text: The succubus, during the day, is beautiful. It’s only during the night when her appetite is at it’s peak that her monstrous, rotting, and decrepit form is revealed. Her involvement with me and my family goes back some fifty years and across the border to Mexico. It started, as my mother told me, one hot night when her older brother Luis comes home to their little house in a poor village holding a suitcase close to his chest. He brings the suitcase to his parents, (my grandparents) opens it, and shows them the gold coins and bank notes inside expecting to be hugged and embraced but instead gets a scolding. My grandparents demand to know how he came upon the suitcase and he simply replies that he found it. He refuses to tell them where or by what means he found it and my grandparents, as my mom said, feared that he had stolen it, or worse yet, she said crossing herself as was her custom, that he had sold his soul to the devil or partaken in some other sort of black magic in exchange for the money. In those days you heard plenty such stories. My grandmother, invoking La Virgen de Guadalupe, pleads her son. My grandfather was not so kind and beat him telling him that if he could not tell them where he got the money, that he should take it back to wherever he found it. My uncle left that night with the suitcase and neither my mother nor my grandparents ever heard from him again. I met my uncle in a strange way. I’d recently lost my job and my girlfriend had left me, when one night, all alone in my apartment high as a kite, I got hungry and decided to go for some food. I was pulled over and the cop found syringes and spoons with residue on them and took me to jail. I was bailed out by who knows who, put into a van where every few hours the men I was with would inject my arm, until finally I awoke in a strange bed. I had no idea how much time had passed since I’d been arrested. I climbed out of the bed dizzy, and as I moved through the upper level of the house, I could feel a strange presence around me. I could feel it in the walls. I felt that I was being watched. It was cold and I could see my breath, but as I moved to the lower floor a sudden change in temperature sobered me up. I went outside. I was in a big ranch. Then at a distance, I saw an SUV that was making its way down the road that led to the house. When it arrived, I noticed its Mexican plates, then two men jumped out and the older man introduced himself as my uncle Luis. He told me to get into the car, that we would be going into town to have some fun. He took me to a whore house. I thought about the girlfriend I’d recently broken up with, but the temptation was too much, and I gave in. My uncle said he’d pay for it. About an hour later, the deed done, my uncle burst into my room and dragged me out. We hightailed it back to my uncle’s mansion where he immediately ran up the stairs with his hand down the front of his pants. The sounds I heard next reverberated throughout the house with a terrifying mixture of pain and ecstasy. The house itself seemed to writhe and moan. I slept on the sofa in the living room. When I woke up there was a gorgeous woman sitting in a chair just staring at me. My uncle came down, kissed her on the cheek, and asked her to make us some breakfast. Then he told me his secret. He said the woman had fallen in love with him fifty years ago and had given him a choice. A treasure in exchange for his love, or his death and the death of his family. Obviously, he chose the former, not knowing that the woman was a succubus that at night turned into a stomach churning ugly old hag with an insatiable sexual appetite. He said that he had been living in torment ever since. That he couldn’t take it anymore, wouldn’t take it anymore, and was prepared to kill himself but was afraid that if he did, the succubus would go after his family. That he brought me here, prepared to bequeath me all his possessions, if only I relieved him of his burden. That the woman had looked me over and approved, and besides, he said, she was losing interest in him on account of his old age. He looked me in the eyes, took my hands, and pleaded. Said I’d be rich and have anything including all the drugs I ever wanted. That the woman was kind and caring during the day. If I relieved him, he’d be able to leave the ranch and be free. I thought it over, but he saw my hesitation. “Just remember, Charlie,” he said, “If you fail to satisfy her, she’ll come after our family.” Then he took a revolver from his waistband, put it to the roof of his mouth, and pulled the trigger.