Husk: A Maresman Tale

by Prior, D. P.

  “Sounds odd, all together.” She pronounced his name again, then let out a light, tinkling laugh. “I still think of you as Little Jeb. I never liked the name, but it was your father’s; just thought I owed it to him.”

  For an instant, a flash of anger drove back Jeb’s fear. “For killing him?”

  “It was more than that. He was special. He was the one who seeded me, and I needed nourishment so you could grow. You were—are—everything.” Her voice quavered, and she dropped her gaze to the floor.

  Jeb shut his eyes against what he thought she’d just said: she’d eaten his father to feed his growth in her womb? Borrowed womb, he reminded himself. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Mortis had said as much, hadn’t he?

  He tried to gather himself, glean what he could while there was still the chance. With an effort, he steered the conversation in another direction, but even as the words left his mouth, he knew they were the wrong ones.

  “What was he like, my father?”

  “Chicken,” she said, more to herself than to him. Then, abruptly, she looked up. “Oh, you mean as a person? No idea. I picked him up, we mated. Nothing more.”

  “Except you ate him.”

  “Are you so ungrateful?” Her eyes narrowed to slits, and when they widened again, the sclerae were veined with red. “How else would you have come to term? If he had lived, you would not have. It’s as simple as that, Little Jeb. This is what we are, our purpose.”

  “Yours, not mine,” Jeb said.

  “I didn’t mean you.” It came out as a sneer, but she swiftly exchanged it for a cloying smile. “I mean, it is what we succubi do. We inflame men, and for our efforts, every so often, we are rewarded.”

  “With a child?”

  She nodded, and drew in a shuddering breath. Her eyes welled up, and she turned her head away.

  “And my mother?” Jeb said. “My real mother.”

  Maisie flung him a wide-eyed look. “That’s me. What do you—?”

  “Sure didn’t look like you.” He grew bold, approached her, and grabbed a handful of auburn hair. “She was blonde, for one thing.”

  Her mouth worked soundlessly before she found the words. “There was no other way, darling. You have to see. We have no substance of our own.”

  Jeb let go of her hair and retreated a step. “So? Get used to it.”

  “You feel the lust,” she said. “Don’t deny it. I’ve seen it in your eyes. It’s the same for me, only with mine, there’s a purpose. There’s a…” Her chin trembled, and she blinked back tears.

  “What?” Jeb said. Were they real tears, or was it just an act? He met her bleary gaze with barely concealed hatred.

  “You, of course,” she said, as if it were obvious. “You were my purpose.”

  The thought that he had anything to do with her, that he had her… essence made his stomach clench. “Not what I meant,” he said. “What’s with the tears?”

  In an instant, she regained her composure. She wiped her eyes dry in one sharp motion and threw her hair back with a tilt of her chin. The action reminded Jeb of Dame Consilia, but when Maisie dropped her head to one side to study him, she had more the feel of a snake.

  “Nothing,” she said, then pressed her lips into a tight line.

  The red veins had left her eyes, but now, around the irises, Jeb could make out a thin corona of yellow.

  “Nothing?” Jeb muttered. “I see.”

  She held his gaze with such intensity, Jeb thought she was about to pounce. He curled his fingers into fists, shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet. He took a sidestep toward the door, but she mirrored him, her lips curling back and somehow managing to make Maisie’s perfect teeth seem sharp and dangerous. Pressure grew in Jeb’s lungs from where he held his breath, and his ribcage shuddered each time his heart thumped. Without warning, her shoulders sagged and she sighed.

  “Oh, Jeb. Jeb, darling, what are we to do?”

  “Good question,” Jeb said. “One I’ve been wrestling with.”

  “And so have I. Since the Crawfish, when I realized who you were.”

  “When’d you figure?” he asked. “At the bar?”

  She smiled and leaned back into the wall, pressing her heel against it like she’d done in his room that time.

  “I suspected. Hoped, even, but I wasn’t sure till your blood was fired, when you leaned over me…” Her chest rose and fell rapidly, and she angled her head away from him. Her cheeks—Maisie’s cheeks—had a rosy flush to them.

  “But you didn’t… I mean, you didn’t let anything—”

  Her head snapped back round. “I’m your mother!”

  “No,” Jeb said, shaking his head. “My mother’s dead.”

  “I,” she said, thumping her chest. “I am your mother. That… thing… that body you remember was a shell, nothing more. It was me that animated it, me that used it to give you life.”

  “She was a person,” Jeb said. “Before you came along, she was a person with thoughts, and feelings, and memories.”

  She tapped the side of her head. “All still there, while I gave life to her body. Just a new pilot at the helm, is all.”

  “Like with Maisie?” Jeb said. “Her ways, her mannerisms, even her twangy accent—when you don’t forget. All there at your beck and call.”

  She nodded vigorously, like she thought he was getting it at last. “Yes, Jeb. Yes. That’s what I do. What I am. It’s the curse of the succubus: to have no substance, and yet yearn for nothing more than to spawn new life.”

  “But it’s not the same,” Jeb said. “Not the same life. When dogs breed, they make more dogs. You… You—”

  “By ourselves, we can do nothing. We just are. We live, but what is living without feeling? And so we feel through the flesh of others; but what is it to feel a heart’s beat, to draw in breath, to touch, eat, make love if there is nothing to show for it? I teeter on the brink of the Void, Jeb, aware of being, but always a hair’s breadth from oblivion.”

  “Save for when you kill,” Jeb said. “Because it sure ain’t fingernails like that doing the rending. Sure ain’t Maisie’s pearly teeth, either.”

  “But only that,” she said, dipping her head. “The power to destroy, but never to create, never to put something new into the world. That’s why we do it, Jeb. Why I do it. I need the humans in order to create; in order to feel… real.”

  “So, Maisie’s life is sacrificed, just so you can feel real,” Jeb said. “How’s she feel about that? Did you even bother asking her?”

  She shut her eyes and sighed. “Maisie has gone, Jeb. All that remain are the impressions left within her body, her brain, like footprints in the sand. It was the same with your… with the host that birthed you.”

  “And you use them—these footprints,” Jeb said, not trying to keep the bitterness from his tone, “to disguise yourself, so you can live and play and work among their families and friends, until you’re ready to kill again.”

  “No!” Her voice was a whiplash that stunned him into silence. “No, it’s not like that. Not for that.” She took a couple of deep breaths, the strain evident in her face as she tried to keep her voice even. “It’s so we can raise our children; so no one will suspect. Until you were fully grown, Jeb. I was to stay with you until—”

  “But they came for you, didn’t they? The Maresmen.”

  Air hissed through her teeth, and she let out a low growl. “Mortis. You know who I’m talking about. Head of the hunters. He’s the one you should be angry with. He’s the one who killed her—the body that birthed you; sent me fleeing back to Qlippoth without my son. Without my son, Jeb! Do you have any idea what that was like?”

  “Do you have any idea what it was like for me?” Jeb said. Old wounds reopened deep down inside, and the buried memories that only surfaced during sleep started to dig their way out of their graves. Uncle Joe at the foot of the stairs; Aunt Mary bleeding out on the kitchen table. “Mortis—”

  “Came for you when you w
ere older? I knew he would, once he found you. Once your nature started to blossom. He would have killed us both if he’d discovered you as a child, but I hid you, Jeb.”

  “Uncle Joe,” Jeb said flatly. “Aunt Mary.”

  She nodded. “Good people, by Malfen’s standards. I did the best I could.”

  “But who were they?”

  “Your flesh and blood, Jeb. The host that bore you—Uncle Joe was her brother. They were suspicious, knew something was wrong with me, but they did their duty, and only just in time. Mortis was close, and within days of me leaving you, he found me. You have to understand, Jeb. What Mortis did was far worse than killing you. He kept me from you, and then, just when you were discovering who and what you really were, he made you a killer of your own kind. He turned you against me, Jeb. Against me.”

  Jeb broke off from her and wandered back to the window. The dark beyond the bars had lightened into gray, and the first red streaks of dawn were bleeding over the horizon.

  “So, this is about revenge,” Jeb said. “Hunting down Maresmen.”

  “Not just Maresmen,” she said. Her fingertips drummed on her belly.

  “The Outlanders? What did they ever do to you?”

  She flinched.

  He ignored that and pressed harder. “What about the men down by Carey’s Hostelry?”

  She flopped forward from the waist and hung there limp as a ragdoll.

  “Were they just for fun? For pleasure? Is that part of what you are?”

  “No!” she screamed. Her dangling torso swayed, and her arms shook. Slowly, vertebra by vertebra, she straightened up. Auburn locks covered most of her face, but through them he could see her eyes, wild and bright. She ran stiff fingers through her hair and grimaced.

  Jeb took a step toward her, but she held up a hand to ward him off.

  “I lost…” she said. “I lost…”

  The stygian had said she’d lost something, when he’d infused her with sorcerous power at her request. But what? What had she lost?

  “I can’t…” She ground her teeth, as if her jaw no longer fit together. “Oh, Jeb!” She hugged her arms about her shoulders and shuddered as wave after wave of sobbing wracked her frame.

  “There was another husk,” Jeb said. “Over at Boss’s place.”

  She managed to nod through her torment.

  “A stygian.”

  She groaned, building to a wail within which the word “yes” was barely discernible.

  “It said it helped you. Helped you to gain control of the blood trail.”

  More nodding.

  “So that you could hunt the hunters?”

  “Lure them,” she said through her sniffles. “Then hide the trail so I could take them by surprise. It worked, Jeb. It definitely worked!”

  “But you lost something in the process, the stygian said.”

  A low keening escaped her lips.

  “What was it?” Jeb asked, his voice barely above a whisper. “What did you—?”

  She stopped trembling and sank to her knees, letting her hair fall back over her face. “You are my last, Jeb. My only.”

  Jeb frowned in confusion, and then the realization hit him. “You’re barren?” How was that even possible? “You can have no more children?” The very thing that defined her, her sole purpose, her tenuous grip on existence.

  She dropped her head to the floor and swept her trailing hair in circles over it. She tried to speak, but nothing came out except inchoate cries.

  “So, all that’s left for you…” Jeb started to say, but there was no need to voice it, no need to tell her what she already knew. All she had left was rage. It wasn’t just about revenge upon the Maresmen; she had a vendetta against the living, the tangible, the truly existent.

  In that moment, Jeb knew the question had been answered for him. What choice did he have? She might have been his mother, in some unfathomable way, but she was a husk—a crazed husk with nothing left to live for but the death of others. If he’d had his saber—

  But would he? Could he really?

  He let out an anguished howl and turned away from her. Maisie grabbed him by the ankle. He froze, torn between kicking her off and yearning for more of her touch—Maisie’s or his mother’s, pleasure or comfort, it was hard to tell which. Her fingers crept up the leg of his britches, but she wasn’t trying to arouse him. Inch by inch, she pulled herself from the floor, until at last she stood behind him. She spun him round, caught his face in her hands, and looked right into his eyes.

  All he saw was madness.

  “I wanted Sweet to frighten you off, Jeb,” she said in a voice like a child’s. “So you wouldn’t have to choose. So I wouldn’t.”

  “I know,” he said. “I worked that out for myself.”

  “I have nothing,” she said. “Nothing left. I am nothing.”

  That was something he could understand. His cheek began to twitch, and he dropped his eyes from hers. Was that part of what she’d given him, the sense of his own emptiness, the insatiable lust that led only to despair? Was Marlec wrong? Had the monk simply tried to placate him, keep him from a truth that was too harsh to bear?

  “The Abyss,” he said, snagging her gaze once more and scrutinizing her eyes for any glimmer of hope, of understanding, of kinship. “Before you appeared in my dream, I was in the Abyss, beside the black river.”

  “Oh, Jeb,” she said, moisture forming in her eyes. She reached up and stroked his face. “It’s gone. Finally gone. The Demiurgos is no more.”

  “How do you know?”

  She let out a weary sigh. “His child is at rest. The Cynocephalus sleeps less fitfully, and Qlippoth produces little that is new. It has grown… stable.”

  “But there were demons—a giant encased in ice, a skull-headed man wading through the dark waters, a tentacled monster, a dwarf with a blood-soaked axe.”

  “Footprints, darling. Memories of what once was, just like with Maisie and your…mother. These things have passed. You need not fear them. What you should worry about is much closer to home.”

  “You?”

  She stepped back, affronted. “No! Mortis, of course. Him and all the other Maresmen. Do you think they’ll stand around chatting like this? They want only to kill me, Jeb. Me, your mother.”

  “Are you surprised, after what you’ve done? Isn’t that still what you plan to do? Lure them in? Kill each and every one of them.”

  “Not now I’ve found you. Not now I have you back.”

  Jeb felt his expression harden. “You don’t.”

  “But darling, I thought—”

  “I’m a Maresman, mother, or had you forgotten?”

  The blood drained from her face. “But… But you and me, Jeb, just like old times. Just like when you were little.”

  “Lies,” Jeb said. “It was all a lie. I thought you were someone else.”

  “No.” It came out like a moan. “No, it wasn’t a lie. It’s who we are. What we are.”

  Jeb took a step away from her. “Not me. I’m more human than husk, remember. All I got from you is as untouchable as the clouds. This…” He patted his chest, his face. “You didn’t give me this. My father did. My real mother. You’re nothing but an infection, a parasite.”

  She let out an anguished wail, spinning a circle on her heels and clutching her belly. “No, Jeb. Please. You’re all I have. You’re all I am.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jeb said.

  She stiffened and stilled, a series of masks playing over her face as if she were running through all the options. She settled on a bright-eyed smile that made Maisie look suddenly girlish.

  “What if I go, cross back into Qlippoth? I could stay there. There’s no need for this. Don’t make me, Jeb. Don’t make me hurt you.”

  Her desperation touched a nerve, made him consider. Finally, Jeb gave a slow shake of his head. “I don’t think so. You’ve gone too far. You couldn’t stop if you wanted to.”

  “I could, Jeb. Please believe me. I give you m
y word.”

  “They’ll come after you,” he said. “The Maresmen. They’ve gone into Qlippoth before.”

  “Then I’ll ditch the body, drift with the clouds. Please, Jeb, do it for me. You have to let me try.”

  Jeb glanced past her to the room beyond. If his weapons were in there, if he could only find them…

  She followed his gaze, seemed to read what he was thinking. “Don’t make me. I killed those others, Jeb. You know what I can do. Please, give me this chance. I can make it right. I’ll stay away, and one day, years from now, maybe you’ll—”

  “Go,” he snapped. “Now. And don’t come back.”

  Her mouth hung open, and her eyes stared at him blankly. A tremor started in her fingers, worked its way up her arm, set her chin quivering. She tried to say something, but her lips couldn’t form the words, and then, with a blurry streak of movement, she shot from the room, faster than anything Jeb had ever seen.

  He watched the space where she’d stood, fighting the hole in his chest that hungered to swallow him. His legs were stone, his arms hanging limp at his sides. But it was his mind that troubled him most; it was congealing, thick like molasses. Barely a word could form in its sludge, never mind a coherent thought.

  Then, something snapped, and he lurched forward to the doorway. He held onto the jamb and stared dumbly at the office beyond. A desk; a chair either side of it; chest of drawers; crossbow hanging by the half-open door to the square outside, a case of bolts slung casually beneath it.

  He crossed the room and pushed the door shut. He half-turned from it, stopped, and slid its single bolt into place. A fly buzzed past his ear. Quick as ever, Jeb’s hand snapped out and caught it. He held it a moment in his fist, the tickle of its frenetic struggles barely registering. She’d been fast, his mother. Faster than him. No doubt she was stronger, too, and by all accounts, certainly more ruthless. It wasn’t fear of him that made her leave, that was for sure. It was concern for what she might have to do to him. He crushed the fly and brushed it off his palm.