SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

No, she knew by now there had to be a real one somewhere, she’d had this dream so many times. She knelt to find it, sloshing in the blackness.

But she was not alone.

Sitting curled in a dry corner, Kora Gillespie was not staring at the black amniotic lake creeping toward her knees. She was staring at Ms. Gillespie, following Ms. Gillespie’s frozen wide eyes up to the ceiling. “Is it me?” she asked, her voice small and shuddering, barely there. “Is that one mine?”

Her puddle-gray eyes were locked on It, the creature whose presence Ramona had superimposed so long ago she’d almost forgotten It. The Inseminator, tentacles a tight cage around the body of Its victim, suckers affixed while It thrusted and thrusted its knife-like phallus, perhaps seeking to make an opening where it failed to find one. Finishing, It blinked several guiltless eyes.

The Cambion looked away, crumpling, shuddering. And Ramona remembered something that she often forgot: Kora Gillespie was a child.

Don’t pay any attention to that, she heard herself say. That part’s done, that part’s over. There’s only you left.

Baby Kora suddenly came alive in Ramona’s arms, this time not soundlessly. Ms. Gillespie wakened screaming, as in life, recoiling from the small thing that came out of her, and took her leap from the fire escape.

Kora stared a moment at the screaming, squirming blood-covered byproduct, paralyzed against the wall. Then she twisted away and fled, leaving the way of her birth-mother.

When Ramona woke, she needed no one to tell her that Kora Gillespie was missing.

Down, and down, there was always more down. No place to sleep. She’d keep walking until the rail tracks ended…Kora wished more than anything she could stop carrying the stupid pictures.

Nobody doubted she’d gone for the tunnels, but that was less helpful than it sounded. The New York College of Theogony and Preternatural Obstetrics was criss-crossed by countless crumbling tunnel systems, with dozens of entry points for a seven-year-old girl to wander into. All about 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ramona guessed a human child could live down there for a little over a day without water. But who knew with Cambions? Who knew anything?

The search parties were a confused swarm, re-visiting tunnels that had already been visited, getting lost and circling back on themselves, shouting her name as they tromped around above-ground, as though that would do any damn good. At night, they were worse than useless.

When Ramona wasn’t searching the tunnels, she fell into exhausted dreams about tunnels. Kora was in these, too, on an endless walk to nowhere, in some imaginary part of some tunnel left unsearched. Or more often, she was just crouched in the dark, waiting. Stop this! She’d scream. If you’re alive, get out of my dreams! Get out of the ground!

Kora was too far down to find her way back now…or else she was just lost and walking around and around in the same tunnels. She couldn’t see to tell. This was as good a place as anywhere to close her eyes. She was too dizzy not to close her eyes.

The truth of it hit her while she slept slumped over her desk, on the third day. This isn’t my dream, is it? Ramona said to the fevered child crouched in the dark, It’s yours. Where are you?

When she woke, she knew the answer.

Shivering, she went out in the late afternoon light, making her way across the campus, ducking and weaving in the tight spots between buildings. Kora’s way. When she reached the uneven border-wall, she climbed it.

In the first flush of discovering the College’s true purpose, the fledgling Union Theological Seminary had had dreams of a shared meeting-house, where the philosophical and theological ramifications of such obviously miraculous births might be debated and discussed. The meeting-house had been gone nearly a hundred years, but the steam-tunnels that connected to it…

Ramona came down hard on her knees on the other side, surrounded by a mess of linden trees. She felt around in the mulch. There it was. The concrete slab. Someone had shut the manhole despite the stick in the way. Kora might have stayed down there for weeks. It took two janitors to lift the slab and carry it off, and by then Ramona’s head was screaming.

But she climbed down into Kora’s own private cave, and let the hot air stifle the screams. Okay, Kora. Where are you?

She walked and walked, not particularly looking ahead of her, or around her, just walking along the rail tracks in this sacred, narrow and desolate place. And when the rail tracks ended, she shut her eyes between every step. Where are you now? Where are you?

She was there. Kora saw her coming even through closed eyes. Aiden Averback had said no one would care when it happened. At least he lied about that.

A small crowd around the manhole erupted in cheers when Ramona brought the girl up, unconscious and glistening with sweat.

Kora Gillespie was severely dehydrated. She was feverish, weak from over two days without food. But she was also apparently a little invincible. Three days of Jell-O and rest found her sitting up in bed staring inscrutably out her window.

“It’s good to see you awake,” Ramona said. “How are you feeling?”

Kora turned, unsmiling. “I don’t know,” she said, though not sullenly.

“I’ve brought you something.” Ramona produced two fistfuls of yellowed, now sweat-wilted pages, spreading them out on the bed. There they were, every one of Kora’s hard-won treasures, staring up at her through masses of eyes and masses of tentacles. Pages of everything from Saint Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, to an illustrated biography on the early life of the historical Merlin. “I thought you might want them back.”

Kora looked at the heap of illustrations but didn’t stir. “What I saw…” she said slowly, “was that really how it was?”

“I don’t know. What did you see?”

“The dream you had, of when I was born,” Kora said, unrelenting, “is that how it was?”

“That was a nightmare, Kora, you should know that.”

“But it’s how it was in your head.”

Ramona paused, searching for words that would mean something to Kora. “There’s a difference between how something makes you feel, and how it is. Incubi are known to cause people to feel fear, even if they’re not being hurt by them.”

Kora nodded, as though making a mental note, and turned again to look out the window. “And so they can be afraid, even if you don’t look like one?”

Oh. Ramona blinked her eyes clear. Oh. “Kora…”

“Do they like hurting people? They have to like it, don’t they? That’s how they live and make babies.”

“Kora,” Ramona waited a few moments to speak, but her voice was still hoarse. “Did you ever read what Malleus Maleficarum— that’s the book you took those two pictures out of—did you ever read what it had to say about incubi? Do you know where an incubus gets the sperm to fertilize a human mother’s egg?”

Kora shook her head.

“Well you know that a female of the species is called a succubus. An incubus must retrieve sperm from the pouch of a succubus. Many Parazoologists even theorize it’s one androgynous organism doing both jobs. Do you have any guess as to where the succubus gets the sperm she stores in her pouch?”

Kora turned to look straight at Ramona as the new thought struck her. “But that’s just a baby, isn’t it?”

“It’s a human baby, made from the same stuff as other human babies.”