Daughter to Demons

by Jeffrey M. Mahr and Levanah

Chapter Three:
It’s Not What it Looks Like

Reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.
― Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1897)

“I’m still starving. I don’t understand it.” The young woman surveyed the myriad empty plates covering the table before her as she spoke to no one in particular. She’d gathered a small but growing crowd in the hospital cafeteria as she consumed at least one of every item on the menu. The onlookers’ comments swirled about her, ranging from raw jealousy on the part of some of the women, “My God, how can she look so fabulous wearing a hospital gown and no makeup?” to the lustful, “Damn, I sure wouldn’t mind being stuck on a desert island with her.” A few of the more jaded souls were running a tally of what she had eaten and were taking bets on what she would eat next, when she would finally regurgitate the food she had ingested in her frenzied gluttony, and even who would be the first to date this hungry goddess, since insatiability in one area seemed likely to spill over into others, or at least that was the quiet consensus among some of her male admirers, who had seen an instant metaphor between this particular mortal sin and at least one other. There were more than a few stares that seemed less fixated upon her consumption than upon her body, which was, in their estimation, fine.

The young woman was oblivious to their stares and comments, focused entirely on her own needs, so much so that the people around her seemed almost unreal, as if they were phantoms in a dream. Somehow she was — ever so slowly — feeling less ravenous. At the moment, that was the only thing that mattered. The intense, driving, unbearable feeling of starvation was gradually subsiding enough to give her the leisure to actually think about what had happened to her in the past several weeks, but as she thought, she drifted back to where and when it happened, and could see herself acting out her part, as if she were a puppet on a marionette stage, but her body looked strange and misshapen, distorted somehow from its true form.

Almost three weeks ago she’d experienced an incredibly sensuous dream of being visited at night by the dancer called Lilith she’d seen at a local nightclub, a dazzling raven-haired beauty whose dance was wonderful, but whose touch in her dreams was better than sex, and she’d had what seemed like an endless series of orgasms until she’d fallen into a stupor of bliss, almost like a trance, but from her new perspective she could see Lilith more clearly, how her … aura…? seemed more … substantial…? satisfied…? as her old body yielded itself to lust. She could even feel? smell? taste? the peculiar energies she let fly into the substance of the plane she partially inhabited and observed from.

When Lilith’s … spirit? … drifted away, she drifted closer, tasted her own waning energies from the source, and they were good. She felt more powerful, more complete, as she did so, and exerted her will upon her own unconscious body to bring herself to yet another orgasm, which she consumed.

The next day she’d fallen ill, sleeping almost continuously, aside from Lilith’s nocturnal visitations, and her own parasitic sequela to each, for several days, until her roommates had become sufficiently worried to bring her to the University Health Clinic. She wasn’t worried, because she knew the eventual destination this path led to, and welcomed it, because she could see the entirety of her experience laid out before her, as if upon a scroll, or a movie reel, and saw the increasing damage to her heart and internal organs as it progressed under the heavy doses of steroids the doctors would use in a misguided attempt to ‘save her’ from an outcome which she could see was inevitable, but was horrifying from their own perspective.

From there, she’d been transported via ambulance to the critical care unit of the University Hospital, where the erotic dreams had continued as before, but had turned increasingly strange, in a confused mélange of images and feelings that switched rapidly between the separate viewpoints of the participants, so that sometimes she just laid there while the woman stroked and manipulated her to orgasm, but in other dreams it felt almost as if their roles had been reversed, so she could see himself in front of him, and she was working on him until he erupted once again, which was even more satisfying for some reason, as if she’d gotten off twice. She wondered idly where Lilith was in this, or even if she were still present, because she now seemed to fill Lilith’s role on her own.

Eventually, she’d been hooked to an IV set and told that this would provide a continuous supply of intravenous nourishment and male hormones to counteract the effects of her disease, but this treatment had been a complete failure, and hadn’t affected the progress of the pervasive changes to her body in the slightest. In fact, it had seemed to escalate the changes, but by that time the doctors were desperate, so continued doing what they thought ought to work even when it obviously didn’t. It had been the nurses who’d started calling her Jackie, because they were uncomfortable calling her ‘Jack’ when it was becoming increasingly obvious that she couldn’t possibly be male.

Finally, after losing over a hundred pounds, her heart had simply given out, although she couldn’t say — in an existential sense — whether the original depredations of the vampiric angel had been at fault, or if it were the male doctors, whose visceral reaction to seeing a man whose male energies were being drained encouraged them to desperate actions intended to ‘save’ her from her ‘horrible’ fate through massive doses of steroids — male hormones and their precursors — that they’d pumped into her veins in a futile effort to allay their own terror. She’d apparently had a heart attack and — despite all efforts to save her — had died, but somehow remembered the whole experience. They’d tried to resuscitate her, pounding on her chest, even shocking her with a defibrillator, but it hadn’t worked and at 7:52 P.M. yesterday she’d been officially pronounced dead. But even that was strange, because the doctor who’d been working to save her life, and the nurse helping him, had decided to have sex on the floor of the operating room, while she lay helpless on the table just above them, feeling not exactly dead, but very lethargic, although she’d felt somewhat better whenever the two on the floor climaxed, which they did repeatedly until they’d finally got up, put their clothing back in order, and walked hand-in-hand out of the operating room without a backward glance. She smiled, looking back, when she saw what she’d done to them as she was born.

Then, about an hour and a half later, the she she’d been back then started feeling better, and had stirred when she felt someone gently stroking her cheek and saying something like, “…young and beautiful. What a shame.” Apparently, the orderly who was wheeling her to the morgue was so shocked when her eyes fluttered open that he’d fainted right there in the elevator. That he had his pants around his ankles had seemed irrelevant at the time, but now she realized that her growing power had forced him to masturbate himself to orgasm, and that she’d fed upon the warm energy that had exploded from his body as if it were a shot of brandy, reviving her. She smiled again. ‘Good girl,’ she thought.

When the elevator door had opened, she’d risen unsteadily from the gurney and shuffled out to the nursing station to tell them about the sick guy in the elevator, then followed her nose to the smell of food and the pristine clarity she’d experienced from outside looking in was subsumed into a physical sensorium and broken into chaotic bits.

Sitting in the cafeteria, sipping languidly at a third double chocolate malted milkshake there was an urge to giggle at the thought of being dead. Here she was consuming vast quantities of just about anything put in front of her and they thought she was dead, just because her heart had stopped, and she no longer breathed. Someone placed a plate with a burger and fries on the table next to the shake and she nodded her thanks as she stabbed at several fries with her fork.

‘He wants me.’ Jackie stopped mid-stab. She resisted the urge to turn and look, turned crafty now, like a cat in a room with a fluttering bird.

“Uh-hum.”

The woman turned to see Dr. Dunlevy beside her. She remembered him from several of the brief intervals of wakefulness she had managed while sick, but he wasn’t the one.

“Oh, hello, Doctor. How are you today?”

“Fine, thank you, Ms. Renfrew. However, I must insist you return to your room so we can examine you and complete some tests.”

There were several groans from the gamblers in the back and at least one who cheered, “Yes!” before the young woman could compose herself and answer. Unsure how to respond, she blurted out the first thing to come to mind, “But I’m still hungry.”

“We’ll provide you with all the food you require, Ms. Renfrew. Will you please come back to the room with me now?”

“‘Ms?’ Why was he calling her ‘Ms?’” She massaged the question with her still-addled mind as she tried to comprehend. She was a guy, wasn’t she? What kind of a Doctor was this Dunlevy, anyway, if he couldn’t even tell what sex she was? Then she stumbled over her own thought process, because when she’d thought that, she’d unconsciously thrust out her breasts, as if to emphasize her femininity, and then she looked down and was astonished to see that she had ‘assets’ to emphasize.

“Please, Ms. Renfrew.” He placed his hand gently on Jackie’s bare arm … and promptly fainted.

Flustered, but feeling much better, Jackie stood and backed away from the bustle of medical staff converging on the now supine Doctor. Almost as an afterthought, she realized she was no longer hungry. In fact, she felt great. So great, in fact, that she decided she should get some decent clothes and go back to her dorm room.

Jackie continued backing away from the crowd and made it out of the cafeteria without being noticed. Actually, it felt strange, almost as if she were floating down the hallways. It was mildly disconcerting and she tried to focus on what was happening. She was walking, but her strides seemed to be longer than they should be, or even could be. She stopped walking and discovered that she was still moving.

‘What the hell?’ she thought. Frightened, she made a conscious effort to stop and found herself motionless in the hallway outside her hospital room. People were passing her by without paying her any attention, as if she were invisible, which was fine with her as she wanted desperately to exchange the hospital gown she was wearing for some real clothes. Once she’d noticed that what she’d thought of as a nightshirt was actually open at the back, at some point on her progress back to her room, she’d realized that she’d been showing her bare ass to everyone in the cafeteria, which explained at least a few of the laughs. The door to her room was closed, but it opened to her touch — or maybe it hadn’t because it was still closed when she walked into the darkened room. No one had seemed to notice her, but this seemed irrelevant, because her room had changed.

“Now what?” she muttered aloud. The room was empty, the bed stripped, the dresser top cleared of her few personal effects. Jackie slapped her hand against the wall in frustration, only to jerk when the action produced a loud noise. After a furtive glance through the door to confirm that no one had heard, or at least hadn’t bothered to walk over from the nursing station and investigate the noise, she checked carefully and realized that the noise had been the blood pressure cuff falling off the wall and crashing to the floor when she’d struck the wall.

With a nervous giggle, Jackie returned to the problem at hand; clothing, her favorite jeans would be nice — worn soft with many washings, and so comfortable that she tended to save them for times when she really wanted to kick back and relax, but was afraid that one day the seams would just disintegrate, like the deacon’s wonderful one-horse shay — and her best Ærosmith tee-shirt, from the Wantagh concert during their tour with Mötley Crüe would be fantastic, and she wondered if anything of hers had been left behind. Stalking to the closet with that purpose foremost in her mind, she yanked the partially-open closet door open the rest of the way. It was empty. With a deep feral growl, she slammed the door closed and gasped.

There was a wall mirror mounted on the outside of the bathroom door, but the closet door had obscured it. Now it showed her dressed in her tee-shirt and jeans, exactly as she had envisioned, right down to the torn knee. She stared in confusion, not remembering changing out of the hospital gown. “How? When? And shouldn’t she be wearing a bra?”

Even those questions were forgotten as she watched, mouth agape, as she slowly realized that the image in the mirror was that of an excruciatingly lovely young woman who looked exactly like her, and nothing at all like Jack Renfrew, but Jackie knew that her image ought to look different, like Jack, but that made her head start spinning again. Suddenly Jackie’s knees felt weak and she collapsed to the floor, her head exploding with questions and confusing answers and a gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach like she was hungry — again.

The room door opened and a hospital aide peeked in. Seeing Jackie sitting sprawled on the marbled vinyl floor he asked, “Miss? Are you all right?”

When she didn’t answer, he came into the room and stood over her. “Miss?” And again louder, “Miss?”

When she failed yet again to respond he reached down to shake her gently — and collapsed on top of her as soon as he’d touched her. This had the unsurprising effect of snapping Jackie out of her daze. No one else was around, so she struggled out from under him, rose to her knees and patted the man’s face to try rousing him.

With each pat, Jackie felt better and better, although the guy wasn’t waking up. Instead, after the third or fourth tap, something strange happened. The man began convulsing. His hips began to buck back and forth like he was riding a bronco — wait a minute … like he was dry-humping the air … and he looked like he had an erection so turgid that it looked like an iron pipe had somehow gotten jammed against his crotch, and Jackie was starting to feel … satisfied, filled almost to the brim with something very pleasant and tasty. ‘Shouldn’t I do something about that?’ she thought, and then blushed, because she’d also thought that she ought to give him a hand, and had felt that one good turn deserves another, but then wondered what she really meant by that.

Fearful for the well-being of the aide — but suddenly reluctant to actually touch him — she stepped back.

He’d stopped writhing and was now merely groaning as he lay panting upon the floor, Jackie rushed into the hallway and called for a nurse. Within moments there was a nurse kneeling beside the still groaning man and ignoring Jackie. Knowing that she had little to offer medically, and still embarrassed by her thoughts, Jackie silently backed out of the room.

Standing in the hallway beside the still open hospital room, Jackie pondered what to do. A nervous breakdown was tempting, but for some reason, Jackie just could not bring herself to a proper state of disorientation and depression. More frustrating was that it shouldn’t have been an issue of ‘bringing herself’ to do it. If anything, she should have been struggling to avoid it, but what should have been and what was were just not matching up today. In fact, she felt better than she had in many days.

Giving up on her impotent contemplation of a nervous breakdown that apparently was not to be, Jackie considered her other options. She could go back into her room and wait for more doctors to come poke and prod her, but somehow, she didn’t think she’d ever be permitted to leave if she did that. Given her apparently unique situation, it seemed likely they would treat her more like an experimental animal than a human being, especially since she’d been declared dead already. She wasn’t an expert on the law, but she couldn’t recall ever hearing that dead people had any rights at all.

The experimental animals at the university lived well, but briefly as a rule, and with nothing of their own beyond the four walls of their cage, so that was clearly not an acceptable option. Besides, she was pretty sure they had absolutely no idea what, why, or how this had happened to her and, when she thought about it, finding out exactly what had happened to her had become extremely important.

What other choices were there? Going back to her old life would be difficult, as this was a remarkably conservative part of the country, despite the presence of the university, and either she wasn’t her old self or the mirrors at this hospital were really great liars. What would her friends think? Would she still be able to share her current dorm room with two guys? Would she even be allowed to return to classes like this, especially if she left the hospital now, without medical clearance? Finally, what would she need to do to have access to her bank account? She didn’t even know if her driver’s license was valid any more, and what would she do if it wasn’t?

Clearly there were many more questions here than answers. Jackie decided that the first thing to do was to get some help figuring out exactly what options were actually available to her. Family was out. She didn’t have any real family to speak of, besides her uncle and his wife, and he was a cop, so might feel obligated to enforce the law, whatever the law was regarding dead people. That left Frank and George.

The aide was being wheeled off to Emergency as Jackie was finishing her internal debate. The orderly pushing the gurney nearly bumped into her as he rushed off with the aide. He didn’t even say excuse me, which kind of annoyed Jackie. It was as if he hadn’t even seen her, but Jackie was more concerned about getting back to the dorm now that she’d made her decision. Instead of stopping the orderly and confronting him about his rudeness, she followed him out to the emergency room waiting area.

Spotting the exit, she veered to the left and went out into the parking lot, then stopped again to get her bearings. The hospital was part of the university, but located about a mile and a half from the main campus and Jackie’s dorm room. There was a bus that traveled back and forth between the hospital and the campus, but Jackie could see from the City Hall clock tower that it was well past midnight, which was when bus service between the hospital and the campus ended. That made things more difficult, since she didn’t have any money. She could have risked flashing her school identification card and hoped the driver would not bother checking the picture if the bus were still running, but a quick check of her pockets revealed that her wallet was gone, probably wherever the rest of her personal effects had gone when they’d cleared her room. With no money, a taxi was out of the question and there was no one in the parking lot from whom she could beg a ride. That meant hoofing it, so with a sigh of resignation she headed off into the darkness.

She had made it just two blocks away from the hospital and already Jackie was questioning the wisdom of her decision. Having never walked this route before, she had failed to recognize that even the good side of town had some seedier areas and even friendly and inviting business areas seem more sinister at night when they were barren of crowds and only intermittently lit by harsh metal halide street lights, because the city turned off every other lamp after midnight. The area she was walking through was mostly stores, closed for the night except for the occasional bar or nightclub.

As she passed one, a brightly lit bar called Callahan’s, she could hear music and laughter. Through the storefront window, Jackie could see about two dozen people inside. She licked her lips. Despite her desire to get back to the dorm, the urge to enter was a palpable pressure and she stumbled slowly toward the door, towards people, towards food.

Fingers just touching the door, Jackie struggled as she tried to control the craving driving her. She jumped and squealed in fright, jolted back to reality by the sudden sound of a siren immediately behind her. A passing police cruiser had turned on its lights and siren and surged off into the darkness. There was also a surge of something else, a feeling of excitement, or maybe lust, that Jackie imagined she felt from the direction of the departing vehicle. It was as if she somehow knew that the man, she was sure it was a man, in the police car was sexually aroused at the thought of the possible conflict in which he was about to become involved. Serendipitously, Jackie also noted that the pressure to enter the bar had lessened a bit. With a nervous giggle, Jackie let her hand drop from the doorknob and slowly strode off towards school. The craving was still present, but for the moment, it was controllable.

Rounding a corner a block from the campus, Jackie could just glimpse the dorms in the distance, behind the science and technology building. She was in a residential area, not as quiet or devoid of people as the business area, although the streets were just as barren. Jackie could feel the warmth of humanity behind many of the apartment windows. It was a curious feeling and not a little disconcerting to realize that she was feeling something she had never felt before. Concentrating a bit, Jackie realized she could detect differences. Some of the bodies were more — for lack of the right word — intense than others. One set of bodies about two floors up and a bit in front of her seemed almost painfully intense. Trying to determine what she was feeling, Jackie stopped and concentrated intently on the two strongest feelings of warmth. It was like something was about to happen that was just out of her reach — and so annoying. She concentrated even harder and she felt herself floating into the air, not flying so much as dreaming of motion that became real with an idle thought.

They were teenagers and they were on a couch in a nicely-appointed living room watching an old horror movie on television. There was a large bowl of popcorn sitting between them on the couch. Lust was barely contained in their eyes, but they sat primly on opposite ends of the couch while sneaking glimpses of each other from the corners of their eyes when one thought the other was not watching.

Wow! Nice hallucination, Jackie thought to herself. I wonder why they didn’t warn me about these?

Floating in the middle of the living room Jackie realized that the lust-filled couple was staring through her to watch the television behind her. Double wow! They can’t see me.

The girl licked her lips and a drop of sweat was forming on the boy’s upper lip. They both squirmed uncomfortably. The intensity of their lust seemed to be growing and Jackie felt more satisfied and at peace with herself than she had in weeks. With a blinding recognition of the truth, Jackie realized that their emotions were affecting how she felt. The more sexual tension they felt, the more replete, satisfied, full Jackie felt, as if she had just finished a really good meal.

With this insight came the decision to experiment. Hallucination or not, if concentrating could bring her through the air, through walls, to their apartment, what would concentrating on the two teens do? Jackie decided to find out and concentrated on what they were doing to each other, and how they were feeling.

More squirming. The girl’s nipples were hard enough to be seen through her thin cotton blouse. The guy was trying to unobtrusively shift things around in the area of his crotch. Each struggled to look away from the other. Simultaneously hands reached for the popcorn, and touched. The couple froze. Slowly they turned to face each other, hands still touching. Fingers intertwined and they stared soulfully into each other’s eyes as if in desperate need, but afraid to act. And then they lunged at each other, popcorn flying to the floor as they embraced while a shocked Jackie sucked in her breath at the sudden rush of emotion.

It felt fantastic, erotic, powerful, and … and … satisfying? Embarrassed beyond her most horrible dreams, because she was acting like a peeping tom, getting off by spying on two lovers, Jackie tore her attention from the erotic activity in front of her and the intense feelings were dramatically reduced. The ardor of the couple on the couch subsided. Mid-kiss, their eyes opened and they stared at each other in shock. They pulled apart and the girl huddled on the couch, evidently ready to burst into tears. The boy stood trembling as he faced the girl, mouth opening and closing as he tried to think of what to say. He was so close Jackie could have ruffled his hair with an exhalation, yet neither acknowledged her presence.

“Come on, say something,” Jackie muttered in frustration, afraid her intervention might have destroyed budding young love. Just as she had concentrated before in order to sense the warmth between them, now she concentrated to make the boy say the words she was sure he needed to say.

“I….” The words would not come, “I….”

“Say it, damn it.” The words were spoken out loud before Jackie had realized. Her hand shot up to her mouth, afraid they would realize she was in the room, but they didn’t appear to have noticed her presence, much less heard her words.

“I love you,” the boy finally said. It sounded strained and forced, but it came out. The boy looked shocked that he could utter such blasphemous words, then quizzical, and finally relieved as he realized that he meant it.

“I love you,” he said again as he smiled and reached out entreatingly. “I love you.” He said it louder, more firmly, and with a huge smile on his face.

The girl grinned, then leapt back into his arms and sighed as they just held each other close, cuddling in blissful happiness, looking deep into each other’s eyes, as if truly seeing each other for the first time.

Jackie looked at the happy couple and began to smile in her joy for them. That’s when the agony came, sharp, stabbing, excruciating pain as their emotions built to a different level entirely, and it was too strong, too much for her to take. With a scream of anguish, Jackie fled the apartment for safety — the safety of her dormitory room. The young lovers continued their embrace, oblivious to the world around them, unconscious of the fleeing wraith that had nudged them past the barriers they’d both felt, just as Jackie was unaware that she’d fled straight through the apartment wall and had flashed through the air into her own apartment.

Copyright © 1998, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2009 by Jeffrey M. Mahr

Copyright © 2011 by Levanah