Demon Mine

by Marina Simcoe

  “Where are we?” I asked the most obvious question, hoping that he would continue speaking to me, since he said more in the past few minutes than he had in the previous weeks.

  “In my place.” He seemed to have abandoned the full sentences again and retuned to short statements instead, but at least he kept talking. And he answered my question!

  I kept on asking.

  “You live here?”

  “Yes.” He cleared his throat again but didn’t explain further. “We’ll need to leave soon. You’ll have to eat first though,” he added firmly.

  “Wait… Where are we going? And who are ‘we’? Where is that scary guy with cold hands?” I asked hurriedly. “You have to give me more than that!”

  “You’ll need to eat,” he repeated resolutely. “Come, I’ll answer your questions while you’re eating,” he added and reached for me.

  “Whoa! Hold on! I’m sure I can walk now!” I exclaimed when he set the lantern on the large wooden cabinet by the wall and wrapped his arm around my shoulders with the clear intention of carrying me to wherever he had the food.

  Although he had carried me many times before, somehow I felt that the situation had changed now with the new setting. I was no longer in the cell. Whether or not I was still supposed to consider myself a prisoner remained to be clarified, but as long as I was no longer in the cell, I wanted to exercise my free will, at least until I was forced to do otherwise.

  I also wished to avoid the close physical contact with him. Even though trusting him somehow had always came natural to me, the lingering feeling of betrayal still compelled me to keep the distance from him right now. I twisted out of his arms and tossed the covers aside.

  “You’re too weak to walk, Alyssa. I’ll have to help you, or you will fall,” he stated evenly.

  Ignoring him, I lowered my bare feet to the cool dirt floor. The air in the room – or the cave – was cold without the warmth of the comforter, and a shiver ran through me. Sytrius stepped aside but remained close by, watching my efforts. He stretched one arm towards me, not touching, just holding it there for me to grab if I needed it.

  I appreciated his willingness to let me try to get up on my own; however, I had to admit that he was right as soon as I tried to get up off the bed. I was too weak to walk without help. My head swam with dizziness immediately, and I would have collapsed to the floor if Sytrius didn’t catch me. He didn’t lift me to carry, though. Instead, he pressed me to his side with one arm, grabbed the lantern with the other hand and led me through the archway into a larger room or, more precisely, into what appeared to be a large cavern in the rock.

  It was difficult to judge the size of the cavern because some of the walls and the ceiling remained in the dark beyond the reach of the lantern light. My eyes had adjusted to the dim light enough now that I could see a worn leather couch across from a large-screen TV, of all things, mounted on one of the walls. Further in the distance, I saw another light radiating from an iron wood-burning stove with a chimney going up to the ceiling hidden somewhere high in the darkness.

  I smelled it before I saw it. A plate with scrambled eggs and bacon was placed on a wrought iron stand on top of the stove! I inhaled a lungful of air filled with the mouthwatering smell of bacon and stopped paying attention to anything else around me.

  “You made me bacon and eggs for breakfast!”

  “Come. Sit.” He maneuvered me to one of the four mismatched chairs that stood around a weathered table made of thick solid wood and helped me to sit down. He put the lantern in the centre of the table, next to two plastic bottles of water already standing there, and pushed one of the water bottles towards me before turning back to get the plate of food from the stove.

  “Eat,” he said firmly and placed the plate along with a fork in front of me.

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. I grabbed a piece of bacon off the plate immediately and shoved a large forkful of eggs in my mouth.

  “Mmmm,” I moaned, closing my eyes in delight. “Nothing. Ever. Tasted. So good!” I said around the mouthful of food and opened my eyes just in time to see the bright white-blue lights flash through the slits of his mask. In the semi-darkness of the cave, the light in his eyes looked even brighter than it did inside my basement cell.

  “What is that? Why do you do this …with your eyes?”

  I didn’t stop eating. I couldn’t have stopped even if I tried, and I was sure as hell not going to try. Eating real food after months and months of the grey-green curdy stuff felt divine. Nothing and nobody could have pried the plate and fork out of my fingers now.

  “Who are you, Sytrius?” I asked quietly. Silent, he sat down into a chair across from me and folded his gloved hands on the table in front of him. I waited for his answer, since he looked like he was about to speak, but he hesitated. Was the answer so difficult for him to give?

  I decided to turn it into a yes-or-no question, just like the game I had made him play, hoping to make it easier for him to answer.

  “You’re not human.” The question came out more as a statement, though, since I had already guessed the answer.

  “No.” He moved his head side to side slowly, his eyes glued to his hands.

  I couldn’t stop now.

  “You are the same as the others there.” It came out as a statement again, and I waved my hand in the general direction of where I thought my cell could be.

  “Who are they, Sytrius?” I waited again, giving him time to answer and worrying that he wouldn’t.

  “Incubi,” he said quietly and raised his eyes to meet mine.

  Chapter Thirteen. Incubus.

  “Incubi?” I repeated, as I drew a blank. Was I supposed to know what that was?

  “Yes,” he said. “I am a demon, Alyssa. An incubus.”

  “An incubus…” The word sounded more familiar. “Incubus? Isn’t it from the stories that Puritans invented to have someone to blame for their masturbation habits, or something?” I said the first thing that entered my mind.

  He shook his head at my ignorance, and I might have heard a low humorless chuckle from behind his mask.

  “Incubi were created long before Puritans entered the scene,” he said evenly and added hesitantly, “As far as …um …masturbation is concerned, though, to be fair, incubi might not be entirely without a blame there…”

  “No, no, hold on, please!” I couldn’t believe that I was stopping him mid-sentence after I had spent weeks coaxing him to talk to me, but I needed to keep this conversation on track, despite the fact that it had already derailed somewhere into a territory beyond strange.

  I also really didn’t feel well. The throbbing headache was still torturing me, making it difficult to gather my thoughts and stay focused. I felt extremely weak too; even sitting at the table took a lot of effort.

  I finished all the food in front of me and drank at least half of the water from the bottle. The full stomach made it even more difficult to keep my eyes from closing. My head was heavy, and I felt sleepy now. I needed to get my bearings and find out what was going on before the heavy sleep dragged me under again. What he was saying now made no sense whatsoever.

  “Incubi don’t exist, and demons are not real. What are you saying? And why are you saying this to me?”

  He inhaled. “Because it is the truth, Alyssa. I don’t lie. I do not have much imagination left to invent a lie even if I wanted to. It takes too much energy…”

  “You can’t expect me to believe it, Sytrius.” I shook my head. “It’s… it’s just… Oh, come on! Don’t you feel it yourself that this conversation is beyond weird, if not outright ridiculous?”

  I sighed in frustration.

  “Who do you believe I am? What would be more real to you?”

  I thought about it for a minute. Who was he? Who were the people at the base? People? I had doubted that they were humans on more than one occasion, mostly because of their super strength. Then there was also that sparkly thing that their eyes did. Well, at least S
ytrius’s eyes did it, I couldn’t be sure about the others. Still, there was way too much from humans in them to assume anything as supernatural as demons, even if I could accept any demonic existence in this world in the first place.

  I thought back to my previous speculations to answer his question. What other, hopefully more plausible explanations, did I have? Cyborgs? Genetically or mechanically modified humans? Robots, kind of like Terminator? Should I ask Sytrius to cut his arm in demonstration for me, to see if that would expose any wires inside? Well, any of the explanations I could come up with seemed just as crazy as the one he had given me…

  My head was hurting only more now. Then, I also recalled the cooling sensation from their touch on my skin and shuddered involuntarily just thinking about it. That thing did not feel as if it belonged to this world at all.

  My brain was working overtime, trying to find a more or less reasonable explanation for that too. Medication? Mind-altering drugs? I was never aware of any injections administered to me, but maybe it was airborne, pumped through the vents in the ceiling? Is that why they wore masks, to avoid inhaling it themselves? What was the purpose of deceiving me, though? I kept looking at him with thoughts rushing through my head, each one only more outlandish than the other.

  “I don’t know, Sytrius…” I finally whispered in defeat. “Please tell me. Please don’t lie to me. Please, don’t scare me…”

  “What would you have me say to make you believe me, Alyssa?” He got off the chair and walked towards the wall of rock closest to us. He sounded like he was thinking out loud. “What would you have me do?” He reached the wall and turned around to look at me directly. “Look closely then and don’t get scared. I’ll be right back.”

  In the weak light of the lantern, I wasn’t sure what happened then. At first I thought that the wall had parted somehow or that there was a hidden movable panel somewhere. I didn’t hear any noise of moving parts, though. Sytrius moved closer to the wall, still keeping his eyes on me. His back was flush with the wall for a fraction of a second, and then he stepped backwards into the wall, moving right through it. It looked like he disappeared inside the wall or that it just absorbed him! It happened so suddenly and unexpectedly, a short choked noise got caught in my throat, and I jumped to my feet. My legs gave out immediately with my knees buckling and sending me back into the chair right away.

  “Sytrius…” I called cautiously. Did I really want him to come back after seeing this? The cave felt too big and too suffocating at the same time.

  “I’m here.” I heard his voice as he appeared out of the wall again, about a foot or so to the side from the spot where he had walked into.

  “What was that? What did you do?”

  “I walked through to the other side,” he said simply and came back to the table.

  “The other side of what...?”

  “Of the wall.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. I just always could do it.”

  “How come I never saw you do it before? Why did you even bother with the door to my cell then?”

  “It is not allowed. It is in the rules. The less humans know, the better.” He lowered himself into the chair opposite of me again. “Besides, I didn’t want to scare you or make you more nervous for no reason. You seemed to respond better when I followed a routine. It kept things more normal for you. Predictability made you feel safe.”

  “False feeling of security as it turned out to be,” I stated flatly.

  I thought back to the night I was taken. I guessed that would have been the reason why my alarm never went off that night until after my captors dragged me out of the door. If they could go through walls so easily, no alarm system would have ever stopped them; no lock on the door, either. He was right, though, knowing he could do this would have messed with my head and would have made it much more difficult for me to trust him. For goodness’ sake, it was messing with my head now!

  “Sytrius. Were you one of those, who took me from my home in Toronto?” I wasn’t sure why it was important for me to know the answer to this question. What difference did it make now anyway?

  “No, I never did Source retrievals in the Army. I was doing something like police work, enforcing the law of the Council among the incubi.”

  His answer did not necessarily make me feel any better in general, but I was relieved to know that he was not one of my abductors.

  Demon or cyborg, I still needed him to explain a lot of things that happened, as well as to tell me what was going to happen next.

  “Sytrius, please tell me what he did to me. Why am I here? Are you going to take me back again? Will you hurt me?” I gave up trying to identify any most important questions and just rushed out with all of them at once.

  “No,” he said firmly, choosing to answer the last question first. “I will never hurt you, Alyssa.”

  “Will you let the guy in white robe hurt me again?”

  “No,” he said again. “That’s why I took you from the base. I don’t want them to hurt you again.”

  “You took me? As in without their permission?” I clarified. “They didn’t order you to move me from there? Is ‘the base’ that basement where they were holding me in the cell?”

  “Yes.” It wasn’t immediately clear which of the questions he answered this time. He reached to rub his forehead before his hand encountered the hard material of the mask, and he lowered the hand back onto the table. “…Base of Western Council of Incubi. The man who hurt you is Raim, Grand Master of Western Council. He took most of your life energy last night. That’s why you’re not feeling well today. You will need good food and a long rest to restore the energy. For reasons I cannot name for sure, he did not drain you entirely. Fortunately, it gave me a chance to take you out of there, so I did,” he continued and then added with conviction. “You were no longer safe there. It would have been just a matter of time until they drained you. All Sources are drained and terminated eventually.”

  “Sources?” I repeated. My head was swimming with pain, and I wasn’t sure what part of everything he just said I should be focusing on first. None of it made much sense, to be honest.

  “Sources of energy, humans like you,” he explained.

  The realization of what that meant hit me with the force of a freight train.

  “They were sucking energy out of me, weren’t they? All the time I was there?” I said through my teeth with disgust. “That’s why they had me there? That’s why they took me in the first place, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Sexual energy is the main source of nourishment for incubi. We can’t create it ourselves. We need humans for that. The Sources.”

  A lot of it started to make sense now, despite my headache. The sexual stimulations, the forced orgasms… That’s why they never seemed excited or aroused themselves: they weren’t there for an orgy. They weren’t getting off by watching a naked girl come. They were feeding… I shuddered. And he… I raised my eyes to catch his through the openings of the mask again …and he was one of them.

  “Did you…” I started. “Were you… doing things to me there… to suck the energy out of me too?” I asked quietly.

  Was I really having this conversation? Was it my life now? I would have laughed if I didn’t feel the overwhelming sadness and disappointment taking over me.

  “Alyssa.” He leaned towards me across the table, keeping his eyes on mine. “I had never touched your life force. Taking it, even a little bit, would have hurt you, like you are hurting now. All incubi at the base feed by skimming feelings and emotions from the Sources. We are only allowed to take them after they had already left the surface of your body. This way you feel nothing and are not harmed.”

  He didn’t answer my question, though, not really. So I also put my hands on the table between us and leaned forward, towards him.

  “Sytrius, did you…” My voice caught, but I was determined to finish. I swallowed the lump in my throat and continued slowl
y, pronouncing every word, “Did you molest and abuse me…”

  “I did not…” he interrupted. His voice rose in protest; even the mask couldn’t hide the fact that he was confused and agitated.

  “Answer the question!” I yelled, cutting him off. “Did you molest and abuse me on that fucking cross to feed yourself and the other perverts? Did you force me to orgasm night after night so that you could suck ‘my energy’ for dinner?”

  I didn’t need to hear his answer. I already felt lower than dirt. Used. All this time, I was not only treated like a cattle by them, I actually was no more and no better than cattle. A food “source”.

  The worst part was that I was no more than a food source to him too. He had made me feel like I had a friend there. I was beginning to hope that he cared… Tears sprang to my eyes, and my hands shook.

  “Alyssa.” I heard his voice crack with emotion. He was pleading with me now. “I did not abuse, molest or force… God help me… I… Please, Alyssa… I helped create pleasure inside of you…”

  “Pleasure?” I asked in a low even voice, despite the seething anger inside me. “Pleasure is supposed to be the result of a consensual act. Have you ever asked for my consent? Has anyone? Did you ever care if I wanted to be touched when you touched me?”

  “I always knew that my touch was welcomed by you.” He said slowly, carefully but with conviction.

  “Oh, my God! Don’t even go there!” I practically screamed and raised my hand between us. “This is like the classic, lame excuse of a rapist: ‘I know you liked it.’ It’s sick! And criminal! And, and…”