Succubi

not authorize further hypnosynthesis or narcoanalysis. They were satisfied that Tharp was just a bipolar schizophrenic acting out a dream delusion. The case was closed. But that did not erase the discrepancies. No wonder Greene was never satisfied. Erik Tharp clearly suffered from a hallucinotic delusion, yet his tarsal plate reactivity, his psych test results, and his visual assessment scores did not indicate delusional behavior. These weren’t things a person could fake. He put the transcripts up and dug back into the bag, extracting the notebooks. Tharp’s only real recreation on the ward was drawing. Immediately, Dr. Harold noticed a rudimentary yet detailed artistic skill. The drawings were fascinating; there were hundreds of them. Many of the strange words from Tharp’s monologues had been written between the scenes. Husl. Peow. Wreccan. A sketch of a queue of naked women cutting up a man had been underscored with: Wihan. More women looked up to a full moon with arms outstretched: doefolmon. Many of the sketches depicted orgies, nude women drawn to great detail on top of blank faced men. Sexespelle, they read, and many had subordinate figures standing aside, similarly blank faced. Yet one face in each was obviously Tharp’s artistic rendition of himself: pallid, wide eyed, staring. And here was a full page sketch: he’d drawn himself holding a shovel in some dense forest dell. Byrgorwreccan, it read. Patients, particularly schizophrenics and hallucinotics, frequently created their own vocabularies for their personal dementias. The word Fulluht-Loc appeared frequently, and even more frequently: liloc.

It was all sexual. Tharp’s madness must have been a byproduct of gross sexual fears. He didn’t hate women, like temporal misogynists, he feared them. The male figures in the sketches had been assigned crude facial identities. But the women were different. Their bodies had been drawn to painstaking erotic detail, yet there was one thing they all lacked.

Faces.

None of the women had faces, and that was another clear sign of a delusional sexual phobia. He can’t, Dr. Harold realized. He can’t draw their faces because he’s afraid to.

Dr. Harold turned a random page. He paused.

Here was a face.

God, he thought. Its clarity stunned him. He was looking at a full page drawing of a woman. The moon shone through brambles and streaks of trees; the woman was standing in a dell. Dr. Harold actually shivered. The sketch was more than a sketch—it was a dichotomy, a wedding of extremes. Revulsion clashed with erotic beauty. The perverse clashed with the reverent. What was going on in Tharp’s mind when he penned this? Dr. Harold had seen quite a bit of patient artwork in his time. Art was a catharsis, and a demented person’s catharsis logically reflected demented art. But this…

Dr. Harold had never seen anything like it. It was atrocious… and lovely. Eloquent, and harrowing. He’d never looked at a work of art so beautiful and yet so obscene.

The woman stood beseechingly. Her hands were out, as if to invite embrace, yet the fingers were exceedingly long, and nails protracted like sleek, fine talons. Long legs rose to form a perfect hourglass figure. The breasts had been drawn so scrupulously they seemed three dimensional upon the page. They were high, large, with large dark circles for nipples. The pubis had been drawn similarly: a shining, downy thatch against pure white skin. The woman’s hair was a great dark mane. Twin diminutive nubs seemed to protrude from the forehead, almost like—

Like horns, Dr. Harold realized.

And the face…

The face was nothing more than two slitlike eyes above a black opened maw full of needle teeth.

—

Chapter 18

Something bothered Martin all day. The dream, of course. The naked girls queerly painting trees in the middle of the night. The parcels he’d buried, and then Melanie… And Maedeen…

He tried all day to forget about it. Even Ann, with her own dream traumas, had noticed he wasn’t himself. They’d had lunch and taken a drive. He’d hoped a nice scenic drive would get his thoughts away, but anywhere he looked he saw the woods, and when he saw the woods he saw the dream. They’d driven by the general store and he’d seen Maedeen outside sweeping the walk. She’d turned and waved as if she’d sensed them driving by. Martin subtly shuddered. The momentary glimpse gave him an erection.

All right, I’m attracted to her, he realized. So what? That’s why God made women good looking, isn’t it?

But it was more than that. He knew it was.

That morning, he and Ann had made love. Lately, it seemed something wasn’t right between them, that she wasn’t enjoying it. Male paranoia, he’d always concluded. Was he rationalizing? It was a fact he didn’t want to face: this time, when they’d made love, he hadn’t been thinking of Ann at all. He had been thinking of Maedeen.

Suddenly, Ann shivered.

“What’s wrong?”

She looked distractedly past the windshield, just as Martin pulled the Mustang around the town square, past the church. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just feel fidgety.” But it seemed that she’d shivered just as they’d passed the church.

“You didn’t sleep well last night. You had the nightmare again, didn’t you?”

Ann nodded. “It keeps getting worse, and there’s more to it now, more details. And lately…” Her words trailed off.

“And?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She seemed confused. “Lately, I’ve been having some kind of vertigo. Like just now. I’ll be wide awake, and all of a sudden I’ll see something.”

Martin slowed through the crossing lights. “What did you see?”

Ann shivered again. “Nothing.”

Martin knew when to lay off. “You’re not getting enough sleep,” he ventured. “This nightmare’s turning you inside out. Maybe you should call Dr. Harold, see what he thinks.”

“No, that would be silly. I will not let my whole life shake apart because of a stupid nightmare.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Martin said. “I had a nightmare last night too.”

Ann looked at him abruptly. “Melanie’s also having nightmares.”

“It must run in the family,” Martin attempted to laugh it off. “Relax, will you? You worry way too much about her.”

“Martin, let’s not get into that again.”

“Okay, okay.” He headed back to the house. But he knew he was right. Ann’s difficulties were compounding. Her father dying, her mother’s adversity, the canceled vacation. Now she had this “vertigo” in conjunction with the nightmare. Too many things were building up at once, weighing her down.

Martin wondered how close she was to breaking.

«« — »»

Ann didn’t know what to tell him. Sooner or later he’s going to think I’m going nuts. Yes, her nightmare just kept getting worse, and now this vertigo. She couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. Was it part of the dream she wasn’t remembering? It was like a gory daydream. Wide awake she’d suddenly shiver—

—and see red.

She’d see hands plunging a knife into someone, a wide silver blade sinking repeatedly into naked flesh. The dead silent backdrop made it even worse; in this vision all she could hear was the steady slup slup slup of the knife. And all she could see: blood flying everywhere, breasts and