Succubi

by Edward Lee

  The nightmare.

  Pieces of the nightmare kept sifting in her head, and that terrible scarlet vertigo. How could anything be so obsessive? Her own father had just died, yet the preoccupation with the dream remained. Slup-slup-slup, she could still hear the sound, and the voice of the sinister birth attendant: “Dooer, dooer.”

  Ann struggled to escape the awful imagery. There were things that needed to be done. Get off it! she screamed to herself. She must call Dr. Heyd at once, tell him that her father had finally passed away. But—

  Slup-slup-slup, she could still hear in her mind.

  Dooer dooer.

  Rising, she winced. But when she went to the phone, something caused her to glance down the stairwell which led to the basement. Even in the dim light, she could plainly see that the door, which her mother kept locked, stood open.

  What am I doing? Call Dr Heyd! she ordered herself. Next thing she knew, however, she was descending the stairs.

  Then she knew, or she thought she did. The basement was where Melanie had been born; it was the setting of the nightmare. That was the lure—the grim curiosity which urged her down the steps. Suddenly, the room seemed forbidden; it enticed her. Ann hadn’t seen the basement in seventeen years.

  But she was determined to see it now.

  The old wood of the steps creaked as she continued down. The door opened in dead silence. Ann still couldn’t imagine why her mother always kept it locked. It was just a fruit cellar, a basement.

  It seemed warmer the instant she stepped in. A single nude light bulb hung from the ceiling. There was an old washing bin, some old furniture, and an ironing board. Shelves of jarred fruit and pickled vegetables lined one entire wall.

  She looked blankly ahead. Something wasn’t right. A few more seconds ticked by when she realized her disappointment.

  She’d hoped that seeing the basement might shake loose a memory that would solve the nightmare and free her of it. The nightmare was of Melanie’s birth. Melanie was born here. Therefore—

  The misconception bloomed.

  This isn’t the room in the nightmare.

  It was all wrong. The room in the nightmare was longer, the ceiling higher. The entire shape of this room was different.

  Yes, Ann felt disappointed. The room showed her nothing that her subconscious might be hanging on to. Why had the dream placed Melanie’s birth elsewhere?

  Time. Memory, she considered. She’d misconstrued it all. The past seventeen years had obscured her memory totally. Her dream had therefore built its own room.

  But why?

  It scarcely mattered. She turned to go back up and noticed several file cabinets. One thing she never noticed, though, was the reason the door had been open. It hadn’t been left open, it had been broken open, the bolt prized out of the frame.

  The file cabinets looked rooted through. One was filled with old newspapers and books, its drawer tilting out. Ann closed it and looked through the second drawer: some manila folders apparently out of order. And a spiral pad. Looks like Martin’s pad.

  She picked it up and stared. It was Martin’s pad. The cramped hastened scrawl left no doubt.

  Why would Martin keep his poetry drafts down here?

  She flipped through some random pages.

  “Wreccan,” one poem was called, but what on earth did that mean? It was dated several days ago. Ann squinted, reading.

  Flawed worlds die quickly as the dreams of men:

  a pointless parody.

  Yet nightly we arise, her song in our heads,

  wreccans of the descending herald.

  We are her birds of prey.

  We’ll come to see you someday.

  What an odd poem. Ann didn’t understand it all, and it didn’t seem like Martin’s style one bit. He usually wrote in meter and a Keatsian rhyme pattern. She turned to the next poem: “Doefolmon.”

  O wondrous moon,

  of your truth I drink.

  Upon the herald’s caress,

  in wondrous pink!

  This one bothered her. Like the first she didn’t know what it meant, and it didn’t seem like the kind of thing Martin would write.

  Moon. Pink, she thought. Did he mean the equinox she’d been hearing about on the news? A special lunar position which caused the moon’s light to appear pink at certain times during the night. She looked out the small ground-level window. Beyond the forest, the full moon hung low.

  It was pink.

  But something else nagged at her. What? she thought. Then her eyes thinned. The poem’s title, “Doefolmon.” Doefolmon, she repeated. A word that made no sense.

  But—

  Doefolmon. Before her father had died, in his delirium, hadn’t that been one of the words he’d written?

  This cruxed her. Perhaps she was wrong—yes, she must be. Dr. Heyd had said that massive-stroke victims frequently wrote things with no memory of alphabet sequence. How could Martin possibly have used the word days before her father had written it?

  Impossible, she agreed.

  Most of the rest of the pad seemed filled with one long poem. She remembered Martin mentioning it the other day, a magnum opus of over a hundred stanzas. This must be it. “Millennium,” it was entitled.

  She didn’t read the whole thing, just bits and pieces. Throughout she noticed more strange words. Wifmunuc, Fulluht-Loc, wîhan, cirice. What did these words mean? The metered poem seemed to deal with some kind of reverence, of worship, but it was alien to her.

  She turned to the last stanza, the end.

  In her holy blood now we are blessed.

  Sweet deity of eons in darkness dressed.

  Through fallen heaven, so swiftly she soars.

  “Dooer” enchants the wifmunuc.

  “Come into our world from yours.”

  Ann felt turned to granite as she stared at the bizarre verse. Again, she thought, Impossible, but for another reason. Dooer, Martin had written, the same word spoken by the figure in her nightmare.

  Dooer, she thought.

  There could be no explanation. She’d never repeated any of the nightmare’s details to Martin. Had she spoken the word aloud in her sleep? But if so, why would Martin use it in a poem?

  Now her confusion ganged up on her. She shivered as she replaced the notebook, a sense beneath her skin like dread. Then she noticed the albums. Photo albums.

  Ann had seen her mother and her friends looking through them several times. She picked one up, opened it—

  What the… She couldn’t believe it.

  It was pornography.

  Lurid snapshots glared up at her. Ann could not imagine anything so explicit, and so absolutely obscene. Each picture depicted a different sex act. Oral sex. Group sex. Lesbianism. Sodomy. Women grinned in raw light as blank-faced men penetrated them in every plausible way, and some implausible. This is crazy, Ann thought. Why would her mother have this smut?

  She was too shocked to contemplate the issue more deeply. Each page showed her a new, greater obscenity. But as she flipped further through the wretched album, that cold tingling, like dread, came back to her. Some of the figures in the photos looked awfully familiar.

  By the fifth page she was picking faces out of the orgies.

  Here was Milly on her hands and knees, fellating one man while another penetrated her from behind. Next, Mrs. Gargan squatting atop someone’s hips. The Trotters swapping marriage companions. And Milly’s daughter, Rena, with her knees pushed back to her face as some young man mounted her. And next—

  My God.

  The next showed Ann’s own mother having intercourse with Dr. Heyd. And next her own father…sodomizing a man as her mother and several other women looked on, grinning.

  Ann was shaking. She thought she’d be sick. Then she turned the page and stared.

  A pretty teenage girl was sitting on another girl’s face. The girl on top was Melanie.

  A vacant-eyed man was sodomizing a woman with her buttocks propped up. The woman was Maedeen
.

  The man was Martin.

  Ann felt dead standing up.

  The second album beggared description.

  Naked figures seemed smeared with something dark. It looked like blood. More figures drank from a cup, all nude, all with weird pale pendants suspended between their breasts. Ann felt all the breath go out of her when she turned the page.

  A female corpse hung upside down against a bare-wood wall, headless. Blood poured into a big pot. Next, a male corpse was being gutted by a man with a thin, sharp knife. The man was Ann’s father. Dr. Heyd was trimming fat away from what appeared to be a liver. Martin was stuffing offal into a big plastic bag. Still more photos showed more men stoking an enclosed pit fire, tossing things in. A black cauldron bubbled. Large roundish objects lay deeper in the embers. Ann knew they were human heads.

  I must be dreaming again, Ann sickly tried to convince herself. None of this could be real.

  Then she turned the next page and saw:

  Milly lying upon the slab, naked, drenched in sweat. Her legs were propped up and widely parted. She was pregnant.

  Naked women stood about her, gazing down in reverence. But betwixt Milly’s spread legs stood a cloaked figure, with hands out as if to accept something. And next:

  The hands holding up a glistening newborn child.

  And next:

  Ann screamed.

  It was the same. Everything. Milly giving birth was identical to the scenario of Ann’s nightmare. And then the final photo, the symbol. The odd double circle looked like a flat slab of stone hanging against a dark wall, but its shape was—

  The same, she realized.

  It was exactly the same.

  “Does it all seem familiar?” queried a cragged voice.

  Ann screamed again and dropped the album. She stepped back and stumbled, glaring up in terror.

  A figure stepped out of the back of the basement. He’d been there the entire time, watching her from the dark.

  The figure took another step: a young man with bizarre short white hair, in jeans, sneakers, and jeans jacket. His face looked extant, lean in some crushed prevalence. He was holding a shotgun.

  “Ann Slavik,” he said. He looked at her, as if curious. “My name is Erik Tharp. Though the people around here call me brygorwreccan.”

  The shredded voice left no doubt. The same voice that had called her, had warned her on the phone not to come here.

  “They’re subcarnates,” he told her. “They’re monsters, all of them. And your mother is their leader.”

  Ann tried to speak but her terror damped her voice.

  “They enslave men with her power, they sacrifice to pay her homage. They’ve existed for thousands of years, Ann, solely to worship her.”

  “H-her? Who?”

  Erik Tharp gave her a broken smile. “Of course, you don’t know about it. You weren’t supposed to. You’re part of a bloodline that worships a devil.”

  Ann’s head reeled…

  “Does it sound impossible?” Erik Tharp continued. “What do you think all that stuff is in those albums? Do you dream, Ann? What do you think those dreams are about? They’re not really dreams, they’re visions—visions of the past to reflect the future.”

  Visions of the past, she thought. But what could Melanie’s birth have to do with the future?

  “Have you seen any male children in this town? Have you?”

  “No,” she said, still staring up. “I looked at the town birth records. It said that all the male children ever born here were put up for adoption.”

  “Of course that’s what it said. Heyd has to cover himself.”

  “What?”

  “The records are falsified, by Heyd. Those kids weren’t put up for adoption. They were sacrificed.”

  The word seemed to eddy in her head and grow like a bloodstain.

  “Males are not allowed in their bloodline. Any sect member who gives birth to a male must hand it over for immediate sacrifice, to appease her. I ought to know, Ann. I’m the one who used to bury the bodies.”

  Ann still couldn’t think right. How could she believe this madness? Erik Tharp was an escaped mental patient. He was certifiably insane. But then she remembered the photo albums…

  “I came back to stop this, Ann. I came back to get you and your daughter away from here. That’s the only way.”

  “What are you talking about!” Ann finally screamed.

  He looked down at her. It seemed painful for him just to talk. “For the last millennium they’ve been breeding themselves for this event, Ann. You and your daughter are part of that event.”

  “What event?”

  “The Fulluht-Loc,” he answered. “The doefolmon.”

  —

  Chapter 30

  “Doefolmon,” Professor Fredrick said.

  Dr. Harold squinted back. “Yes, another of the words that Tharp makes frequent reference to in his sketches. What does it mean?”

  Fredrick relit the big pipe. Its carven face depicted vacant agony. “It means, roughly, ‘moon of the devil,’ and it’s another term that proves how thoroughly Tharp researched the Ur-locs before his delusion overtook him. The doefolmon was considered a portent, like a biblical sign, and a precursor to their holiest rite—the Fulluht-Loc.”

  Harold’s nose crinkled against the cloying fetor of the tobacco. That, and the queer face on the pipe, harassed his attention.

  “It was their incarnation rite,” Professor Fredrick said.

  Incarnation. Harold considered the word, and its implications. To make flesh.

  “Fulluht is another weird meld of Old Saxon, Old Frisian, and some older Chilternese constituents; it means essentially ‘baptism’ or ‘baptismal,’ and loc, as I’ve said, is a reference to—”

  “A female demon,” Harold recalled. “A succubus.”

  “Yes. Hence, Fulluht-Loc can be translated as ‘baptism of the succubus.’ It’s the ritual that their entire system of belief revolved around. It’s what they lived for.”

  The window framed full dark now; Dr. Harold had been here all day scarcely without realizing it. He could glimpse the moon through the high trees of the campus quadrangle. It seemed pink.

  “The basis of their entire religion was offertory,” the old professor went on. “The zeal with which they sacrificed innocents was intensively devout. Everything they did was an offering. Sex. Murder. Cannibalism. They’d even anoint initiates with the blood of sacrifice victims. They’d paint trees with the blood, to mark the territory of the succubus, to make it blessed. The Druids did the same thing centuries later, which might cause you to wonder about the nature of religious influence.”

  But Dr. Harold was wondering about a lot more than that. So many questions itched at him now, like stitches healing. “But what you mentioned earlier,” he said. “The ultimate point?”

  Fredrick’s ancient face looked grimly amused. “The Fulluht-Loc. The incarnation. According to the legend, this can only occur during the doefolmon, and supposedly the Ur-locs succeeded at it once.”

  “The incarnation, you mean?”

  “Correct. From what could be translated from their manuscripts, the Ur-locs claimed that a successful incarnation occurred a thousand years ago, just before their race disappeared.”

  Dr. Harold contemplated the supposition. No, like Fredrick, he didn’t believe in demons, but…what was he thinking? “I don’t quite follow you. How did this incarnation supposedly come about?”

  “Remember what I said before,” Fredrick replied. “Everything the Ur-locs did was an offering. They were devoted to the notion of the bludcynn, or the sanctity of their bloodline. What they offered to the Ardat-Lil, ultimately, was themselves.”

  “I still don’t quite—”

  “The element of offering, Doctor. Sacrifice. Blood. Faith. Everything. The Fulluht-Loc was an offering of one of their own, a physical gift of substitution. What I’m saying is that, on the doefolmon, one of the Ur-locs’ own bludcynn would become the Arda
t-Lil. This was foreseen, mind you, years beforehand, upon the birth of the substituted body.”

  “Foreseen by who?”

  “By the wifmunuc, the leader. They were supposedly clairvoyant. The doefolmon was considered the holiest time, much like Christians would consider the Second Coming. This was essentially the same thing, the return of their god onto the earth.” Professor Fredrick’s time-worn hand tapped out the pipe again. Behind him, in the office window, the moon was rising. “But what you should find most curious of all,” he amusedly went on, “is the timing.”

  “The timing?” Dr. Harold queried.

  “The doefolmon. Astronomers have recently identified it—a peculiar astronomical configuration. You’ve probably been hearing about it on the news lately.”

  Had he? The equinox, he thought. “I’ve heard something on the weather channels about the equinox.”

  “Yes, yes. That’s what the doefolmon really is. Of course, astronomers don’t call it the doefolmon—” Fredrick cragged another chuckle. “They call it a tangental lunar apogee. You’ve probably noticed over the past week or so that the moon appears pink. It’s what’s known as a straticulate refraction, the moonlight shining through the upper atmosphere at an anomalous angle. It’s very, very rare, and quite precise—a vernal equinox that occurs at the exact same moment as the moon becomes full.”

  Dr. Harold’s eyes narrowed.

  “And that’s the curious part,” Fredrick went on. “Even an old, skeptical atheist such as myself must admit. The last time this happened was exactly a thousand years ago, and exactly a thousand years ago was when the Ur-locs supposedly succeeded in incarnating the Ardat-Lil.”

  —

  Chapter 31

  “It’s happening now, right now,” Erik Tharp told her in the dark confines of the basement.

  He’d been talking, and she’d been listening, staring at each of his raddled words as though they were deformed faces. Incarnation, she thought. Fulluht-Loc. Ardat-Lil. It was insanity, and this was supposed to be an insane person. Yet the things he’d told her rang of a spectral memory, inklings dripping like a wound in the back of her mind. Ann’s confusion amassed. It was the confluence of it all, what Tharp had disclosed, plus the dream and what she’d seen in the albums—that left her unable to reckon anything.