The Beloved

by Gonzalez, J. F.

  “I made it across the mall and dived down the hallway. When I got to the ladies room I hesitated for a moment, wondering whether I should go inside. It turned out I didn’t have to; Lisa came right out. She almost bumped into me.”

  Don’s mouth descended in a frown at the memory. “I was standing right in front of her and she didn’t even recognize me, didn’t even say anything. I took her by the shoulders and said, ‘Lisa, Lisa, it’s Don, it’s me honey, it’s okay,’. And she...she acted like...like a zombie. She didn’t even react. Didn’t yell, didn’t try to get away. It was like she was indifferent to me. And as I looked at her I noticed two things—one, her physical condition had deteriorated rapidly and two, I could see his hold on her and her complete dependence on him. She was completely addicted to him.

  “I said her name several times and she didn’t respond. And then I noticed this aura about her just around the same time she started warming up to me. Her face, which had been slack and unresponsive, suddenly came to light. It was like...” Don shuddered, closing his eyes, head bowed. “God, it was awful. It was like watching a rag doll suddenly come to life. It wasn’t natural! And she had this aura about her...this real strong aura of sexuality that was like being around a whore in heat. I could smell it, I was drawn to it, but I also knew instinctively she was already marked and she wouldn’t respond to me even if I tried to seduce her right there. She would only respond sexually to one man and one man only. Bruce Miller.”

  Don buried his face in his hands, and as he wrapped up the narrative his voice began to tremble and break. “I was still carrying the .22, and I had it in my pocket that afternoon and...Oh God, please forgive me,” A sob escaped his throat. “...but...when I saw how hopeless it was...how bad off she was I just knew she wasn’t going to make it. I knew she was a lost cause and I knew she was suffering. She had this need to satisfy by being with Bruce, but he was sucking the life out of her and it was destroying her, but she was enjoying it. And at the same time it was killing her and...and...I couldn’t stand by while she suffered like this!” Don was crying quietly now and Gregg held his breath, already knowing what the outcome was. “So I shot her. I didn’t even look around to see if anybody was there, I just shot her. I shot her in the head and she fell to the floor and...and I just started walking down the hall toward the Exit, trying to act casual about it and...and even now when I think back on it I still remember the look in her eyes when she went down.” He looked at Gregg with tears in his eyes. “Whatever hold he had on her was gone and...it was like she was thanking me...she was thanking me for taking the pain away and setting her free.”

  Gregg didn’t know what to say. Don’s story was so powerful, so disturbing. He was stunned.

  Don sniffled, wiped the tears from his eyes with his fingers. “Some fucking husband I am, killing his wife when she needed him the most. I didn’t think that till later when I was miles away from LA. I was lucky to make it out of that parking lot.”

  “Nobody saw you?”

  Don shook his head, looking back out the window. “It was like I was on auto pilot. I knew what I had to do and my body just reacted. I shot her and just started heading out the door. It happened so fast, within seconds. The exit was maybe ten feet away. I was out the exit and I just walked out to the parking lot as calmly as can be. The gun? I stuck that in my jacket pocket before I hit the exit door. By the time I got to my car I knew I was safe. I didn’t think about who might have seen me or could be watching me. I tried not to draw attention to myself. I drove away and I don’t even think the cops had shown up yet, although I’m sure by then somebody had found Lisa and was calling 911.”

  They were silent for a moment as Gregg thought about this. He glanced at the room again. The round silhouettes remained.

  “I just drove,” Don said, his voice sounding tired. “I made it to the 91 freeway and headed out to Riverside, then found the 10. I went east. By nine that evening I was on the outskirts of Phoenix and I pulled over at a Motel 6. The next day I left and that afternoon I stopped in El Paso, Texas.”

  He wrapped it up. He ditched the car in Juarez, Mexico, trading it in for a cheap Buick. Then he drove northeast into New Mexico, settling in outside of Carlsbad. He found a little apartment and got a job working at the Caverns, a popular tourist spot located in the Carlsbad National Park. “Of course, before I did that, I went into Mexico and got some new ID.” Don smoothed his hair back from his forehead. “I knew I couldn’t stay in the U.S. under my own name. And Juarez was the best place where a gringo like me could get anything: new social security number, new identity. American money can go far down there.”

  There had been no witness to Lisa Grant’s murder, which was reported all over Southern California, but her husband was being sought for questioning. Don kept on top of the story and laid low, working his job as a janitor in the Caverns; cleaning up trash dropped by awestruck tourists and bat shit off the floor of the well-worn paths that snaked their way into the immense caverns. A job like that made it easy for Don to change his appearance pretty fast. “Places like that, jobs like that, they don’t care if guys grow their hair long,” he said. “Long as I was doing my job, they didn’t care.”

  A year later a very different looking Don Grant took a week vacation and drove to Los Angeles. Only his name wasn’t Don Grant anymore. It was John Lowe.

  The first place he went to was the apartment complex Bruce had lived at. Bruce’s name was no longer on the mailbox, but Don remembered his last name: Miller. During his week in Los Angeles, with the aid of a cellular phone, a laptop computer, and a ton of determination, stealth, and brawn, he tried to track down Bruce Miller by way of his last residence and got nowhere.

  The landlord of the apartment complex wasn’t much help—she just confirmed that Bruce had once lived there.

  Neighbors were a little more helpful. One man said that Bruce just “up and moved out” one day. This man, who Don paid a visit to (he told the man he was a private detective—even showed him a fake badge he had procured especially for the trip; it worked!), indicated Bruce had been a quiet neighbor, had kept to himself and he didn’t think much of him until he was suddenly gone one weekend. “It was like he was never here,” he told Don.

  The few people at the complex that would speak to him reported the same thing.

  He knew better than to try to look into Lisa’s death, but he did it anyway. He had done pretty well in grieving for Lisa in the year that passed, and when he finally looked into her death from a different perspective, he began by contacting her old friend from work, Connie Washington. He was able to not only convince Connie he was a private detective, he was also able to get most of the information he needed over the phone. Good thing Lisa was attracted to stupid women for her friendships; Don had seen more raw intelligence in the eyes of frogs.

  According to Connie, the police were still looking for Lisa’s husband. They’d learned that Don had bought a handgun a few weeks before the shooting. Ballistics tests from the spent rounds found at the crime scene matched the weapon Don had purchased. They’d also learned that she’d been having an affair with another man. Furthermore, they’d questioned this other man—Bruce Miller—and his neighbors. And while Bruce Miller denied any role in Lisa’s death, a few of his neighbors swore they’d seen Don at the apartment complex one morning a week or two before his wife’s murder, running out of Bruce’s apartment looking terrified, holding a gun. Prior to that there had been loud yelling and arguing followed by what sounded like gunshots. Bruce later dismissed what happened as some ‘personal mess’.

  But the circumstantial evidence against Don was great, and he was officially charged with the murder of Lisa. Don had felt a brief stab of fear when Connie told him this but it quickly went away. What about Bruce Miller? he had asked. Connie hadn’t known much about Bruce. Lisa had never talked about him much (at this, Don had silently screamed at her, you bitch! You fucking knew she was fucking around!). Don was afraid he wasn’t going to learn abou
t Bruce unless Connie let something slip out.

  “She told me one time he was from the Midwest,” Connie had said. “Denver or somewhere near there. He was married once and had lived there, then after the divorce he moved to LA. That’s about all she told me about him.”

  And that was all Don had needed to jump-start his investigation.

  He paid a sketch artist he met in Venice a hundred bucks to draw a caricature of Bruce Miller that he recalled from a memory that was as good as a snapshot. He made photocopies of the sketch and, armed with that, he went home to Carlsbad, New Mexico.

  Three months later he took a long weekend and traveled to Denver, Colorado.

  Nine months later he was able to find out by combing through every available source of public records and a few follow-up phone calls that Bruce Miller had, indeed, once lived in Denver.

  Only he hadn’t left behind a divorced wife.

  He’d left behind a dead one.

  Hannah Martinez had been young, vibrant, and beautiful when Bruce Miller swept her off her feet one day in May of 1992. Just twenty-one, she had met him at a popular nightclub. She’d gone home with him that night, moved in with him the following week, and within a month they were married. Her parents had been surprised at the sudden speed of the relationship. They also hadn’t approved. It had been very easy for Don to convince Hannah’s still grieving father that he was a private detective investigating a case involving Bruce Miller when he called him. The poor man had been a chatterbox. The more her parents expressed their disapproval of Bruce Miller, the more Hannah defied them. Bruce soon quit his job so that Hannah could support him while he ‘pursued other interests’. When her parents asked her what these other interests were, she told them Bruce had always wanted to be an artist and needed time away from the corporate rat race to devote to his art.

  Hannah’s father thought that was not only stupid and foolish, but crazy. He related a story that was familiar to Gregg—Hannah had worked two jobs to support them and pay all the bills. Bruce had always wanted sex, and all Hannah did was cook, clean, do the laundry, and work to support them. It drove her ragged and she started deteriorating. The more her parents protested, the less they saw of her because she was always working to pay the bills. On the few occasions Hannah’s mother, Anita, was able to speak to her daughter by phone Hannah sounded like a different person. “Like a junkie,” Hannah’s father related to Don. Hannah’s entire focus had become centered on Bruce and on making him happy.

  Meanwhile, Bruce was not only indifferent to Hannah’s downward spiral, he seemed to thrive on it. His physical appearance changed—the skinny man Hannah had brought home that first time had filled out into a muscular, well-groomed man who sparkled with an energy and charisma that was frightening. He had become handsome, bearing a perfect aerobiczed body that looked like it got plenty of time at Gold’s gym. He even became more likeable to her parents. Hannah’s father began to question whether he had been wrong to condemn his daughter’s new husband so openly. He questioned it right till the end when Bruce suddenly demanded a divorce from Hannah and left.

  The news shattered Hannah. Before her parents realized it, Bruce left Denver, leaving Hannah an emotional wreck. They tried to get their daughter support, tried to get her to talk to them, but she wouldn’t open up.

  Five days after Bruce left her she hung herself in the condominium she’d shared with him.

  “Poor man was still crying about it when he told me this,” Don said, looking out the window. “To him it was like it happened yesterday.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” Gregg said. “To lose a child like that...I don’t ever want to have to go through something like that.” He turned back toward the window and saw that the two round silhouettes were gone. “Which reminds me,” he said, glancing at his watch. “We’ve been out here for two hours and I have a feeling we could be out here the rest of the night with all you have to tell me. I’ve really got to get in and make sure the kids are okay, and then I guess I should get some sleep.”

  “You’re right,” Don said, smoothing back his hair from his face. “I’m sorry I’ve kept you up so late.”

  “It’s okay,” Gregg said, sighing. Despite all that had happened, despite hearing the bad news and knowing it was true he felt a strange sense of calm. “I’m glad I’m hearing this. Frankly I’m...well, I’m reeling from it all. I don’t know what to do, and I know I need to hear more. No, I have to hear more.”

  Don looked at him. “You believe me?”

  “Yeah,” Gregg said, nodding. “I believe you.”

  A sigh of relief from Don. “Good. I was afraid that all my work, all my research, everything I had put myself through to reach you and get in touch with you, would be in vain.”

  “Before I go in and we call it a night, I do need to know two things,” Gregg said, turning to Don. “And please be honest with me.”

  “I’ve been honest with you the whole time,” Don replied.

  Gregg saw nothing but honesty in those blue eyes and he felt good knowing this. He knew he could trust Don. “Did you have any idea that what happened today was going to happen?”

  “I was afraid that something like it might happen,” Don answered. “That’s why when I found out where it was and who it had latched onto, I came out here as quickly as I could and tried to learn everything I could about Ronnie and his family.”

  “You keep referring to Diana as an ‘it’. What are we dealing with here? A vampire? Some supernatural creature that can change shape?”

  “I think it’s a succubus.”

  “A what?”

  A succubus,” Don said, hugging himself; it had grown suddenly cold in the SUV and Gregg could see the mist rising from Don’s mouth as he spoke. “Or something like a succubus.”

  “What’s a succubus?”

  “They’re usually described as mythical creatures,” Don began, hunched over against the cold. “The various vampire legends are thought to have evolved from the Lilith myths. Are you familiar with Jewish lore?”

  “A little. Isn’t Lilith supposed to be, like, Adam’s first wife?”

  Don nodded. “According to some versions of ancient Hebrew myth, Lilith was actually the original woman and Adam’s first wife. She was described as a woman of great beauty, with long flowing black hair. Unlike the subservient Eve, Lilith demanded to be treated as her husband’s equal. She especially disagreed with Adam about taking a position beneath him during intercourse, and it was this battle that led to Lilith storming out of paradise. Adam was outraged, and insisted that God make her come back. Lilith refused, and for her sins of independence, she was demonized and cast out. After that she was cast with a variety of names: Night Hag, Queen of the Vampires. Her most notorious role was as the queen of all succubi.”

  “Diana’s a vampire?” Gregg said. He couldn’t believe he was hearing this.

  “Not a vampire. Something different. A succubus. There’s a big difference.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “After Lilith was banished, God created Eve. Lilith had become a pariah, a truly wicked thing, a night-stalker. It was rumored she strangled infants and killed pregnant mothers. She wasn’t about to let Adam live on in bliss. Some myths suggest Lilith was the demon that tempted Eve with the apple in the Garden of Eden. It’s even been suggested that she transformed Cain, influencing him to murder his brother. This drove Adam to celibacy, and he began to feel the pangs of manhood. His separation from Eve left him wide open and vulnerable to his ex-wife. Lilith came to Adam in his sleep, teasing him with horrific, erotic dreams. She took him every night, sucking the life force out of him as she carried him to sexual climax every night. Legions of demons were born to Lilith from these couplings, and she released these children, the lilim, upon the earth—succubi and incubi.”

  “Incubi?”

  “The male counterpart. In fact, some myths state that they’re shape-shifting creatures, that they can change their form at will. The more I read
about the various myths, the more I began to form my own opinions. It took me a long time to piece everything together. I think I was fully convinced of what I was dealing with when I found records that went back to...well, shit, I found records that went back to 1872 or so and—”

  “1872? You mean this thing has—”

  “It’s probably older than that,” Don said, cutting Gregg off, speaking quickly. “I can show you—I brought some floppy disks that contain PDF files of newspaper clippings and copies of official documents, all of it verifying my research. How before it was Bruce Miller it was a woman named Heather Wilson who lived in Seattle, and then it was a woman named Tonya Williams; then it was a man named Stephen Billings, then a man named Jesse Rodriguez, then a woman named Julie Magby. The more I began to trace all this, to connect the dots, the more I began to believe, and then—”

  “So you’re not shitting me?” Gregg couldn’t believe this. “My brother-in-law’s girlfriend is really—you really think she’s some supernatural thing?”

  The look on Don’s face was one of pure terror—it looked the way a child looks who is suddenly told that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, that the whole thing is just a fairy tale. “I thought that...that you were accepting this—”

  “I am,” Gregg said, feeling the adrenaline rush again, his mind spinning as he tried to process the impossible. “I just...I guess I just don’t know how to take it.”

  “I understand,” Don said slowly, more carefully. “Hearing this for the first time can be traumatic. I don’t think I would have handled it very well either if I had learned all this in less than two hours.”

  Gregg glanced at the dashboard clock—it was now after midnight. “Listen, I believe you. I just...I have to think about this for a moment. I have to process it. And I have to get to the kids. They’re going to have a thousand questions and I don’t know what to tell them.”