November 6, 2012
Yes, it's too late for Halloween. Actually, there's a good reason why I'm posting this story in November. It's another one written for a contest on XNXX. The winner was announced on Halloween, and I wanted to see how I did before I posted it here. The bad news is that I didn't win. The good news is that I tied for second, only one vote behind the winner!
The theme of the contest was to select from a set of creepy classical paintings and write a story based upon it. I chose Fuseli's The Nightmare.
My story, titled The Terror of the Incubus, is probably the darkest thing I've ever written, but of course I couldn't leave it with an unhappy ending, so in my traditional fashion, I added a twist that turned the whole thing around.
Warning! Spoilers! (Although you should already know by now that my Musings pages contain spoilers)
As I was trying to come up with a happy ending for a story that's basically a depiction of a supernatural rape, I realized that a rape can only have three possible happy endings: The victim gets over it, the victim gets revenge, or the victim ends up enjoying it. The first and second options didn't really appeal to me because they're not really happy endings. But the third has its own set of problems. Namely, it's not realistic. I've read a few stories like that, and they all make me roll my eyes. So I started leaning toward option B: the victim gets revenge.
Of course, revenge is best if it's poetic. In this case, giving a nightmare to a creature of nightmares. Or more broadly, causing fear in a creature of fear. But that naturally brought up the question: what does an incubus fear?
We all fear things that are contrary to our nature. So I started thinking of what is the nature of an incubus. Well, for starters, he's a sex demon. He exists for one purpose: to have sex with as many lovely young ladies as possible. That makes him the quintessential "love 'em and leave 'em" type. That kind of man doesn't want to be burdened with relationships or worse (eek!) children. What he fears, then, is responsibility.
And that idea gave me the inspiration for the ending of the story. How would an incubus be given responsibility? By being forced into it by one of his victims. I had ideas about child support payments or custodial hearings, but in the end I went with something much simpler. The woman in the story snares him and demands that he give her a more permanent commitment.
And now, of course, we're back to the "victim enjoys it" ending. If I was going to go with that, I decided to make fun of it, so I went completely over the top and made it funny bordering on the absurd. Not only does the woman enjoy it, but she goes on and on about meeting the parents and a great big June wedding and settling down and raising a family. It's even a bit reminiscent of the old "And I will hug him and squeeze him and call him George" abominable snowman in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons (although I should point out that one of my readers reminded me that the abominable snowman character was based upon Lenny from Of Mice and Men).
A word about the title: The Terror of the Incubus is actually a pun. Initially you think that it referrs to terror caused by the incubus, but the last line of the story tells the true meaning: it's terror possessed by the incubus. He's terrified of the future and his newfound responsibility.
One more note: Although the theme of the contest was to write a story based upon one of the aforementioned paintings, the contest was titled "Night Gallery." And yes, it is a reference to the old TV show. Having never seen an episode of Night Gallery but being a fan of Rod Serling's other show The Twilight Zone, I knew I had to write in a Rod Serling voiceover. Although not explicitly stated in the story itself, the first few paragraphs and last few paragraphs are meant to be imagined in his voice. If you want, you can mentally tack on one more sentence to the end: "A fitting doom for a creature... of the Twilight Zone."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.