He stirred restlessly as his troubled sleep was interrupted yet again, as he felt the hand tracing the inside of his thigh, stealing upwards. And started, fully awake now. His heart beating like a hammer, his pyjamas damp with sweat, and as for the bedsheets……he dreaded the silent knowingness with which his mother did not mention what she had noticed, each time now, every time she knocked and came to his room at the weekend, for his washing. His bedlinen.

Once again there was the mere impression of an inky shadow stealing its way towards the window again, just out of the corner of his eye, too far out of angle to be sure that it was no trick of the imagination. Yet he was wise this time. All he had to do was to feign sleep, even to trick himself into a semi-drowsy slumber, and the shadow would return. Only more substantial…..

His body quivered in delicious anticipation

And sure enough, as he felt the sleepiness crowd in on his awareness again, his limbs succumbing to the delicious heaviness of sleep they craved, so did that sense of the other. His back began to arch as it always did as he began to hear the soft breathing close to him, the gossamer touch of that impossibly thick, soft and wavy hair, as it tickled his chest, the softness between the angle of his shoulder and throat. And that cool, slender hands, first just the haziest suggestion of touch, then the firmer materialisation of the presence against his overwrought and feverish flesh. First they would trace the length along his stomach, then his thighs, then his loins, into exquisite, unimaginable and sinful ecstasies, as finally the full weight of his nocturnal Visitor finally lowered itself upon him, enfolding him with her voluminous and membranous wings. And sucked his seed, his emerging manhood away from him, again and again and again.

These nocturnal visits did not pass without leaving their mark on him, even he could see for himself, the signs of depletion in his face, on his face, on most days: the dark, bruised shadows under his eyes, the pallor, an occasionally glassy look in his eyes.

‘Well, he is not anaemic, Mrs Wells,’ the doctor had pronounced, complacently looking up from the test results he had just received, eyes twinkling behind the glasses. ‘No sign of diabetes either, nor of any vitamin deficiency. And I think we can rule out the possibility of anything more serious. There are no signs of bruising or nosebleeds, as we have discussed before. David appears to be a perfectly fit young man.’ Here, he smiled indulgently.

‘However…’ – and here, David could have sworn that the geniality of those twinkling eyes had just briefly penetrated his very soul, recognised the hidden decadence and sinfulness from within: ‘David could probably do with a few more early nights. Adolescence can make a lot of demands on the system, and what with so many pressures…’

‘I will also prescribe some vitamin pills for the tiredness.’

Suddenly, confronting David full on again with those shrewd eyes that missed nothing, he told him:

‘You shouldn’t bottle up any problems, you know. Your mother is a very understanding lady.’

The effect of that last admonition was enough to give the grounds for his mother to create many an understanding mother-to-son interrogation in the next few days to come. How he hated having his soul, his feelings and movements probed in this way! No, he was not taking drugs, and no, there wasn’t any girl, nor had he got her into any kind of trouble. Neither – and he could not believe his mother had suspected this of him, just because he was moody and didn’t feel much like communicating about his private life or inner feelings – had he ever started to hear or see things that weren’t there. Did she really think he was going off his head?????

So much for his Mum being his best friend.

His father was not much better. At breakfasts the newspaper was stonily set in front of him, a list of possible temporary Summer jobs already ringed in violent red for him to peruse.

‘But I couldn’t work in a fast-food restaurant!’ he would protest. Or in a shop, dealing with stroppy customers all day, having to be nice all the time. Or as a labourer. He knew his body would never make the adjustment in sleeping patterns now, in the case of jobs which required early-morning starts. Perhaps his father did too, as the silences became yet more strained within the house. Apart from the occasional pointed comment about how experience was just as important as good qualifications, and that lying in bed all morning was not improving for the mind, they did not persist as much as they could have done. Only his sister, with whom he had never got on, would needle and jibe him at breakfast.

‘What do you get up to these days?’ she would sneer, as he would stumble, still barely conscious, into the kitchen. ‘You filthy lump. You weirdo. Watcha do in bed all day?’

‘Leave your brother alone,’ his mother would say wearily. His sister enjoyed teasing him about his last misadventure – goading him. But she herself too could of have told him about that girl, the one he had kissed, in front of everybody, making everyone laugh at him for weeks. The one who had been on the game.

‘You don’t know anything about people,’ his whole family had told him. ‘You may be more gifted academically, and better looking, but you sister is so much more perceptive than you.’

Wanting to understand himself more, he had discretely questioned some of his peers about their own nocturnal visitations. Whilst most of them had had ‘wet dreams’ and the like, they had certainly received no visitations such as his. Was it he really going insane in some way, as his mother feared? Having hallucinations, or whatever it was.

Reading about it in the local library helped, and did provide some answers.

It seemed that the lamia, or succubus, was a genuine occult phenomenon, and most likely to be perceived by special, sensitive souls such as himself. And hadn’t the psychics always reminded him that he was unusually endowed with great imagination and sensitivity, whenever he had sought out their services and advice, when they had read for him in order to discern his destiny wit their Tarot cards, sand, or whichever method of divination they used?

So he relaxed a little, and his nocturnal visitor began to open to him a little more, even to communicate a little more to him.

‘You are a unique,’ she would whisper to him, the wings wrapping ever more heavily around him. ‘Only you have the inner soul with which to see me. I have been so lonely.’

Lonely? David had stroked the side of her cheek, wiped the tears away with her tongue as she said this. Never had she seemed so human, so vulnerable. He could never, of course, see much of her features in the darkness, and his Visitor had explained that even the feeble light from his bedside lamp might harm her. His sense of touch, however, had always told him that her body, whilst mature where his was still in the process of growing and filling out, was not that of a hag. She was impossibly slender, lithe, fragile, her breasts pert little buds under his questing fingers. ‘I would not be able to fly if I was a blob!’ she had giggled once. (Her speech, he had noticed, was starting to take on the familiar playground slang to which he was more used, though at first, her English had sounded almost Victorian, quaintly archaic.) Moreover, the soft luxuriousness of her hair, both of her head and of her moist and tightly-coiled pubis, promised the luscious vigour of a girl who could only be a year or so older than he. Neither could he of course, be sure about the colour of her skin, but he suspected it would be dusky, like that of a rich rum – or of a rich, creamy shade of coffee.

He had even thought of a name for her, this mysterious Presence, this anima.

Melissa. His special secret, his flower of hidden delight. Even she had liked the sound if his name, and had wrapped her legs round him with delight on hearing it, making little purring sounds of glee.

In fact, as Melissa had become more human to him, he had somehow managed to accommodate to her in other ways, so that her nightly visitations no longer drained him as they did. The pallor lessened somewhat and his eyes became a little clearer, though a new sensuality still lent him a dreaminess, a distracted air that at times was difficult to dispel. Yet he was happy – admittedly, a rare state of mind.

It was not to last for long.

Perhaps this new sensuality in some ways had lent him a new confidence that was somehow beginning to stoke envy amongst others. Maybe his sister was behind it: he could never understand the deep antagonism that had always seemed to exist between them. Almost as though she had hated him. It did not help that she always seemed to somehow be privy to most of his weaknesses of character and gullibility – and always, successfully, to be able to rub these in.

He had done his filial duty and joined his sister’s birthday party – in the home of her best friend, as theirs was so small and cramped for such things – and by the time he arrived, at had very much reached the mellow phase. That is, a fair amount of drink had been consumed, the participants had tired themselves out form the frenetic, dancing phase. In discrete areas, couples had paired off and were snogging. And girlie talk was now being exchanged, through the haze of a passing joint. Or even of something stronger, David reflected, as an unfamiliarly cloying and bitter scent clogged his nostrils.

His sister’s eyes had widened in a false, welcoming smile. ‘Ah, David!’ she had cooed. ‘It’s been so long since we have really talked, come and sit down!’

A drink had been thrust into his hands – by Andy, an acquaintance of his sisters, whom he had never liked. He was urged to imbibe heavily, which he dutifully did: often, it seemed that his sister, amongst others, disliked him because he failed to join in whole-heartedly in such activities. In fact, though, he had never really much enjoyed drink, and he did not like the effects it seemed to have on others.

At first though, everyone, even his sister, had seemed mellow. When his turn had come to smoke the joint, his mood seemed to lift as his sister made gay little sallies about their happy shared childhood as siblings.

‘I may have eaten worms when I was two,’ she said ‘But at least I did not try to eat poo.’

‘It was chocolate!’ protested David, and everyone laughed. A successful bit of banter.

As the light darkened, though, so did the mood. The mood was turning to disclosures of even more intimate kinds, and David, through a disoriented kind of a haze, heard Andy telling the others about a girl he had once hidden and fucked in his room, whilst his dad was watching television downstairs. It was only as his sister’s voice started out as humorous, then as accusing in a tabloid-horrified kind of a way, that he realised it was directed, not entirely at him, but about him.

‘A monster. Some kind of a giant, disgusting bat. And it reeks. I tell you, I saw it. In his room. Some kind of a monster, and it was hideous. I don’t know what was going on, to see such a repulsive thing like that. Sucking him like that, how could he let it. An unclean thing like that. Every other night…’

David tried to concentrate, but strangely, the voices were beginning to sound indistinct, everything hazy, except for the one pair of hard, grey eyes, directed, full of hate, joined by others, full of curiosity and dislike, all centred at him, pinning him……

‘And unless that house is cleansed…..’

‘A monster, I tell you. Some kind of an vampire.’

‘Satanist.’

‘Mum says he’s in the library every day. Reading books on black magic all the time.’

‘Cool it Ann.’

That was the only voice of sanity, and David was grateful to whoever had said it. Yet even through his own dope-befuddled senses, he realised that it did not matter if his sister Ann or her friends really believed her or not: the innate hostility she had always harboured against him had been crystallised, giving them all an excuse. It was a scenario had had seen experienced all too often at school.

He rose to storm out, away from Ann and her jeering friends. Andy, near the door, blocked his way at first, challenging him with his sneering face. He was not strong enough to push past, and had to say ‘please’ before he would let him go. It was clear he would have been badly beaten up if he hadn’t.

This time, he was not just furious, he was absolutely terrified of the reactions of his sister and of her friends, whom he had at least thought were basically rational creatures. It was not just the revelation that the entire village seemed to be under the impression that he was some kind of a witch, who could be a spiritual danger to them all, he was still reeling from the shock of his sister’s new betrayal. As soon as I can, he promised himself. Just as soon as I can, I am moving out. And away from this benighted place, out in the middle of nowhere. With all these narrow, nasty people.

If the party was bad, however, the trip back was even worse. Too late, he realised that the drink Andy had given him was spiked, and on top of the joint he had smoked…..

Leering, accusing voices within his mind started to whisper, to accuse, to sneer at him, with indescribable hate and contempt.

Per-vert, pervert, pervert………’

The words echoed, maddeningly. No getting away from them.

‘Vampire lover!’

‘Lover of old hags. PERVERT!!!!!!!!!’

The spider webs brushed against his face as he stumbled through the trees, cutting and scratching himself against a dozen thorned brambles mocked him in his dizzy stumbling through the thickets towards home. Repeatedly he had to bat away the fat, bloated bodies of spiders and ticks as they fell through his hair.

He had read about that, of wizened old witches taking potions that made them seem like sweet young girls to their victims, as they feasted on their youthful life-energy. But why, oh why, did it have to be Ann, his horrible, gloating, malignant sister all over again, who had to be the one to open his eyes to the unpalatable truth????

Was this was what Melissa – this fiend – was doing to him? Was she really some kind of a psychic vampire, a demonic Lilith, leeching off him like some filthy parasite?

As he reached his room in utter exhaustion and hurt confusion (yet again, yet again!!!), he vomited on his pillow and passed out.

‘David, my sweet!’

He woke to find his mind relatively clear, though his body ached all over and the nausea and horror of what had happened to him at the party had not left him.’

It was Melissa. Forlornly stroking his bruised cheeks, the scratches on his naked torso.

‘David, dear.’

But David could no longer trust the sweetness of her tones. In the half-light from the moon which peered through the gauzy curtains of her room, he could only perceive that she was hunched up on his bed in an obscenely simian gesture, her devilish wings reminiscent of some kind of a vulture. It was time to put all this behind him!! he admonished himself, as he reached towards the forbidden lamp. Be a man. Face reality. His sister was probably right about Melissa.

And Melissa cowered, in sudden understanding of what he was about to do. David hesitated briefly, as he thought about the sweetness this alien creature had shown, the qualities of pathos and forlornness he had always perceived in her.

She reached out tentatively, towards his bicep. And that triggered that, his stern resolve to go through with it.

It was only a weak light, but he might as well have let loose the full beam of a laser. There was a cry, rather like the mew of a kitten in agony, as something like a giant moth appeared to flutter, then crash against the panes of the window. Once his eyes had accustomed, David peered at the insensate form at his feet, below him.

The slender form of a young girl, torso twisted and clearly irretrievably broken up inside met his eyes, which were already stinging with a remorse come too late. The face was exquisite, cherubic in death with delicate, tiny lips and ears, all framed with Pre-Raphaelite curls, alas! – the complexion already blighted by the marble shades of death. Her wings, translucent, shimmering with prisms of trapped light stuck up obscenely, like the masts of a broken kite, or sails. Blood had gushed from her open mouth and ears, and from her torn and lacerated wings.

Even as he watched, her body began to wither, to fade on the carpet – no evidence would remain of her presence by the time dawn broke, he knew, just the moment of the broken window pane, about which his family would have questions to ask. David fell on the floor, his body heaving with voiceless sobs. He knew, however, that it was helpless: a cold voice from within told him that he had made his choice. He knew that Melissa would never, ever come to him again.

His sister, out of his angle of sight, was watching him from the next room, an expression of gloating satisfaction on her full face. Ordinary again, my little brother, she breathed. No more sublime visitations for you.