Chapter Text
Chapter 40: End Up
When they arrived at the apartment, the succubus's mood shifted again. She caught the scent of pizza upon entering and saw Rhys engrossed in his physics textbooks while eating. Taylor could feel the gleam in her eyes as she looked at his friend; he knew she was thinking about the sexual potential of the situation. "Your roommate is such a delightful treat," she murmured in his mind, licking her lips and making his mouth suddenly drier.
Taylor felt a shiver of both anticipation and dread at her words. "Don't you start," he warned her, shutting the door behind him. "I just want a normal night, okay?"
Rhys looked up from his books, his eyes lighting up when he saw Taylor. "You're back!" he exclaimed, jumping up from the couch. "And... wow, you've... survived?" He eyed his friend's slumped shoulders.
Taylor sighed and set his bag down. "Yeah, we had a bit of a... situation at the frat house," he said, trying to keep his voice casual.
Rhys looked at him with a mix of concern and curiosity, a pizza slice hanging from his hand. "What's wrong?"
Taking a deep breath, Taylor began to recount the events of the afternoon, the succubus's voice echoing in his mind with a hint of amusement at his discomfort. "Well, you remember how I told you about the ritual?" he began, his eyes darting toward the kitchen where the aroma of pizza still lingered.
Rhys nodded, his eyes wide with curiosity as he set the pizza slice back on the plate. "Yeah, Dude."
"Well, the spell book was a fake," Taylor said, dropping his bag with a thud.
Rhys's eyebrows shot up. "No way!" he said, his mouth full of pizza. Taylor explained how they had discovered the book was a repurposed gardening guide, and how they had seen that the mirror had been cleaned of the remains of vellum.
The succubus watched with amusement as Taylor tried to dodge describing the awkward intimate encounter with James and Brad, in which Taylor had been a bit of a voyeur. Rhys looked at him with a mix of shock and bewilderment, his chewing slowing to a halt.
Jacques joined the conversation a few minutes later when Rhys received a video call from her, and the two-person dinner turned into a four-person conference call.
"It's very interesting..." she said after listening to Reece's summary, adjusting her glasses as Rhys angled the phone screen toward Taylor. Jacques Chan's eyebrow arched—sharp as a scalpel—as she assessed Taylor's disheveled state. "You look like you've swallowed a cactus... What happened?"
The succubus pressed her phantom fingers into his shoulders—her breath hot against his ear—and Taylor flinched as she whispered, "Talking about swallowing, why don't you tell them what else you saw in that frat house east wing?" He coughed violently into his fist, cheeks flushing.
Rhys squinted. "Dude. You good?"
Taylor waved him off—too fast—while the succubus's laughter coiled around his ribs like smoke. Jacques's eyes narrowed behind her horn-rimmed glasses; she smelled blood like a shark sensing chum. "Spit it out," she demanded, sitting up straighter in her dimly lit dorm room. "What aren't you telling us?"
Rhys leaned in, pizza forgotten. "Yeah, Dude, you're acting weirder than usual... even with the whole-succubus-thing considered." His fingers twitched toward his Python programming textbook as if he wanted to shield himself with it.
Taylor's throat tightened as the succubus's fingers traced teasing circles against his neck. Through gritted teeth, he muttered, "Well, there are a couple of things I haven't told you..." He began to explain how he saw Brad and James in a compromising position while wandering around the frat house, and about the succubus's strange powers to hide in plain sight and her sixth sense for sex. "She’s like Santa Claus; she knows when you're being naughty," he joked nervously, shrugging with exaggerated nonchalance.
Jacques’s nostrils flared. "That sounds like a load of—" Rhys's gaze darted in Jacques's direction, silencing her mid-sentence.
Taylor sighed, rubbing the back of his neck where the succubus's ghostly touch still lingered like a brand. "Yeah, I know how it sounds."
Jacques leaned forward toward her screen, her dark eyes sharp behind her glasses. "So what you're saying," she muttered, "is your succubus has some kind of sex-dar that she forgot to mention?" The goth's expression of suspicion was mixed with disbelief and weariness; the succubus's bitter laughter hissed through Taylor's skull like steam escaping a kettle.
Taylor winced. "It's not that she forgot—"
Rhys cut through the growing tension by tossing his pizza crust onto the plate with a decisive clatter. "Wait, hold up. Forget the sex-dar thing for a second." He leaned forward, elbows on knees, fingers steepled like a budget Mr. Burns. "Do we really want to find that book... I mean the real one? The actual ritual text?" he inquired doubtfully.
Jacques scoffed, pushing her glasses up her nose with a deliberate click. "What do you mean, 'do we want to'?"
Rhys leaned back. "Think about it," he said, his voice lowering. "If the ritual book turns frat boys into that"—he gestured vaguely at Taylor—"why risk finding more cursed shit? Bad things always happen in movies when you mess around with those kinds of books."
"Hmm, that's true," Jacques agreed. "All the Evil Dead movies, The Mummy, Doctor Strange..."
"Tom Riddle's diary in the Chamber of Se—" the succubus abruptly cut herself off, realizing she had thought aloud.
"The Babadook was also really scary," Rhys added, before continuing the list: "In the Mouth of Madness, Prince of Darkness, The Ninth Gate, Hocus Pocus, Inkheart, The NeverEnding Story..."
"Well, those weren't horror," Taylor chimed in, earning an exasperated glare from Jacques.
"Yeah, tell that to Bastian!" Rhys scoffed, grabbing the last piece of cold, rubbery pizza left in the box.
Taylor groaned with a half-smile. "Are we really making decisions based on film tropes?"
"Yeah, It is what it is! I haven't found anything about our friend, Nis, on the internet," Jacques shrugged apologetically, tossing her hair a little. "She doesn't appear in any occult sources as—" Taylor couldn't hear any more because the succubus's screams shook his eardrums.
"NO! NOOOO! NO!!!!!!" The demonic screech resonated inside Taylor's skull like multi-tracked feedback. "HOW DARE SHE! YOU HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA, YOU CELLULITE-RIDDEN, LOUSY-MONKEY-FACED BI... ARGH!!!!"
"Calm down!" Taylor pleaded, clutching his head in his hands.
Rhys and Jacques froze mid-conversation, watching as Taylor's body shuddered violently.
Taylor doubled over, fingers digging into his temples as the succubus's fury ricocheted through his nervous system like a live wire. His vision swam with static—her rage tasted like copper and burnt sugar on the tip of his tongue. Rhys's pizza slice hit the floor with a wet slap as he lunged forward. "Dude! Talk to me... what's happening?"
"SHE DIDN'T Have... she shouldn't have looked for me," the succubus's voice sounded hoarse and broken, as if her strength had run out, "my name shouldn't have crossed these walls... beyond the three of us," she muttered the last words with a hint of pure delirium that made Taylor question her sanity.
The air in the apartment finally began to clear as Taylor clung to the armrest of their sofa after the dizzying jolt his neurons had endured. Behind his eyelids, the succubus seemed to have sunk like lead to the bottom of a lake of pure bitterness; her wings beat against the cage of his skull in erratic, agonizing bursts that made his teeth ache and his stomach churn.
Taylor gasped as the succubus's fury subsided into something quieter—a wounded, almost animal sound vibrating behind his sternum. "I think... I think she considers you've mes... messed up, Jacques," he managed to articulate when he half-opened his eyelids and the room stopped spinning.
A lifeless, sarcastic laugh died in the succubus's throat before her unwitting brainmate—Taylor—could hear it. According to her, 'messing up' was stepping in horsedung outside The Globe after a performance of The Bard's plays. No, what Jacques had unintentionally done was equivalent to running over John Wick's dog while leaving a parking lot.
It was a screw-up of astronomical proportions.
"I-I didn't mean to—" Jacques stammered, her eyes wide behind her horn-rimmed glasses. "I haven't used my computer, I was in the library and... and I also used a VPN and cleared my history and... and..." her voice trailed off, realizing the futility of her rambling.
Rhys snatched up the fallen pizza slice with a low muttered "That's going to leave a stain!" before tossing it onto the table.
The ensuing silence was so dense and oppressive that one could almost drown in it as if it were a pit of sticky tar. Taylor's fingers trembled on the armrest of the sofa as he regained his breath and composure, while the succubus's presence intensified in his chest like an icy serpent constricting his sternum; she was no longer angry, but felt something worse.
She was completely bleaked out.
On the small phone screen, Jacques remained very still, nervously biting her lip, her horn-rimmed glasses reflecting the dim light of her dorm like twin moons. The succubus couldn't entirely blame her for her incompetence, for with the biased silence she had maintained since introducing herself to Taylor's friends that afternoon, she had paved the way for disaster.
Jacques, like any young woman her age, had turned to what was familiar and what she believed to be safe. She had been raised on it since childhood. She didn't know, couldn't even begin to imagine, that by Googling the name of the succubus, she had thrown an unusual incongruity into the vast and unfathomable ocean of internet data.
A word that had NEVER existed before.
Sulcepnis assumed her name held no power outside the three people who had ever spoken it aloud. Her only hope was that it would be lost in the endless stream of fake news, TikTok videos, Wikipedia articles, and restaurant reviews, among other such nonsense. But if it somehow reached them, they could force them...
"Taylor, when you recover," the succubus began, her voice breaking with the tears she was trying to swallow. It was time to talk seriously and stop the suggestive jokes and sarcasm. "I want you to repeat my words verbatim, please."
In the Jacques apartment, surrounded by paleontology notes and with a comp book wide open, the goth girl's screen flickered as Taylor's jaw tensed—his teeth grinding beneath the succubus's tension. His voice emerged flat and hollow, syllables sharp as broken glass: "You can't both use her... my name," Taylor corrected himself mid-sentence, clicking his tongue, "you mustn't use it, or rather, not from now on. Don't write it down, or record it aloud, or type it... If by chance He and I discover how to fix this whole mess and for me to return to where I came from, you must both keep the promise afterward not to repeat—"
"Why?" interrupted Rhys, rubbing pizza grease off his fingers with exaggerated slowness using a wet wipe.
The succubus's voice slithered through Taylor's thoughts like a calm river—cold and serene at once. "Because that name is the bond that ties me to this physical reality," Taylor repeated mechanically, his throat tight. "And even if Taylor and I manage to separate, it would be enough to use that word to bring us together again. You must all forget that I ever existed and swear on your most sacred oath that you will never think of me again."
Jacques adjusted her glasses with trembling fingers. "Okay, but there must be a... a way to prevent that from happening—" Her voice cracked on the last word. "That tie can be broken?" she added with feigned lightness, glancing sideways at the last words she'd jotted down in her marble notebook after her brief investigation.
And especially the crossed-out words she'd scribbled on the photocopies. No summoning circles made of salt, or painted, or sculpted... circles of PEOPLE, she'd underlined after the weeding.
"The only way to sever the tie for good is for the receptacle to be destroyed," Taylor uttered in a weary, slurred voice, "but that's never going to be an option, got it?" he added, a rage emanating from the succubus seeping through his lips before he shuddered. "Wait, what?!"
There was a moment of silence deeper than any abyss before it was broken by her bawling in his ears.
The succubus's voice dissolved into fractured sobs inside Taylor's skull—wet, shuddering gasps that distorted like a distant underwater echo. "I... I can't, again, I can't see it... again." Her syllables bled into each other, indecipherable except for the raw ache behind them. Taylor clutched his stomach as if he wanted to awkwardly embrace her to offer some comfort, but her anguish was a hurricane, scattering his focus like debris.
"Okay, let's back up," Rhys said slowly, holding up both hands like a traffic cop in the middle of rush hour. His gaze flickered between Taylor's ghost-pale face and Jacques' frozen expression on the screen. "None of us are going to get to that point, okay? We're talking about... fixing this mess, and to do that we'll first need to know more... Nis, you said something about that ritual guy. The summoner."
The succubus's sobs tapered into something thinner—a sound like wind through cracked glass. Taylor felt her presence curl inward, folding into itself, retreating into their brain. He took over, feeling her so dejected in every one of his bowels, and spoke with a voice tinged with unshed tears. "The summoner wasn't just some frat boy playing with fire; if what we both assume is true, he's been preparing everything for years to make sure Hell Week went exactly as choreographed."
"Wait—" blurt Jacques unexpectedly from the other side of the screen, "So this wasn't some drunken idiocy reading black magic books? Someone planned to turn his fraternity brothers into demonic fuck-toys?" Her voice cracked on the last two words, her glasses flashing white with reflected lamplight.
The ex-pledge shrugged disdainfully.
"I don't even think whoever was responsible was at the ritual last night," Taylor opined, bringing his conclusions to light. "He could very well have left the mirror with the inscribed vellum inserted last year—" He noticed a certain agitation from the succubus at his words, but it didn't rouse her from her lethargy.
"That's not cool, Dude," Rhys muttered, rubbing his arms as if he suddenly chilled and needed more warmth than his Hawaiian shirt. His fingers twitched toward the pizza box and he took the previously discarded slice. "How the hell are we going to find answers if we don't know who we have to avoid from Sigma Kappa Beta?"
Taylor's fingers tapped against his thigh—a nervous staccato rhythm that matched the hum of the refrigerator in the sudden quiet. He was convinced that the person who had begun the speech was not the same person who finished it; they were two different voices, equally muffled by satin masks, repeating a script without understanding the supernatural and sinister truth that loomed in that pavilion.
The silence stretched like taffy—thick and sticky—until Jacques exhaled sharply through her nose and pushed her glasses up with an impatient finger. "That's easy to guess, isn't it?" she said, flipping open her notebook with a crisp snap, leaving her two roommates bewildered for a few seconds. "If someone was supposed to perform last night," she exclaimed, making air quotes with her fingers and twisting her lips as if in disgust, "as a call girl for Taylor's horny brothers, where was she then? Why didn't she show up in her fake costume? Who canceled it then?"
Taylor's fingers froze mid-tap as Jacques' words landed like a grenade in the quiet apartment, the veil being lifted from his mind. The succubus stirred in his mind, somewhat annoyed by the surprise her receptacle displayed at such a clever conclusion. It was infuriating that Rhys and Taylor, being men, hadn't considered that perspective. Jacques might have been careless because of her and her silence, but the flat-ass goth was the smartest person in the room, and... she wasn't even there!
Rhys unconsciously bit off the end of the pizza slice as his mind wandered, his gaze unfocused, trying to process Jacques's words. A piece of cheese stretched like the tension in the air before snapping sharply at Jacques's question. "Taylor," she pleaded, "did you make any mobile payments this week, at Sigma Kappa Beta?" She added, watching the geek that the aforementioned nodded in agreement.
"You do... cough, cough," Rhys wheezed as he tried to swallow the piece of pizza in one bite. "You don't think those guys are dumb enough to pay—"
"Pay for the services of a prostitute and stripper with a public Venmo, do you?" the anthropology student concluded with a smug little smile. "When men think with their crotches, their IQ is cut in half, it's a proven fact."
The succubus's presence flared weakly in Taylor's mind like a struck match in the midst of a wind of anguish—her amusement sharp enough to make him wince with relief. "Oh, Amen, sister!" She purred in a murmur, her voice dripping with reluctant admiration.
"Will it work? We check their Venmo transactions?" Taylor's voice cracked halfway through—part disbelief, part irony.
"It's the only thing we can do without going to the police to file a report," she explained slyly, shrugging. "One of them definitely knew he wasn't going to need any more meat for that orgy last night—"
"What the hell!" a shrill, female voice boomed as the light in Jacqueline's room blazed like fireworks. "Damn it, girl! You should warn me if you're planning on sexting with your boyfriend!"
Jacques jerked back from her laptop screen like she'd been scalded, her glasses sliding down her nose as the overhead light flared to full brightness. "Yikes! Can't you knock?" were the last words Rhys and Taylor heard before the video call abruptly cut off, and they were about to let out a mocking whistle.
Rhys snorted, swallowing his pizza crust with a theatrical flourish. "Dude, you literally got screwed over—no pun intended—and didn't even get paid for the performance." His grin was all teeth.
Taylor started to retort, but the succubus's bitterness made the words stick in his throat. "Shut your big mouth and watch what you're putting down your gullet."
Rhys noticed that the piece of pizza he'd been chewing suddenly tasted rare—perhaps a faint hint of carpet—his jaw froze mid-bite as Taylor's lips contracted in a restrained smile. A drop of sauce slid off the corner of the geek's mouth and plopped back onto the floor unnoticed.
He stood up from the couch—not with his usual lazy stretch, but with the jerky abruptness of a marionette whose strings had been yanked, while muttering something almost unintelligible that sounded like "I need an antacid" to the ears of the succubus and Taylor.
While his roommate retreated to his bedroom to retrieve his supply of stomach protectors, Taylor picked up the dinner boxes and folded them mechanically, his fingers moving as if independent from his thoughts—or perhaps too intimately connected to the storm of emotions swirling inside him. The succubus's presence had gone eerily quiet, not coiled tightly in fury as before, but submerged somewhere deep, like a forgotten relic at the bottom of a well filled with her tears.
"Sorry," Taylor apologized, feeling completely lost and unsure how to handle the situation. He felt like a fish out of water in the face of the succubus's distress.
"Why are you apologizing if you haven't done anything wrong?" he heard in his ears seconds later, accompanied by a lump in his throat that nearly choked him. "I got really sentimental earlier, okay? But you don't know what it's like to be like me, or what I've been through in this world... I've seen... I've seen many of my receptacles die without being able to lift a finger to stop it. Dozens of women who—"
"You don't have to worry about me!" the next engineer spat, a little louder than necessary, after clearing his throat of the tears that were seeping from deep within. "Nothing bad is going to happen to me."
The succubus let out a sigh, almost a groan of exasperation, and Taylor felt a touch on his neck that she was shaking her head in denial:
"Unlike you, I'm immortal, Taylor, or at least what you in this world would call something like that. I have existed from eternity to eternity," she tried to explain, her words gaining serenity with each syllable. "Do you understand that experiencing death is more than traumatic for those of my ilk?"
"It won't be like other times," he continued, before the succubus could contradict him. "You yourself said we're a special case. I can help you return. We can talk to each other. We have help, and you don't have to obey someone else's orders."
"If you put it that way, it sounds nice," the succubus admitted, wiping away the last tears from her.
"Maybe Rhys, Jacques, and I are rookies and we might make some mistakes along the way, but you don't have to lose your temper because of us again, please," Taylor realized that he wasn't going to make a living giving encouragement and coaching. He was worth less than nothing. But he felt he had to finish the job and added, "I'm sure with your advice we'll finally make it."
"My advice?!" the succubus shot back, letting out a nervous laugh. "Don't invest in crypto. Bitcoin's days are numbered."
Taylor joined in the succubus's quiet laughter, seeing that her spirits had lifted enough for her to make one of her usual absurd jokes.
"Tayl—" A sudden rush of breath stopped her from finishing the word, as they both saw out of the corner of their eyes that the Samsung screen lit up in complete silence, like a swampy, 21st-century will-o'-the-wisp.
A tenth of a second later, Taylor realized that he must have muted it, perhaps when he'd synced it with Alexa, or when he'd entered ΣΚΒ's house; he couldn't remember.
"It was just a call from Sienna," he reassured Nis as he took the phone in his hands, the screen going silent again. But he gave a slight start of disbelief, which she shared with the succubus, as he grasped the absurdity of the sentence he'd just uttered.
Sienna never, ever called him.
She used WhatsApp voice notes, very occasionally, to contact her former elementary school classmate. Something that made Taylor nervous, because he never knew what to say in response and his voice wouldn't come out when he used the app, while Sienna's voice was so mellifluous and overflowing with sonority that it made him repeat the message hypnotized just to delight in it.
He almost always responded with a terse text message, not daring to say more for fear of crossing lines he himself had drawn.
Five missed calls! Taylor exclaimed inwardly, gasping for breath in surprise, staring at his smartphone screen in disbelief.
The succubus shook off her self-satisfied complacency and brushed away the last metaphorical cobwebs of anguish and doubt. She couldn't do much, whatever was going to happen, but wallowing in it would only hurt Taylor and the other friends who were unknowingly risking their lives.
She observed this slice of everyday human drama—more to alleviate the tedium of eternity than out of genuine interest—not over her brainmate's shoulder, but through his wide-eyed pupils as they scanned the WhatsApp application overflowing with messages.
"Oh, wow!" she commented, unable to find a gentler way to express herself.
Saturday, May 3
Sienna
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This message was deleted
check ur vns... i need to talk to u asap
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Missed video call at 18:14
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r u srsly ghosting me rn?? just tell me if ur busy
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🍙 hello? answer ur phone lol this isnt funny anymore
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This message was deleted
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okay r u actually okay? starting to get worried
Edited
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This message was deleted
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evry1 says they hvn't seen u since yday wtf is goin on
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Missed video call at 20:57
omg taylor WHERE R U???
"Umm, you've been hitting your head lately, Taylor," the succubus inquired, half-jokingly, as the freshman scrolled up and down, almost as if he expected it to disappear with the frantic swiping of his fingers. She also noticed that every time he reached the name 'Taylor' at the bottom of the screen, his heart rate spiked, and some beats seemed to skip.
Taylor shook his head, snapping out of his screen trance.
"No, why do you say that?" he murmured, blinking almost in slow motion.
"Because I can't explain this, unless we're having an attack of anterograde amnesia... since when has Sienna been acting like your personal stalker?"
"Never! You know as much as I do... Besides, if I'd had an accident and amnesia, I don't think I'd remember!" he added, trying to be funny as he looked away from the screen in the entryway mirror. But the succubus was still mulling over this 21st-century epistolary pursuit and wasn't in the mood to manifest herself in the reflection.
As far as she knew, and Taylor knew too, Sienna had only asked him a few questions about hazing and bullying within the fraternity, all geared toward completing her class assignment—nothing that would justify a remake of 'Fatal Attraction' with Taylor as the next victim.
Before she could come up with an ice pick joke at the expense of both Taylor and his childhood sweetheart, the phone rang loudly between his fingers. The name 'Sienna Davis' was displayed in large letters.
- Come on, baby, do it. Hah!
- La-da-dee—
Fergie's voice strangled in an ominous and cruel way as Taylor pounded on the screen and he prepared to respond to her. "Hello?"
The line crackled with silence for three excruciating seconds—during which he thought he heard a sigh of relief—before Sienna's voice sliced through, sharp with an edge Taylor had never heard before. "Where the hell have you been all day? Do you realize I've been about to call the police?!"
The phone slipped slightly in Taylor's sweaty palm. Sienna's voice vibrated with an unfamiliar desperation, like guitar strings stretched too tight. "I—" he began hesitating, but instantly gained composure. "I'm sorry, I was studying... I've been here all day and I forgot to turn the phone back on." He lied so brazenly, even though his mind and body were a jumble of raw emotions, that the succubus was left speechless with astonishment, unaware of this side of him.
Sienna's exhale crackled through the speaker—part relief, part exasperation—as if she'd been holding her breath since the first unanswered call. "Studying," she repeated flatly, and Taylor could practically see her rolling eyes, the way she always did when he gave some mathematically precise but emotionally tone-deaf answer. "Right. Because you're definitely the type to ghost everyone for twelve hours to cram for engineering or mathematics."
The succubus settled into Taylor's mind like a cat stretching after a nap, cushioning his neurons and memories.
Taylor felt the phantom pressure of her claws—not quite painful, just present—as she murmured, "She's worried. Really worried. That's new." There was something almost clinical in the succubus's observation, like a scientist noting an anomaly in an otherwise predictable experiment.
Sienna's voice softened suddenly, the sharpness giving way to something warmer but no less urgent. "Listen, I— Look, I don't care what you were actually doing. Just... answer your damn phone next time, okay?" A pause. Then, quieter: "Are you alone, Taylor?"
The succubus felt the weight of her own intrusion on Taylor's nerves; he tried to remain indifferent, but it was clear that he would not enjoy a moment of intimacy again while she was lurking inside his body.
"No," he admitted, glancing toward Rhys's closed bedroom door. "Why?"
A rustling sound—fabric against the microphone, maybe her shifting the phone against her ear. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped to a conspiratorial hush. "Something's I wanted to talk to you. I need to— Can we meet? Tomorrow, between exams?"
Taylor’s grip tightened around the phone, "Yes, sure—" he stammered, caught between confusion and the gnawing suspicion that something was deeply weird. The succubus prickled at the edges of his consciousness, intrigued. "Where?"
"At the entrance to Sterling Hall," Sienna suggested in her typical tone that brooked no refusals, evasions, or conditions, and wasn't entirely arrogant either. "I'll send you my schedule, and if we can find a time, goodnight, Reece."
The succubus clearly perceived Taylor's chest deflating at the disappointment of hearing his last name on Sienna's lips again.
The first and only call between Sienna and him ended abruptly—with the syllable of a 'goodnight' almost burping from Taylor's mouth—leaving him staring at his darkened screen as if it might suddenly explain why the hell the girl who usually treated him with polite indifference had just sounded like she'd claw through campus security footage to find him.
"Another weird thing to add to the pile of weirder things today," Taylor muttered under his breath, and shrugged listlessly.
The apartment smelled like burnt pepperoni and existential dread when Rhys finally emerged from his room, clutching a bottle of Pepto like a holy relic. He took one look at Taylor’s shell-shocked expression and froze mid-step. "Dude. You look like someone just told you pi is exactly three."
Rhys's joke landed like a lead balloon—Taylor didn't even blink. He continued checking the other WhatsApp messages he'd ignored all day, but the screen's occasional blurriness told the succubus his mind was elsewhere.
He barely noticed Jude's photos on the beach, enjoying surfing in a skintight wetsuit. The succubus held back—biting her disembodied tongue—from commenting that she had a better figure to fill out that sporty black and white striped swimsuit. But finally, Taylor closed the apps and headed to their room...
"Okay, so what's this about now?" he asked unexpectedly when he caught her eyes wandering again, closing the bedroom door and leaving the conversation between them.
"I don't know what you're talking about," the succubus feigned, changing the subject.
"Thin walls, remember?" Taylor muttered, pressing a finger to his temples where the succubus's curiosity throbbed like a second pulse. "You think I haven't noticed you've been looking at the clocks and the time ever since we left Sigma Kappa Beta?"
"Okay, you caught me," the succubus griped, her voice curling like smoke through Taylor's thoughts. The digital clock on his nightstand blinked 10:47 PM in aggressive red. "You didn't notice, probably because you were very nervous, but when we were at the fraternity house this afternoon, did you hear the grandfather clock chimes at any point?"
The memory clicked into place like a dislocated joint—that eerie, hollow tolling that had echoed through the frat house's drafty halls had accompanied the pledges throughout Hell Week and during the hours of the ritual and the shifts in which Taylor and the succubus had relieved each other.
But he had never heard it on previous visits, nor today. Now that he had noticed that incongruous detail, it seemed crystal clear, but he still didn't understand what the succubus found interesting about it.
"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact," the succubus murmured, quoting Doyle with a theatrical flourish that made Taylor's lips twitch despite himself. "That clock must also be part of the ritual, though I don't know how," the succubus lied audaciously, for ever since she had heard the twelve strokes of midnight in front of Brad and his orgy-loving brethren, she had felt her very essence vibrate at that sound like the strings of an overly taut violin.
"Well, we'll have to add that to the countless things we'll have to investigate," Taylor grumbled, gathering a couple of strands of Rapunzel's succubus hair that were still scattered on the floor and throwing them into the trash can.
The mattress springs groaned like a dying man as Taylor collapsed onto his bed, still fully clothed...
"Don't worry about me," the succubus said shamelessly, rolling her eyes at Taylor. "I've been watching you fap in your memories, so if you want..."
Taylor got red.
Not the flushed-pink of embarrassment or the mottled crimson of anger—but a sudden, violent scarlet that crawled up his neck like spilled ink on parchment.
The kind of reddish hue that, in a grown man, accompanied angina or climbing a particularly steep hill.
The succubus didn't revel in her cruel joke, for it had barely managed to distract Taylor from the dark thoughts that tormented her. Ever since that morning, when she had heard the name of her receptacle and had dared to respond.
She dreaded every minute, every hour, every moment she remained with him, inextricably bound to him.
For they would already be on the prowl.
Meanwhile in Ann Arbor...
The bus station smelled of diesel and decades-old floor polish, the kind that clung to linoleum like a stubborn sin. A figure walked slowly, step by step, making its way like an icebreaker through the people who gave way to him upon seeing the clerical collar.
The œlder clutched the cracked leather strap of his duffel bag with fingers that had performed last rites for more souls than he could count. The bus station fluorescents buzzed overhead like dying angels, casting jaundiced light over his wrinkled cassock. Eighty-four years hadn't prepared him for this: standing in a Michigan Greyhound terminal, waiting for a Uber that surely smelled faintly of despair and stale fast food.
He took a seat on a bench that groaned under his weight like a penitent in confession. His fingers, gnarled as old olive roots, clutched a rosary carved from wood so dark it seemed to drink the flickering fluorescent light above him, while some unruly youths with shifty, malicious eyes noticed the duffel bag he had left propped up on the ground, damp from a late drizzle, from a corner of the row of buses.
They weren't the only passersby who were eyeing the bag with interest, though, as the bright colors and sporty lines of its design clashed completely with the œlder's style.
beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep
The sound sliced through the diesel-choked air like a scalpel—three sharp electronic chirps from the depths of his cassock pockets. The old priest's head snapped up with a speed that belied his age, his eyes suddenly alert. They weren't milky with age but a very, very dark green, almost the same blackness one might find in the thick of a forest when lost and desolate.
The rowdy youths froze mid-whisper, their shifty gazes locking onto the bag as if it had grown fangs, a delicious irony that only the œlder could capture.
His arthritic fingers fumbled with the device, the LCD display casting a sickly blue-greenish glow across his weathered face.
▂ ▃ ▅ ▆ ▇ 1 MSG 11:56 PM
itshapndagndamidntethng@aftnjuslykUsd
⬤ ◀ ▶ ■
Frowned at the small screen, the old priest's lips moved silently as he parsed the garbled text—a cipher from his young assistant in Chicago that he couldn't decipher, even when he held the text up to his eyes. He understood nothing of that gibberish. What use would an email address be to him? He had instructed her to only contact him that way in a real emergency.
The Uber’s headlights cut through the Ann Arbor drizzle like two dull knives, windshield wipers squealing in protest as it pulled into the bus station’s pickup lane.
The œlder rose from the bench with the creaking deliberation of an ancient oak resisting a storm. His knees popped like gunshots—two dry cracks that made the lurking youths flinch—some of the few travelers that night stopped mid-stride, almost as if awaiting the disaster that would occur when his fragile body, which seemed unable to support him, collapsed, like watching an avalanche of snow descending the mountain of the inevitable.
The Uber's tires hissed against the wet pavement as it pulled up, the vehicle's interior illuminated by the sickly glow of a phone charger. The priest moved toward it with the painful gait of a glacier shattering from global warming, in a way that was uncomfortable, irreversible, and realistic to be observed. His gnarled hand reached for the door handle just as the young men were about to make their move.
The priest's fingers tightened around the strap of his duffel bag, the leather groaning like a tortured soul. Then the duffel bag twitched—just once—as if something inside had stirred in its sleep, and the spoiled, quarrelsome brats stopped when they saw the old priest glance at them out of the corner of his eye.
He whispered something, barely moving his lips, almost like a prayer or a comment to himself, and turned toward the kids, with a look that seemed to read all their sins and reproach them, before getting into the vehicle.
He didn't look back when he started the car, but if the octogenarian had, he would still have seen the petrified faces of the five boys.
One of them had his pants soaked in urine up to his knees.
The journey through the city streets, under the iridescent shimmer of the wet asphalt and the scent of petrichor in the light of the crescent moon—which played the mysterious card, almost disappearing behind the horizon—would have been more invigorating in his youth, but that night he had other things on his mind.
Times had changed, and although the old man found it strange to give stars instead of tips on one of those apps, when the journey ended and he reached the house with its lights on, other things hadn't changed, not even with the slow passage of decades.
A chain rattled, locks turned with mechanical clicks, and the door swung inward just enough to reveal a sliver of face—pale, sweat-sheened, with pupils blown wide enough to swallow the dim hallway light. "Are you Father Rathmoore?" the man breathed, the words tinged with a strange yet mundane emotion, as the old man nodded, as if priests were accustomed to strolling along the avenue at midnight.
Before letting him in, he glanced him up and down, his expression slightly annoyed by the man's decrepit state, but when his gaze fell upon his face, something unsettling stirred within him.
The door creaked wider, revealing a living room bathed in the jaundiced glow of a single table lamp. Shadows clung to the corners like starving rats. A younger priest—mid-thirties, with the wiry build of a man who'd wrestled more problems than he could bear—stood abruptly from the couch. His black shirt was rumpled, the clerical collar slightly askew.
"I'm glad to finally meet you, Father. I hope the journey here hasn't been too difficult for you," said the younger priest, stepping forward with outstretched hands—his fingers twitching slightly, as if he'd been gripping something too tightly for too long.
Father Rathmoore's short laugh rattled like dry leaves in a gale. "Difficult, is it? Ah, 'twas no more trouble than trying to explain the transubstantiation to a Baptist, Father..." He let the title hang, waiting for the name he'd been given over the phone but couldn't quite recall—his memory wasn't what it once was.
"Neiers, although you can call me Carl, if you prefer," the younger priest replied, gesturing toward the sofa where a middle-aged couple sat stiffly, their fingers interlaced tight enough to cut off circulation. The husband's knuckles were white; the wife's left eye twitched in irregular intervals. Behind them, a teenage boy scrolled aggressively on his phone, the blue light washing out his already pale complexion.
Carl cleared his throat. "This is the Driscoll family. As I mentioned in our email, Father Rathmoore"
"Seamus, if you please," Father Rathmoore corrected, his Irish brogue curling around the words like peat smoke—thick enough to taste. His green-black eyes flicked to the younger priest with the precision of a falcon spotting prey. "Father Rathmoore was me old fella, God be good to him."
Carl hesitated—just a fraction—before nodding. "Seamus, then. This is Michael and Elaine Driscoll, and their son, Lucas." His gesture toward the boy was perfunctory, the way one might indicate a piece of furniture that happened to be in the room. "These are the neighbors next door, the Fritzmeyers, who have been helping them these past few days since they came back from the hospital." He nodded toward the older man who had opened the door and a graying blonde woman in her fifties who was carrying a tray of coffee and pastries. "And—"
A scream tore through the house before anyone could finish introductions—high, ragged, unmistakably female—coming from somewhere upstairs. The Driscolls and Fritzmeyers didn’t flinch. Lucas didn’t even glance up from his phone. Only the younger priest, Carl, winced, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed hard.
Seamus set his duffel down with deliberate slowness. The leather creaked ominously. "Ah," he murmured. "That’d be the lass, then?"
Carl nodded stiffly. "Emily. Their daughter. Sixteen. She’s—" Another scream, this one dissolving into wet, guttural sobs that didn’t sound entirely human. Carl’s fingers twitched toward his rosary. "It started two weeks ago. Nightmares, sleepwalking. Then the... the voice."
Seamus arched a bristly white eyebrow. "Voice singular, is it?" His brogue thickened, syllables rolling like storm clouds. "Not more than one?"
Michael Driscoll finally spoke, his voice sandpaper-rough. "One’s bad enough." His wife dug her nails into his forearm but said nothing.
"Right then, we’d best be getting to work, so" said the œlder with surprising calm, beginning preparations for the exorcism.
To be continued...
Notes Click to show/hide
AUTHOR’S NOTES:
🕐 Back to the Future: Wisconsin normally uses the Central Time Zone (CTZ UTC−06:00) while Michigan uses the Eastern Time Zone (ETZ UTC−05:00). However, on this occasion they are using Daylight Saving Time which came into effect on March 9, both in Madison, CDT (UTC−05:00) and in Ann Arbor EDT (UTC−04:00).
Deciphering the beeper message: in case you haven't understood the meaning of this tongue twister, here's the solution.
- itshapndagndamidntethng@aftnjuslykUsd
- its hapnd agn da midnte thng @ aftn jus lyk U sd
- It's happened again, the midnight thing, at afternoon, just like you said
- It happened again—the midnight thing—in the afternoon, just like you said
