Ghosts, Monsters and Madmen
Page 24
“There is no need for pain. You shouldn’t have woken up,” the eyes moved in the direction of his outstretched wrist. “But it seems my abilities are a little unreliable when it comes to you. I suppose that shouldn’t come as a surprise. You are just about the furthest thing from my type.”
Those words again.
My type
But somehow, this time they seemed less of an indictment.
He felt her touch his wrist. Unable to move, he watched as her eyes dipped in the darkness and felt what had to be the brush of her lips against his skin. The pain fled in an instant, leaving him more comfortable, yet even heavier than before. But by now, even his sluggish mind had figured out what must have been the source of the former pain. He couldn’t work up much emotion about it, but it did seem he ought to know why…
“M…My wri….”
“Yes.”
Then it was true. She was killing him.
“Wh…why?”
“Because it needs to be done.”
Her tone never varied. It carried the same even gentleness one would expect of a nurse dealing with a sick child. If she said it needed to be done, then in his current state it felt to him like it needed to be done.
Yet it seemed a little unfair. Something inside made the herculean effort to rise…to offer some form of resistance against this. But her hand pressed softly against his chest, and the resistance sank back into the syrupy blackness. He could detect no malice in the glowing eyes, nor did she seem…
The glowing eyes.
Once again the molasses of his thoughts gathered and he made the connection. What the hell? What exactly was in the room with him?
“Wha…wha…”
“What am I?”
“Yssssss….”
She stood, causing her eyes to rise in the darkness. They slowly retreated back from the bed until she once again must have been standing against the wall near his feet. Their blue glow still revealed nothing of the rest of her face. They regarded him with even evaluation, and for a moment he wondered if she would answer his question. How much time did he have left anyway?
Silence reigned for few seconds more, but then she replied.
“I’m a succubus, Colin.”
He tried to wrap his slowing brain around that.
“Y…you mean…like a…demon?”
The eyes closed, causing them to disappear for moment, then reappeared.
“No,” she whispered, “no. In India they would call me a ‘mohini’. They have a somewhat closer idea to what I really am. Although, their understanding is incomplete as well.”
“Wh..wh…”
“I’m a predator,” her voice found its former evenness, “I was born of the shattered souls of women who were destroyed by the very worst of men. Men like Jerry Saban, only far worse. Men who found a certain type of woman and then dominated, controlled, used, and abused her until by the time they discarded her she was broken in both mind and spirit. And when she died…usually by her own hand….what pitiful shreds of her soul that remained flittered off into the winds of the afterlife like leaves in a gale.
But even Limbo has its far corners, and sometimes an eddy will form. And sometimes, in the rarest of instances, the shreds of all those broken women will collect in those eddies. Not much at first, but more eventually come. Then they gather and swirl around each other like paper scraps in a whirlwind. Over time, as more and more join the dance, they begin to fuse. And if this process goes on long enough, it results in an entirely new type of being…a spirit that becomes something other than human when it reincarnates and is born into the world. It becomes something that preys on the very men who created her. Something that drains their life away while they think they are using her. It becomes me.”
Colin’s world began to recede, and he struggled to focus on her.
“Then J-Jerry…”
“Jerry Saban is dying. Once I drained him beyond the point of no return…it takes about a year…I left him. He will die over the course of the next couple of days—a wasted, sickly husk of a man that is half mad with need for me and possessing a spirit so gutted it will be a very long time before it ever walks this world again, if ever.’
‘But then I…I…”
“No, Colin. I did not feed on you. I cannot feed on you. You are literally not my type.”
A dull ache formed in his chest as he fought to understand. He even made one last attempt to struggle, but his body lay inert. A remote sense of sadness finally managed to surface as he grasped the import of what was happening to him.
She really was killing him. He really was about to die.
“But…but….then why? Why do…I…”
“Because,” she answered in the same soft voice, “you kissed a succubus.”
She must have stepped forward, for now the glowing blue eyes looked down on him from beside the bed.
“My kiss is one of my most potent weapons. Its poison binds a man to me to the exclusion of all others. It is how I keep him coming to me even after he has realized I will be his death. But if for some reason I am separated from my prey, or I do not kill somebody snared by my kiss, the poison still does its damage.
It will allow a man to find no happiness or satisfaction in the arms of any other but me. And over time it will twist a man, turn him into something ugly. He will hunt solace in woman after woman, and begin to hate them all as he fails. He will become evil, dangerous, and...worse.”
She paused and leaned close, her eyes filling his dimming vision.
“Colin,” she whispered, “Jack the Ripper was a mere teenage messenger boy who kissed the wrong woman as she passed him at a drunken revel. And when she finally caught him again, after he butchered those women, his soul was so rotted with hate and poison that it dissolved as soon as it hit the afterlife.”
He barely heard her. The world seemed to harden around him like amber as the life left his body.
“Colin?”
He no longer had the strength to talk, and even the glow of her eyes came from very far away.
Time was up.
She must have sensed him beginning to pass for she gently kissed him, then put her lips next to his ear…
“Colin,” she whispered, “I really am sorry but even monsters make mistakes. And just like people, we have to clean up our messes too.”
About the Author
D. Nathan Hilliard lives in Spring, Texas with his wife, kids, a little old lady of a cat, and assorted gerbils and guinea pigs. He is also the author of the action/horror novels Dead Stop and Spiderstalk, and an anthology of ghost stories titled, Shades: Eight Tales of Terror. Mr. Hilliard draws his inspiration from a childhood living in assorted small towns throughout Texas and New Mexico, and a wide variety of jobs and experiences as an adult. After being diagnosed with Charcot Marie Tooth at the turn of the century, he now spends his days raising kids and exploring the field of writing.