Succubi

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, wihan, 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.