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

The police found no sign of Richard at the house. The place was deserted. I changed the locks and put it up for sale. Lili was gone too, of course. The police shook their heads when her descriptions failed to add up. Untrained observers, they said. It happened all the time. Richard and Lili would turn up, they assured me, probably at some resort hotel in Mexico. I shouldn’t worry.

One night last week the phone woke me up. There was breathing on the other end. It sounded like someone fighting for air. I told myself it wasn’t Richard. It was only breathing. Only a stranger, only a run-of-the-mill obscene phone call.

Some days I still wake up at five in the morning. If lamias are serpents, they can’t interbreed with humans. Like vampires, they must somehow turn human children into their successors. I have no doubt that was what Lili was doing with Emily when I found her.

I can’t say anything, not even to Darla. They would tell me about the stress I’ve been under. They would put me in a hospital somewhere. They would take Emily away from me.

She seems happy enough, most of the time. The only changes in her appearance are the normal ones for a healthy, growing baby girl. She’s going to be beautiful when she grows up, a real heartbreaker. But puberty is a long way away. And I won’t know until then whether or not she is still my daughter.

Time is already moving much too fast.

In college back in the early seventies I took a course called “The Bible as Literature.” This was great fun and something our current climate of religious extremism would no longer permit. We dared treat Christianity like any other myth, as a source for allusions, metaphors, and plots. We also talked about the Bible as a piece of literature unto itself—asking who wrote the various sections and when, what earlier works were swiped to create it, why various pieces of writing were included or left out. I added several words to my vocabulary, like “pseudepigraphal” (which friends have hounded me for using in conversation). I also got interested—even a little obsessed—with Lilith.

Lilith, you all remember, was Adam’s first wife, who was kicked out of the Garden for fornicating with demons, and so on. She is the dark, sexy underbelly of the Judeo-Christian myth. She is Keats’s Belle Dame sans Merci, horror’s succubus, Greece’s Lamia. She is the first vamp and the first vampire. She is the Kind Men Like.

I’d wanted to write a Lilith story for years. I’d also toyed with the idea of writing a companion piece to “Love in Vain,” a story that used a serial killer to talk about men’s ideas about women. I wanted to tackle the same subject from the woman’s perspective, a literary “answer record” if you will, like “Dance with Me Henry.” I would have written something like the present story eventually, but I have to give Ellen credit for pushing me to it.

I should also mention that, in struggling desperately for a title during the final draft, I hit upon “Scales” without remembering where I’d first seen it. I later realized I had stolen it from a brilliant, but unpublished, mermaid story by fellow Austinite Nancy Sterling. My thanks to her for being generous enough to let me keep it.

Since 1985, when she sold her first horror story to Dennis Etchison for his seminal anthology Cutting Edge , Roberta Lannes has contributed short stories for anthologies in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, some translated into Russian, Japanese, Finnish, French, Spanish, and Italian. She has also published numerous articles, interviews with fellow authors, and essays in the science fiction genre. Her collection The Mirror of the Night was published in 1997.

Lannes currently lives in Southern California. After thirty-eight years of teaching high school art and English, she retired and is now working on a young adult dark fantasy trilogy, a Japanese vampire novel, numerous short stories, and a story collection. Her digital artwork and photography has appeared in magazines, in website designs, on CD covers, iPhone app screens, and book covers. Visit her author website at www.robertalannes.com.

THE BRASS BELL CLANGED over the screen door of the New Moon Café. Terri turned, once again, to see if it might be Earl come to beg her forgiveness and haul her butt home. It was a trucker. She sighed heavily and held out her cup for a warm-up.

“Go home Terri. That’s your eleventh cup of coffee. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re still up in a couple of days and can’t, for the life of you, remember what coulda kept you from sleepin’.”

“Please, Mary Ann, I want to be wide awake when Earl gets here.”

The coffee sloshed over the top and into the saucer. Terri giggled, giddy with caffeine. “Thanks.”

“He ain’t gonna come, Terri. He’s a stubborn man. And he ain’t in the prettiest spot, either, with you knowin’ about his affair with Florence and all…”

Acid bit her stomach. A twist of pain in her heart made her gasp. She didn’t need to hear anyone speak of it again. She just wanted him to say he was sorry. Grovel a little. Then maybe they could go on with their lives and not be hurting each other like that anymore. Hell, it wasn’t the first time, and she’d done her share of messing around, but this was different.

She drank down half the cup of coffee, filled it back up with cream, and added five teaspoons of sugar. She opened the menu then let it slap closed. She ordered her third piece of apple pie à la mode. Or was it her fourth and she’d had three brownies? She couldn’t remember.

The bell. She looked over her shoulder.

A man. Short, maybe five feet tall, but thickly built. And handsome in an exotic way. His round dark eyes reminded Terri of a snake’s. He wore a smart-looking leather jumpsuit. He moved smoothly, gracefully, like someone with a foot more height and the agility of a dancer.

She turned back to her coffee. The bars closed at two. Much of their clientele trickled into the café, nearly filling the place. But Terri sat alone at the counter. He sat down beside her.

She shifted uneasily on her stool. She hadn’t had a man interested in her since before she’d had little Earl and put on sixty pounds. Maybe this one was one of those guys she read about in Real Romance that like their women large. She needed this. Badly.

Mary Ann noticed the man’s obvious interest and gave Terri a wink. Terri smiled at the man as she picked up her fork to dig into her pie.

The man smiled back. He reached for a food-stained menu wedged behind the napkin dispenser.

Terri cleared her throat. “If you’re looking for dessert, they have the best apple pie….” She pointed to hers.

“Thank-you.” He looked up at Mary Ann. “I want same.”

“You won’t be sorry. Hi. My name is Terri Sipes.” She held out a hand. He looked at it curiously, took it in his, and turned it over, examining it. She pulled it away.

His eyes met hers. “Thank-you. My name.” He paused, took a gulp of air. “Name is Pauldor.”

His voice was strange. Deep, brittle, emotionless. It was like Earl’s when she’d asked for an explanation of his behavior with Florence. He’d droned on and on in that same tone, not making much sense. Her stomach churned.

“Paul Door? A nice name. Where are you from?”

He looked blankly at her, then smiled. He gulped air again and whistled. “Thank-you. I am from the other side of the world.” He made a giggling noise at some private joke. “And you are from here?”

Terri looked to Mary Ann and back to Paul. He seemed nervous, she thought. A foreigner.