STORY: The Succubus Dances
The friendship between a succubus and the man it is intending to seduce. Contains discussion of sexual matters, but no explicit sex or other mature content.
I don't think I have been human. It is said that many of us here in hell have lived as humans before our arrival, even some of my kind. Galhetah says that they can remember their place of birth and even their sex. If I did I have no traces of the memories, and thus it can't matter. In fact I have so few memories, one might think that I am young. My existence has been fairly monotonous, both in hell and on the expeditions. I have not forgotten, but similar memories have been layered on top of one another until it takes effort to separate them.
It had come to the point where we needed a new harvest, and it was my turn. I was standing on one of the uppermost terraces of the tall building in the pleasure quarter when I received the signal, watching the eternal glitter on the water that rushed from terrace to terrace. The water was silver against the yellow marble that lined the pools. Perhaps travel to the physical plane was more difficult when I was young, if I have been young, but now it needs no more than a step.
It was an input expedition, so I would require a female form, but I rarely tend to materialise in the same moment as I arrive on the physical plane. It is rare that I find myself in a place where there is a man whose semen I can collect, and travelling without a physical body is easier.
There is not much to be gained in trying to specify the place on Earth where one wants to arrive. What I saw in the new world was a nocturnal street between tall houses, wet ground, no animal life. The buildings of humans are not unlike those of hell: perhaps we have influenced them, perhaps those of our kind who have been human have brought their customs. I was nearest the tallest and most vast building, so I let my presence move towards it. It was simpler of structure than the buildings in hell, but not ugly: its front was a smooth surface of squares in shades between silver and blue, and some of them were lit. I slid through the glass of the door.
It took some time before I sensed the directions of the humans. The first one I found sat alone in a small room and pushed papers together on her table, but she was female and therefore useless for my expedition. In the next room I found a male. He was young, thin, and his hair was covered with a plastic cap. He stood by a bench with cupboard doors in a scratched and flaking material, counting objects in low drawers. Now and then he twisted himself to one side to make a note.
I let my position shift closer to him, until it touched or intersected with his body. His shadowed skin was very clean and smooth, as close to unmarred as an animal's can be, and the few tufts of his hair that poked out from under the hairnet were black. His face was a little gaunt and one eyelid hung lower than the other. His body felt ill, but that might have come from fatigue and bad posture. Regardless, there didn't seem to be anything wrong with his testicles: the thing that mattered for our harvest. The things he studied in the drawer were little stains of organic material between two glass slides.
I decided to not materialise as a human yet. When we take human form, the rest often goes fast: some substance we exude makes us irresistible to them. I wanted to study him for a while while he was still unaffected.
I receded into the dusk under the cupboards and shaped myself into a rat with little hand-like paws and a snuffling pink snout. When I was finished, I poked my head out and ran across the mirror-sleek floor that pricked my snout with its chemical cleanness.
As soon as I heard the flapping of his coat I stopped and turned my head. He leant forward and studied me, without either revulsion or sympathy.
I picked up enough from his brain to understand his language when he spoke.
“How the heck did that get in? Just be still, little one.”
He took a few steps back and lifted a large blue container with one hand without taking his gaze off me. He turned it upside down and lowered it over me. I waited until the shadows in the hollow were on top of me before I dematerialised.
The container landed on the floor. He cried out, and took a couple of steps towards the door. He opened it and looked out in the corridor. When he returned he walked more slowly, as if he were afraid that he would stagger.
I pulled back into the corridor and took the form of a female human: the same skin colour as his, hair curled hard, cheekbones, black leather. It was the same general design that had been successful in several input expeditions. The air smelled of plastic and disinfectant and something dusty and bitter as I stepped into his chamber.
The clack of my shoes on the floor was enough to make him turn around. He stood frozen, his lips slightly parted.
“What are you doing here?” he said eventually.
His gaze slid past me to the corner of the room.
“What's your name?” I asked.
His mouth forced itself into a quick smile.
“Jorge Francés Núñez, but... what are you doing here, ma'am? Do you need help with anything?”
I smiled at him.
“I want to follow you home,” I said.
This time his smile was involuntary like blinking.
“Seriously, there is some sort of catch here. I have no idea why you would dress like that, unless you're a prostitute. And if you are a prostitute I don't know why you'd be after a guy like me. I don't have any money. Get out of here, you'll get hell if anyone sees you.”
I let the body collapse before him as if all its sinews had loosened.
When he leant over me, he must have thought I was unable to perceive it. He took the wrist between his fingers and held it for a moment, then crouched and looked into my eyes. His own were a pale brown, his eyebrows had straightened. His face moved in some emotion, then he rolled over my body on the floor and stood up. I heard his voice as he spoke to someone.
Others came, lifting me up and putting me in a soft bed in a dark room. I remained there until light returned. A female human, also dressed in white, came in to look in my eyes and examine me. In the meantime I asked her about Jorge. It took her a while to remember him, but once she knew, she happily told me that he was a medical student, and his street and house number.
The next time no-one saw me I dematerialised and flew to his habitation.
*
The space where he lived was not big, but perhaps big enough for him. A dog with greying fur on its muzzle lay curled up on a bed with a green bedspread patterned with pink roses, dark in the bad light from the window. There wasn't much to see: a screen, perhaps modern since it was shiny and not scarred, among few and worn pieces of furniture; not a lot of dirt, but hardened crumbs along the skirting-boards in the kitchen and dirty plates in the sink. I waited until the sky darkened and he dragged his feet up the staircase. I materialised in the landing a moment after he had gone inside. The door was locked, so I pressed the button.
Jorge opened. His face was lightly shocked even before he recognised me.
“Is that you?” he said. “I went up to the ward and asked for you. No-one knew where you'd gone. I think they went to the police.”
When I didn't speak, he went on:
“What's your name?”
“Ángeles.”
It was a name I had picked up from one of the women at the hospital. His shoulders relaxed, as if he was calmer now that I had a name.
“Can I stay here for a while?” I asked.
So far I was not using anything on him, other than the submissive courtesy of my tone. He hesitated for a moment, then his long body relaxed yet another degree.
“Don't you have anywhere to stay?” he said. “Of course you can. How long do you think you'll need?”
“Oh, not very long. Just a few days.”
He didn't ask anything more, but walked before me into the dusky rooms.
“Are you OK with sleeping on the couch?” he said pointing at it, square and upholstered in unadorned green. “Otherwise I'll see if I can borrow a mattress.”
I moved through the rooms and looked at his life outside the hospital. He warmed food for humans, flesh and plants, and partitioned it between two plates. I let my transient body grind the food with its jaws and absorb it. He looked up at me now and then across the table, and there was a light behind his face that hadn't been there.
“I certainly don't have a problem with you staying,” he said. “It gets a bit lonely... you're welcome to stay a bit longer, if you can't find anywhere. OK, now I have to do the washing-up. You can do what you want here in the flat, there's books if you want that.”
I got a book while he sat watching scraps of images on the screen, but didn't read much. Humans easily exaggerate our power, and that of the angels. We are superior to physical beings in many ways, but we are not omnipotent. Merely communicating with him with human words required concentration, and I couldn't manage to read more than a few sentences at a time. What I read was about humans studying the planet Mars in the hope of travelling there.
Jorge had gone. I put the book down on the worn beige carpeting and dematerialised. When I entered Jorge's room, he lay on his front in the bed and read in the little intense light of a bed lamp. On the table next to him lay piles of notepads and books. The cover had slid down and showed his pale blue shirt.
Shortly afterwards -on the physical plane it was easier to perceive time- he made a couple of notes, put down his book and turned out the light. I could have done it then, perhaps while he slept. He wouldn't have been able to resist me, and it might have been more merciful to do it while he thought it was a dream. Our expeditions rarely harm the humans, no more than their regular mating.
I still don't know why I didn't do it.
The planet rolled around until we saw the sun. His clock rang with a blaring note and he got up. In the living-room he stopped.
“Ángeles?” he said.
His hair swung as he shook his head and went out in the hallway. He shoved the door to a smaller room, and it slid open.
“Ángeles?” he said again, louder this time.
When he went back out to the couch I materialised. My shoes hit the linoleum carpet.
“Here I am,” I said. “I just went out to the landing.”
His gaze flew across me and he gave a sniff like the beginning of a laugh. Perhaps some details had changed in my physical form, but he didn't seem to react to anything.
“You'll have to excuse me,” he said. “I've had some weird experiences lately. Perhaps I just need to sleep more.”
I said something affirmative.
“Forget about it,” he said. “What do you want for breakfast? There's only cereal, I'm afraid, but there's money if you want to go shopping. Please feed the dog sometime around lunch, that'd be great.”
He left.
I poured food for the dog. It ate, without looking at me. It was possible that one of its senses perceived that I wasn't a real human, but it wasn't as if it could communicate with him.
The sky darkened. When he came back I heard his running footsteps on the flagstones in the landing.
“Ángeles!” he almost shouted when he stepped into the hallway. “I'm sorry... I forgot you didn't have a key. I can get one cut tomorrow if you want.”
“That's not a problem,” I said.
He gave a quick smile.
“I'm going to walk the dog. You want to come?”
I barely looked at him during the walk, nor at his animal. They resembled one another more than he did me, with the many layers in their eyes, the wet membranes in their noses. I could have told him the truth just to see how he would react, and that thought made me shrink back, the way humans also do before temptations.
It was the surroundings that drew my gaze. There weren't many humans or vehicles around us, the sky had cleared and retained the last light behind a sparse cluster of grey clouds. He went ahead to an area with trees inside a green-varnished metal fence. There were other humans there with dogs, and a number of youths laughing by a table screwed into the ground. Jorge picked up a fallen branch and threw it to make the dog run for it.
“If you want to, I can go out with the dog,” I said.
“Tomorrow?”
“Every day. Until I've found somewhere else to live.”
I looked for more words. With humans you always have to use words when you want to communicate.
“In exchange for letting me stay there.”
As we returned between the blackening trees he switched hands with the leash so that he could take mine. His hand was a bit damp from the moisture on the branch.
“You know, you're a real friend,” he said.
That night he asked whether I wanted to watch a film. I let him choose, and he picked a film about space called To the Terra, in a different language from the one he spoke. I don't remember anything of the film, either. I remember that the grid of other yellow windows was visible in the blackness outside.
“It feels very weird,” Jorge said after the film had ended. “Having you living in here...”
He cut himself off. I could have searched in his mind until I found the words, but there was no point. He straightened up from the sofa cushions.
“Nah, you'll have to excuse me. I should be able to have a woman living here with me, there's no difference to if you were a guy. But I'll have to help you look for a flat. As long as you don't think I want you out of here. I mean, we can keep seeing each other, after all.”
He looked at me, and when I didn't respond he said:
“We can, right?”
I made a noise that wasn't any real word, and he relaxed.
“Well, then,” he said, getting to his feet. “I can't sit here any more, then you won't have anywhere to sleep.”
*
Once more I slipped through his door, dematerialised so that he wouldn't see me. I didn't need to, because he was asleep. Orange light groped through the window, with the blinds up, and turned his face into something that barely looked like a human's. One of his hands lay lightly closed on the blanket.
If I had been able to make a noise I would have told him that I wasn't going to do it. He wouldn't have heard; he was trapped in the humans' chaos of sleep. When he awoke, Ángeles would be gone and he would be unspoilt.
I stopped on the way out when he moved in his sleep, but he didn't wake.
Some time later I found a male human in a street, and shortly afterwards I could return to hell with my harvest.
THE END
I don't think I have been human. It is said that many of us here in hell have lived as humans before our arrival, even some of my kind. Galhetah says that they can remember their place of birth and even their sex. If I did I have no traces of the memories, and thus it can't matter. In fact I have so few memories, one might think that I am young. My existence has been fairly monotonous, both in hell and on the expeditions. I have not forgotten, but similar memories have been layered on top of one another until it takes effort to separate them.
It had come to the point where we needed a new harvest, and it was my turn. I was standing on one of the uppermost terraces of the tall building in the pleasure quarter when I received the signal, watching the eternal glitter on the water that rushed from terrace to terrace. The water was silver against the yellow marble that lined the pools. Perhaps travel to the physical plane was more difficult when I was young, if I have been young, but now it needs no more than a step.
It was an input expedition, so I would require a female form, but I rarely tend to materialise in the same moment as I arrive on the physical plane. It is rare that I find myself in a place where there is a man whose semen I can collect, and travelling without a physical body is easier.
There is not much to be gained in trying to specify the place on Earth where one wants to arrive. What I saw in the new world was a nocturnal street between tall houses, wet ground, no animal life. The buildings of humans are not unlike those of hell: perhaps we have influenced them, perhaps those of our kind who have been human have brought their customs. I was nearest the tallest and most vast building, so I let my presence move towards it. It was simpler of structure than the buildings in hell, but not ugly: its front was a smooth surface of squares in shades between silver and blue, and some of them were lit. I slid through the glass of the door.
It took some time before I sensed the directions of the humans. The first one I found sat alone in a small room and pushed papers together on her table, but she was female and therefore useless for my expedition. In the next room I found a male. He was young, thin, and his hair was covered with a plastic cap. He stood by a bench with cupboard doors in a scratched and flaking material, counting objects in low drawers. Now and then he twisted himself to one side to make a note.
I let my position shift closer to him, until it touched or intersected with his body. His shadowed skin was very clean and smooth, as close to unmarred as an animal's can be, and the few tufts of his hair that poked out from under the hairnet were black. His face was a little gaunt and one eyelid hung lower than the other. His body felt ill, but that might have come from fatigue and bad posture. Regardless, there didn't seem to be anything wrong with his testicles: the thing that mattered for our harvest. The things he studied in the drawer were little stains of organic material between two glass slides.
I decided to not materialise as a human yet. When we take human form, the rest often goes fast: some substance we exude makes us irresistible to them. I wanted to study him for a while while he was still unaffected.
I receded into the dusk under the cupboards and shaped myself into a rat with little hand-like paws and a snuffling pink snout. When I was finished, I poked my head out and ran across the mirror-sleek floor that pricked my snout with its chemical cleanness.
As soon as I heard the flapping of his coat I stopped and turned my head. He leant forward and studied me, without either revulsion or sympathy.
I picked up enough from his brain to understand his language when he spoke.
“How the heck did that get in? Just be still, little one.”
He took a few steps back and lifted a large blue container with one hand without taking his gaze off me. He turned it upside down and lowered it over me. I waited until the shadows in the hollow were on top of me before I dematerialised.
The container landed on the floor. He cried out, and took a couple of steps towards the door. He opened it and looked out in the corridor. When he returned he walked more slowly, as if he were afraid that he would stagger.
I pulled back into the corridor and took the form of a female human: the same skin colour as his, hair curled hard, cheekbones, black leather. It was the same general design that had been successful in several input expeditions. The air smelled of plastic and disinfectant and something dusty and bitter as I stepped into his chamber.
The clack of my shoes on the floor was enough to make him turn around. He stood frozen, his lips slightly parted.
“What are you doing here?” he said eventually.
His gaze slid past me to the corner of the room.
“What's your name?” I asked.
His mouth forced itself into a quick smile.
“Jorge Francés Núñez, but... what are you doing here, ma'am? Do you need help with anything?”
I smiled at him.
“I want to follow you home,” I said.
This time his smile was involuntary like blinking.
“Seriously, there is some sort of catch here. I have no idea why you would dress like that, unless you're a prostitute. And if you are a prostitute I don't know why you'd be after a guy like me. I don't have any money. Get out of here, you'll get hell if anyone sees you.”
I let the body collapse before him as if all its sinews had loosened.
When he leant over me, he must have thought I was unable to perceive it. He took the wrist between his fingers and held it for a moment, then crouched and looked into my eyes. His own were a pale brown, his eyebrows had straightened. His face moved in some emotion, then he rolled over my body on the floor and stood up. I heard his voice as he spoke to someone.
Others came, lifting me up and putting me in a soft bed in a dark room. I remained there until light returned. A female human, also dressed in white, came in to look in my eyes and examine me. In the meantime I asked her about Jorge. It took her a while to remember him, but once she knew, she happily told me that he was a medical student, and his street and house number.
The next time no-one saw me I dematerialised and flew to his habitation.
*
The space where he lived was not big, but perhaps big enough for him. A dog with greying fur on its muzzle lay curled up on a bed with a green bedspread patterned with pink roses, dark in the bad light from the window. There wasn't much to see: a screen, perhaps modern since it was shiny and not scarred, among few and worn pieces of furniture; not a lot of dirt, but hardened crumbs along the skirting-boards in the kitchen and dirty plates in the sink. I waited until the sky darkened and he dragged his feet up the staircase. I materialised in the landing a moment after he had gone inside. The door was locked, so I pressed the button.
Jorge opened. His face was lightly shocked even before he recognised me.
“Is that you?” he said. “I went up to the ward and asked for you. No-one knew where you'd gone. I think they went to the police.”
When I didn't speak, he went on:
“What's your name?”
“Ángeles.”
It was a name I had picked up from one of the women at the hospital. His shoulders relaxed, as if he was calmer now that I had a name.
“Can I stay here for a while?” I asked.
So far I was not using anything on him, other than the submissive courtesy of my tone. He hesitated for a moment, then his long body relaxed yet another degree.
“Don't you have anywhere to stay?” he said. “Of course you can. How long do you think you'll need?”
“Oh, not very long. Just a few days.”
He didn't ask anything more, but walked before me into the dusky rooms.
“Are you OK with sleeping on the couch?” he said pointing at it, square and upholstered in unadorned green. “Otherwise I'll see if I can borrow a mattress.”
I moved through the rooms and looked at his life outside the hospital. He warmed food for humans, flesh and plants, and partitioned it between two plates. I let my transient body grind the food with its jaws and absorb it. He looked up at me now and then across the table, and there was a light behind his face that hadn't been there.
“I certainly don't have a problem with you staying,” he said. “It gets a bit lonely... you're welcome to stay a bit longer, if you can't find anywhere. OK, now I have to do the washing-up. You can do what you want here in the flat, there's books if you want that.”
I got a book while he sat watching scraps of images on the screen, but didn't read much. Humans easily exaggerate our power, and that of the angels. We are superior to physical beings in many ways, but we are not omnipotent. Merely communicating with him with human words required concentration, and I couldn't manage to read more than a few sentences at a time. What I read was about humans studying the planet Mars in the hope of travelling there.
Jorge had gone. I put the book down on the worn beige carpeting and dematerialised. When I entered Jorge's room, he lay on his front in the bed and read in the little intense light of a bed lamp. On the table next to him lay piles of notepads and books. The cover had slid down and showed his pale blue shirt.
Shortly afterwards -on the physical plane it was easier to perceive time- he made a couple of notes, put down his book and turned out the light. I could have done it then, perhaps while he slept. He wouldn't have been able to resist me, and it might have been more merciful to do it while he thought it was a dream. Our expeditions rarely harm the humans, no more than their regular mating.
I still don't know why I didn't do it.
The planet rolled around until we saw the sun. His clock rang with a blaring note and he got up. In the living-room he stopped.
“Ángeles?” he said.
His hair swung as he shook his head and went out in the hallway. He shoved the door to a smaller room, and it slid open.
“Ángeles?” he said again, louder this time.
When he went back out to the couch I materialised. My shoes hit the linoleum carpet.
“Here I am,” I said. “I just went out to the landing.”
His gaze flew across me and he gave a sniff like the beginning of a laugh. Perhaps some details had changed in my physical form, but he didn't seem to react to anything.
“You'll have to excuse me,” he said. “I've had some weird experiences lately. Perhaps I just need to sleep more.”
I said something affirmative.
“Forget about it,” he said. “What do you want for breakfast? There's only cereal, I'm afraid, but there's money if you want to go shopping. Please feed the dog sometime around lunch, that'd be great.”
He left.
I poured food for the dog. It ate, without looking at me. It was possible that one of its senses perceived that I wasn't a real human, but it wasn't as if it could communicate with him.
The sky darkened. When he came back I heard his running footsteps on the flagstones in the landing.
“Ángeles!” he almost shouted when he stepped into the hallway. “I'm sorry... I forgot you didn't have a key. I can get one cut tomorrow if you want.”
“That's not a problem,” I said.
He gave a quick smile.
“I'm going to walk the dog. You want to come?”
I barely looked at him during the walk, nor at his animal. They resembled one another more than he did me, with the many layers in their eyes, the wet membranes in their noses. I could have told him the truth just to see how he would react, and that thought made me shrink back, the way humans also do before temptations.
It was the surroundings that drew my gaze. There weren't many humans or vehicles around us, the sky had cleared and retained the last light behind a sparse cluster of grey clouds. He went ahead to an area with trees inside a green-varnished metal fence. There were other humans there with dogs, and a number of youths laughing by a table screwed into the ground. Jorge picked up a fallen branch and threw it to make the dog run for it.
“If you want to, I can go out with the dog,” I said.
“Tomorrow?”
“Every day. Until I've found somewhere else to live.”
I looked for more words. With humans you always have to use words when you want to communicate.
“In exchange for letting me stay there.”
As we returned between the blackening trees he switched hands with the leash so that he could take mine. His hand was a bit damp from the moisture on the branch.
“You know, you're a real friend,” he said.
That night he asked whether I wanted to watch a film. I let him choose, and he picked a film about space called To the Terra, in a different language from the one he spoke. I don't remember anything of the film, either. I remember that the grid of other yellow windows was visible in the blackness outside.
“It feels very weird,” Jorge said after the film had ended. “Having you living in here...”
He cut himself off. I could have searched in his mind until I found the words, but there was no point. He straightened up from the sofa cushions.
“Nah, you'll have to excuse me. I should be able to have a woman living here with me, there's no difference to if you were a guy. But I'll have to help you look for a flat. As long as you don't think I want you out of here. I mean, we can keep seeing each other, after all.”
He looked at me, and when I didn't respond he said:
“We can, right?”
I made a noise that wasn't any real word, and he relaxed.
“Well, then,” he said, getting to his feet. “I can't sit here any more, then you won't have anywhere to sleep.”
*
Once more I slipped through his door, dematerialised so that he wouldn't see me. I didn't need to, because he was asleep. Orange light groped through the window, with the blinds up, and turned his face into something that barely looked like a human's. One of his hands lay lightly closed on the blanket.
If I had been able to make a noise I would have told him that I wasn't going to do it. He wouldn't have heard; he was trapped in the humans' chaos of sleep. When he awoke, Ángeles would be gone and he would be unspoilt.
I stopped on the way out when he moved in his sleep, but he didn't wake.
Some time later I found a male human in a street, and shortly afterwards I could return to hell with my harvest.
THE END