Succubi

“Happy writing,” she offered.

Alone now she felt even more of a shitheel. She’d never expressed any active interest in his writing because she didn’t know how to. That, and what she’d almost wrongly accused him of, made her feel very low, and lower still considering her lewd foray with Milly.

Milly, she thought again. What would she say next time she saw her? She dreaded their next meeting. But she’d have to see her soon, to check on her father. This morning, Dr. Heyd had told her that her father seemed to have stabilized from last night’s blunder, but that could change any minute. Shivering, she remembered the nightmare, the vertigo, and the new words the dream had whispered in her mind. Dother fo Dother But what could that mean? The words made no sense. Then she remembered where they’d come from: they’d been some of the words her father had written last night when he’d come conscious. The dream had merely transplanted the words into its own scape.

That made her feel a little better. But there was still Milly. Total recollection evaded her. In pieces, she remembered what they’d done together, and she even remembered how much she’d liked it. But what had happened afterward? Ann had wakened on the couch, downstairs, not in Milly’s bed.

In dread, she went up the stairs, down the hall. She could hear the awful heart monitor. She stepped in and stopped. Milly was taking her father’s blood pressure. Innocuously, she looked up. “Oh, hi, Ann.”

Hi, Ann? Ann thought. Ruffled, she gazed at the nurse.

“What’s wrong?”

Ann cleared her throat. “Milly, I want to talk to you about last night.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Milly perkily replied. She looked fresh, rested, bereft of taint. “Your father’s fully stabilized.”

“That’s not what I’m referring to,” Ann proceeded. “I mean, you know…last night.”

“What about last night?” Milly casually removed the cuff from Ann’s father’s thin arm. She wore her typical nurse’s outfit, the white dress, white stockings, and white shoes. She acted as though nothing were amiss.

“Are you all right?” She came right up to Ann, put her hand on her forehead. “You look pale.”

“I’m fine, Milly, I just—shit! I’m really bothered about what we did last night.”

Milly laughed softly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I went right back to bed after we stabilized your dad. I slept till three a.m., then Dr. Heyd woke me up so he could go home.” Her concerned look deepened. “Oh, you must’ve had a fight with Martin last night.”

“What? What makes you say that?”

“I came downstairs a couple of times to get a Coke, and I saw you sleeping on the couch. You were tossing and turning. Bad dreams?”

Ann didn’t get it. “Milly, wait a minute. I slept on the couch last night? All night?”

“Of course, don’t you remember? I just assumed you had a fight with Martin, so that’s why you weren’t sleeping with him.”

Ann gauged her next question. “Milly, did I come into your room last night?”

Milly gave her a canted look. “My room? No. Why?”

Ann stared, fully confused. Then Milly said, “You poor thing. You mustn’t have slept well at all. Do you feel okay? You don’t seem to have a fever. Do you want me to get you something?”

But Ann felt better at once, much better. A dream, she realized. She shuddered at the imagery: Milly’s pubis in her face, her dirty talk, and the hideous black phallus. I dreamed the whole thing. “No, no,” she answered at last. “I’m fine, just a little mixed-up. I had the strangest dream last night.”

“It must have been a humdinger,” Milly responded. “The way you were tossing and turning on the couch. I was a little worried.”

“I’m fine,” Ann repeated. “I’ll talk to you later, I’ve got some errands to run.”

“Okay. Bye.”

Ann nearly skipped out of the room. The dream had been so intense she’d actually thought it was real. Knowing now that it wasn’t made her jubilant. What do you say about that, Dr Harold? I’m not a latent lesbian after all.

Back downstairs, she stopped on the landing. She looked down. More steps descended to the fruit cellar, which she’d seen her mother locking yesterday. Ann felt piqued. Her recurring nightmare of Melanie’s birth originated at the bottom of those stairs, where she’d given birth to Melanie for real seventeen years ago. Suddenly, she wanted to go down—she felt she needed to, if for no other reason but to confront the landscape of the nightmare. Perhaps if she saw it again, after all this time, she might realize what it was that distressed her subconscious to this extreme. What harm could there be?

She went down the stairs, feeling suddenly ill. Each step down showed her another detail of the nightmare. The hands straying over the pregnant belly. The hovering double-orbed emblem. The cloaked figure standing between her legs waiting for her to deliver the newborn Melanie. And the arcane words: “Dooer, dooer.” Ann quickly decided she didn’t want to go back into this room, yet she felt she must. She felt it contained some secret she needed to know. She could not explain the compulsion.

She turned the knob and swore. The door was still locked. It infuriated her. Why on earth did her mother insist on keeping this door locked? It was just a fruit cellar.

Now she felt driven. She raced back up the stairs. “Mother!” she called out. She checked everywhere, every room on every floor. She asked Milly, but Milly hadn’t seen her. Ann’s mother was not in the house.

Goddamn it, she thought. Where the hell is she?

«« — »»

The wifmunuc scowled. Chief Bard was scared; that look on her face filled him with the basest kind of dread. He’d parked the cruiser behind the fire hall. She took a final glance at Zack’s shotgunned body, then slammed the trunk closed.

“This cannot be tolerated,” she said.

“I know,” Chief Bard admitted. His rotund stomach squirmed. Sweat broke out on his high brow.

“We’ve been violated, blasphemed.” The wifmunuc’s eyes were somewhere else, in the sky, past the trees. Bard felt grateful. They’d inspected the cirice together; Bard noted details that had escaped his earlier inspection. Amid the vandalism, they’d discovered a gas can. It was full. Clearly, Tharp had intended to set fire to their holy place. But he hadn’t, as though he’d been interrupted. Something had stopped him, but what?

“He’s out there somewhere, Chief Bard. He could ruin everything. Find him, stop him at all costs.”

Bard’s collar dug deep into his fat neck. “There’s only me and Byron. I need help. The only way I can guarantee Tharp’s apprehension is to call the state police.”

The wifmunuc glared at the suggestion. “You will find him yourself, Chief Bard. Bringing in an outside agency is far too great a risk. They might find something we don’t want them to find. You will capture that miserable wretch yourself. Is that clear?”

Bard dared not look into her eyes. Like a furnace they were, like pits of hatred, of terror. “I understand,” he said.

“He has offended us. He has tainted us in our holy grace. You will catch him and put an end to his heresy.”

Bard gulped, nodded.

Suddenly, she was gazing high up into the sky. “Just two more nights,” she whispered, smiling. “Such glory awaits us all.”

Bard knew what she was talking about. He also knew what would happen to him if he didn’t nail Tharp. “What about Zack?” he asked, more to change the subject.

She glanced with distaste to the cruiser’s trunk. “Must I tell you everything? Bury the wreccan scum and get on with your job. You’re wasting time. Her time.”

“Yes,” Bard said.

The wifmunuc gazed at him now, her awful eyes boring into his own. She gingerly touched the pendant at her bosom. “Give ælmesse to me. Give lof.”

Aw, God, no, he thought.

“You know what to do.”

Humiliation, debasement, that’s what she meant. They made him to it regularly. He unzipped his police trousers, pulled out his penis. There was nothing erotic about these circumstances, of course, but the fear of punishment always compelled the needed response. A few hard thoughts of this month’s Playboy had him erect in a few moments.

“Go on, go on…”

He jerked off in fast, desperate yanks, then numbly ejaculated into his hand. Jesus, he thought, regaining his breath. He knew what she wanted. He smirked and licked his semen out of his palm, swallowed with a bitter gulp.

“Good. Now kneel,” she commanded.

Bard knelt in the dirt. He could either kneel of his own before the evil bitch, or she could make him. He had long ago learned the futility of resisting them. Beads of sweat twitched down his bald pate. The taste of his own sperm was bad enough, but now it would just get worse.

“Yes,” she said, “drink of me.” She raised her dress to her waist. The thick thatch of her pubis shined in the sun. Chief Bard dutifully propped open his mouth as the wifmunuc began to piss into his face. She grinned down at her fat little peow, guiding the hot stream directly into his mouth. Wincing, he gulped down each caustic mouthful, felt the awful heat spread in his belly. When she’d finished, he knelt before her, dripping piss in the sun.

“You will find our little brygorwreccan, Chief Bard, and you will bring him to me in pieces. Otherwise, the next wreccan pig we bury will be you.”

—

Chapter 23

Sr. Harold barely heard his patients. All afternoon, his mind kept straying, re-examining thoughts and images, and homing back to the disturbed psych ward artwork of Erik Tharp.

It ate at him. After his last private patient had left, Dr. Harold went right back into the bag of Tharp’s hospital records. The accounts, the bizarre drawings and words, were all he had to go on. Invented languages were nothing new to psychiatry; they accompanied many acknowledged psych profiles: tripolar schizophrenics, referential neurotics, autistics, etc. But Tharp fell into none of those categories. Dr. Harold looked more closely at the sketches. He found a clear coherence in theme, something ritualistic, which paralleled Tharp’s transcripted accounts when interviewed by Dr. Greene. Tharp had also very coherently applied the cryptic vocabulary to each drawing. Demons, Dr. Harold mused. Tharp said they worshipped a demon. He thumbed back through the pads, to attempt a correlation between the most often repeated words and what their corresponding sketches depicted. Peow and wreccan seemed to relate to the male caricatures, while loc and liloc obviously denoted the women. Brygorwreccan was the word Tharp had consistently applied to himself, the self-portrait with the shovel. Then came wîhan and hüsl, which were always written around a scene depicting a clear ritual act, violence, murder.

The demon was the keystone. Doefolmon, hustig, Fulluht-Loc. These words implied an event in the sketches, a repeated event. But why was the latter capitalized? Fulluht-Loc, he pondered. An event more significant than the others?

I’m a psychiatrist, not a demonologist, he reminded himself. Perhaps he was attempting to decrypt Tharp’s delusions from the wrong angle. Tharp possessed a delusional sexual phobia.

Most phobias and hallucinotic fugue-themes had some basis in truth, something the patient had heard or read, seen on TV. Objectify, Dr. Harold thought now, staring at the pads. Rituals. Sacrifices. Cults. He wondered. The sketches seemed almost mythological; they possessed a tone, a hint of something ancient, clandestine. Semicircles of figures in the woods, beneath the moon, naked, bowing. Worshipping something, he finished. Like the Druids or the Aztecs.

It wasn’t much to go on, but he could think of no other avenue by which to proceed. He flipped through the phone book, to the department listings at the university.

I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff, Dr. Harold reckoned. So I’ll find someone who does.

«« — »»

By midafternoon, Ann was bored. She felt useless, uninvolved. Melanie was with her friends, Martin was off writing. Everyone but Ann was busy with something. She lingered about the house and yard. She still hadn’t seen her mother around—another involvement—but that probably worked out for the best. Ann wished she had something useful to do, like help out with her father or something, pull weeds, paint the shutters, anything. She called her associate at the firm to find out how everything was going, and she was disappointed when he said, “Fine, Ann. Everything’s fine. Depositions are out, we’re firing back ’rogs a mile a minute, and JAX Avionics wants to settle before trial. Don’t worry about a thing.” She hung up, depressed.

She went for a walk through town. Maybe she’d run into Melanie and meet some of these friends of hers. But the streets stood idle as usual. A lot of cars were parked around the town hall; Ann’s mother, no doubt, was conducting another of her endless council meetings. It infuriated Ann how easily her mother went on with the moving parts of her life while Ann’s father lay dying. Perhaps that was just part of being realistic. Around the corner she saw several little girls playing near the woods. It reminded her how few children there seemed to be in Lockwood. She caught herself staring, and the little girls stared back. Then they broke and ran away, giggling. Next thing she knew, Ann was walking into the general store.

“Hi, Ann,” Maedeen looked up from behind the counter and smiled. “How are you today?”

“Fine,” Ann said. But why had she come in here? To begin with, Maedeen was not exactly her favorite person. “I’m just sort of wandering around. Where is everyone?”

“Town Hall. Today’s the monthly advisory council meeting. How’s your dad?”

“The same.” Saying that was a more refined way of saying the truth. He’s still dying. She browsed around the knickknacks, and sundries: quilts, handmade candles, porcelain dolls. Did people buy enough of this stuff to support the store? Behind the counter, Maedeen was typing. Further back, Ann noticed a room full of tall file cabinets. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Maedeen said, concentrating on her task. Then she zipped the page out of the old manual machine. “I’m also the town clerk,” she informed Ann. “Whenever there’s a meeting I have to prepare the minutes from the previous month, and I’m late.”

“Town clerk?” Ann queried.

“Yeah, aside from running the store, I keep all the town records on file.” She pointed to the little room full of cabinets. “In there.”

Now it made more sense. The store was just a local formality. Maedeen supported herself as a clerk.

“I have to run these over to your mother. Would you like to come?”

“Oh, no thanks.”

“Could you keep an eye on things for me? I’ll only be a few minutes.”

“Sure,” Ann said. Maedeen left with the sheaf of papers, the cowbell jangling after her. Alone now, Ann’s faint jealousy resurfaced. What could Martin see in her anyway, if he saw anything at all? I’m better looking than her, Ann childishly affirmed to herself. Maedeen was short and rather tomboyish, or tom-womanish, in this case. She always wore faded jeans and plain blouses, flip-flops. Melanie had told her that Maedeen’s husband had died. Ann wondered when, and why. She casually scanned the big glass bowls of candy along the counter, when she noticed the small framed picture amid Maedeen’s typewriter clutter. She knew she shouldn’t but she did anyway. She walked around the counter. She glanced out the front window; Maedeen was still heading briskly for the town square. Ann then went to the typewriter desk and picked up the picture. The snapshot showed Maedeen, a decade younger, sitting on a couch with a little girl—Wendlyn, her daughter. But in her arms, Maedeen held a naked baby. The baby was a boy.

Just like Milly. A baby boy.

This was very weird. Like Milly, Maedeen had only mentioned a daughter when they’d met. She’d said nothing about having a boy too. Why?

Don’t, she thought. It’s none of your business. Yet the lawyer in her couldn’t resist. She’d said she kept the town records here, hadn’t she? Ann glanced again out the window, to make sure it was safe. Then she went into the file room.

It didn’t take her long. BIRTH RECORDS, one drawer was clearly marked. She opened the drawer and began to rummage. What if someone comes in and sees me? But she ignored the suggestion. Her curiosity burned her. The files were alphabetical. FOST, MAEDEEN. Ann opened it and found a certificate of birth. But just one. FOST, WENDLYN. It was dated seventeen years ago. The signature of the delivering doctor was Ashby Heyd. There was no record of a boy being born. When Ann dug out Milly’s file, she found the same thing. Only Rena’s birth certificate.

So who were the baby boys? Were they relatives’ children?

Before Ann closed the drawer, she noticed a different colored folder in the very back. It possessed no heading. Ann picked it up, opened it.

Stared.

Several sheets of old paper. A typed list. MALE BIRTHS, the top of the sheet read.

She thumbed down the list of chronological dates.

FOST, MAEDEEN, MC 1-12-80, relinquished for adoption 1-23-80.

MC? Ann thought. Male child? It had to be.

She put the boy up for adoption, she realized. Why?

But that was not all. She found Milly’s name. GODWIN, MILLICENT, MC 6-15-82, relinquished for adoption 6-22-82.

My God, Ann thought.

The list went back fifteen years, women she’d never known or heard of. Each had an MC typed behind the name, a date of birth, and a date of adoption.

No wonder I haven’t seen any boys in town, Ann came to the bizarre conclusion. Their mothers put them all up for adoption.

—

Chapter 24

Scierors tied the figures down, laying open abdomens in single swipes. The helots still twitched as their organs were systematically removed. Heads were lopped off with great machetelike blades which whirred in the firelight. Genitals were sliced off groins. Some were thrown onto the fire whole, others were filleted first, the choice meats added to the boiling chettles of blood. Females, fattened for weeks on corn mash, were hauled screaming from the pens. Wreccans expertly flensed them alive as they thrashed, peeling off sheets of skin…

Erik shivered in the dark. These weren’t just visions, they were memories. They were the feks he’d watched in his past. And he’d seen it all again, in his mind, the instant he’d stepped back into the cirice.

He’d been lucky. Zack’s pickax had nailed his hand to the door. He’d reached the shotgun in time; fortunately, there’d been a round in the chamber. Zack’s knife had flashed. Just as it would’ve sunk hilt-deep into his solar plexus, Erik had squeezed the trigger. The 12-gauge blast knocked a hole into Zack’s chest, blowing him six feet across the room.

Gunsmoke rose, and a static silence. Erik dislodged the pick from his hand, bandaged himself, and entered the cirice.

Its darkness greeted him like an old friend, and its smell. The smell was always the same, like pork roast. The heat lingered in the air; embers still glowed from the great cooking pit.

The memories held him in numb stasis. He panned the flashlight through the nave, more pieces of his grim past. The chettles, the irons, carving knives, stokers, and the stone dolmen. Blood streaked the cinder-block wall, where they’d decapitated countless hüsls, and there were the iron hooks, from which they’d been hung upside down. Erik stared at all this for a length of time he could not determine. Last, he found himself gazing upon the back wall of the nave, at the uneven double-orbed sheet of gray stone, the—

“Night-mirror,” he muttered.

Leave, he thought. Leave this evil place and never come back. But he couldn’t do that, he knew he couldn’t. Who else would stop them? There’s only me, he realized.

Suddenly, he felt engulfed in rage. He broke, throwing things. He cleared the racks of utensils, kicked over the candelabra. The smaller chettles he picked up and threw, cracking them. The larger ones he could only tip over. Next, he grabbed a sledgehammer—which they used for cracking open heads—and attacked the dolmen with it. He banged and banged, but the thick granite wouldn’t break. With two-by-fours, then, he managed to lever the slab itself off its seat and slide it off the twin plinths. His rage roiled, carried him, and next he was slamming the sledgehammer against the face of the nihtmir. He slammed at it for minutes, almost mindlessly. When he stopped and looked at the slight damage he’d done, he thought: No, no, not good enough. But—

Of course. The maintenance shed, outside. Lawn equipment and… Gas, he thought.

He dashed back outside, around the side of the church. He was giddy with excitement. What a perfect way to announce his homecoming: burning the entire church to the ground. The studs in the basement would carry to the ceiling, then everything would go. He rummaged through the shed where they kept the mowers, and there it was, shiny red. A five-gallon gas can. It was almost full.

The pinkened moon followed him back to the stairs. It made him feel watched. Protect me, God, protect me, he thought, or prayed. When he was back in the cirice, he looked for the best way. Yeah, perfect, he thought. A full cord of wood lay neatly stacked against one wall. It would catch the studs, leading the flame to the wood rafters above. By the time the fire truck got here, the whole church would be in flames.

He unscrewed the cap, was about to douse the pile of wood with gas, when he stopped. Had he heard something? No, he felt something. He felt…

He set the can down, turned. Erik, Erik, he heard, but not in his ears, in his head. He stepped forward. Now a faint glow seemed to rise in the cirice, from the nave. Light like mist, like luminous fog. The fog seemed pink…

Erik. Brygorwreccan. Come.

“No,” he croaked in his ruined voice.

He was standing before the nihtmir. Its dead gray stone seemed to glow. Yes, he could see it, could see into it.

Something moved there, in the pinkened depths.

A face. A—

Her face, he thought, staring.

He couldn’t take his eyes away.

Protect me, God. Protect me.

The face smiled at him, a great maw jammed with teeth.

Hello, Erik, it said.

The smile lengthened, drawing up.

Erik screamed. He ran out of the cirice, up the stairs, and into the woods, his fear propelling him like a missile, away, away from that hideous unholy visage.

«« — »»

He lay awake now in the front seat of the van. He was staring up through the trees at the moon. The moon was pink. “Protect me, God,” he whispered. “Protect me.” But in his desperate prayer, he didn’t see God. All he saw was the perverse pinkish moon, and suffused in its sphere, the memory of her horrid face remained. Grinning at him.

—

Chapter 25

It was a dream. Of course it was.

It had to be.

Milly was unwrapping her warm legs from Ann’s face. Ann had no breath. “That wasn’t bad,” Milly said. “You’re learning.”

Milly’s naked body shined pale white in the lamplight. Excitement filled her nipples. Ann sat up, wiped her mouth off on her wrist. Where am I? she thought. She was sitting on a carpet. When she looked up, she gasped. She saw a bed, but why was she on the floor? Then she heard grim, steady beeping. This wasn’t Milly’s room at all. It was her father’s.

“Let’s see if I can find it,” Milly said. She was bending over one of the dresser drawers, looking for something.

But Ann was aghast. Her father’s pallid form lay still in the bed, his face sunken. Needles jammed in his arm led up to inverted IV bottles on wheeled stands. Suddenly, his old mouth popped open, and he groaned.

“You seemed to like the black one a lot last night,” Milly was commenting. Was that a bottle of milk on the dresser? “Ah, here it is. I think you’ll like this one even more.”

Ann wanted to scream when she saw what Milly was talking about. From the drawer, the nude nurse had extracted another strap-on phallus. But this one was flesh-colored, longer, and much thicker. Milly was on her knees now, calm as she strapped the grotesque apparatus onto her hips. She turned, still kneeling. The rubber prong pointed at Ann. “Suck it awhile,” Milly said. “Pretend it’s a real cock, and suck it.”

Ann felt shrinking. Her will tore like frayed fabric. She was repulsed, but she could not disobey.

As instructed, she commenced. Milly tittered. She leaned her groin forward, hands on hips, grinning. “That’s it, that’s a good little cocksucker.”

Ann, eyes squeezed shut, could barely get it in her mouth. She could feel the hideous molded veins. Against her tongue she could feel the hole centered in the bulblike glans.

“This one’s got balls too,” Milly said.

Ann remembered the molded rubber testicles of last night’s phallus. This one, though, was different. She brought her hand beneath it and felt a rubber bag of some kind, filled with some warm fluid. Then she saw the rest, a tube leading out, attached to a rubber squeezeball, a pump.

“Keep sucking,” Milly ordered. “Suck me like you do Martin.” She was sighing now, as though she really felt something. Ann was mortified, at Milly, and at herself for doing this. Why couldn’t she stop, get up, leave?

“Yeah, I wish I had a real cock,” Milly was saying, “just for tonight. A great big long real cock to fuck you with, to come all over your face with.”

Ann tried to perform her task more intently, for she knew when Milly tired of this, she’d want to put the monstrous thing somewhere else.

“Almost real, huh?” Milly was grinning. Then she pushed Ann’s mouth off. “Hold still,” she said. She began to stroke the rubber penis in front of Ann’s face.

“I—” Ann queried. “What are you—”

“Lean up.” The odd pale pendant lay between Milly’s breasts. “I’m going to come in your face.” Her other hand began to squeeze the rubber ball.

Ann flinched, closed her eyes. With each squeeze, the phallus squirted a jet of warm milk into Ann’s face.

“There. You like that?”

Ann could not respond. More milk jetted from the artificial glans. One spurt went right into Ann’s mouth. The rest ran down her breasts and legs.

Why is she doing this? Ann wondered in turmoil. Milk dribbled from her lips. Why can’t I leave?

That was certain. The more she wanted to flee from this perverse masquerade, the more she knew she couldn’t.

It’s a dream, she assured herself. Just a dream.

“Hands and knees,” Milly ordered.

“Milly, please. Don’t—”

Milly slapped her face. “Just do it.”

Milk dripped off Ann’s nipples. She shut her eyes, humiliated. Milly knelt right up behind her and inserted the rubberized phallus into Ann’s sex.

She nearly yelped. The thing was huge, it bulged her. She almost fainted when she felt how deeply the prosthetic probed her. Her mind seemed like a jigsaw, throwing pieces. Part of her thought, Thank God Dad’s unconscious, thank God he can’t see this, while another part continued to reassure, Don’t worry, it’s just a dream. It’s not real.

She gritted her teeth as the thing slid hugely in and out. Each thrust nudged the bulb of her cervix. “You like it, right?” Milly asked.

“Please, Milly, I—”

She slapped Ann’s right buttock hard as she could, like wet leather snapping. “Right?” she demanded.

“Yes, yes,” Ann replied. The slap print buzzed on her rump. But a forbidden inkling drifted up. Part of her did like it.

“Close your eyes and look,” Milly ordered next.

Ann didn’t understand. “Wha—”

Milly grabbed the back of her hair, pushed Ann’s face into the carpet.

“Look!”

Ann squeezed shut her eyes. Most of her mouth was pressed to the floor.

“Do you see?”

“See what?” Ann muffled.

“Her! Do you see her!”

Ann didn’t see anything but her own disgrace. Her hands and knees felt bolted to the floor.

“What have we here?” a voice asked from above. Maedeen walked in. She began taking off her clothes. “You’re breaking her in well, sweoster. Mind if I join in?”

Milly chuckled, pumping steadily. Maedeen sat down right in front of Ann, spreading her legs. She too had one of the little pale pendants about her neck. It looked shapeless, a little stone. She pulled Ann’s face to her crotch. “Eat it, yeah, that’s right.” Ann felt helpless; she lapped frantically at the musky flesh. She was crying, gasping for breath. “I fucked your precious Martin the other night,” Maedeen remarked. “Five or six times. I’ll fuck him anytime I want. He’s a good little peow. I’m already pregnant.”

“Oh, Maedeen,” Milly congratulated, grasping Ann’s hips. “That’s wonderful.”

“And you know what he’s doing now? Your precious Martin?” Milly laughed along with Maedeen. “He’s watching your daughter take a shower through a hole in the wall. He’s jerking off. But don’t worry, he wouldn’t dare touch her, he knows never to do that.”

“Melanie’s quite a beautiful girl, Ann,” Milly added. “And she’s a virgin.”

“She’s just what we need for the doefolmon.”

Ann could make nothing of this madness. She brought her face up long enough to plead, “Why are you doing this to me?”

“We’re initiating you,” Milly said, thrusting deeper.

Maedeen fingered the pendant between her smallish, big-nippled breasts. “We’re making you holy. For the doefolmon.”

“Ready, Annie?” Milly asked. She pulled Ann’s hips back, to effect maximum penetration. Ann squirmed; she felt skewered. “Come in her now,” Maedeen said, and pushed Ann’s face back down, and Milly was squeezing the rubber ball again, pumping. Ann felt the warm spurts of milk launch into her sex. She whined in anguish.

The tiniest sigh of relief escaped her throat when Milly withdrew and began to take off the phallus. Thank God it’s over… But then Maedeen said, “Now let’s get her off.”

Ann was flipped over on her back. She hissed through her teeth when two metal clips were quickly applied to her nipples; her back arched at the bitelike pain. Then Milly straddled her face and simultaneously gave the clips a twist. “Stick your tongue all the way in,” she ordered. The pain at Ann’s nipples soon began to radiate into something sharply pleasurable; her sex began to drench. Just as she wondered how Maedeen would participate, four fingers wriggling in her vagina answered the question. Then the shock of thought exploded—No!—when she realized what exactly was being done.

“I’ll bet the little prude’s never been fisted before,” Milly said.

“Probably right. She’s real tight.”

Ann’s bare heels thumped the floor as Maedeen slipped her whole hand in, and she gagged when the hand pulled into a fist within the confines of her vaginal vault. Maedeen cooed as she pushed her hand deeper, and when she was in several inches past the wrist, she began to pull back and forth, all the while the fist gently revolving. The violation appalled Ann…but she came explosively, her disgust tremoring with the orgasm.

“Feel good?” Milly unstraddled Ann’s face, and when Maedeen withdrew her hand, Ann’s entire body flinched. Suddenly, a groan sounded from above. In panic, Ann looked up. Her father, conscious now, was leaning out of the convalescent bed, his jaundiced eyes huge on the scene below. Ann shrieked. Her father’s face looked like a bad wax mask. His withered finger shook, pointing down at her.

“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. “Wîhan,” 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 A.D. The scant Latin derivations are obvious, from the Roman Occupation of 55 B.C. Old English is a coalescence of tongues, and unique in its incorporation. But this…” He tapped one of the sheafs. “This is unusual.”

“How much of it do you think is invented?” Dr. Harold asked.

“Invented?” The old man looked at him, puzzled. “None of this is invented, Doctor. All of these words are real.”

But that was impossible; he must not understand. “Tharp is an escaped mental patient. We’ve determined that he escaped for a reason specific to his delusion.”

Professor Fredrick looked the part: keen-eyed in his weathered face. Countless digs and years in hostile sun had toughened his skin to the consistency of tanned leather. He was probably sixty but he looked a hundred. On his cragged hand a gold ring glittered, whose mount centered a pebble from Golgotha.

“Is Tharp a professor or language expert?”

“Oh, no,” Dr. Harold replied. “He’s a drug burnout. He never graduated high school.”

Fredrick seemed to smile cynically, if the toughness of his face would permit a smile at all. “That’s difficult for me to believe, Doctor. This mental patient of yours—this drug burnout—is using terms, syntactical structures, and even particularized inflections that are twenty-five hundred years old. And he’s doing it perfectly.”

Dr. Harold looked at him. The old man must be overreacting. Tharp had done well on the standard IQ batteries, but he was essentially uneducated.

“Let me give you some background,” Fredrick offered. His voice, like his face, seemed frayed by the impairment of years. “The island of England is linguistically unique simply because of its geography. The basis of the English language is a direct reflection of the major invasions of the island. The Celts, in 600 B.C.; the Romans, in 55 B.C.; and the Saxons, in 500 A.D. But before the initial Brythonic, or Celtic, invasion, there was another society that we know very little about. They were called the Chilterns, and they had a language all their own. So it is actually the Chiltern language that provides the first root of English.”

“What’s that got to do with Tharp’s vocabulary in those transcripts?”

“It’s not just the vocabulary, Doctor, it’s the syntax too, and the conjugations. Tharp seems better versed in the Chiltern language than the entirety of the archaeological community.”

That’s ridiculous, Harold thought. “Can you translate any of the words?” he asked.

“I can probably translate all of them.” Fredrick pointed to a random page. “This word here, hüsl—it means to sacrifice. An interesting thing about the Chiltern-influenced forms of Old English is that there was little distinction between common nouns and transitive verbs. Hüsl is a good example. It also means sacrifice victim.”

“What about wreccan?”

“Slave. The a’s, strangely, are masculine, and o’s are feminine. Hence: male slave.”

“And brygorwreccan?”

“A male slave who digs graves.”

Dr. Harold felt numbly stunned. “Five years ago Tharp was apprehended by police for burying bodies. Some of the bodies were children and infants. We assumed his vocabulary was invented.”

“You assumed wrong,” Professor Fredrick asserted. “All these words are real. Scieror, one who cuts with a knife. Hustig, a general ritual. Fek, festival. Cnif, knife. This is fascinating, and clearly religious.”

Religious? “How so?”

“These words here, oft repeated, loc and liloc. They’re general references to a demon, a female demon. Many pre-Druidic settlements worshipped female demons via ritual sacrifice. The sacrifices frequently involved children, infants.”

This was maddening. How did Tharp, an amotivate and dropout, become this learned in not only an ancient language but in an ancient religious custom? “Look at the rest, here,” he insisted, and dug into his briefcase. “These are Tharp’s sketchpads from the ward. Tell me what you make of them.”

Professor Fredrick opened the first pad, then fell into a concerned silence. For the next twenty minutes he examined one page after another. He seemed to be transfixed.

“What? What’s wrong?” Dr. Harold finally asked.

Professor Fredrick glanced up quizzically. “Ur-locs,” he said.

“What?”

“Several thousand years ago, Doctor, there was an offshoot of the Chiltern race. They were called the Ur-locs. It was an occult society, and one, I might add, that we know very little about. There can be no mistake here. Tharp knows more about the Ur-locs than most archaeology professors.”

Ur-locs, Dr. Harold thought.

“They were one of the most unique societies in history, and the only settlement in England to successfully resist every invasion of the island—the Celts, the Romans, the Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians, even the Normans. We only know about them from the registries left by each invader. Every army that was ever dispatched against the Ur-locs never returned, and the Ur-locs, mind you, were an entirely female-dominated culture.”

That at least explained something. Tharp’s delusion was based on a premise of female superiority. All of the men in the sketches were clearly subservient to a female hierarchy.

“The Ur-locs themselves,” the old man continued, “were small in number, yet somehow they maintained a great power over large male populations. They were served entirely by men enslaved from invading camps or conquered settlements. Men did everything for them: fought their wars, cultivated their foods, built their towns. The Ur-locs reigned over a body of men dozens of times their own size.”

“But…how?”

“Probably just a very clever management of power and fear, like any successful monarchy. And then, of course, there are the legends.”

“What legends?”

Fredrick again attempted a smile. “The registries claim that the Ur-locs were witches and that they used witchcraft to enslave their attackers. That’s where the religious part comes in. The Ur-locs were savagely ritualistic. Their existence revolved around a single religious belief. They sacrificed thousands in appeasement to their god. These people made the Aztecs look like the Girl Scouts.”

So Tharp’s delusion was based on an actual ancient religious system, and that religious system was based on a specific object of belief.

“Tell me about their god,” Dr. Harold inquired next.

“Here, this right here,” Fredrick said. He pointed to the most memorable sketch, the beautiful buxom woman in moonlight whose face was just a maw of needlelike teeth. “They called it the Ardat-Lil. Tharp’s rendition is nearly perfect.”

Dr. Harold looked at the sketch again, and shivered in its obscene impact of perversion and beauty. The flawless hourglass figure and flawless breasts. The taloned feet. The three-fingered claws for hands. And the face, the face…he could only glance at it a moment before having to turn away.

Ur-locs, he thought again in a strange, slow pulse. Ardat-Lil.

Now Professor Fredrick was getting up. Was it the chair that creaked, or his old joints? A small statue of the incubus Baalzephon stared down from a high bookshelf, along with the multi-limbed Bengalian Kali and the squat Babylonian Pazuzu. Fredrick removed a thick, dusty text: Pre-Druidism: A Study of the Mythologies of Angle-Land. “This should enlighten you,” he proposed, and lay the book down at a specific chapter. “Here’s a field summary from an Oxford University dig near Ripon, in the summer of 1983. Quite by accident, the dig uncovered the original Ur-loc ruins. It was tremendous, I can tell you. I personally supervised the dig.” One photo showed several big iron pots. “Fek cauldrons,” he explained. “The Ur-locs were cannibals, and these cauldrons, which they called chettles, were what they cooked their festival meats in.” The next photo showed a great stone slab on plinths. “A ceremonial dolmen, part altar, part sacrifice platform. The Ur-locs iconized dolmens; after a thousand sacrifices, it’s said, they cut the dolmens up and made things out of the pieces: jewelry, tools, religious regalia such as fonts and tribal pendants. The very first dolmen, according to the myth, served as the central icon. They called it the nihtmir, or night-mirror. High priestesses were said to actually be able to see the Ardat-Lil in it. All sacrificial communities used dolmens, and many similarly retired the older ones for a higher use in their ceremonies.”

“At this dig,” Dr. Harold asked, “did they find the original Ur-loc dolmen?”

“The nihtmir itself? No, and that’s a bit strange. All the archaeological evidence suggests that the Ur-locs willingly dispersed themselves—disbanded, I should say—between 995 and 1070 A.D., and they apparently took their nihtmir with them, which must’ve weighed, mind you, close to a thousand pounds. It was probably about the size of a desktop.”

Nihtmir, Dr. Harold reflected now. Night-mirror. Hadn’t Tharp mentioned something similar during his narcoanalysis? And he’d mentioned chettles too, hadn’t he? “What’s this?” came the next query. A photo showed a pile of scrolls or something, as a field technician gingerly dusted them with a camelhair brush.

“It’s a manuscript,” Professor Fredrick informed him. “The only direct written record of the Ur-loc race. It had been buried in a cairn, in some very peaty high-sulfur/low-oxygen soil. The excavators were able to photograph most of it before it disintegrated. And this,” he said, “you should find very interesting.”

The next photo showed a drawing on a manuscript page. Dr. Harold recognized the sleek body and long flowing mane of hair, the talons and tiny slits for eyes above the stretched maw for a face, and the stubby protuberances, like little horns.

“The Ardat-Lil,” he muttered. “It’s almost identical to Tharp’s sketch.”

“Indeed it is,” Professor Fredrick replied. “No doubt Tharp researched the Ur-locs at a college library, and based his delusion on the information.”

Of course, Dr. Harold tried to agree. What other answer could there be? Still, the proposition pricked at him, like briars. “Do you think it’s even remotely possible, though, that some very distant remnant of the Ur-loc culture still exists, some cult or something?”

Professor Fredrick’s eyes fixed on him. Then the old, cragged face broke, and he began to laugh.

«« — »»

“I suppose now is a suitable time.”

“Yes,” Dr. Heyd agreed.

Milly and the wifmunuc peered down from the foot of the bed, the breasts bare, the faces intent in glee. Dr. Heyd opened his black medical bag.

“Nis hoefonrice gelic tharn lige,” said the wifmunuc.

“Fo hir doefolcyniges,” Milly finished.

Dr. Heyd filled the 10cc syringe, watching a few droplets sparkle.

“I want his death to be relishing,” the wifmunuc ordered.

“Nice and slow,” Milly added, her dark nipples erecting at the thought. “Nice and slow, for her.”

Dr. Heyd nodded. The pale figure on the bed seemed to tense a little, jaundiced eyes staring up, mouth propped open.

“He’s served well, in his own way.”

Goodbye, Josh. Dr. Heyd inserted the needle into one of the pulsing veins of Joshua Slavik’s upper arm. Then he slowly depressed the plunger.

“Wîhan!” whispered the wifmunuc.

—

Chapter 27

“You two! Hey!” Sergeant Byron shouted.

The figures scampered away into the woods.

“Come back here! This is the police!”

Giggling fluttered up. They’d looked like kids, hadn’t they? Several tree trunks seemed pasty with some dark shine. Byron touched a trunk and his finger came away red.

Blood, he thought.

Chief Bard had dispatched him to search the woods around the edge of town, which made little sense to Byron. A lot of things didn’t make much sense lately. Bard wasn’t telling him much. Had he gotten a tip? It infuriated Byron that his own boss didn’t trust him with confidential information. What made Bard so sure Tharp would be hiding out in the woods?

And now this…these kids. Who were they? What were they doing?

Byron delved into the thicket. Fallen brush crunched underfoot. He tried to follow the giggling, and their sounds, but the brush grew so thick in places that he could barely pass without a machete. The late-afternoon sun drew mist up from the forest’s moist ground. He felt pricked, perspiry, and pissed off.

But then the thicket subsided. A trail seemed to etch a line through the woods. Byron followed it. He noticed more wet trees lining the way. Someone had painted them with something, something like blood.

Byron then stepped between a pair of gnarled oaks.

He stared down. What in God’s name…

He’d stepped into a small dell, a clearing. Three girls stood there as if they’d been waiting for him. They were grinning.

They were also buck naked.

“Who the hell…” But then he recognized them. Wendlyn Fost, Maedeen’s daughter. Rena Godwin. And the third, Josh Slavik’s grandkid. What was her name? Melanie?

Byron looked around for guys. A bunch of naked girls usually meant that a bunch of naked guys were close at hand. But there were none, he saw. There was only him.

“What the hell are you girls doing?”

They only grinned in response. They were passing something around, smoking. Pot smokers, he concluded. But this stuff didn’t smell like pot at all. It smelled light, cinnamony.

“We’re waiting for you,” one of them, Rena said.

Byron stared at them. They didn’t seem the least bit concerned that they were standing naked in front of a police officer. He gulped, though; he couldn’t help it. They were just teenagers but—Christ, he thought. Three pairs of breasts stared back at him, three pubes. Rena, the youngest, barely had any hair at all. The other two looked fuller, more shapely. But what were those pails on the ground? And brushes?

“Peow,” Melanie Slavik said. Her eyes looked bright but… funny.

Then Wendlyn added, “Let’s give lof.”

Rena giggled.

Give lof, Byron thought. It was a slow thought, slow like blood oozing from a wound. Something was happening.

The three faces—the three grins—seemed to reach into him, drag him down like drugs. They’re kids, he kept thinking. They’re just kids… I can’t…

They converged, laying him out. His vision seemed detached; he saw only in fragments, diced glimpses. Faces hovered over him, bodies, breasts. The little stone pendants swayed like pendulums as they eagerly clustered about him, unbuttoning his shirt and pants. Their giggling made him sick; soon it didn’t even sound human. It sounded wet, clicking, like voracious eating.

“The Fulluht-Loc is coming…”

“The doefolmon…”

“Give lof! To the Modor!”

“Wîhan!”

“Dother fo Dother!”

They had his penis out, which was already erect, pulsing. Melanie ran her hands up over his chest. Wendlyn was stroking his face, suspending a big nipple over his mouth. And Rena, whose own giggles sounded muffled, was fellating him.

This was all wrong, part of him knew. It didn’t matter that they’d come on to him. They were teenagers. He could lose his job for this, even go to jail. But that part of him faded. He lay there as if staked to the ground. He couldn’t move.

“Lots of muscles,” Melanie cooed, rubbing. “He’d make a great wreccan.”

“Shit on him,” Wendlyn said.

“He’s big,” Rena stopped long enough to say. “Look!”

They giggled, appraising his penis whose glans already shined wetly with a glaze of pre-ejaculatory drool.

Now Rena had his service piece out, a Colt Python. She cocked its gridded hammer, prodded his testicles with the barrel.

Byron was shivering, terrorized. He felt the cold end of the barrel poke into his scrotum, trace his shaft.

“Don’t worry, little baby,” Melanie said.

“We won’t shoot it off,” Wendlyn promised.

She and Rena traded places. Wendlyn mounted him. “Ooo, you’re right. He’s real big,” she commented, and inserted him into herself. Rena straddled his head, pushing the nearly hairless furrow against his lips. “Lick it, lick it,” she commanded in glee, then began urinating.

Byron felt pinned down, buried in madness. Hot urine streamed against his face, into his mouth. He couldn’t breathe. Wendlyn rode him ferociously, slamming her hips down against him. Both Byron’s heart and his genitals felt like they would explode at the same time.

Rena climbed off. Melanie was getting something out from under a log. Wendlyn rode him faster, harder, eyes turned up.

She shuddered, then shrieked—

Byron exploded into her sex—

As Melanie slid the sharpened cnif against his throat, cutting immediately and right to the bone.

“Wîhan!” Rena celebrated.

Byron’s blood spurted out of his neck precisely in time with his orgasm. He died a minute or two later, when they began to slice his belly open.

«« — »»

Erik scouted the woods. The sun was going down. He had pretty good bearings now. He could even see the Slavik house from here. He’d need to go in soon, but he didn’t dare yet. A big Fleetwood had pulled up as he watched. He didn’t want to go into the house when a lot of people were there. They’d have plenty of preliminary rituals before the actual rite. That should give him enough time.

He knew the cops were onto him; no doubt Bard had found the brygorwreccan’s body—they knew he was close. He went back deeper into the woods, to conceal himself until it was time.

But what was that he heard? Erik stopped, poised himself to listen. Voices, it sounded like. Quiet voices.

He followed, moving as lightly as he could. Soon he thought he detected movement, pale shapes in the darkening light.

He looked past some trees, into a dell. A girl, naked, was walking away. Two more stooped over something. It didn’t take Erik long to realize that what they were stooping over was a corpse.

A cop, he thought. They were eviscerating him, putting certain organs into a plastic bag. The thinner girl seemed to be sawing something. This, too, did not surprise Erik. He’d seen it all before. The slender girl sawed off the cop’s head and put it in the bag.

Wifhands. Younger ones. He thought he recognized them.

Then they rose. They turned slowly, grinning. Their pendants dangled. Their white flesh was smeared with blood.

“We know you’re there, Erik,” the older one said.

Rena Godwin giggled. “We can feel you.”

The other one was the wifford’s kid, Wendlyn. “Come here.”

“No,” Erik said. He raised the shotgun. “You bitches don’t have me anymore.”

The two girls laughed.

“We have you. You’ve been blessed.”

“You’ll always be ours.”

No… I…won’t, he determined. He could feel it already, their pull on his brain, like the moon.

“Come to us, Erik,” Rena said.

“The little brygorwreccan.”

Their young faces beamed, the stare of their eyes sinking into his head like daggers, like cnifs.

“Come to us.”

Erik stepped forward. The shotgun was charged, but he scarcely even felt it now. It felt like something he was holding in a dream.

“Let us give you fulluht. Let us make you holy again.”

Kill them, he commanded himself. He tried to aim the gun, but his arms barely moved.

“The doefolmon is coming.”

“The Fulluht-Loc.”

“You’ve come back to be with us. We welcome you, Erik. We will take you back into the cirice.”

No, pounded the thought like hammer to stone. I’ll kill myself first.

He would, he knew he would. Anything to be free of them. They were so strong against his will, much stronger than before.

They began to come forward. Wendlyn outstretched her hand, smiling softly. Rena came up behind her.

Kill them, he demanded of himself. Kill them before they—

“Little peow. Kneel—”

—change, he thought.

Erik squeezed his eyes shut. His mind felt released from a fetter. His forearms shot up, brought the shotgun to bear.

“No!” Rena shrieked.

His finger contracted. The shotgun jumped behind a great flash and concussion: ba-BAM!

The round socked a hole into Wendlyn’s throat. Blood flew out of her like thin, flailing tentacles. Rena, screaming, flew at him with a small glinting æsc.

He racked another round and fired. The hand holding the spike flew off the end of her arm. He cycled the shotgun once more, raised it to her face.

Her face…

His teeth clacked shut.

The third round of 12-gauge exploded in her face. Her head blew apart in wheeling, wet chunks.

Gunsmoke shifted up like a ghost. It tinged in his nostrils. Before they change, his thoughts continued to tick. His face felt like a flat plate of stone when he looked down at the two naked forms. Their dark blood pumped slowly into the soil.

The part of his mind that still belonged to this world told him, You just killed two kids.

“No, I didn’t,” he answered himself in voice. “I just killed two monsters.”

He racked another round into the chamber and stalked off back into the darkening forest.

—

Chapter 28

Sooer, dooer, the dark voice groped. The black words seemed to drag her down, deeper, deeper into the strange, chanting labyrinth of the dream.

Ann awoke in the terrible crimson vertigo, the knife—

slup-slup-slup

—sinking to its guard into her abdomen.

Slup-slup-slup, she heard, wincing. She brought a hand to her flat, sweat-moistened belly. She was naked in bed, drenched. The room was empty. She gasped when she saw the clock: 8:12 p.m. She’d slept the entire day away, and well into evening.

She showered in a cold torrent, hoping the spray of water would revive her. She felt terrible, as if hung over or drugged. She shivered as she washed herself, her hand guiding the bar of soap felt like someone else’s hand, like the fluttering hands of the nightmare, roving her, stroking her stretched belly.

God, was all she could think. She felt haunted; she didn’t even feel real. Each movement as she dressed prodded the worst headache of her life. What was wrong with her? Something was terribly wrong; she could feel it. Something wrong with…everything.

She must be sick—that was it. She must be coming down with flu; that’s why she’d slept so late. She went downstairs for some juice and heard car doors closing.

Ann peeked out the sidelight sash of the front door. Her mother’s Fleetwood was backing out the drive. It looked like there were several people in it.

She frowned. The car drove off. Dusk was settling. A bright, pinkened moon peered over the horizon. It was full.

Something shattered. Upstairs.

Ann spun around. She raced up the staircase. Something else shattered. It sounded like glass breaking.

The heart monitor’s beep down the hall sounded slow, irregular. Ann’s breath lodged in her chest when she spun into her father’s room. Saline bottles lay shattered around the outer rim of the throw rug. The wheeled stands lay toppled over. Ann’s vision rooted to the bed.

Her father lay sprawled, half over the convalescent rail. Blood dripped out of his arm from where the IV needles had torn out. He was convulsing, his mouth locked open. His eyes bulged as if lidless. Ann could only stare. His right arm, tremoring, began to lift. The crabbed hand unfurled.

His mouth jittered but no sound came out. He was pointing at her.

“Oh, Jesus… Dad…”

His hand fell to the bed. The slow beep-beep-beep of the Lifepak monitor stopped—

—then flat-lined.

He’d been leaning over for something. Ann’s wide gaze slowly lowered. The nightstand, she saw. The antique, enameled nightstand seemed to have something on the side facing the bed.

Writing? she thought. It looked like writing.

She cast it aside. She quickly dragged him over, leaned down. She attempted CPR as she best knew how. Each downward push against his frail chest pumped a little more blood from the torn IV hole at the inside of his elbow. She craned his head back, pinched shut his nostrils, and blew.

Nothing.

The flat line droned on.

He’s dead, she realized.

Her downward stare seemed drawn by something. She stared at the side of the drawered nightstand.

Her father had written something on it. He’d used his own blood:

Doefolmon

Leave Melanie, Martin, Everything.

Get out while you still can.

«« — »»

“The Ardat-Lil was a succubus,” Professor Fredrick explained. “Or I should say, the supreme succubus, the first lady of hell.”

“Succubus,” Dr. Harold repeated the word.

“A female sex-demon. Many variations exist throughout world mythology, and it’s interesting how many ancient religious modes reflect a reverence to identical gods and anti-gods. The Ardat-Lil is no exception. The Scottish Bheur, the German Brechta, the Scandinavian Agaberte, the Teutonic Alrune, the Egyptian Aldinoch—they’re all names for the same thing. They’re all the Ardat-Lil.”

Succubus, Dr. Harold thought. The word even sounded evil. It seemed to walk across his groin like a tarantula.

Professor Fredrick lit a pipe with a face on it, puffing sweet smoke into the air. “The Ardat-Lil has a very racy history. The Ur-locs believed that when the earth was made, half of heaven’s angels were banished. Sound familiar? On the first day of his banishment, Lucifer decided to take a stroll around the earth, which he found, to his complete dissatisfaction, to be inhabited by peace-loving humans who were completely bereft of sin. They all rejected him immediately, and Lucifer, mind you, doesn’t take kindly to rejection. Therefore, he decided to corrupt the human race, by tricking them into turning away from God. This may sound familiar too. Anyway, Lucifer searched for the most beautiful virgin in the world and after six days he found her—a young woman named Ardat. Lucifer promised to make her his queen if she turned away from God, and Ardat, as you’ve probably already guessed, agreed. They sealed the agreement by having intercourse. Ardat became pregnant, and after only six days, gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. This baby eventually bloomed into a woman even more beautiful than her mother, so beautiful that Lucifer deemed any name unworthy of her beauty. She was known simply as the Daughter.”

“Or the Ardat-Lil,” Dr. Harold supposed.

“No, not quite. The Daughter was so beautiful that Lucifer, notorious for his hormones, couldn’t resist. She was beautiful, but she wasn’t evil, and Lucifer wanted an evil little girl. So he changed himself into an anonymous man, whom the Daughter fell in love with. It was all a ploy. The Daughter married the man, had intercourse with him, and then she became pregnant. In other words—”

“Lucifer seduced his own daughter.”

“Exactly,” Professor Fredrick said. “The Daughter then gave birth to an even more beautiful baby girl, and she turned out to be heinously evil. She was known as the Daughter of the Daughter, or the Ardat-Lil. That’s what this repeated term in Tharp’s sketches refers to.” Professor Fredrick pointed to one.

Dr. Harold read, beneath a drawing of a woman giving birth on a dolmen, the words Dother fo Dother.

“The dohtor, or in the Chilternese form, the Dother fo Dother, was half human, half devil, the worst of both parts, and she was therefore condemned by God to eternity in hell. However, like many demons, she was born with the power of incarnation, and it is the bounden duty of all demons to perpetuate evil. Through time, the Ardat-Lil gained followers on earth, human followers, who were granted subcarnate powers in return for their worship. A coven formed—”

“The Ur-locs,” Dr. Harold conjectured.

“Right, whose existence revolved solely around the worship of the Ardat-Lil. They served her in many ways, by ritual, by sacrifice and cannibalism, and by eliminating all men from the bloodline, or bludcynn—another word which Tharp refers to quite frequently. The Ur-locs, according to legend, turned men into slaves via something called the sexespelle; it has always been thought that intercourse with a succubus functioned as a pact with the devil. All coven members—wifhands—had the power to become succubi for short periods, during which they seduced men and hence enslaved them. They’d trick men into thinking they were dreaming, have intercourse with them, and that was that. Any man who had sex with a wifhand in the succubi state was lost forever to the coven’s will.”

“What are these words here?” Dr. Harold asked, pointing to further sketch pages. “Are they all relative to this system of worship?”

“Oh, yes,” Professor Fredrick answered. “Ælmesse, alms; lof, praise in ceremony; cirice, church. Thane, helot, and peow all mean the same as wreccan: male slave—one who has fallen to the succubi. Wîhan means to make holy. The Ur-locs believed that the only way to make a man holy was to kill him—and often eat him—in homage to the Dother fo Dother.”

“And these? Wifford? Wifmunuc?”

“A wifford to the Ur-locs was their version of a verger or a seminarian, a religious hierarch. The wifford was second-in-command of the coven, and in constant training to replace the coven leader upon her death. The leader was called the wifmunuc, the one closest to the deity.”

Dr. Harold grimly stroked his white mustache. He considered this, and what the old professor had said earlier. What a ghastly vision…

“Not a pretty topic, I assure you. Despite their obscurity, the Ur-locs proved one of the most savage societies to ever exist.” Professor Fredrick then emptied the smoking guts of his pipe, tap-tap-tapping them into an obsidian ashtray that once served as an Assyrian blood tap. “There’s a summation, though, in an ultimate respect, I mean.”

“I’m sorry?” Dr. Harold said.

“There’s a point to all of this. I don’t believe for a minute that an Ur-loc cult could actually have survived all this time, nor do I believe in the occult. However, I do have an observation to make, which you should find exceedingly uncanny.” Fredrick released a roughened chuckle. “Would you like to hear it?”

The dying pipe smoke sifted up. From the bookshelves, and from odd perches all about the office, the stone likenesses of demons persisted in their frozen stares. And splayed across the desk lay Tharp’s drawing of the Ardat-Lil, shimmering in its obscene beauty…

“Yes,” Dr. Harold said. “I’d like to hear it very much.”

—

Chapter 29

Ann fled down the hall, then slowed. Then she stopped. What was she thinking? Her father was dead. With his own blood he’d written a warning. But what did that really mean? Ann stood still in the paneled hall, blinking.

He’d suffered a massive stroke. He was delirious. He didn’t know what he was doing.

There.

She let reality catch up to her. As usual, no one was in the house. What do I do now? It was a good question. What do you do when someone dies? Call an ambulance? A funeral home? Mustn’t a doctor declare him dead first? Ann felt disconnected. It was her father who lay dead in the next room, not some stranger. Oddly, even guiltily, she felt relief.

His torment’s over, she realized. This was a good thing. What must it have been like for him, immobile and brain-damaged? In death, her father had found the peace that his illness had robbed him of. Now Ann understood why people always said “It’s a blessing” at funerals. Her father’s death was a blessing.

The acknowledgment made her feel better. She went downstairs and sat on the bottom step, chin in hand. The total lack of sound made the house seem even more empty. How would Melanie take her grandfather’s death? And what would her mother say? But in a moment Ann realized she was reaching for distractions. Above all, what continued to gnaw at her was the same thing that had been gnawing at her for months.

The nightmare.

Pieces of the nightmare kept sifting in her head, and that terrible scarlet vertigo. How could anything be so obsessive? Her own father had just died, yet the preoccupation with the dream remained. Slup-slup-slup, she could still hear the sound, and the voice of the sinister birth attendant: “Dooer, dooer.”

Ann struggled to escape the awful imagery. There were things that needed to be done. Get off it! she screamed to herself. She must call Dr. Heyd at once, tell him that her father had finally passed away. But—

Slup-slup-slup, she could still hear in her mind.

Dooer dooer.

Rising, she winced. But when she went to the phone, something caused her to glance down the stairwell which led to the basement. Even in the dim light, she could plainly see that the door, which her mother kept locked, stood open.

What am I doing? Call Dr Heyd! she ordered herself. Next thing she knew, however, she was descending the stairs.

Then she knew, or she thought she did. The basement was where Melanie had been born; it was the setting of the nightmare. That was the lure—the grim curiosity which urged her down the steps. Suddenly, the room seemed forbidden; it enticed her. Ann hadn’t seen the basement in seventeen years.

But she was determined to see it now.

The old wood of the steps creaked as she continued down. The door opened in dead silence. Ann still couldn’t imagine why her mother always kept it locked. It was just a fruit cellar, a basement.

It seemed warmer the instant she stepped in. A single nude light bulb hung from the ceiling. There was an old washing bin, some old furniture, and an ironing board. Shelves of jarred fruit and pickled vegetables lined one entire wall.

She looked blankly ahead. Something wasn’t right. A few more seconds ticked by when she realized her disappointment.

She’d hoped that seeing the basement might shake loose a memory that would solve the nightmare and free her of it. The nightmare was of Melanie’s birth. Melanie was born here. Therefore—

The misconception bloomed.

This isn’t the room in the nightmare.

It was all wrong. The room in the nightmare was longer, the ceiling higher. The entire shape of this room was different.

Yes, Ann felt disappointed. The room showed her nothing that her subconscious might be hanging on to. Why had the dream placed Melanie’s birth elsewhere?

Time. Memory, she considered. She’d misconstrued it all. The past seventeen years had obscured her memory totally. Her dream had therefore built its own room.

But why?

It scarcely mattered. She turned to go back up and noticed several file cabinets. One thing she never noticed, though, was the reason the door had been open. It hadn’t been left open, it had been broken open, the bolt prized out of the frame.

The file cabinets looked rooted through. One was filled with old newspapers and books, its drawer tilting out. Ann closed it and looked through the second drawer: some manila folders apparently out of order. And a spiral pad. Looks like Martin’s pad.

She picked it up and stared. It was Martin’s pad. The cramped hastened scrawl left no doubt.

Why would Martin keep his poetry drafts down here?

She flipped through some random pages.

“Wreccan,” one poem was called, but what on earth did that mean? It was dated several days ago. Ann squinted, reading.

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, wîhan, 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.

It was exactly the same.

“Does it all seem familiar?” queried a cragged voice.

Ann screamed again and dropped the album. She stepped back and stumbled, glaring up in terror.

A figure stepped out of the back of the basement. He’d been there the entire time, watching her from the dark.

The figure took another step: a young man with bizarre short white hair, in jeans, sneakers, and jeans jacket. His face looked extant, lean in some crushed prevalence. He was holding a shotgun.

“Ann Slavik,” he said. He looked at her, as if curious. “My name is Erik Tharp. Though the people around here call me brygorwreccan.”

The shredded voice left no doubt. The same voice that had called her, had warned her on the phone not to come here.

“They’re subcarnates,” he told her. “They’re monsters, all of them. And your mother is their leader.”

Ann tried to speak but her terror damped her voice.

“They enslave men with her power, they sacrifice to pay her homage. They’ve existed for thousands of years, Ann, solely to worship her.”

“H-her? Who?”

Erik Tharp gave her a broken smile. “Of course, you don’t know about it. You weren’t supposed to. You’re part of a bloodline that worships a devil.”

Ann’s head reeled…

“Does it sound impossible?” Erik Tharp continued. “What do you think all that stuff is in those albums? Do you dream, Ann? What do you think those dreams are about? They’re not really dreams, they’re visions—visions of the past to reflect the future.”

Visions of the past, she thought. But what could Melanie’s birth have to do with the future?

“Have you seen any male children in this town? Have you?”

“No,” she said, still staring up. “I looked at the town birth records. It said that all the male children ever born here were put up for adoption.”

“Of course that’s what it said. Heyd has to cover himself.”

“What?”

“The records are falsified, by Heyd. Those kids weren’t put up for adoption. They were sacrificed.”

The word seemed to eddy in her head and grow like a bloodstain.

“Males are not allowed in their bloodline. Any sect member who gives birth to a male must hand it over for immediate sacrifice, to appease her. I ought to know, Ann. I’m the one who used to bury the bodies.”

Ann still couldn’t think right. How could she believe this madness? Erik Tharp was an escaped mental patient. He was certifiably insane. But then she remembered the photo albums…

“I came back to stop this, Ann. I came back to get you and your daughter away from here. That’s the only way.”

“What are you talking about!” Ann finally screamed.

He looked down at her. It seemed painful for him just to talk. “For the last millennium they’ve been breeding themselves for this event, Ann. You and your daughter are part of that event.”

“What event?”

“The Fulluht-Loc,” he answered. “The doefolmon.”

—

Chapter 30

“Doefolmon,” Professor Fredrick said.

Dr. Harold squinted back. “Yes, another of the words that Tharp makes frequent reference to in his sketches. What does it mean?”

Fredrick relit the big pipe. Its carven face depicted vacant agony. “It means, roughly, ‘moon of the devil,’ and it’s another term that proves how thoroughly Tharp researched the Ur-locs before his delusion overtook him. The doefolmon was considered a portent, like a biblical sign, and a precursor to their holiest rite—the Fulluht-Loc.”

Harold’s nose crinkled against the cloying fetor of the tobacco. That, and the queer face on the pipe, harassed his attention.

“It was their incarnation rite,” Professor Fredrick said.

Incarnation. Harold considered the word, and its implications. To make flesh.

“Fulluht is another weird meld of Old Saxon, Old Frisian, and some older Chilternese constituents; it means essentially ‘baptism’ or ‘baptismal,’ and loc, as I’ve said, is a reference to—”

“A female demon,” Harold recalled. “A succubus.”

“Yes. Hence, Fulluht-Loc can be translated as ‘baptism of the succubus.’ It’s the ritual that their entire system of belief revolved around. It’s what they lived for.”

The window framed full dark now; Dr. Harold had been here all day scarcely without realizing it. He could glimpse the moon through the high trees of the campus quadrangle. It seemed pink.

“The basis of their entire religion was offertory,” the old professor went on. “The zeal with which they sacrificed innocents was intensively devout. Everything they did was an offering. Sex. Murder. Cannibalism. They’d even anoint initiates with the blood of sacrifice victims. They’d paint trees with the blood, to mark the territory of the succubus, to make it blessed. The Druids did the same thing centuries later, which might cause you to wonder about the nature of religious influence.”

But Dr. Harold was wondering about a lot more than that. So many questions itched at him now, like stitches healing. “But what you mentioned earlier,” he said. “The ultimate point?”

Fredrick’s ancient face looked grimly amused. “The Fulluht-Loc. The incarnation. According to the legend, this can only occur during the doefolmon, and supposedly the Ur-locs succeeded at it once.”

“The incarnation, you mean?”

“Correct. From what could be translated from their manuscripts, the Ur-locs claimed that a successful incarnation occurred a thousand years ago, just before their race disappeared.”

Dr. Harold contemplated the supposition. No, like Fredrick, he didn’t believe in demons, but…what was he thinking? “I don’t quite follow you. How did this incarnation supposedly come about?”

“Remember what I said before,” Fredrick replied. “Everything the Ur-locs did was an offering. They were devoted to the notion of the bludcynn, or the sanctity of their bloodline. What they offered to the Ardat-Lil, ultimately, was themselves.”

“I still don’t quite—”

“The element of offering, Doctor. Sacrifice. Blood. Faith. Everything. The Fulluht-Loc was an offering of one of their own, a physical gift of substitution. What I’m saying is that, on the doefolmon, one of the Ur-locs’ own bludcynn would become the Ardat-Lil. This was foreseen, mind you, years beforehand, upon the birth of the substituted body.”

“Foreseen by who?”

“By the wifmunuc, the leader. They were supposedly clairvoyant. The doefolmon was considered the holiest time, much like Christians would consider the Second Coming. This was essentially the same thing, the return of their god onto the earth.” Professor Fredrick’s time-worn hand tapped out the pipe again. Behind him, in the office window, the moon was rising. “But what you should find most curious of all,” he amusedly went on, “is the timing.”

“The timing?” Dr. Harold queried.

“The doefolmon. Astronomers have recently identified it—a peculiar astronomical configuration. You’ve probably been hearing about it on the news lately.”

Had he? The equinox, he thought. “I’ve heard something on the weather channels about the equinox.”

“Yes, yes. That’s what the doefolmon really is. Of course, astronomers don’t call it the doefolmon—” Fredrick cragged another chuckle. “They call it a tangental lunar apogee. You’ve probably noticed over the past week or so that the moon appears pink. It’s what’s known as a straticulate refraction, the moonlight shining through the upper atmosphere at an anomalous angle. It’s very, very rare, and quite precise—a vernal equinox that occurs at the exact same moment as the moon becomes full.”

Dr. Harold’s eyes narrowed.

“And that’s the curious part,” Fredrick went on. “Even an old, skeptical atheist such as myself must admit. The last time this happened was exactly a thousand years ago, and exactly a thousand years ago was when the Ur-locs supposedly succeeded in incarnating the Ardat-Lil.”

—

Chapter 31

“It’s happening now, right now,” Erik Tharp told her in the dark confines of the basement.

He’d been talking, and she’d been listening, staring at each of his raddled words as though they were deformed faces. Incarnation, she thought. Fulluht-Loc. Ardat-Lil. It was insanity, and this was supposed to be an insane person. Yet the things he’d told her rang of a spectral memory, inklings dripping like a wound in the back of her mind. Ann’s confusion amassed. It was the confluence of it all, what Tharp had disclosed, plus the dream and what she’d seen in the albums—that left her unable to reckon anything.

“The Ardat-Lil is already here,” he was saying through the haze of her quandary. “But certain things have to take place before she can be incarnated through the host.” He paused, looked right at her. “That’s why I escaped. To make sure those things don’t happen.”

Ann felt slick in the sweat of her own dread. Melanie, her mind tolled again and again. That’s what the dream meant: Melanie’s birth was the birth of the host. They want my daughter to serve as the physical body for this…thing.

“Your daughter’s a virgin, isn’t she?”

Ann nodded.

“She wasn’t born in a hospital, was she? She was born here, in Lockwood. Wasn’t she?”

“Yes!” Ann shrieked.

Tharp loaded several rounds into the shotgun. “We have to find her and get the two of you away from here. We have to do it now. The doefolmon is tonight.”

Martin, Ann thought. “What about my fiancé?”

“Forget him. He’s one of them now. Forever.”

Tharp roughly grabbed her arm, yanked her toward the steps. “They’re all at the cirice now—”

“The what?”

“The church. They’re getting ready.” Tharp paused on the stairs, as if pricked by the palest vision. He was staring at nothing for a moment, or perhaps at the ghost of what he used to be. “Come on,” he said next. He was thumping up the stairs, with Ann in tow. “If we can prevent the incarnation rite itself, or even the kin sacrifice, then they’ll be ruined. They won’t be able to do this again for a thousand years.”

Ann huffed up the dusty wood steps. What did he say? “The kin sacrifice? What’s that?”

“It’s like a trigger for the whole ritual,” Tharp’s ragged voice grated on. “The final offering to the Ardat-Lil. Proof of faith.”

Kin sacrifice, Ann was still thinking. Suddenly on the stairs her joints locked up. Her mind blanked, and—

slup-slup-slup…

The vermilion vertigo embraced her again, like a desperate lover. The vision of the great blade plunging down again and again into the squirming naked abdomen…

“Come on, come on!” Tharp was commanding. He slapped Ann hard in the face. She blinked at him, numb. Then he was leading her up again.

Now Ann understood it, the vertiginous visions and how they related to the nightmare. Kin sacrifice, she realized more fully. She tried to assimilate. They want Melanie to be the host. For the host to become the Ardat-Lil, she must first sacrifice her own kin. Me.

That’s what the vertigo was trying to show her.

Melanie must murder me before she can become the demon.

Again, Ann’s thoughts cloaked her. They were on the landing now; Tharp was leading her to the kitchen. “We’ll go out the back. We’ll follow the woods to where I got the van parked. You’ll wait there while I go look for Melanie.”

But at the end of the paneled hall, Tharp stopped, oddly turning to her. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Ann said, diffused.

His eyes twitched. His shredded voice croaked on, “I could’ve sworn I heard—”

Ba-BAM!

Ann screamed. A chunk of the entrance molding exploded into splinters. Tharp was pushing her backward as a dark cackle issued from the kitchen. Then came another loud ba-BAM! as they dove across the foyer. A hole the size of a fist blew into the wall.

A figure stepped into the hall, holding a huge revolver.

“Surprise! I’m back!” Duke Belluxi announced to them.

«« — »»

As Fredrick put away the books he’d gotten down, Dr. Harold was remembering, for no real reason, the odd coincidence. Erik Tharp was from a town called Lockwood. Yes, that was odd. One of his private patients, Ann Slavik, the lawyer suffering night terrors, was from the same town.

Coincidence, he thought. How could it be anything else?

“I’m afraid that’s all I have for you,” Professor Fredrick said, and sat back down. “The Ur-locs were a very obscure society; there’s simply not that much information available about them.”

“But enough for Tharp to discover.”

Fredrick shrugged. “I’ve spent my entire life pursuing the remnants of civilizations whose beliefs were rooted in superstition. I’ve been from Nineveh to Knossos. From Jericho to Troy to Rhodes. And do you know what I’ve discovered? In all those places, over all those years?”

“What?”

“There are no superstitions. No credence to any subjective belief that has ever been asserted. They’re just stories, fables, people making fables in order to explain themselves.”

“Of course,” Dr. Harold said. “But it is interesting: Tharp’s escape in conjunction with an equinox that occurs only every thousand years.”

“He’s no doubt a very good researcher, that’s all. Do you suppose you’ll catch him?”

“We informed the state police that Tharp would most likely return to the geography of his delusion, but they didn’t put much stock in it. The most recent murders indicate that he’s actually moving away from the seat of his original crimes.”

“That could be a ploy, couldn’t it? Tharp’s intelligence quotient is quite higher than average.”

“I know. That’s what bothers me.”

“Where exactly do you think Tharp is returning to?”

“A little town up on the northern edge of the county,” Dr. Harold answered. “It’s called Lockwood.”

Professor Fredrick subtly laughed, fingering a tiny stone statue of Xipe, the Aztec god of the harvest. “You’re kidding me, right? He’s from a town called Lockwood?”

“Yes. What’s so funny?”

Fredrick’s eyes suddenly appeared huge in their amusement. “It’s almost a joke—the name, I mean.”

“I don’t under—”

“Lockwood,” Fredrick said. “Simply break it down. Lock for loc. Lockwood, ‘wood of the loc.’ Wood of the—”

“Succubus,” Dr. Harold realized. More coincidence? “That is strange. And you’re sure there’s no way an actual Ur-loc cult could be in existence today?”

“I don’t see how. Unless the bloodline really did remain intact, as the legend indicates. The Ur-locs dispersed themselves a millennium ago, after the last supposed incarnation. They disappeared without a trace, quite like Christ’s disciples after his death. The demon incarnate supposedly blessed them all, then sent them out into the world to spread her influence for the next thousand years.” Fredrick again chuckled, a sound like creaking wood. “But of course to believe that, you’d have to believe the original myth.”

This latest abstraction didn’t set well with Harold. Actually, none of them did. I do not believe in demons, he reaverred. He began putting Tharp’s transcripts and sketchpads back into the big leather bag. One pad slipped from his hand and fell open. When he picked it up, a page slid off the other. They’d been stuck together somehow; he’d never noticed it.

His eyes fixed down. It was a sketch he’d never seen.

“What is it?” Professor Fredrick asked.

“I…” Harold replied. He paused. “Impossible.”

Fredrick leaned over and looked. The pointillistic sketch showed a cloaked figure standing between a pregnant woman’s legs. The figure’s hands formed a cradle, as if to receive the newborn. Beneath, Tharp had written the single word:

Dooer!

And behind the figure, the symbol seemed to hover:

Ann Slavik’s nightmare, Harold realized. To the last detail.

“It’s just more of the same thing,” Fredrick said, not realizing Harold’s shock. “The symbol is the nihtmir, the night-mirror, and the word, dooer, is part of the incarnation litany. It’s the final acknowledgment of the birth of the host.”

“What’s it mean?” Harold croaked more than asked.

“Denotatively it’s a concrete noun, meaning, essentially, door. But the religious connotation goes quite a bit further, not a noun but an elliptical statement of welcome. The mother of the host was considered the door through which the host of the Ardat-Lil would come among them.”

The revelation seemed to collapse, like a bombed building. Dr. Harold’s eyelids felt peeled open.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. He got his coat, his keys, and made quickly for the door.

“But it’s almost midnight,” Professor Fredrick pointed out. “Where do you have to go at this hour?”

“To Lockwood,” Dr. Harold replied.

—

Chapter 32

“Upstairs! Quick!” Erik shouted as three more bullets punched holes along the wall of the drawing room. Ann screamed after each heavy, concussive shot; her senses dispersed like confetti. Laughter black as char rattled from the hall as Erik and Ann pounded up the stairs. The shadow turned below. A sixth bullet exploded the mirror at the top of the landing, raining glass.

Impulse had caused him to flee upward; a high vantage point was easier to defend. He’s reloading, Erik thought. He dragged Ann to the floor around the corner and brought up the shotgun.

Sweat and hysteria glazed Ann’s face. “Who is that!”

“My former traveling companion,” Erik replied, understanding none of it yet. “Stay behind me, stay down.”

Duke, Erik thought. His hands shriveled against the shotgun. The fucker followed me here. But how?

“Hey, buddy-bro!” erupted the familiar voice from downstairs. “Thought I’d come back for some of that dandy head! Ain’t ya pleased to see me?”

Erik replied with a stray shot down the stairwell. Even the 12-gauge report sounded feeble against the Webley’s mammoth .455 concussion. “I killed you, you sick fuck!” Erik grated to yell.

“Must be that dandy head you give,” Duke Belluxi replied. “Brings a fella back from the dead, ya know?”

Did I miss all those times? Erik wondered in spite of his prickling, bare-eyed terror. The fact smashed into his consciousness: Duke was back. Duke was here, now, just downstairs. And he’d definitely be wanting some revenge. Plus he still had that giant revolver, which didn’t lighten the matter. But Erik was sure he’d put several shotgun rounds into Duke’s chest back at that second Qwik-Stop…

This is not going to be one of my better days, Erik realized.

He fired two more stray shots down the stairs. “Just get out of here, Duke!” he attempted to bargain. “If you don’t get out of here right now, I’ll have to kill you!”

Duke belted out a good, hard laugh. “You already tried that, didn’t ya, faggot? But just to show you I’m a fair guy, I’ll give you another chance. How about that?”

What the fuck? Erik still couldn’t see his enemy, but in a moment, he could hear him.

He could hear him coming up the stairs.

He must be crazy, Erik thought, and then frowned. Considering where Duke had spent the last decade, his state of mind was not even debatable. But the guy was coining up the stairs, knowing full well that Erik was armed…

Wait, wait, he told himself. Ann quivered, clinging to Erik’s shirt. Not…yet… The footfalls continued to ascend, each fat thump! inducing a different image of atrocity. If this guy gets me, I’m…but Erik didn’t even bother to contemplate the rest of the conjecture. What Duke would do to him was bad enough to ponder. But what he would do to Ann was significantly worse by comparison.

Erik paused another second, then rolled out on the landing. He had two rounds left in the shotgun. He raised the bead, touched the trigger…then paused. Memory drew his stare out like elastic.

Duke stared back, halfway up the steps. His plump, sociopathic face grinned almost childlike, all big teeth and chubby cheeks.

“Hey, fairy. Long time no see, huh?”

Erik’s finger depressed. The gun bucked behind a spew of sparks as the spread of 12-gauge rammed into Duke’s chest.

Duke tumbled like a bag of stones down the steps.

That was too easy. Erik, bewildered, stared down at the Remington’s bead, then raised his head. Shooting Duke had been no more complicated than spearing a fish in a bathtub. It seemed almost as if he’d let himself be gunned down…

Gunsmoke drifted. Duke’s bulk shape lay limp at the bottom of the steps, sprawled across the fine slate foyer.

Ann crawled forward, her hair in strings. “Did you—”

“I got him this time. Christ…”

Erik, regrettably, did not weigh the incongruities. Who would? The task ahead summoned him: getting Ann away, finding her daughter, breaking the maleficent thousand-year-old chain of the Ardat-Lil. He helped Ann up, brushed her hair out of her face, and tried to calm her down. She shivered in his embrace. Probably half in shock, he concluded, not that he could blame her. How could she possibly deal with all that had happened and all that she’d learned in the last handful of minutes? Erik did not expect her to.

“Come on, come on.” He led her back down the stairs, keeping the Remington tipped toward Duke’s motionless bulk. The wifmunuc, no doubt, was already starting the preliminaries to the rite. But they still didn’t have Ann, a fact which only thickened the grimness of the circumstances. They needed Ann, and that could only mean…The wifhands are out looking for her, Erik concluded.

“We still have time,” he tried to console.

“Time?” Her voice sounded shattered and hoarse. “You said the doefolmon is tonight.”

“Yeah, but not till four in the morning or something like that. I’ve been dreaming about it for months, and you have too, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Ann replied.

“And haven’t most of the dreams occurred around then?”

Ann’s terror-drained face tightened in reflection. “Yes,” she repeated. “Almost every time, I’d wake up, and the clock read 4:12.”

“That’s why. The dreams were really portents.”

They stepped over Duke’s body and made for the kitchen. “Same plan,” Erik informed her. “We’ll go out the back. I’ll take you to the van, then I’ll go look for your daughter. She’ll be at the cirice—the church—now. Getting her out shouldn’t be too risky. Most of the wifhands won’t be there.”

“Why?”

“They’re looking for you, and so are the wreccans. Giving them the slip is the hard part. The rest’ll be easy.”

Ann didn’t look convinced.

Erik stopped at the kitchen entrance.

“What?” Ann asked. “Let’s get out of—”

Bullets, Erik thought. None of it would be easy if he didn’t arm himself more effectively. He only had one round left for the shotgun.

Duke’s revolver, he reminded himself.

“Wait here. I’ll need Duke’s gun too.” He went back to the dim foyer and peered down. The giant revolver still lay in Duke’s grubby, squab hand. Erik knelt, fished around in his adversary’s jacket for bullets, the—

Holy sh—

What he noticed in that fraction of a second was all that his destiny would ever amount to. Duke’s plaid flannel shirt lay in tatters, but there was no blood. Through the holes he could see smudged, pocked white and several balls of buckshot that clearly had not penetrated Duke’s torso.

Bulletproof v—

In one split-second motion, Duke’s left hand grabbed the shotgun barrel, and his right hand snapped forward. Erik froze.

The revolver was aimed directly at his face

Duke leaned up, grinning proudly as ever. “Fooled you again, huh, fairy?” he remarked.

«« — »»

Ann stood in the entry, letting the pulse of her thoughts slow down in time with her heart. The sweat of her fear sucked her clothes to her skin. Then the thought replayed:

Kin sacrifice. Melanie must murder me before she can become the demon…

Time seemed to congeal before her face; all motion, even the world’s, seemed to freeze. Ann sensed something but didn’t know what. She stepped down the short hall to the foyer. Erik Tharp knelt at the body, rummaging for bullets. Suddenly, he seemed poised, his joints locked up. Then—

—his skull divided into three segments

She never even seemed to hear the sound of the shot. She felt concussion, and heat, then Tharp’s head simply burst. Wet hanks of brain slapped her in the chest. It all happened so fast she couldn’t even react. Tharp’s body collapsed before a fine gray cloud of smoke…

And through that smoke, the figure rose: Duke Belluxi grinning behind the giant revolver pointed at Ann’s face.

—

Chapter 33

“So you’re the one,” the madman observed. The end of the gun barrel looked big enough to admit a thumb. “You’re the one he came back for.”

Ann stood taprooted in her terror. The chunks of Tharp’s brains fell off her blouse, leaving glistening stains. A piece of scalp, tufted with white hair, stuck to her forearm. Duke’s hair was the same strange color. He took a step forward, his grinning face broad as a carved pumpkin. Behind the closely set eyes, Ann saw sheer, raging madness.

“The cocksucking little fairy set me up,” Duke informed her. Old bloodstains streaked his pants. “He used me to help him bust out, thought he was smarter than me.” He veered the mad grin down and laughed. “How smart are you now, fucker?”

Ann’s mind swam. If she tried to run, he would kill her. But somehow she also knew that if she didn’t run—if she tried to placate him, bargain with him—he’d also kill her. She could see that fact. She could see it in his eyes.

“Tharp kept talking about destiny, like he was put on earth to do something special. He wasn’t shit. But me, I got a real destiny. Know what it is?”

Ann couldn’t reply, couldn’t even move.

Duke was all over her at once, wielding his massive body with a nearly eloquent finesse. Ann screamed as he dragged her to the floor by a handful of hair. As his weight sidled onto her, so did the meaty, fetid stench of him. He straddled her chest; she could only squirm within herself. His mad eyes focused down. Chuckling, he tore open her blouse, snapped off her bra. Then the chuckle shrank into a demented stare. Ann gagged when he drooled into her mouth. His breath grew short as he traced her nipples with the revolver.

“You’re gonna be my best nut yet,” he promised her. “Oh, yeah, you sure as shit are. I can tell just by lookin’ at ya.”

He opened his trousers and withdrew himself. Suddenly, his stench stupefied her. Dried blood matted his pubic hair.

Then he plugged the revolver into her navel.

“That faggot Tharp, he used to blow me for quarters. Always makin’ phone calls. He was calling you, wasn’t he?”

Look at the moon tonight. Ann remembered the words. She nodded tensely.

“Why?” Duke Belluxi asked, and pinched a nipple.

Doefolmon, she thought. Fulluht-Loc.

Duke laughed. “Doesn’t matter none to me. Now, don’t take this personal, honeybunch, but it’s best if you’re dyin’ slow while I’m boppin’ ya. Gives me a better nut—know what I mean?”

Ann tremored in her paresis. Duke cocked the big, clunky revolver, growing erect in time with his pulse. Through the front bay window, the moon shimmered pinkly.

Ann prepared to die. She closed her eyes

Then the awful weight was gone.

Ann turned where she lay, looking ahead. Duke Belluxi was being dragged across the carpet by…something. Ann caught glimpses of faces, flesh. Duke thrashed as he was pinned to the floor by quick, snatching hands. Abruptly, he was screaming in hoarse bursts. What’s happening? Ann dumbly wondered. She felt in shock. Duke’s heels and palms pummeled the floor, his body arching up. Two fingers sharp as masonry nails sank promptly into his eyes. Two more clawlike hands ripped his trousers off. Ann could only stare frozen at the dreamlike sequence of horror…

Two shapely, concupiscent bodies knelt over Duke with grins like shards of glass. A long taloned finger raised a skewered eyeball to a needle-toothed mouth. The eyeball was eaten whole, like a grape. Humor was licked off the elegant finger. Lust-swollen breasts shined over the atrocity. Ann could only continue to catch glimpses at first. Pale pendants swayed as Duke’s body twitched with vigor. The figures persisted in their delighted butchery—Duke’s abdomen was laid open, exposing glistening organs. Blood flew like spaghetti and sauce. The closest figure grinned down at Duke’s genitals. A mouth like a knifecut in fresh meat opened heinously wide; rows of glassine teeth sparkled. A moment later, the mouth lowered, gritting down. Duke’s penis and testicles were quickly eaten out of the apex of his groin. A river of blood gushed onto the carpet.

Then the first figure’s mouth spread likewise. The top of Duke’s skull was bitten off. Orbs of brain glimmered. Duke Belluxi died in flinching convulsions, atop a blanket of his own blood and offal.

Holy Mother of G—

The two figures looked at Ann. They seemed amused. Ann’s mind crumpled at the impact of recognition. One figure straightened up on her knees, her nipple ends erect as coat pegs; she chortled, smearing Duke Belluxi’s blood over her breasts and abdomen like some luxurious lotion. The other figure was sloppily eating gobbets of Duke’s brains out of the cranial vault.

Milly. Maedeen, Ann realized. But…

It was something she apprehended rather than saw, a recognition that somehow reared beneath the tainted features: pronglike taloned hands and feet, elongated heads, bottomless, primeval eyes.

Not women, Ann’s thoughts verified. Things.

Maedeen rummaged for plump morsels amid Duke’s plundered gut, while Milly rather greedily slurped blood and spinal fluid out of the emptied skull. They paused only briefly to grin at Ann.

By now her incomprehension turned her limp. Laughter followed her as she was dragged away suddenly from behind. She was being helped up, urged out the back door into darkness. She was insensible.

“Come on!” a voice bellowed at her. Rough hands shook her at her shoulders. “Snap out of it!”

Ann’s eyes roved up, focused on the plump face in moonlight. It was Chief Bard.

“It’s tonight, Ann! We’ve got to get you out of here!”

Her awareness returned in pieces, in slabs. “What…”

“They’re succubi, Ann. They’re part of a cult that’s as old as civilization,” Bard told her, dragging her now toward the woods behind the house.

“Then it’s all true,” Ann muttered. “Everything Tharp said—”

“Yes!”

“They want Melanie to be the physical body of—”

“Come on!” he yelled again.

But the voice stopped them in their tracks. They turned, staring. In the sliding glass door, Maedeen stood looking after them. She was holding what appeared to be one of Duke Belluxi’s lungs. Even at this distance, Ann could see the chaotic features of her transformed face, and the teeth glittering like chisel blades.

“Bring her back, Bard!” croaked the inhuman voice. “You can’t get away from us! You can never get away!”

Bard yanked her on through the brambles. The moon followed them like a distended, pink face. “I’m one of their helots,” he panted to explain, “but they never fully initiated me because they needed someone on the outside. I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to watch any more innocent people die for their devil. It’s your mother, Ann—she’s the wifmunuc. They’ve all been waiting for this day for the last—”

Thousand years, Ann finished in thought. Tharp had said the same thinly. But—

“Melanie,” she said “We have to get Melanie.”

“Melanie’s lost! She’s part of the bludcynn now. She’s not your daughter anymore, she’s hers!”

Ann pulled against him. “I’m not leaving Melanie!”

“I might be able to get her later,” Bard said. “But the most important thing right now is to get you as far away from the cirice as possible. If they don’t have you when the moon goes into complete apogee, then the Fulluht-Loc can’t take place.”

Could he really get Melanie back, or was he just placating her? Ann couldn’t think of a way to resist him; he was saving her life, after all. She supposed all she could do was hope and pray.

He’d parked his police cruiser at the end of Senlac Street, in the dark. He was sweating, harried. He rushed her into the passenger side, jumped in himself, and gunned the engine.

He paused on the shift. “It’s all true, Ann.”

“I…I know.”

“And I’m sorry.”

Ann tilted her head. He’d saved her life. What did he have to be sorry about?

His chubby face turned to her. “I’m very, very sorry.”

“But I’m not.” rose the voice from the darkness of the backseat.

Ann flailed, screaming. Bard’s fat hands grappled at her. He clamped her head in the crook of his elbow. She shrieked at the sharp deep prick of pain.

“Well done, Chief.” Dr. Ashby Heyd’s face emerged into the pink fight. “There, fine.” He gingerly withdrew the hypodermic needle from her neck. “That’s a good girl,” he said.

—

Chapter 34

Dr. Harold didn’t know what he was thinking. He’d stopped only briefly at his house—for his gun. Clinical psychiatrists easily received state gun permits. But what do I need a gun for? he queried himself.

What did he expect?

The highway seemed to thwart him, its abandonment, its wide, open darkness—or something. His high beams stretched out ahead of the car only to be sucked up by interminable black.

He did not try to calculate the coincidences, and the facts, that had been revealed to him tonight. What am I thinking? the question returned. It seemed fat, like a dull, protracted headache. What do I think I’m going to do? He felt certain that Tharp had already returned to Lockwood, that he was there now.

But where does that leave me?

He could call the police, but what would he tell them? That Tharp had gone back to the locale of his crimes to prevent the incarnation of a female demon? They’d be committing me, he considered. Besides, the authorities had ignored his and Greene’s early recommendations. Why should they listen now?

Maybe I should listen to myself.

The moon seemed to pace him, its odd pink light flittering through lone stands of trees. The light and the constant drone of the tires threatened to lull him at the wheel, or hypnotize him. Yes, he felt thwarted, he felt pushing upward against some bizarre mental gravity that was bent on repelling him. Paranoia, he dismissed. He felt he was racing against something, but he couldn’t imagine what. Time, perhaps, or unprecedented fears.

Or impossibilities, he thought.

The moon was so full now it looked pregnant in its raw light; it looked heavy enough to drag itself out of the sky and fall to earth. Doefolmon, the strange word came to his head. Moon of the devil.

And another word, a name: Ardat-Lil.

He could not erase the image from his memory. It seemed indelible—the sheer beauty wed into the features of sheer repugnance, sheer evil. Most religions were born out of reaction to other religions; their roots were obvious. But the Ur-locs? Pre- Christian? Even pre-Druidic? What bizarre sociology could’ve created such an idea?

Dr. Harold did not attempt to contemplate an answer.

He felt sick in increments, waning as the car droned on into the inclement dark. The pinkened moonlight on his face felt warm, humid. He could see it still, Tharp’s harrowing psych ward sketch transposing into a vision of stunning clarity: the perfect hourglass physique, the large and perfect breasts, and then the bestial three-fingered hands with talons like meat hooks, and—

The face, he remembered.

—a black, thinly stretched maw full of stalactitic teeth.

How long had he been driving now? It seemed like all night, or a week of nights. Perhaps he’d been driving in circles, his sense of direction perverted by Tharp’s perverted imagery.

Perhaps I’ve died and gone to hell, and this is how I am to spend eternity, driving forever in darkness.

Then the big green road sign flashed in the headlights, a beacon to his relief.

LOCKWOOD, 15 MILES.

The moon shimmered beyond the sign, beyond the night.

Beyond the world.

And beyond the eye of Dr. Harold’s mind, the dark sketch of the creature seemed to turn to flesh and smile.

—

Chapter 35

The dream is vivid, hot—it always is.

“Dooer, dooer “

“It’s always the same: the back arching up, and waves of moans. The tense legs spread ever wide, the swollen belly stretched pinprick tight and pushing…pushing…pushing forth…

Then the image of the cup, like a chalice, and the emblem on its bowl like a squashed double circle:

She senses flame behind her, a fireplace perhaps. She senses warmth. Firelight flickers on the pocked rock walls as shadows hover. A larger version of the emblem seems suspended in the background, much larger. And again she hears the bizarre words:

“Dooer, dooer.”

She’s dreaming of her daughter’s birth. Birth is painful, yet she feels no pain. All she feels is the wonder of creation, for it is a wonder isn’t it? Her own warm belly displacing new life into the world? It’s a joyous thing.

Joyous, yes. So why does the dream always revert to nightmare?

The figures surround her, they seem cloaked or enshadowed. Soft hands stroke the tense sweating skin. For a time, they are all Ann’s eyes can focus on. The hands. They caress her not just in comfort but also—somehow—in adoration. Here is where the dream loses its wonder. Soon the hands grow too ardent. They are fondling her. They stroke the enflamed breasts, the quivering belly. They run up and down the parted, shining thighs. The belly continues to quiver and push. No faces can be seen, only the hands, but soon heads lower. Tongues begin to lap up the hot sweat which runs in rivulets. Soft lips kiss her eyes, her forehead, her throat. Tongues churn over her clitoris, and voracious mouths suck milk from her breasts.

The images wrench her, they’re revolting, obscene. Wake up! she commands herself. Wake up, wake up! She cannot move. She cannot speak.

Her orgasm is obvious, a lewd and clenching irony in time with the very contractions of birth. Behind her she senses frenzied motion. She hears grunts, moans—

—then screams.

Screams?

But they aren’t her screams, are they?

She glimpses dim figures tossing bundles onto a crackling fire. Still more figures seem to wield knives or hatchets. The figures seem palsied, numb. She hears chopping sounds.

The dream’s eye rises to a high vantage point; the circle moves away. Naked backs cluster about the childbirth table. Now only a lone, hooded shape stands between the spread legs. It looks down, as if in reverence, at the wet, bloated belly. The belly is pink.

Moans drift up, and excited squeals. The firelight dances. The chopping sounds thunk on and on, on and on…

“Dooer, dooer,” bids the hooded shape.

The belly shivers, collapsing.

A baby begins to cry.

«« — »»

“Ann, Ann?” queried the familiar voice.

Ann’s eyes opened, but at first she saw nothing. Soft murmurs seemed to hover about her like vapor. Color shifted—orange—and she sensed a pleasant pulse of heat. Again she’d had the nightmare of Melanie’s birth…but where was she? She knew she couldn’t be in bed. Beneath her felt cold, hard, like stone. Then, as suddenly as her realizations—

Slup-slup-slup…

Her vision blanked again, bringing the image of crimson vertigo.

The wide knife plunging down—

Slup-slup-slup…

“Ann. Wake up.”

The face formed, a reverse dissolve. It was Dr. Heyd.

Her eyes at last came into focus. Cloaked and hooded figures surrounded her, looking serenely down. Ann’s gaze panned. One by one she recognized the ovaled faces: all of Lockwood’s elderwomen. Around each of their necks hung a pale pendant, like a piece of stone on a white cord. At Ann’s feet stood Maedeen and Milly, and standing between them, in a cloak not of sackcloth but of black silk, was Ann’s mother.

Ann couldn’t move from where she lay, though she felt no lashings of any kind. She was completely naked before them all. It felt as though ghosts squirmed over her, holding her down.

In the background, more figures busied themselves. Shadows bent to stoke the flames within a great brick furnace. They were all men, she could see, and they seemed faltering, devoid of all will. Another man poured some dark fluid from a vessel into a large earthen cup. A chalice.

The women lowered their hoods, their eyes wide in some deep intent. The man passed the cup to Ann’s mother. The man was Martin.

He did not look at her at all.

“Blud fo cuppe,” the wifmunuc intoned. “Nis heofonrice, bute nisfan.”

The coven responded: “Us macain wîhan, o Modor. Us macain fulluht with êower blud.”

The chalice was passed around, each woman mouthing a silent prayer, then sipping. When the chalice had made the entire circle, the wifmunuc, Ann’s mother, consumed the rest of its contents.

Engraved along the cup’s rim, the glyph could be seen—the weird double circle. And when Ann’s mother bent to set the chalice down, Ann saw the glyph again, a much larger version, behind the circle. It was not a carving, she noticed, but a large slab of flat stone hanging from the rear wall. Ann’s eyes could only remain fixed ahead. The wifmunuc turned around, her hands splayed. Then she leaned forward and kissed the great rectangular slab of stone.

“O Mother, Holy Sister, Holy Daughter—”

“Bless us on this holy night.”

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.

Dr. Harold then walked to the back of the unholy nave.

Twin metal hooks stuck out from the rearmost wall, mounting hooks as if to hang something from. Nothing hung there now—there was just an outline of dust and age against the old wood. Whatever had been there had been quickly removed, taken away.

Dr. Harold’s eyes remained fixed upon the spot.

The outline was clearly visible, that of a great squashed double circle.

THE END

—

Edward Lee (seen here with his new electronic cigarette) has had more than 40 books published in the horror and suspense field, including CITY INFERNAL, THE GOLEM, and BLACK TRAIN. His movie, HEADER was released on DVD by Synapse Films, in June, 2009. Recent releases include the stories, “You Are My Everything” and “The Cyesologniac,” the Lovecraftian novella “Trolley No. 1852,” and the hardcore novel HAUNTER OF THE THRESHOLD. Currently, Lee is working on HEADER 3. Lee lives on Florida’s St. Pete Beach. Visit him online at:

http://www.edwardleeonline.com