Edward Lee: Succubi

Around the sketch he scribed the glyph. The night mirror, he thought. How many times had he looked into it and seen the most unspeakable things?

My God, he thought, but behind the thought he was sure he heard their warm, viscid laughter, like beating wings, like screams in a canyon.

He looked at the moon. The moon was pink.

Beneath the sketches, and with no conscious thought at all, he scribbled one word:

liloc

—

Chapter 3

The dream was vivid, hot—it always was.

“Dooer, dooer.”

It was always the same: the back arching up and waves of moans. The tense legs spread ever-wide, the swollen belly stretched pinprick tight and pushing…pushing…pushing forth…

Then the image of the cup, like a chalice, and the emblem on its bowl like a squashed double circle.

She sensed flame behind her, a fireplace perhaps. She sensed warmth. Firelight flickered on the pocked brick walls as shadows hovered. A larger version of the emblem seemed suspended in the background, much larger. And again she heard the bizarre words:

“Dooer, dooer.”

She was dreaming of her daughter’s birth, she knew. Birth was painful, yet she felt no pain. All she felt was the wonder of creation, for it was a wonder, wasn’t it? Her own warm belly displacing life into the world? It was a joyous thing.

Joyous, yes. So why did the dream always transform to nightmare?

The figures surrounded her; they seemed cloaked or enshadowed. Soft hands stroked the tense sweating skin. For a time they were all her eyes could focus on. The hands. They caressed her not just in comfort but also—somehow—in adoration. Here was where the dream lost its wonder. Soon the hands grew too ardent. They were fondling her. They stroked the enflamed breasts, the quivering belly. They ran up and down the parted, shining thighs. The belly continued to quiver and push. No faces could be seen, only the hands, but soon heads lowered. Tongues began to lap up the hot sweat which ran in rivulets. Soft lips kissed her eyes, her forehead, her throat. Tongues churned over her clitoris. Voracious mouths sucked milk from her breasts.

The images wrenched her; they were revolting, obscene. Wake up! Wake up! she commanded herself. She could not move. She could not speak.

Her orgasm was obvious, a lewd and clenching irony in time with the very contractions of birth. Behind her she sensed frenzied motion. She heard grunts, moans—

—then screams.

Screams?

But they weren’t her screams, were they?

She glimpsed dim figures tossing bundles onto a crackling fire. Still more figures seemed to wield knives or hatchets. The figures seemed palsied, numb. She heard chopping sounds.

The dream’s eye rose to a high vantage point; the circle moved away. Naked backs clustered about the childbirth table. Now only a lone, hooded shape stood between the spread legs. It looked down, as if in reverence, at the wet, bloated belly. The belly was pink.

Moans rose up, and excited squeals. The firelight danced. The chopping sounds thunked on and on, on and on…

“Dooer, dooer,” spake the hooded shape.

The belly shivered, collapsing.

A baby began to cry.

«« — »»

Ann awoke suddenly, lost of breath. The dream, she thought. The nightmare. She reached blindly for Martin, but he wasn’t there. The digital clock read 4:12 a.m.

Did she always have the dream at the same time, or did she imagine that? Months now, and nearly every night. Beneath her felt sodden, and her mind swam. The dream sickened her, not just the glaring, pornographic imagery, but what it must say about some part of her subconscious. She didn’t like to think like that—she was a lawyer. She didn’t like to contemplate a part of herself that she couldn’t break down, assimilate, and recognize structurally.

She knew the dream was about Melanie’s birth. The abstractions—the bizarre words, the emblem on the chalice and the wall, the firelight, etc.—were what Dr. Harold termed “subconscious detritus.” “Dreams are always outwardly symbolic, Ms. Slavik, subjectivities surrounding a concrete point. The birth of your daughter, in other words, surrounded by encryptions. You’re here to find a means to expose those encryptions, and to identify them, after which we can determine how they relate to the central notion of the dream.”

Ann couldn’t imagine such a notion, but she suspected, quite grimly, that much of this “detritus” was sexual. She’d told Dr. Harold everything about herself that he asked, except one detail. She was having orgasms in her sleep. The wetness, as well as the acute vaginal sensitivity upon waking, left no doubt. Worse was that these “dream orgasms” had proved her only orgasmic release for some time. Martin was by far the best lover of her life, yet she hadn’t had an orgasm with him for as long as she’d been having the nightmare. This worried her very much.

Everything did.

Yuck, she thought, and got up in the darkness. Her nightgown stuck to her, she felt doused in slime, and the coldness of her sweat shriveled her nipples.

She padded down the hall and peeked into her daughter’s room. Melanie lay asleep amid a turmoil of sheets. The sheets were black and so were the walls. “Killing Joke,” one big poster read. Her favorite group. Martin had taken her to see them last year. Ann vowed one day to go to one of these wild concerts with her, but the more she determined to get involved with her daughter’s joys, the more impossible it seemed to achieve. Not trying hard enough, she lamented. She knew this neglect was part of Melanie’s seclusion. Growing up without a father was tough for a kid, and with a mother submerged at work six, sometimes seven days a week made it even tougher. Dr. Harold informed her that Melanie’s “alternative” tastes reflected a “self developed” identity. Most seventeen year olds read Tiger Beat and watched sitcoms. Melanie read Poe and watched Polanski.

Sleepy eyes fluttered open. “Mom?”

“Hi, honey.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Shh. Go back to sleep.”

Melanie shifted under the covers. “I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too. Go back to sleep.”

Ann closed the door.

She worried too much, she knew that. Melanie was coming of age, and Ann often had a hard time reckoning that. It had caused some awful arguments in the past—Melanie had run away several times, all of which were Ann’s own doing. She lost herself too often. The last time, it had taken Martin two days to find her, while Ann had been in the office working on counterlitigation for Air National. Ann’s success as an attorney haunted her with her failure as a mother.

Tonight she’d promised things would change, but would this prove another failure? To think so would crush her. The trip to Paris would bring them together; it would start the relationship that should’ve started properly seventeen years ago. Too late’s better than nothing, she considered.

Through the living room now, and soft darkness. She stepped into Martin’s moonlit den. The drapes billowed around the open French doors. Indeed, Martin stood on the terrace. Often she’d find him here, in wee hours when he couldn’t sleep, looking down into the city, the water, the docks. Always looking for something. Tonight, though, he stood straight in his robe, staring up at the sky.

“Martin?”

No reply. Staring. He looked sad or confused.

He turned, startled. His cigarette fell. “What’s wrong?”

“I—” she said.

He hugged her at once. “I know. The dream again. You were—”

“I’m sorry I woke you.”

“You didn’t,” he lied. “I just couldn’t sleep. Too much caffeine.”