and gently asked Camilla, "Hey, are you going to be OK?"
"Yeah," Camilla grunted in that eerily hoarse voice she had whenever Nigrovum was overwhelming her. "I just need a minute."
"OK," the first girl said, startled by Camilla's strange voice. She got back up and whispered in the ear of the second girl. "I'll bet that's Camilla."
"Maybe she and the Asian were lesbian lovers," the second girl whispered.
Camilla's whole body was oppressed by intense shaking from stress, and also the crushing heaviness of grief weighing down on her; she knew Nigrovum was adding to her pain. She refused to be destroyed by it as Akemi had been; Camilla would pull herself out of all that swamp of negativity, as difficult and arduous as it would be for her. As she lay on the floor, she whispered to herself these words: "It wasn't my fault. Akemi chose to kill herself: I didn't make her. She didn't have to fall in love with me. I didn't make her. It wasn't my fault. I mustn't be negative. I must be cheerful. I didn't make her kill herself; she chose to. This isn't my fault."
Slowly but surely, Camilla felt the weight of despair lift away, as though huge rocks had been taken off her back one by one. As she repeated the healing mantra, "It wasn't my fault," she felt the shaking gradually abate, too, like the ending of an earthquake. Also, she could hear her voice slowly going back to normal.
The other girls, concerned, watched her slowly raise her head and back, her breathing gradually getting slower and slower. Finally, she got up, looking straight towards the way out of the washroom, with an artificially serene expression.
"Are you OK now?" one of the girls asked.
