Darkness faded from a pinhole of distant light. Night, in a living room of an old house. I found that I was standing, appreciative of the fact that I was fully clothed. The windows were the only source of illumination from the moon outside. The house itself was not extraordinary. A couch covered in cobwebs, old in style with leather buttons, sat lifeless and dead in the main room, close to a piano shrouded in transparent cotton. Otherwise the place was tidy. I imagined an older couple had lived here before it was abandoned. Or a widow, left alone.

As I moved toward the kitchen I realized the oldest part of the house was the wallpaper, themed with white flowers, aged and appearing yellow with strips missing throughout. Dusty chairs sat around an ancient table with a wooden broom standing upright on the side. I imagined this would be a good place for antiquing but it all felt dry and sad. Life had probably flourished here once, a long time ago, perhaps in the 1950s. Now it was quiet and had a musty energy behind its derelict walls and dusty cabinets, sink, and stove.

Quiet until a sound caught my attention. Boards creaked above me. I suddenly felt like I was in a horror movie creeping towards the stairs until my insides twisted into a knot. The balcony seemed to beckon to me as more footsteps welcomed each of my steps up the groaning stairs. My heart thumped as I made my way towards the dark hallway, a pattering of hard feet running across the floor halted me until my curiosity got the better of me. The hallway was empty except for the light from the window at the end. I froze in place and listened to my heart as a creak near the far open doorway seized my throat.

A foot stood out from the doorway and suddenly retreated. For a moment I glimpsed the foot and saw that it was entirely made of bone. The strength instilled in me by father reminded me not to be a coward in these situations but I couldn’t help but feel the urge to flee. Another seizure of fear grasped me by the throat as a figure rushed from the doorway to the adjacent door. It was a woman veiled in white, almost hovering like a ghost. The veil flowed like a nightgown as she passed, delicate, translucent, and inviting. It became clear to me that this was another attempt by the sisters to remind me of my past, to show me something that I had missed. The nightgown, my mother, I certainly didn’t miss her. I know I’m indebted to her for giving birth to me but not all parents deserve that respect, or any respect. I should thank her for the self-loathing, the knowing that even as a child I was never innocent, and the knot in my throat when I put on a leather belt. Pounding against my back, pounding away my masculine fortitude. The cooling satin that followed the arm swing provided a relief from the stinging pain that followed, gentle wisps of a nightgown that I wanted to bury my head in, despite knowing that my mother’s naked body was underneath.

Was this ghostly figure meant to be my mother? If it was she was thinner and paler than she used to be. Each of the rooms at the end of the hall were devoid of any apparition, each containing a large canopy bed with decorative column posts, two dressers, a chair, and thick cobwebs over everything. The bedroom to the right contained less webbing so I entered cautiously and squinted, listening and looking for any signs of movement, cobwebs, satin or otherwise.

A howling whisper startled me, icy daggers running up my spine. The bed sheet that was previously flat rose up several inches, ripples spreading out like a drop of water in the ocean. It wasn’t until I reached the bed post that I realized the window was completely open and sending a chill through the shadowy chamber. The bed sheets were clean and velvety and drew me closer in, my hands wanted to feel the sweet, smooth caress and rid my mind of the previous nightmares. I collapsed onto the plush mattress and let the sheets fold around me, the air pressed them to my body and I could even feel the swaddling strokes through my clothes. My clothes…Damn, they were gone again. As the sheets flapped gracefully in front of me I thought I saw random shapes forming as if I was watching clouds form and dissipate, faces appearing, flowers sprouting in white puffs, billowing satin tickling my skin. The sheets descended, floating, and a male face appeared, dark and obscure, made of shadows. For that split second I could see that he was angry, angry at me, angry at the world for having such a pathetic and weak-minded son. I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to move. Then I saw a tall humanoid shape standing over me at the end of the bed and I didn’t want to breathe either.

The shape bent over me and cold hands came through the floating sheets and held my biceps down, cold legs came forward as well and the body of the shape straddled me. The tenderness in the body’s movement drew me to the shape’s chest which revealed feminine qualities, slim and frail. A veil of bed sheets swirled above her and descended as petals would fall from a flower and scatter to the ground. Her hair frolicked on my chest as her shadowed face came down to mine.

“What’s your name?” I smiled, enjoying the comforting embrace and the skin-on-skin contact that I missed out on in the real-world for so long. The moonlight cast its glow onto her body and created a silhouette but I knew that she was indeed a woman, with wispy arms and bony legs at my sides. This warmth was nurturing until I became shocked to discover that I was inside her, my pants were open. She swiveled her hips when I tried to push her away but it didn’t help as I sank deeper into her canal. The writhing and forcefulness of that moment took me back to my first experience where I was subjected to the willpower of a girl I barely knew in high school. As she thrashed against my hips I held my eyes shut, hands over my face, and tried to wish it all away. The crossroads of flesh, the bond of intimate desire. It wasn’t something I wanted to discover about myself or see a heaving, pulsing body over me, growing hot with bodily moisture.

As my fingers parted I could see through the crack that there was no longer any moisture or fluids, seeping onto me through wet skin. There wasn’t skin either, or muscle, or any flesh at all. There was only bone. Leg bones, thigh bones, a ribcage, bony fingers pressing against my abdomen. Black bone against the moonlight, except for the shiny cap. The bile in my throat tasted different than the usual revulsion. The fluid that built up in my mouth was closer to the salty substance from the initial encounter with the witches. I wanted to speak and tell the skeletal woman that I was sorry, that although her hips were a cage to my manhood I wished I could have been better for her, that I should have been braver, that I knew this wasn’t real, and that I shouldn’t have been a coward but the salt water splashed out of my mouth. She stopped and leaned forward, gray teeth coming closer, empty holes staring into mine. 

“Things are always not what they appear.” Her breath…her breath, cold and noxious like fumes from dry ice, pummeled my senses. Eyes shut I found the bitterness growing and awoke…again, on the floor, in a sleek room of ice.

Cold, so cold and barren. White ice composed the chamber, the same size as the previous bedroom, and not only numbed my feet and back but my insides as well. The entire room of white was shaped like an egg, a bitter womb shear and glossy. My penis shriveled but that didn’t bother me as much as the stabbing shivering that drove me to desire a warm fire or even a warm body. I looked into the wall of rounded ice and saw a woman, her visage frozen like my own. I rubbed away the frost and saw her delicate features, attractive and beautiful through the opaque prison. Her light brown hair was shuffled but remained perfectly still like a painting. Her delicate face gave her the appearance of a mid-forties housewife with sad closed eyes, perhaps a divorcee raising a child on her own, lonely and tired. Steam rolled off the wall as it started to melt, water pooling at my senseless feet.

This was the woman, the skeletal woman from before. It had to be. Was this cold ice chamber her home or her tomb? As the wall melted her eyes suddenly opened. I grew tense, my muscles shivering as I clamored faster. I was meant to save her with the only thing I had left, my body heat. These metaphysical dreams were like enigmas that I desperately wanted to understand. I pressed my lower body flat against the wall, ignorant of the heat generated from my groin. Oddly, her thin head came first, wet, pale, and freezing. Lacerations on my fingers turned the ice red as I dug deeper. I couldn’t help but want to free her. She didn’t seem to deserve this imprisonment, her tight skin and long face suggested she was already torturing herself with malnourishment. I pressed even harder against the cold wall between us. She refused to lift her head.

“Talk to me. It’s too quiet. Please talk to me.” I shivered. “You’re the third one, aren’t you? Is this your hell or mine? Please…” She remained with a bent neck, head down, and warm breath melting away more ice. For a moment water streamed down her wrinkled nakedness. These nightmares had gone on too long. “You want me…Take me. I’m so tired of being alone!”

Her arms exploded from the melting ice and grabbed the back of my head. Her head jumped up and her eyes penetrated mine. “But even when you aren’t alone you inevitably feel that you are.”

Her face froze over, her arms followed and then suddenly my vision froze over like a snowy windshield. I couldn’t ignore her logic. Every relationship I had ever suffered through left me more alone than I had been before. It was strange that I never considered this until now.

The blur of the ice melted into an opaque view of a dark forest and I found myself on the ground, cold, dewy grass against my cheeks. I stood and saw the glow of a crescent moon through the branches of the tall trees. A woman with long brown hair in a green dress stood a few feet away on the breach of the forest, her back to me.

The green dress…”You’re the woman from the bus. The one who agreed to meet me. I thought you were being kind, sitting with me, comforting me, but you’ve only provided me with suffering.” I tried to conceal the anger in my voice.

She seemed to disregard my question. “Energy can be passed from one person to another. Did you feel it? Did you feel it when I touched you? Do you feel it when you sit next to someone you admire? Hasn’t the proximity of a person who fauns over someone cause that person to be influenced by sexual prowess, causing them to glow more radiantly?”

“Is that why you took me? To give me sexual energy? I don’t need more sex.”

Cybella, having learned her name from Shaina, didn’t move. “You have things confused, Everett. This isn’t about you. This is about us.”

“It certainly doesn’t feel that way.”

The woman turned with an elegance that swirled her dress, causing it to shimmer in the nearly pitch darkness. She seemed to be dressed for a ball or ballet, or maybe this was her own ballet. Unlike Shaina’s forest these trees were all leafless, even the grass was gray. Her continence reflected this and she didn’t smile, holding her hands together below her waist. Again the sheer sight of her placed something in me that told me I should bow. Against the backdrop of the bleak woods she shined like the sun. But it was the way she stood that told me she was more prudish than the others, standing perfectly straight up like a twig, never leaning, never swaying.

“You look at me like I am a villain. It can’t possibly be because I am a woman.”

I started at this. “No…Of course not. It’s just –I’m a bit cautious meeting new people and this place –I just don’t understand.” The slipstream nightmares were taking its toll on my mental state. I couldn’t decide if I should be angry, reverent, appreciative, petrified, ashamed, or all of them at once. The knot in my throat started to subside. “People usually think bad thoughts before they think good ones. Human instinct –to fear things in the dark. Kind, honorable intentions take a backseat to horniness, hormones, malice, and hostility.”

“And yet you chose to try to rescue me in the ice. I’ll intent is not all that humanity has to offer. And it is infantile to the ancient ones. Focusing on negative thoughts breed negative emotions.”

The wrinkles on her cheeks became more defined as I stepped forward, the glow of the moon revealing more details, more age, and less beauty. “So this is about therapy. To cure me of my ill intentions?”

“You give us what we need and in return we give you what you need. The universe is more than just about your own experiences and your experiences are not always about you. It is about all of us. Humanity. Animals. Cosmic beings. The seen and unseen. Life is full of pain. There must be pain before there is appreciation of the release that comes after.”

My thoughts turned back to the torture, the pain, the abuse, the darkness, and blackness seeped with red. “You succubus…you devil women…You mutilated my spirit, burdened me with things I never wanted to see.”

“We’re not as cruel as we have been portrayed. Yes, it’s true. We hunger for deviances but only because we are ourselves figments of sexual energy. You think of it as sin but sex has been a powerful instrument since man’s inception. It breeds new life and spreads disease. It can be the sole cause of war and the cause of peaceful movements. It can make people feel loved. It can make people feel scared and insecure about the truth of their own identity. These figments you claim to suffer from are the result of your own mind.”

“That’s not fair. Shaina made herself into a horrific spider. Deeva was a demoness in my visions. You can’t claim to have never influenced the slipstreams.”

“You remained fixated by the You. Once more–” she waved her hand and a glowing aura appeared in the same arcing motion. Through the haze she became even older. “You see what you want to see and think only of you. And it is this you that prevents you from leaving this static path you place yourself on.” I felt like I was being lectured by an aging school teacher, one with gray skin and grayer hair. “Shaina was kind to you. Kinder than perhaps she should have allowed. You think you aren’t in control. I will grant you this mistake but there is something she neglected to warn you of.”

She meant to tell me that I was beneath her, beneath any of them, weak, inferior, and unenlightened. “What would that be? That, as a man, I could never be like you? That I’ll never rid myself of these nightmares?”

She smiled, wrinkles lining her dimples, “That you are still just food and when this is over, if you choose to let your fate guide you into oblivion, you will be an afterthought, a wisp of a figment, a forgotten construct. No one will know your name and you will fall below the sands of time.”

The swirling green of her magic blew towards me, broadening into a storm. “No!” I wanted more than just one more chance. In that split second my pitiful life passed before my eyes. Every woman I caused embarrassment to, every woman I turned down, the embarrassment of my mother, and the embarrassment of my father. All pointless and worthless. I struggled against the green currents. Cybella’s words chimed in my head. “Shaina was afraid but I, as the most venerable, as the eldest, am not afraid of the rift, of the great dissolution that is prophesized to come.”

“What rift?” I shouted. But it was too late. She went silent and my eyes refocused. The night was cold and the cathedral in rotten city I was standing in was tall, elaborately designed with gothic grandeur, and just as cold on the eyes. This time I wasn’t frightened. I knew the figments and constructs were only temporary, the pain I would receive swift and brief. The rift though…Shaina never mentioned this and would have been less inclined to offer any show of weakness but I couldn’t help remember her sullen expressions, as if she were lost in thought.

Looking at the spired tower of the cathedral I became enamored by a gray gargoyle that crested the lower tip. It was higher than the others and had wings that must’ve stretched ten feet wider than the smaller ones. Years I’ve spent wondering the streets alone. I was used to the shadows and the creatures that hid within. Taught to be afraid of the monsters I grew to be intrigued by them instead. But those were human monsters. The thing at the top of the steeple was something else. It was alive and it was watching below, subtle head movements gave it away.

Further down the cobblestone road, looking furtively over her shoulder at the alleys and unhorsed carriages, was a woman in a blue hoop skirt. Curious I followed her passed several shops, beginning to glance over my own shoulder at the winged gargoyle high on the tower, wondering when it would descend. This felt like another ploy for the sisters to test me, or maybe they weren’t testing me at all and instead were using me for entertainment, feeding as they said, on my desires. But what desire of mine was this? To help this woman, this construct, or at least warn her? I wasn’t allowed as a child to abandon responsibility, no matter how trivial it seemed. My heart wouldn’t be able to take the consequences of the beatings against my brain if I didn’t.

“Hey!” I shouted, but she turned, gave an expression of mistrust and ran down the adjoining alley. On the cathedral steeple the gargoyle was gone. This wouldn’t end well…”Wait. There’s a monster…” Of course she would run, having a man walk after her and shout “monster.” At that moment I wished I had been born a woman so I could know what it was like to not have women think of me as the monster when I was only trying to save them from the real monster.

Her hoop skirt was flattened when the creature came from above and landed on her, a slosh of wet wings hitting the dark alley floor. The gargoyle was less stone and more leathery flesh once the light from the street gas lamps hit the veins of its back. From the distance I could see it moving in a flurry of motion, obscured by the wings as it thrashed back and forth. The head was bobbing as I approached with curiosity. This construct would likely hurt me but it seemed preoccupied by its victim. Was it draining her blood like a vampire? I came closer. Blood pooled into a puddle below the woman. Vampires have no remorse. No empathy. Their mentality involved supping off the life force of those with more empathy than themselves. The analogy that people would often profit from the proximity of another’s emotion, from Cybella’s words, was not lost on me. Anger was addictive, that was true, especially when exposed to it so often. Once you saw the red-skinned, hair pulling rage in someone’s face it was hard to not want to embrace it, feel it, and use it against the aggressor or an innocent victim. A lesser being, a pathetic…

Me…The gargoyle was flailing its arms, the wings were spreading further out in joyous brutality. This…closeness, this proximity of emotion was how the succubae were feeding off me, off my dark, sexual energy. Because they were limited in their own sexual energy, an absence of creativity, a bout of melancholy, like a rich man forgetting what it’s like to feel.

I could see clearly what the monster was doing. He, his manhood distinctly visible, was beating her with a…leather…belt? “No…stop. You can’t…” Her body was limp as he flailed harder and harder, faster and fast. “No, please! What did she do? What did she do to deserve…” His back arched as he stopped and stood erect while his member dangled below his knee. I stepped back, legs barely able to hold me, wondering how far I would get before it pounced. In his other hand, opposite the belt, was…it couldn’t be…a metal, rusted cross. Jesus the Savior. The Son. The Way. The Truth. I collapsed to my knees and begged, begged with all my heart, for forgiveness. The creature breathed heavily, growling with pleasure over my pathetic…Pathetic… The proximity of emotion. I felt it again. I felt…kindness, tenderness. I couldn’t feel the rage, the hate. Why was humanity so eager to spread hate and violence when they could so easily spread love and compassion?

I lifted my head and the beast had departed. The only thing that remained were my tears.