Succubi

“That’s right, peow,” Milly said. “We’re fucking your daughter…”

Ann’s father was shaking, murmuring in bursts. Eventually, his twisted mouth formed words. “Guo the wifhands,” he croaked. An IV line tore from his arm. “Guo the Fulluht-Loc…”

“Listen to him.” Maedeen chuckled. “He can’t even talk right anymore, the stupid helot.”

“Uor mut go!”

Ann tried to get up, to go to him, but she couldn’t move.

“He didn’t really have a stroke, Ann,” Maedeen said, licking her fingers. “Dr. Heyd gave him something to fuck up his brain.”

“Doefolmon!” the old man shouted as best he could. “Uor mut—”

Maedeen and Milly got up. Ann pleaded, “Help him!”

“Oh, we’ll help him, all right,” Milly assured. She was standing by the night table now. Maedeen leaned over the bed.

“Es unwi! Es dwola!”

“Shut up, you old fuck,” Maedeen said. “Or we might decide to kill you right now.”

“I don’t know why we don’t,” Milly commented. She was preparing an injection. Ann screamed at her but still couldn’t budge against whatever power kept her on the floor.

“The wifmunuc wants him alive for a while longer,” Maedeen said. “To keep Ann here.”

What were they talking about? What were they doing?

“Huro liloc!” Ann’s father grated. “Huro succubi!”

Maedeen climbed on the bed. Her pendant swayed as she squatted over the old man’s face. “Peow, thane,” she said. She began to urinate. “Wihan,” she said, glaring down.

“What are you doing!” Ann wailed. “He’s a sick old man!”

“He’s a peow,” Milly corrected. “And we piss on peows.”

Now the old man was gagging, coughing urine as Maedeen pissed in his mouth. “That should quiet him down a little.”

Milly jammed a needle into his arm. “Dother to Dother,” he gurgled. Then he fell limp in the sheets.

Ann continued to scream at them, but they only laughed at her outrage. Now Milly was refilling the phallus with milk. “My turn,” Maedeen said. The two naked women exchanged grins. Then Maedeen strapped on the device.

Ann looked up in horror. “Wha—what are you going to do?”

Milly laughed. Maedeen was smearing Vaseline over the shining, veined phallus.

“Guess,” she answered.

«« — »»

Ann awoke screaming. She jerked up in the dark, glanced frantically about, then screamed once more. Martin was not in bed with her. Her sex felt sore. Pinkish moonlight eddied through the gap in the curtains. Her nightgown billowed as she flew out of the room and down the hall. Her father lay unconscious in the bed, the heart monitor beeping steadily. Milly was not here. Ann leaned over her father’s sunken face. The face was dry, the pillow clean. Then she scampered to the other end of the house. Her mother’s room was empty, the bed unslept in. Nor did she find Melanie in her own room. Confusion infuriated her. She checked the house top to bottom.

No one was here.

Where is everybody, goddamn it! she demanded. It’s past midnight, and everybody’s gone!

In the kitchen, she tried to calm herself down. She drank some juice, wishing it were scotch. This was inexcusable. Martin must be at the bar, getting drunk. And Melanie must be with these new weird friends of hers. And her mother, and Milly, where could they be this late?

Images of the dream felt like splinters in her brain. She felt so disgusted she wanted to throw up. She’d been raped by women, by a hideous milk-spurting phallus and a fist. She’d watched Maedeen urinate into her father’s face. Where did Ann’s mind dredge up such obscene, pornographic imagery? What would Dr. Harold say? What did it mean?

Worse was that it seemed so real. Her sex and rectum ached dully. Harold would claim the dream meant she didn’t trust anyone, that she subconsciously feared those who seemed the most innocuous. And as for the dull ache, “conative sensory dream-supplantation,” he would say, or something similar. “It’s common for tactile stimuli to linger after night terrors,” he’d told her once.

Her mind felt like a meld of ground meat. She could scarcely distinguish between dream and reality these days. What had happened today? The store, Maedeen’s files. Had that been a dream too? No, no! she felt certain. It couldn’t have been! She’d seen the birth records. In the last fifteen years over a dozen male babies had been born, and they’d all been put up for adoption. Why? Why were the only men in Lockwood transients? Why were the only children girls?

Simmer down, she thought. She went back upstairs, to her room. She hated it here. She wanted to be back in the city, back at the firm. Everything was going wrong. Martin and Melanie had never been more distant. Her mother’s disapproval of her had only intensified. Nothing was right.

Spikes of the dream returned. The mocking, naked women. The bizarre pendants between their breasts, and the even more bizarre words. They’d implied they wanted Melanie for something.

…she’s a virgin…she’s just what we need for…

Surely Dr. Harold would claim this was only her subconscious symbolizing her fear of Melanie’s vulnerability as she approached adulthood. Why did Ann sense something phony about it all?

Through the curtains, she peered at the moon. The moon peered back. Something about the dream pendants bothered her. The pink moonlight seemed to jar something loose. The pendants, like little stones. Of course, she realized. They seemed to bear the same cryptic symbol in her recurring nightmare of Melanie’s birth. Rough, misshapen double circles.

Ann, Ann, a voice seemed to drift in her head. She was suddenly exhausted. Was she dreaming standing up?

The moon shimmered.

Go back to bed, Ann.

Ann yawned, vigorously shook her head.

Go back to sleep…

She climbed back into bed and buried herself beneath the covers.

Go back to sleep and dream…

—

Chapter 26

“It’s English,” the old man said without pause.

Dr. Harold didn’t understand. “English? But how—”

“Old English, Doctor. Or I should say it’s really more of an amalgamation, a rough mix of specific linguistic influences. Old English, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, and…something else I can’t identify. Something that looks older.”

Dr. Harold was at this moment sitting in the faculty office of one Professor Franklin M. Fredrick, who had been referred to him through the campus information desk. Fredrick was the head of the archaeology department, and also an expert on mythology and ancient religion. Various degrees decorated the cramped office, as well as many relics. Dr. Harold had brought Erik Tharp’s entire hospital file in hopes that Fredrick might shed some light on the technical aspects of Tharp’s delusion.

“I use the term Old English as a generalization,” Fredrick was saying, scanning the transcripts of Tharp’s narcoanalysis and psychotherapy sessions. “What I mean is the language of the island of England, or Angle-land, before it became influenced by the Germanic invasion of about 450