Succubus

She had healed. The doctor told her so, in a flat, cold voice that killed all hope. She could leave the hospital and go home.

It had been a bad accident - she was lucky to be alive. Everyone told her that, so it must be true. She had only to look in a mirror to see the extent of her luck. Both legs had been amputated at the hip, leaving her wheelchair bound. The cranial damage had affected her speech center, leaving her incapable of speech. The worst, though, had been done by the fire - her left side was a crazy quilt of scar tissue, her left arm a withered and twisted thing with a useless claw where the hand had been. Her hair had flared brightly that night, and her left eye had cooked beyond salvage. By the cruelest twist of fate her mind remained, encapsulated in this mute and crippled husk. But she was healed now, free to face the rest of her life. She was 28 years old.

The first month was the worst. After that the nervous well wishers, who couldn't meet her eye and were so nervous in her presence, stopped coming. The insurance and her small inheri- tance allowed her to move to a small cottage in a run-down sub- urb, and still afford the things she needed to live. The nurse was the greatest expense, but her passion became books. The house was filled with books which, for a while, allowed her mind to escape its prison.

Fiction paled first, followed by history, mathematics, and psychology. Western religion also proved inadequate. Meditation helped, especially when she found the knack of alpha rhythm control. Eastern religion teased at her mind, suggesting possi- bilities but yielding no concrete instruction. Each day became harder to face, each night harder to endure. The glands of her body were still young, and did not take kindly to abstinence.

Bedtime had become a ritual - first endure the necessary assistance and cleaning by the nurse, then the insertion into the small waterbed with the call button clipped near her right hand. After the nurse left to her own room came the test - always the same task, to keep her mind from the futility of life, her love- less existence, and the emptiness of unending, unchanging tomor- rows.

The answer, when it came, seemed like a dream. While in a deep alpha state her good hand had, seemingly without volition, begun to caress her body. Her long abstinence and loneliness, combined with her need for love, fed the waves of feeling that washed through her body and mind. Knowing only the need to remain in the alpha state, but unable to stop the emotional firestorm, she struggled to impose the control of meditation on the mounting spiral of passion. As her body shuddered through a too quick release, she became aware of a shift of viewpoint. She was outside her body, looking down on her bed. She was free! She was also frightened, and as the fear broke her meditational control, she found herself once again in her body.

She thought about the experience for the remainder of the night, and spent the following day reading everything she could find on out of body experiences. She knew now what she wanted - she wanted out!

Achieving the alpha state was unusually difficult that night. She was so excited, the necessary calmness wouldn't come. When she finally imposed the hard learned discipline upon her- self, it was even harder to build her excitement slowly. Some of the scar tissue was nerve dead, some extremely sensitive. She relearned her body's responses with feather light caresses and little nips of the fingertips. First her unscarred breast, its nipple turgid and proud to her touch. From feathery drifting caresses to pinching, twisting almost-pain, her response came rapidly. The flat stomach that would never swell with child still responded to her fluttering strokes. Even the pain from some of the scars was exciting, in its own way.

She could feel her labia swelling and opening as her hand continued to drift toward her passionate center. Before her fingers reached their goal she knew that she was wet and slick inside, her clit straining to shed its hood for the sensations to come. Firmly channeling her sexual energy, she began to manually explore her sex.

Separation came easily, and earlier than she had expected. She looked down from her near-ceiling vantage point, watching the girl on the bed straining toward the only release left to her. The hand continued its exploration, building and teasing without allowing the final release. Sexual energy seemed to be the wellspring of her separation, and it was the body's responsibili- ty to provide impetus to her souls flight.

Her first impulse was to explore. The house was dark and unappealing, and the nurse snored. Up the street, a blaze of energy, sensed rather than seen, drew her on. She floated into the edge of the energy pool, surprised and delighted to find that, in some unexplained way, she was fed and sustained by this radiant source. Greedily reaching for more, she found herself floating above a young couple entangled in their bed. The energy given off by their lovemaking was abundant, but something seemed to be lacking. To her enhanced senses, it was obvious that the young man was more interested in his own pleasure than in his partners, and that he would reach his orgasm well before hers. Without thinking, she REACHED and took control of his essence, adjusting his angle of entrance to better stimulate the young girl's clitoris, slowing and extending his lunges toward climax. As the two came closer to their mutual orgasms, she manipulated both energy fields, giving and taking energy to sculpt the maxi- mum pleasure for all. Their release was shattering, leaving her satisfied and returning to her own body as her fingers teased and tortured her body to its climax.

Days turned to weeks and months, as again and again she rode the currents of the night for her sanity. The excursions became the reason for her continued existence, and the daylight hours paled to an exercise in endurance, something she must put up with until she could once again come alive. Her skills increased with practice, and her body learned to sustain the level of excitation needed for her travels for ever longer intervals. As a side benefit, the sex lives of randomly chosen couples in the community improved drastically!

With her fascinating new pastime, however, came the growing realization that something was not quite right, something was still missing. She had always homed on the energy source of active intercourse, allowing herself to be pulled into and bathed by the flaring corona of the couple's passion. She realized, finally, that the problem seemed to be one of focus. She was the beneficiary of all that energy, but always as an outsider. Oh, it was good, it was marvelously good, but she wanted more.

Her night time excursions began to take on a different tone as she searched for something she couldn't describe, couldn't even know existed, but wanted desperately. She became more adept at sorting the various energies of the night, looking for the thread that would lead her to her unknown goal. What she found, and nearly ignored, was the unstructured, raw blare of raging hormones in an adolescent male's dream.

Puberty is unkind to the male. Sudden growth spurts, new body hair growth, changes in muscle mass and placement, embarrassingly uncontrollable octave breaks in the previously reliable voice, and strong but unfamiliar sexual urges descend on the young boy, changing him forever and leaving him confused and distressed. The fact that the changes are natural are no comfort to the child experiencing them. The most frightening, though, are the dreams. As chemicals trigger physical changes, the subconscious plays night tricks on the fevered brain. It was this interplay that finally caught her attention.

Mere curiosity initially drew her closer, to examine and ponder the inchoate images tumbling through the boy's mind. Impossibly breasty and other anatomically incorrect female images came and went, interspersed with Hollywood-vivid monsters and impossible, incomplete scenarios. Chaos ruled the sleeping mind as the boy sweated and tossed in his bed.

Without conscious thought, she began to control and channel the images, damping down the fear and unrest and soothing his sleep. At some level, he became aware of her presence and fastened onto it with all the untarnished trust of a child. For the first time, she knew the full intensity of a focused life field. The strength of the experience was devastating, shocking her back into her physical shell.

The next night she travelled again, searching specifically for that strong but chaotic pattern of energy. To her surprise and chagrin, the pattern was not only common but nearly overwhelmingly present. She would not have to look far for her pleasure.

The young man was dreaming - vague, unfinished images flashed and disappeared in his minds eye as his conscious mind relinquished control. Slowly an image coalesced in his brain, the image of a young woman. The human mind clings stubbornly to its individual self-image. In his dream, she was her pre- accident self - pretty but not beautiful, intelligent, open in her emotions with a firm grasp of reality and a wry sense of humor. As his focus narrowed, the image became more vivid, until it took on its own form of reality. In his mind his hands reached out to caress, his lips and tongue tasted skin and the infinite textures found in the folds and surfaces of the female body. His body reacted helplessly to a stimulation it thought it felt, and was soon reduced to uncontrollable spasms in a growing, cooling pool of semen.

She awoke the next morning sated, nearly content for the first time since the accident. She had an entire city to explore, uncounted dreams to shape and sup, immeasurable energy to experience and revel in. She had found her purpose, adapted to her existence. She had become, of her own free will and out of her unique circumstance, the succubus.

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Consider the lowly mushroom. Is it merely a fleshy fungus, or perhaps a freudian symbol of the male organ? Or is it a metaphor for an existence characterized by lack of enlightenment and restricted diet?