Succubi

Now the heat swelled to a prickling intensity. Ann felt sweat gather liberally between her breasts and trickle down her sides. Her sex felt tingling, but from what? Her breasts felt enflamed with desire.

“Receive this offering…”

But there was no desire in her heart, only a misshapen terror. Receive this offering… She shivered in the heat as she realized what it was she lay upon: a stone altar.

Receive this offering—

A stone altar, a sacrificial slab. The kin sacrifice, she remembered Tharp’s words just before he’d died. This rock slab was what Ann was to be sacrificed upon, by her own daughter.

It’s like a trigger to the whole ritual, Tharp had said. The final offering to the Ardat-Lil.

The coven grinned down at her. From either side, Milly and Maedeen touched her daintily, as though her naked flesh were iconic. Her mother remained at the foot of the altar. Her silken mentel was so fine as to be partly transparent. The woman’s body showed through the sheer material. Though close to sixty now, her large dark- nippled breasts scarcely sagged at all. Her body had remained firm, robust.

“You’ve been dreaming, haven’t you?” the wifmunuc inquired.

Now the recurring nightmare came together: Melanie’s birth as a foreshadow to this night. Through her mother’s malefic ploy, Ann had given birth to a child destined to become a monster.

“Yes,” the woman said. “You’ve been shown all along. Do you understand now? You are a keystone to history. Do you understand how important you are?”

Ann still felt rooted to the slab, but she could lean up to look her mother back square in the face. “You want Melanie for this madness!” she screamed.

“Dother fo Dother,” Milly said.

“Daughter of the Daughter,” Maedeen translated.

“Our savior,” Ann’s mother added. “Our deliverer.”

“This is crazy!” Ann spat. “You’re all crazy!”

“Through this holiest night, our god will come among us in the flesh, Ann. To bless us for the next thousand years.”

Behind her, Dr. Heyd opened a long thin box. From the box, Martin and Chief Bard lifted a gossamer-like gown of the purest, sheerest white.

“Rise,” Ann’s mother said.

Ann’s paralysis loosened. She felt like a puppet being risen by wires. The elderwomen guided her off the altar, urged her forward. Her arms raised by no volition of her own. Then the stunning paralysis returned. She stood upright but could move no further.

“Bring the mentel.”

Martin trudged forward. He slipped the lambent gown over Ann’s head. It slid against her flesh like mist. Martin stood to look at her; his eyes shone dull, flattened. No recognition was exchanged.

Then he walked away.

“Melanie has served well,” her mother said. “We all have.”

The white gown must be some symbolic raiment, a ritual garment in which to be sacrificed. “Where is she?” Ann croaked.

“You’ve been dreaming of it all along,” her mother replied.

Maedeen added, “But it wasn’t Melanie’s birth you were dreaming of.”

“It was your own,” her mother finished.

Ann felt lost in this information. In her confusion she could only stare back at her mother’s gaze.

“You are the Daughter of the Daughter, Ann. You are the new Ardat-Lil.”

Ann tremored with the words. Her eyes felt skinned open. In the high ground window, the pink moon bloated to fullness. Only then did she note that the edges of her gown were wet. In panic, she glanced down. Her arms were slick to the elbows with blood.

The circle parted for her to see.

On the earthen floor a naked figure lay: a corpse in a great spread of blood. The heart had been cut out of the bosom and laid aside next to a long, wide knife.

Ann gasped through vision like a chasm, or like staring down from the highest place of the earth. The butchered corpse was Melanie. It was her blood that now dripped fresh from Ann’s hands.

The wifmunuc pointed to the rear wall of the church. “Look into the nihtmir, Ann. Look into the face of our queen.”

The great slab of stone seemed charged now with some spiriferous energy. Its flat pocked surface changed before her eyes, to a perfect silver plane.

Ann gazed into the reflection of her own face.

Crimson spheres gazed back at her. The mouth opened in horrid astonishment, a colossal black orifice full of shardlike cuspids and incisors. Shining silken hair hung adrift in the night-mirror’s radiant static energy.

She raised a hand to touch her cheek, but it was not a finger that appeared in the mirror’s veins. It was a long, sleek talon, sharp as an awl.

High atop her forehead, two diminutive nubs protruded.

She turned to reface the coven. All members then fell at once to their knees, voicing prayers of praise and homage to their deliverer in the flesh.

The Ardat-Lil smiled down upon its new flock.

—

Epilogue

The night had indeed thwarted him, the night in all its loss of reason, its queer moonlight, and its inexplicability. He’d taken three wrong turns, and twice he’d found himself driving unlit back roads in circles. Then the driver’s-side front tire had blown. Half an hour later, the spare had blown. He’d driven on the rim awhile, and next the oil pump had seized up. It had only taken a few minutes before most moving parts of the engine had fused.

He’d had no choice then but to walk the rest of the way. Not one vehicle had passed him, not one potential ride. By the time he’d actually made it to the small secluded municipality of Lockwood, dawn was less than an hour away.

Dr. Harold felt lost even when he’d found it. The town lay in total darkness. The police station and fire hall were empty. He walked several residential streets, and found doors wide open, no persons within. More walking and he realized that he had yet to see a single car anywhere in the township’s perimeter.

Piqued, he made his way back to the main drag. He stood in the middle of the desolate street and looked up. Just above the high steeple of the church, the moon shone down. It looked bloated to hugeness, gravid. Its weird pink light seemed hideous now. It tinted his face, blurred in his eyes.

Moon of the devil, he thought. Moon of the succubus.

The pink light made him feel enslimed in some portent, or some chasmal acknowledgment.

What? he asked himself on the dark street. An acknowledgment of what, for God’s sake?

It was in the church that he found it, or actually the basement of the church. Another church of sorts, a chancel of evils which refused to allow description. The air was warm in these cramped confines. Behind a small room which looked like living quarters, he discovered the lair of their black reverence. Much blood was seen soaked into the dirt floor. The stench of cooked flesh wafted before his face like ghosts. Perhaps they were ghosts, the remnants of spirits freed through heinous acts. Blood had dried to shellacked blackness atop a great stone altar; charred bones and skulls lay scattered about, amid indescribable scraps of fleshy sinew.

This church was as empty as the entire town. Its population had fled, but to where, and for what? Where did they all go? he wondered.