Succubi
Edward Lee
Necro Publications
— 2010 —
First Digital Edition
—
Smashwords Edition
Also available in a signed trade paperback edition
ISBN: 978-1-889186-39-9
Succubi © 1992 by Edward Lee
This digital edition June 2010 © Necro Publications
—
Special thanks to Dave Barnett, Ginger Buchanan, for publishing the p/b, and Bob Strauss.
—
Prologue
“They cooked heads,” Ms. Eberle said.
Professor Fredrick quailed. His mind seemed adrift in the presiding pause. They cooked heads. He stared at the odd, gracile woman, then stared back down into the pit of skulls.
A cooking pit, he realized.
Despite the sun’s fierce blaze, he shivered in the clean, highland air. The site made him think of violations, of rape. A line of enthusiastic students tore at the face of the ridge with 20 pound pickaxes. Others turned shovels around amorphous shapes of things that the last six days of excavation had raised from the oblivion of ages. Dust rose in billows. The hectic sound of metal striking rock rang as a familiar song. Fredrick had spent his life doing this: disgorging smothered civilizations from the thick skin of the earth. Yet he’d never felt this way before. He felt like a trespasser.
Ms. Eberle stood beside him, gazing down into the dig like a god on a precipice. She was skinny and rather tall, pallid–a female version of Fredrick. Straight gray black hair had been cut around her gaunt face like a helmet. She had inordinately large breasts for her frame, which stretched the front of her khaki field blouse. Big pale blue eyes watched intently over the dig’s activity. When she smiled, the slit of her mouth showed a row of sharp, even white teeth.
She carried a bizarre expertise: an archaeological sociologist. Fredrick had read many of her papers in the journals; her work fascinated him—the application of societal mechanics to mythology. She was also perhaps the world’s only expert on the obscure pre Iberian race known as the Ur locs. Fredrick had contacted her in the states when the Oxford dig had begun to unearth things that weren’t supposed to be in the inclusion perimeter.
Cenotaphs. Dolmens. Huge mass graves in the middle of the plush English countryside.
A British air survey had notified Oxford University when some telltale traits had shown up on the topography plates. They’d thought it was an urn field. Oxford had then commissioned Fredrick and his team to start digging; they’d been looking for a misplaced Saxon settlement in the area since the discovery of several Brython tomes twenty years ago. Fredrick hadn’t been on the site a day when he realized they’d stumbled upon something else altogether.
They cooked heads, the woman’s soft throaty voice slipped back into his mind. Butchers. Cannibals.
A big diesel dredger pumped racket and fumes into the dappled sky. Young stratigraphy technicians finnicked with core cutters at the face of the deepest stope. Here time was a measurement, not in years, but in strati, in camelhair brushes, and in dust. Fluorine probes were thrust into orifices of wet clay and shale. No, this was no urn field—it was a corpse vault.
Tall trees shuddered around the dells, as if in pain. The site looked bombed, crater pocked. Dirt smudged students lifted buckets of trinkets off the winzeline, and carried them off on poles across their shoulders. The conveyor rolled up rock chunks and human bones out of the main trench.
“The Ur locs,” Fredrick said. “So you’re certain now?”
Ms. Eberle twisted a macro lens onto a modified Nikon F. “There’s no doubt,” she told him. “Everything your people have found corresponds directly to the archives of the Roman Occupation. This is the archaeological find of the decade.”
Her big eyes beamed back into the exhumation. Their glint made Fredrick think of lust.
«« — »»
The dig was nearly over. They were already past budget. Fredrick and Ms. Eberle walked past the last copse toward the tents. He looked down at his clay flecked leather boots, the same he’d worn on countless digs. From Galli to Nineveh, from Jericho to Troy to Knossos. He abstracted, wanting to smile. He thought of himself as a specter of the future. All these cities, once great, had been predestined to be trod upon by Fredrick’s old boots a millennium later. Time buried. Whole civilizations locked in layers of clay. He was walking on worlds, and some day, he realized, someone like him would walk on his.
“We’re going to be famous,” Ms. Eberle whispered.
“What?”
She didn’t answer, trudging on. Trucks rumbled out of the excavation, their springs straining against the proof of ages. Lots of bronze and primal iron. Brooches, jupon clips, stave caps and decorative armlets. Crates of potsherds exhaled rising ageless dust as the trucks rumbled on. They’d found a lot of cutlery, finely crafted and still sharp. Flat blades with long tangs, clearly not Saxon or Frisian. Cnifs, Eberle had called them. For human sacrifice. They’d found several cauldrons that were huge. Fek-chettles. But Ms. Eberle seemed most excited by the manuscripts. The well made earthenware and high nitrogen soil had preserved them; she photographed almost all of them before the truth of the open air had disintegrated the parchment to fine dust, infinity taking back what it was owed.
They stopped at the crossroads, to watch the last of the exodus. The trucks moved on, full of crates of the entrails of another time.
The last trucks carried significantly more:
Bones.
How many pits had they disinterred? How many graves? How many trenches ensiled with human heads?
“The graves will take months to exhume,” Ms. Eberle remarked.
“We don’t have months,” Fredrick replied. He stood upright against the mounting weight of his age. His tanned, lined face looked like a dried creek bed. “That’s what I need to talk to you about. We may not even have hours.”
“What do you mean?” she stiffened to object. “Don’t you realize what this is? This dig is the only physical evidence in the world of the Ur locs’ existence. They’re not an obscurity anymore, this excavation proves that they were real.”
“I’ll tell you something that’s more real. Recession. Tax rates. Inflation. We think we’ve got it bad in the states? This is England. Oxford will probably terminate the funds now. They paid us to find a Saxon urn field.”
The awkward woman’s face seemed to redden. “It’s history. How can they turn their backs on their own history?”
Easy, Fredrick thought. “You’ll get your chance to convince them. The appropriations liaison will be here in the morning. Just don’t get your hopes up.”
Their footsteps crunched up the weed tangled path. The sun seemed misshapen this close to dusk, an orb of molten orange light losing its contour to the slow and steady churn of the earth.
Fredrick held open the canvas flap. As she entered the tent, he stared after her, and the lithe shadow. He paused in time, then entered the tent himself, wondering how many thousands of people had been butchered here.
«« — »»
It was the ease with which Ms. Eberle spoke that made Fredrick queasy. She assessed several field photos of the huge cauldrons. “The Ur locs did things that would make Vlad the Impaler look like Captain Kangaroo. Skinning, castrating, dismembering—it was all part of their art. They plundered whole settlements, not for spoils or territorial expansion, but for infydels to serve either as sacrificial victims, slaves, or food. They were big on sacrificing children from conquered settlements. Babies provided the ultimate sacrifice to the object of the Ur locs’ belief. Men were taken as slaves. Women were butchered for food. The Ur locs considered any women out of their bloodline to be spiritual enemies. So they ate them.”