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  DEMON LOVERS

  AND

  STRANGE SEDUCTIONS

  Another Fawcett Gold Medal Book:

  edited by M. L. Carter:

  THE CURSE OF THE UNDEAD

  DEMON LOVERS AND

  STRANGE SEDUCTIONS

  EDITED BY

  M. L. Carter

  A FAWCETT GOLD MEDAL BOOK

  Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich, Conn.

  Copyright © 1971 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof. Selections reprinted herein are protected by copyright and are included by permission.

  Printed in the United States of America January 1972

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The editor and publisher are grateful for permission to reprint the following:

  Marion Zimmer Bradley: THE WIND PEOPLE © 1958 by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 580 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10036.

  Jerome Bixby: CAN SUCH BEAUTY BE? © 1953 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Robert Bloch: THE THINKING CAP © 1963 by Robert Bloch. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 580 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10036.

  Fredric Brown: TOO FAR © 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 580 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10036.

  Winston Marks: THE NAKED PEOPLE © 1954 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 580 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10036.

  Theodore Sturgeon: A TOUCH OF STRANGE © 1957 by Mercury Press. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Robert P. Mills, Ltd.

  Contents:-

  Introduction

  I ~ LOVERS

  ULTOR DE LACY J. Sheridan LeFanu

  THE GREAT GOD PAN Arthur Machen

  THE WIND PEOPLE Marion Zimmer Bradley

  CAN SUCH BEAUTY BE? Jerome Bixby

  II ~ BRIDES

  THE GLAMOUR OF THE SNOW Algernon Blackwood

  HOW LOVE CAME TO PROFESSOR GUILDEA Robert Hichens

  THE THINKING CAP Robert Bloch

  TOO FAR Fredric Brown

  THE NAKED PEOPLE Winston Marks

  A TOUCH OF STRANGE Theodore Sturgeon

  This volume is dedicated to

  Earnest and Marie Franke, two

  friends who kept the faith.

  Proserpine may pull her flowers,

  Wet with dew or wet with tears,

  Red with anger, pale with fears;

  Is it any fault of ours If Pluto be an amorous king

  And come home nightly, laden Underneath his broad bat-wing With a gentle earthly maiden?

  —“Song of the Stygian Naiades,”

  THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES

  A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover!

  —“Kubla Khan,”

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

  Introduction

  In The Ruins of an ancient castle, sixteen-year-old Norah Kovecs was forced to take part in a diabolic midnight orgy. An inverted cross was placed on her forehead. Drugged by the fumes of the ceremonial fires, she was raped by a strange young man with burning eyes. Nine months later she abandoned on the altar of a church an infant with rudimentary horns and tail.

  The confession of a repentant witch poured out under torture to some medieval inquisitor? No, this incident allegedly took place at Szombathely, Hungary, in 1968. In Sex and Satanism,* Brad Steiger reports a letter he received from a young woman of our own sane Western culture. The writer of the letter returned alone to her apartment one night after going to a movie. A few minutes after lying down she heard footsteps in the dark bedroom. She peered into the darkness and saw no one. Suddenly she felt the weight of a body settling down on the mattress beside her. Then an invisible something stretched itself over the full length of her body, pinning her down. A coldness seemed to seep through the covers into her very pores. Somehow she forced herself to cry out, “For the love of God, leave me alone!” This exclamation seemed to operate like an exorcism, for the dark entity disappeared.

  *© 1969, Ace Publishing Corporation

  Do incorporeal forces roam the earth, lusting after the flesh of mortal men and women? Certainly men have believed so from their earliest questing into spiritual realms. Apocryphal Hebraic lore tells of Adam’s first bride, Lilith, who was cast out of Eden for her rebellion and became the queen of succubi. Genesis states that in the primal age of Earth the “sons of God,” the spirits of ethereal spheres, looked upon the beauty of mortal maidens and took them for wives. In classical myth gods often consorted with the daughters of men. Zeus came to Danae, shut up in a tower to keep her away from male contamination, in a shower of gold. In the form of a swan he ravished Leda, mother of Helen of Troy. He impregnated Semele, the mother of Dionysus, but she died of shock when she insisted on seeing her lover in his full glory. Eros, the god of love, took Psyche as a bride and came to her only in darkness, so that she never saw his face.

  To the medieval theologians, who admitted no god but their own, these divine lovers were ravishing demons. Venus, goddess of love, became a succubus. There is a tale of a rash young knight who jestingly placed a ring on the finger of a statue of Venus. The lascivious goddess visited him by night and claimed him as her bridegroom. When he later married, the incorporeal mistress interposed her substance between his body and his bride’s. The Church of the Middle Ages seemed obsessed with sexual sins. The sex act in any form was a mortal sin, not pardoned but only made venial through the sacrament of marriage. A significant element of the witchcraft mania was the identification of woman with the lusts of the flesh and the male horror of the castrating female. In this atmosphere of repression, sexual license was inevitably associated with the worship of the Devil.

  No wonder incubi and succubi hovered above every bed. In many cases the demon ravisher was also a vampire—such as the Nosferat of Rumania and the Mara of Scandinavia— whose embrace meant death. If a woman became pregnant by an incubus, the child she bore grew up to be a witch, war-lock, werewolf or vampire. (Yet, oddly, tortured witches often testified that the sexual intercourse of the Sabbat orgy was always sterile. Perhaps demons could control their pro-creative power at will.) Theologians endlessly debated over how incorporeal spirits could engage in physical intercourse. Was the whole operation simply a Satanic delusion to lure the victim into mortal sin? Did the demon form a temporary body out of whatever free elements might be available, or perhaps out of ectoplasm? Or did a demon have a real body of its own?

  The prototype of the Demon Lover in literature is such a case. The German ballad “Lenore,” by Gottfried Burger, tells of a maiden of the Middle Ages whose dead lover returns from the wars and whirls her away on a terrifying midnight ride. When they reach a remote churchyard, the lover’s form disintegrates to a-skeleton. The grave is Lenore’s bridal bed. This poem was often imitated in the eighteenth century, and German horror-romanticism had a strong influence on English literature. The Gothic novelist Matthew Gregory Lewis includes in his The Monk the ballad of “Alonzo and the Fair Imogene,” involving the return of a dead lover to punish his faithless beloved.

  A variety of inhuman lovers appear in fantasy and science fiction. Poe is particularly fond of unearthly females such as Ligeia and Eleanora, whose love endures beyond the grave. Though Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights has no overtly supernatural elements, there is a hint of Cathy’s ghost yearning for reunion with Heathcliff. And certainl
y there is something inhuman in the intensity of Heathcliffs love. Of this tormented pair, consuming each other by their remorseless passion, we may well ask, “Who is the haunter and who the haunted?” Another inhuman lover appears in “Schalken the Painter,” by J. Sheridan LeFanu, author of Carmilla and “Green Tea.” Rose, a master painter’s niece in medieval Holland, mysteriously disappears after her marriage to a rich but dark and frightful suitor. The traditional ghost stories, ‘The Beckoning Fair One,” by Oliver Onions, and “How Love Came to Professor Guildea,” by Robert Hichens both involve invisible paramours. “The Beckoning Fair One” is a tale of great length and subtlety that builds by delicate suggestion to a devastating climax. The hero, Paul Oleron, a writer in the midst of the novel that is to be his masterpiece, rents an ill-omened house. A female presence lurking there creeps into his writing, possesses his mind, seduces him away from all normal life, and ultimately causes the death of his former girlfriend. Professor Guildea’s unwanted admirer is a particularly loathsome entity that punishes him for his deliberate renunciation of social ties and human feeling. H. P. Lovecraft, who was strongly influenced by Arthur Machen, has a wizard’s daughter raped by the outcast dark divinity, Yog-Sothoth, in “The Dunwich Horror.” The girl gives birth to twins, one a queerly repulsive boy who grows at an impossible rate but looks outwardly human, the other an invisible monstrosity, formed of elements alien to this universe. Asenath in “The Thing on the Doorstep” is the result of a union between a blasphemously evil necromancer and a “thing from the sea.”

  In more recent times, “We Never Mention Aunt Nora,” by Paul Fleehr, is a wry “Dunwich Horror” in miniature. Aunt Nora’s unmentionable sin is a youthful indiscretion, resulting in a child whose ultimate fate is shrouded in secrecy. The mystery of-Aunt Nora’s past is cleared up when niece Mary Lynne marries and becomes pregnant by the same man, who has not aged over the intervening decades. The child she bears is like nothing of Earth. “Triflin’ Man,” by Walter M. Miller, makes the seducer clearly an extraterrestrial rather than a supernatural being. The heroine is a hill country woman living alone with her son, subject to “fits,” who claims to be able to communicate with his unknown father. The father’s species aims to take over the Earth by using such half-breeds as their instruments. But when the faithless lover returns to claim his son, the outraged mistress and mother unwittingly saves the world by killing the alien. Still another interplanetary paramour, reminiscent of H. G. Wells’ “Star Begotten” (in which some sort of ray from distant solar systems impregnates human females), is the Protean siren of “Star-Crossed Lover,” by William W. Stuart. In her true form the lady is a point of radiant light, but she can mold matter into a body of any shape she desires. Her human husband is ecstatic over her infinite variety. She becomes pregnant, though, and instead of giving birth in the Earthly way, she divides like an amoeba. So the forlorn lover is left with two scintillating daughters and no wife.

  More conventionally supernatural demon lovers also appear in modern fiction. Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Demon Lover,” tells of a lonely young woman who is engaged to marry a man she hardly knows. He disappears in strange circumstances, leaving behind a throng of unanswered questions. A more detailed summary could not give any better impression of the cloud of foreboding that hangs over the story. The villain of Charles Williams’ All hallows Eve is Simon Leclerc, a necromancer who takes a mistress to bear him a daughter whose mind he can use for his diabolic purposes. Ray Bradbury’s enchanting “April Witch,” Cecy, is confined to her bed and “travels” by entering and possessing the minds of other creatures. Barred from human love because of her uncanny heritage, she borrows the body of an unwitting girl for one night of romance. “Angela’s Satyr,” by Brian Cleeve, is a charming fairy tale of the Italian countryside. The innocent satyr, who needs to be taught the mysteries of love, is a survival of the classic age when demigods walked the earth and mingled with mortals. We encounter the spectre bride, akin to Poe’s Ligeia, in May Sinclair’s “The Nature of the Evidence.” A recently bereaved husband takes a new wife, the voluptuous Pauline. On their wedding night they lie together in the room he had shared with his beloved Rosamund. The ghostly form of Rosamund, visible only to the husband but tangible to both, comes between their bodies. Whenever they embrace, Rosamund pushes them apart Pauline finally leaves, realizing she cannot fight a dead rival. Rosamund then returns to her husband and teaches him the real meaning of passion. Fredric Brown, with his characteristic light touch, is. fond of strange romances—his numerous satirical vignettes involve human beings with extraterrestrials, mermaids, demons, and a variety of other unearthly creatures. And we must not forget today’s best-known Demon-Lover novel, Rosemary’s Baby—the chilling tale in which a young wife is persecuted by a coven of Satanists, gets raped by Lucifer himself, and gives birth to the Antichrist—a plump, cooing baby with rudimentary horns, pearly claws, and large yellow-green eyes.

  In this volume Demon Lovers and Spectral Brides appear in every guise—seductive, terrifying, traditional, futuristic, grotesque, humorous, and horrible. Let the reader beware of accepting the Phantom Wooer’s invitation, expressed by Romantic poet Thomas Beddoes:

  Young soul put off your flesh, and come

  With me into the quiet tomb,

  Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet;

  The earth will swing us, as she goes,

  Beneath our coverlid of snows,

  And the warm leaden sheet.

  Dear and dear is their poisoned note,

  The little snakes of silver threat,

  In mossy skulls that nest and lie,

  Ever singing, “Die, oh! die.”

  I

  LOVERS

  ULTOR DE LACY

  a legend of cappercullen

  J. Sheridan LeFanu

  I

  The Jacobite’s Legacy

  In My Youth I heard a great many Irish family traditions, more or less of a supernatural character, some of them very peculiar, and all, to a child at least, highly interesting. One of these I will now relate, though the translation to cold type from oral narrative, with all the aids of animated human voice and countenance, and the appropriate mise en seine of the old-fashioned parlour fireside and its listening circle of excited faces, and, outside, the wintry blast and the moan of leafless boughs, with the occasional rattle of the clumsy old window frame behind shutter and curtain, as the blast swept by, is at best a trying one.

  About midway up the romantic glen of Cappercullen, near the point where the counties of Limerick, Clare, and Tipperary converge, upon the then sequestered and forest-bound range of the Slieve-Felim hills, there stood, in the reigns of the two earliest Georges, the picturesque and massive remains of one of the finest of the Anglo-Irish castles of Munster—perhaps of Ireland.

  It crowned the precipitous edge of the wooded glen, itself half-buried among the wild forest that covered that long and solitary range. There was no human habitation within a circle of many miles, except the half-dozen hovels and the small thatched chapel composing the little village of Murroa, which lay at the foot of the glen among the straggling skirts of the noble forest.

  Its remoteness and difficulty of access saved it from demolition. It was worth nobody’s while to pull down and remove the ponderous and clumsy oak, much less the masonry or flagged roofing of the pile. Whatever would pay the cost of removal had been long since carried away. The rest was abandoned to time—the destroyer.

  The hereditary owners of this noble building and of a wide territory in the contiguous counties I have named, were English—the De Lacys—long naturalized in Ireland. They had acquired at least this portion of their estate in the reign of Henry VIII, and held it, with some vicissitudes, down to the establishment of the revolution in Ireland, when they suffered attainder, and, like other great families of that period, underwent a final eclipse.

  The De Lacy of that day retired to France, and held a brief command in the Irish Brigade, interrupted by sickness. He ret
ired, became a poor hanger-on of the Court of St. Germaine, and died early in the eighteenth century—as well as I remember, 1705—leaving an only son, hardly twelve years old, called by the strange but significant name of Ultor.

  At this point commences the marvellous ingredient of my tale.

  When his father was dying, he had him to his bedside, with no one by except his confessor; and having told him, first, that on reaching the age of twenty-one, he was to lay claim to a certain small estate in the county of Clare, in Ireland, in right of his mother—the title-deeds of which he gave him— and next, having enjoined him not to marry before the age of thirty, on the ground that earlier marriages destroyed the spirit and the power of enterprise, and would incapacitate him from the accomplishment of his destiny—the restoration of his family—he then went on to open to the child a matter which so terrified him that he cried lamentably, trembling all over, clinging to the priest’s gown with one hand and to his father’s cold wrist with the other, and imploring him, with screams of horror, to desist from his communication.

  But the priest, impressed, no doubt, himself, with its necessity, compelled him to listen. And then his father showed him a small picture, from which also the child turned with shrieks, until similarly constrained to look. They did not let him go until he had carefully conned the features, and was able to tell them, from memory, the colour of the eyes and hair, and the fashion and hues of the dress. Then his father gave him a black box containing this portrait which was a full-length miniature, about nine inches long, painted very finely in oils, as smooth as enamel, and folded above it a sheet of paper, written over in a careful and very legible hand.