Харлан Эллисон - Alien Sex - 19 Tales by the Masters of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy

He stood at the sink. He had his penis in one hand and a bar of soap in the other. I could smell the sex he’d had with her, still clinging to him. The smell brought back the same revulsion I’d felt at the sight of her.

We looked at each other a long time. Finally he turned off the water and zipped himself up again. “Wash your hands,” I said. “For God’s sake. I don’t want you touching anything in this house until you at least wash your hands.”

He washed his hands and then his face. He dried himself on a hand towel and carefully put it back on the rack. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet, looked up at me, then back at the floor.

“She was lonely,” he said. “I just… I couldn’t help myself. I can’t explain it to you any better than that.”

“Lili,” I said. “Why don’t you say her name? Do you think I don’t know?”

“Lili,” he said. He got too much pleasure out of the sound of it. “At least it’s out in the open now. It’s almost a relief. I can talk to you about it.”

“Talk to me? You bastard ! What gives you the idea that I want to hear anything… anything about your cheap little slut?”

It was like he hadn’t heard me. “Every time I see her she’s different. She seduces me all over again. And there’s this loneliness, this need in her—”

“Shut up! I don’t want to hear it! Don’t you care what you’ve done? Doesn’t this marriage mean anything to you? Are you just a penis with legs? Maybe you’re sick of me, but don’t you care about Emily? At all?”

“I can’t… I’m helpless….”

He wouldn’t even offer me the dignity of putting it in past tense. “You’re not helpless. You’re just selfish. A selfish, irresponsible little prick.” I saw myself standing there, shouting at him. It wasn’t like me. It was like a fever dream. I felt weightless and terribly cold. I slammed the bathroom door on my way out. I packed a suitcase and put Emily in her carseat and carried her outside. It wasn’t until we were actually moving that she started to cry.

For me it took even longer.

Darla knew everything to do. She told me to finish the story while she drove me to my bank. I took all but a hundred dollars out of the checking account, and half the savings. Then she called her lawyer and set up an appointment for Monday morning. By midnight I had a one-bedroom apartment around the corner from hers. She even loaned me some Valium so I could sleep.

Even with the Valium, the first few days were hard. I would wake up every morning at five and lie there for an hour or more while my brain wandered in circles. Richard had said, “Every time I see her she’s different.” And everyone I asked about her had a different description.

Helpless. He said he was helpless.

After a week of this I saw it wasn’t going to go away. I left Emily with Darla and spent the evening at the library.

Back when I was a lab assistant, back when I first met Richard, I took English courses too. Richard was a first-year teaching assistant and I was a love-struck senior. We read Yeats and Milton and Blake and Tennyson together. And Keats, Richard’s favorite.

I found the quote from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in Keats’s Selected Poetry. “Apollonius… by some probable conjectures, found her out to be a serpent, a lamia; and that all her furniture was, like Tantalus’ gold… no substance, but mere illusions.” The lamia had the head and breasts of a woman and the body of a snake. She could change her appearance at will to charm any man. Like Lilith, her spiritual ancestor, she fed off the men she ensnared.

I drove back toward my apartment. The night was hot and still. Suppose, I thought. Suppose it’s true. Suppose there are lamias out there. And one of them has hold of Richard.

Then, I thought, she’s welcome to him.

I brought Emily home and went to bed.

By the second week it was time to look for work. With luck, and child support, I hoped to get by with a part-time job. I hated the idea of Emily in day care even half days, but there was no alternative.

I left her at the sitter’s at nine o’clock. I came back a few minutes after noon. The sitter met me at the door. She was red-faced, had been crying.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I didn’t know where to find you.”

I would stay calm, I told myself, until I found out what was wrong. “What happened?”

“I only left her alone for five minutes. We were out here in the yard. The phone rang and I went inside, and—”

“Is she hurt?” I said. I had grabbed the sitter’s arms. “Is she alive? What happened ?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know!” she wailed. “She just… disappeared!”

“How long ago?”

“Half an hour? Maybe less.”

I turned away.

“Wait!” she said. “I called the police. They’re on their way. They have to ask you some questions…”

I was already running for the car.

Subconsciously I must have made the connection. Lamia. Lilith. The legends of stolen children, bled dry, turned into vampires.

I knew exactly where Emily was.

My tires screamed as I came around the corner and again as I hit the brakes. I slammed the car door as I ran for the house. A fragment of my consciousness noticed how dead and dry the lawn looked, saw the yellowing newspapers still in their plastic wrappers. The rest of my mind could only say Emily’s name over and over again.

I didn’t bother with the doorbell. Richard hadn’t changed the locks and the chain wasn’t on the door. There were no lights inside. I smelled the faint odor of spoiled milk.

I went straight to the bedroom. The door was open.

All three of them were in there. None of them had any clothes on. Richard lay on his back. Lili crouched over him, holding Emily. The smell of spoiled milk was stronger, and the smell of sperm, and the alien sex smell, Lili’s smell. There was something else, something my eyes couldn’t quite make out in the darkness, something like cobwebs over the three of them.

Lili turned her head toward me. I saw the black eyes again, staring at me without fear or regret. I couldn’t help but notice her body—the thick waist, the small drooping breasts.

I said, “Let go of my baby.”

She pulled Emily toward her. Emily looked at me and whimpered.

I was shaking with rage. There was a gooseneck table lamp by the bed and I grabbed it, knocking over the end table and spilling books across the floor. I swung it at Lili’s head and screamed, “Let her go!”

Lili put her arms up to protect herself, dropping Emily. I swung the lamp again and she scrambled off the bed, crouched like an animal, making no effort to cover herself.

Emily had started to cry. I snatched her up and brushed the dust or whatever it was away from her face.

“Take the child,” Lili said. I had never heard her voice before. It was hoarse and whispery, but musical, like pan pipes. “But Richard is mine.”

I looked at him. He seemed drugged, barely aware of what was going on around him. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his eyes seemed to have sunken deep into his head. “You can have him,” I said.

I backed out of the room and then turned and ran. I drove to my apartment with Emily in my arms, made myself slow down, watch the road, stop for red lights. No one followed us. “You’re safe now, Tater,” I told her. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

I bathed her and fed her and wrapped her in her blanket and held her. Eventually her crying stopped.