Edward Lee - Succubi

“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.