Succubi

by Edward Lee

  Ann’s brow runneled. “A ride to where?”

  “I told you, Mom. To Wendlyn’s. She wanted to show me her dresses. In fact, she gave this one to me. Wasn’t that nice of her?”

  “Uh,” Ann stalled. “Yes, it was.” She felt an instant fool, looking at Martin. “I’m sorry, Martin. I thought—”

  Martin laughed. He came around and rubbed her shoulders at the table. “What, you thought I was running off with Maedeen the ice cream lady?” He laughed again.

  “I guess I’m overreacting to everything these days,” Ann said, as if that were an excuse. “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

  “Actually, I can’t blame you for jumping to conclusions,” Martin joked. “As good-looking as I am, what woman wouldn’t be constantly jealous? My expertise as a lover is world-renowned. Before I met you, women had to put themselves on a waiting list to go out with me.”

  “Oh, God!” Melanie laughed and left the kitchen. But Ann still felt like a shitheel. She touched Martin’s hand as he continued to massage her shoulder. How long could he remain so forgiving of her quick temper and lack of forethought? She’d practically accused him of cheating on her, which was the laugh of all time, considering what she’d done last night with…

  Milly, she remembered.

  She felt horrible keeping the truth from him. If it were with another man, he’d be justified to end the relationship right now. But with another woman? What would he do if he knew? What would any man do?

  She wanted to tell him, but what on earth could she say?

  “I’m going out back for a while,” he said, and picked up his pad and pen. She didn’t have time to say anything. “I’m working on a great poem, my magnum opus,” he went on with his mysterious poet’s enthusiasm. “So far it’s a hundred stanzas.”

  “Happy writing,” she offered.

  Alone now she felt even more of a shitheel. She’d never expressed any active interest in his writing because she didn’t know how to. That, and what she’d almost wrongly accused him of, made her feel very low, and lower still considering her lewd foray with Milly.

  Milly, she thought again. What would she say next time she saw her? She dreaded their next meeting. But she’d have to see her soon, to check on her father. This morning, Dr. Heyd had told her that her father seemed to have stabilized from last night’s blunder, but that could change any minute. Shivering, she remembered the nightmare, the vertigo, and the new words the dream had whispered in her mind. Dother fo Dother But what could that mean? The words made no sense. Then she remembered where they’d come from: they’d been some of the words her father had written last night when he’d come conscious. The dream had merely transplanted the words into its own scape.

  That made her feel a little better. But there was still Milly. Total recollection evaded her. In pieces, she remembered what they’d done together, and she even remembered how much she’d liked it. But what had happened afterward? Ann had wakened on the couch, downstairs, not in Milly’s bed.

  In dread, she went up the stairs, down the hall. She could hear the awful heart monitor. She stepped in and stopped. Milly was taking her father’s blood pressure. Innocuously, she looked up. “Oh, hi, Ann.”

  Hi, Ann? Ann thought. Ruffled, she gazed at the nurse.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Ann cleared her throat. “Milly, I want to talk to you about last night.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Milly perkily replied. She looked fresh, rested, bereft of taint. “Your father’s fully stabilized.”

  “That’s not what I’m referring to,” Ann proceeded. “I mean, you know…last night.”

  “What about last night?” Milly casually removed the cuff from Ann’s father’s thin arm. She wore her typical nurse’s outfit, the white dress, white stockings, and white shoes. She acted as though nothing were amiss.

  “Are you all right?” She came right up to Ann, put her hand on her forehead. “You look pale.”

  “I’m fine, Milly, I just—shit! I’m really bothered about what we did last night.”

  Milly laughed softly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I went right back to bed after we stabilized your dad. I slept till three a.m., then Dr. Heyd woke me up so he could go home.” Her concerned look deepened. “Oh, you must’ve had a fight with Martin last night.”

  “What? What makes you say that?”

  “I came downstairs a couple of times to get a Coke, and I saw you sleeping on the couch. You were tossing and turning. Bad dreams?”

  Ann didn’t get it. “Milly, wait a minute. I slept on the couch last night? All night?”

  “Of course, don’t you remember? I just assumed you had a fight with Martin, so that’s why you weren’t sleeping with him.”

  Ann gauged her next question. “Milly, did I come into your room last night?”

  Milly gave her a canted look. “My room? No. Why?”

  Ann stared, fully confused. Then Milly said, “You poor thing. You mustn’t have slept well at all. Do you feel okay? You don’t seem to have a fever. Do you want me to get you something?”

  But Ann felt better at once, much better. A dream, she realized. She shuddered at the imagery: Milly’s pubis in her face, her dirty talk, and the hideous black phallus. I dreamed the whole thing. “No, no,” she answered at last. “I’m fine, just a little mixed-up. I had the strangest dream last night.”

  “It must have been a humdinger,” Milly responded. “The way you were tossing and turning on the couch. I was a little worried.”

  “I’m fine,” Ann repeated. “I’ll talk to you later, I’ve got some errands to run.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  Ann nearly skipped out of the room. The dream had been so intense she’d actually thought it was real. Knowing now that it wasn’t made her jubilant. What do you say about that, Dr Harold? I’m not a latent lesbian after all.

  Back downstairs, she stopped on the landing. She looked down. More steps descended to the fruit cellar, which she’d seen her mother locking yesterday. Ann felt piqued. Her recurring nightmare of Melanie’s birth originated at the bottom of those stairs, where she’d given birth to Melanie for real seventeen years ago. Suddenly, she wanted to go down—she felt she needed to, if for no other reason but to confront the landscape of the nightmare. Perhaps if she saw it again, after all this time, she might realize what it was that distressed her subconscious to this extreme. What harm could there be?

  She went down the stairs, feeling suddenly ill. Each step down showed her another detail of the nightmare. The hands straying over the pregnant belly. The hovering double-orbed emblem. The cloaked figure standing between her legs waiting for her to deliver the newborn Melanie. And the arcane words: “Dooer, dooer.” Ann quickly decided she didn’t want to go back into this room, yet she felt she must. She felt it contained some secret she needed to know. She could not explain the compulsion.

  She turned the knob and swore. The door was still locked. It infuriated her. Why on earth did her mother insist on keeping this door locked? It was just a fruit cellar.

  Now she felt driven. She raced back up the stairs. “Mother!” she called out. She checked everywhere, every room on every floor. She asked Milly, but Milly hadn’t seen her. Ann’s mother was not in the house.

  Goddamn it, she thought. Where the hell is she?

  «« — »»

  The wifmunuc scowled. Chief Bard was scared; that look on her face filled him with the basest kind of dread. He’d parked the cruiser behind the fire hall. She took a final glance at Zack’s shotgunned body, then slammed the trunk closed.

  “This cannot be tolerated,” she said.

  “I know,” Chief Bard admitted. His rotund stomach squirmed. Sweat broke out on his high brow.

  “We’ve been violated, blasphemed.” The wifmunuc’s eyes were somewhere else, in the sky, past the trees. Bard felt grateful. They’d inspected the cirice together; Bard noted details that had escaped his earlier inspection. Amid the vandalism, they
’d discovered a gas can. It was full. Clearly, Tharp had intended to set fire to their holy place. But he hadn’t, as though he’d been interrupted. Something had stopped him, but what?

  “He’s out there somewhere, Chief Bard. He could ruin everything. Find him, stop him at all costs.”

  Bard’s collar dug deep into his fat neck. “There’s only me and Byron. I need help. The only way I can guarantee Tharp’s apprehension is to call the state police.”

  The wifmunuc glared at the suggestion. “You will find him yourself, Chief Bard. Bringing in an outside agency is far too great a risk. They might find something we don’t want them to find. You will capture that miserable wretch yourself. Is that clear?”

  Bard dared not look into her eyes. Like a furnace they were, like pits of hatred, of terror. “I understand,” he said.

  “He has offended us. He has tainted us in our holy grace. You will catch him and put an end to his heresy.”

  Bard gulped, nodded.

  Suddenly, she was gazing high up into the sky. “Just two more nights,” she whispered, smiling. “Such glory awaits us all.”

  Bard knew what she was talking about. He also knew what would happen to him if he didn’t nail Tharp. “What about Zack?” he asked, more to change the subject.

  She glanced with distaste to the cruiser’s trunk. “Must I tell you everything? Bury the wreccan scum and get on with your job. You’re wasting time. Her time.”

  “Yes,” Bard said.

  The wifmunuc gazed at him now, her awful eyes boring into his own. She gingerly touched the pendant at her bosom. “Give ælmesse to me. Give lof.”

  Aw, God, no, he thought.

  “You know what to do.”

  Humiliation, debasement, that’s what she meant. They made him to it regularly. He unzipped his police trousers, pulled out his penis. There was nothing erotic about these circumstances, of course, but the fear of punishment always compelled the needed response. A few hard thoughts of this month’s Playboy had him erect in a few moments.

  “Go on, go on…”

  He jerked off in fast, desperate yanks, then numbly ejaculated into his hand. Jesus, he thought, regaining his breath. He knew what she wanted. He smirked and licked his semen out of his palm, swallowed with a bitter gulp.

  “Good. Now kneel,” she commanded.

  Bard knelt in the dirt. He could either kneel of his own before the evil bitch, or she could make him. He had long ago learned the futility of resisting them. Beads of sweat twitched down his bald pate. The taste of his own sperm was bad enough, but now it would just get worse.

  “Yes,” she said, “drink of me.” She raised her dress to her waist. The thick thatch of her pubis shined in the sun. Chief Bard dutifully propped open his mouth as the wifmunuc began to piss into his face. She grinned down at her fat little peow, guiding the hot stream directly into his mouth. Wincing, he gulped down each caustic mouthful, felt the awful heat spread in his belly. When she’d finished, he knelt before her, dripping piss in the sun.

  “You will find our little brygorwreccan, Chief Bard, and you will bring him to me in pieces. Otherwise, the next wreccan pig we bury will be you.”

  —

  Chapter 23

  Sr. Harold barely heard his patients. All afternoon, his mind kept straying, re-examining thoughts and images, and homing back to the disturbed psych ward artwork of Erik Tharp.

  It ate at him. After his last private patient had left, Dr. Harold went right back into the bag of Tharp’s hospital records. The accounts, the bizarre drawings and words, were all he had to go on. Invented languages were nothing new to psychiatry; they accompanied many acknowledged psych profiles: tripolar schizophrenics, referential neurotics, autistics, etc. But Tharp fell into none of those categories. Dr. Harold looked more closely at the sketches. He found a clear coherence in theme, something ritualistic, which paralleled Tharp’s transcripted accounts when interviewed by Dr. Greene. Tharp had also very coherently applied the cryptic vocabulary to each drawing. Demons, Dr. Harold mused. Tharp said they worshipped a demon. He thumbed back through the pads, to attempt a correlation between the most often repeated words and what their corresponding sketches depicted. Peow and wreccan seemed to relate to the male caricatures, while loc and liloc obviously denoted the women. Brygorwreccan was the word Tharp had consistently applied to himself, the self-portrait with the shovel. Then came wîhan and hüsl, which were always written around a scene depicting a clear ritual act, violence, murder.

  The demon was the keystone. Doefolmon, hustig, Fulluht-Loc. These words implied an event in the sketches, a repeated event. But why was the latter capitalized? Fulluht-Loc, he pondered. An event more significant than the others?

  I’m a psychiatrist, not a demonologist, he reminded himself. Perhaps he was attempting to decrypt Tharp’s delusions from the wrong angle. Tharp possessed a delusional sexual phobia.

  Most phobias and hallucinotic fugue-themes had some basis in truth, something the patient had heard or read, seen on TV. Objectify, Dr. Harold thought now, staring at the pads. Rituals. Sacrifices. Cults. He wondered. The sketches seemed almost mythological; they possessed a tone, a hint of something ancient, clandestine. Semicircles of figures in the woods, beneath the moon, naked, bowing. Worshipping something, he finished. Like the Druids or the Aztecs.

  It wasn’t much to go on, but he could think of no other avenue by which to proceed. He flipped through the phone book, to the department listings at the university.

  I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff, Dr. Harold reckoned. So I’ll find someone who does.

  «« — »»

  By midafternoon, Ann was bored. She felt useless, uninvolved. Melanie was with her friends, Martin was off writing. Everyone but Ann was busy with something. She lingered about the house and yard. She still hadn’t seen her mother around—another involvement—but that probably worked out for the best. Ann wished she had something useful to do, like help out with her father or something, pull weeds, paint the shutters, anything. She called her associate at the firm to find out how everything was going, and she was disappointed when he said, “Fine, Ann. Everything’s fine. Depositions are out, we’re firing back ’rogs a mile a minute, and JAX Avionics wants to settle before trial. Don’t worry about a thing.” She hung up, depressed.

  She went for a walk through town. Maybe she’d run into Melanie and meet some of these friends of hers. But the streets stood idle as usual. A lot of cars were parked around the town hall; Ann’s mother, no doubt, was conducting another of her endless council meetings. It infuriated Ann how easily her mother went on with the moving parts of her life while Ann’s father lay dying. Perhaps that was just part of being realistic. Around the corner she saw several little girls playing near the woods. It reminded her how few children there seemed to be in Lockwood. She caught herself staring, and the little girls stared back. Then they broke and ran away, giggling. Next thing she knew, Ann was walking into the general store.

  “Hi, Ann,” Maedeen looked up from behind the counter and smiled. “How are you today?”

  “Fine,” Ann said. But why had she come in here? To begin with, Maedeen was not exactly her favorite person. “I’m just sort of wandering around. Where is everyone?”

  “Town Hall. Today’s the monthly advisory council meeting. How’s your dad?”

  “The same.” Saying that was a more refined way of saying the truth. He’s still dying. She browsed around the knickknacks, and sundries: quilts, handmade candles, porcelain dolls. Did people buy enough of this stuff to support the store? Behind the counter, Maedeen was typing. Further back, Ann noticed a room full of tall file cabinets. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Maedeen said, concentrating on her task. Then she zipped the page out of the old manual machine. “I’m also the town clerk,” she informed Ann. “Whenever there’s a meeting I have to prepare the minutes from the previous month, and I’m late.”

  “Town clerk?” Ann queried.

  “Yeah, aside from
running the store, I keep all the town records on file.” She pointed to the little room full of cabinets. “In there.”

  Now it made more sense. The store was just a local formality. Maedeen supported herself as a clerk.

  “I have to run these over to your mother. Would you like to come?”

  “Oh, no thanks.”

  “Could you keep an eye on things for me? I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  “Sure,” Ann said. Maedeen left with the sheaf of papers, the cowbell jangling after her. Alone now, Ann’s faint jealousy resurfaced. What could Martin see in her anyway, if he saw anything at all? I’m better looking than her, Ann childishly affirmed to herself. Maedeen was short and rather tomboyish, or tom-womanish, in this case. She always wore faded jeans and plain blouses, flip-flops. Melanie had told her that Maedeen’s husband had died. Ann wondered when, and why. She casually scanned the big glass bowls of candy along the counter, when she noticed the small framed picture amid Maedeen’s typewriter clutter. She knew she shouldn’t but she did anyway. She walked around the counter. She glanced out the front window; Maedeen was still heading briskly for the town square. Ann then went to the typewriter desk and picked up the picture. The snapshot showed Maedeen, a decade younger, sitting on a couch with a little girl—Wendlyn, her daughter. But in her arms, Maedeen held a naked baby. The baby was a boy.

  Just like Milly. A baby boy.

  This was very weird. Like Milly, Maedeen had only mentioned a daughter when they’d met. She’d said nothing about having a boy too. Why?

  Don’t, she thought. It’s none of your business. Yet the lawyer in her couldn’t resist. She’d said she kept the town records here, hadn’t she? Ann glanced again out the window, to make sure it was safe. Then she went into the file room.

  It didn’t take her long. BIRTH RECORDS, one drawer was clearly marked. She opened the drawer and began to rummage. What if someone comes in and sees me? But she ignored the suggestion. Her curiosity burned her. The files were alphabetical. FOST, MAEDEEN. Ann opened it and found a certificate of birth. But just one. FOST, WENDLYN. It was dated seventeen years ago. The signature of the delivering doctor was Ashby Heyd. There was no record of a boy being born. When Ann dug out Milly’s file, she found the same thing. Only Rena’s birth certificate.