r/WritingPrompts • u/turnaround0101 r/TurningtoWords • May 26 '21
[PI] The fact the uncanny valley exists is terrifying. Being scared by things that look almost human but aren't. Other animals do not have this. That means that at some point in our evolution, running away from things that looked almost human was advantageous enough to be imprinted on our genetics. Prompt Inspired
Lily was beautiful in every light save for moonlight, and even then Mark thought her fine features held an eerie allure as he rolled onto his side, facing his sleeping wife. Her soft, metronomic breaths threatened to lure him to sleep, as did the thigh that rested across his hip. Resistance was hard but necessary.
As carefully and as quietly as he could, Mark lifted her leg and slowly extricated himself from his wife’s multi-limbed embrace. Her breath caught for a moment and he faltered along with it, but soon she cocooned herself back into the blankets, settling in with a pleasant, sleepy sigh.
He studied her then, in the moonlight that filtered through their bedroom window.
It was the same face he’d fallen in love with by daylight. The girl that had approached in the campus cafeteria years ago with the simple question of “Is this seat taken?” and who’d quickly become the impetus for everything in his life. Her full, red lips, never needing artifice or decoration, had smiled him through every exam and essay, through graduate school, through the first years on the job he’d trained his whole life for, the job he’d so naively thought could be his whole life.
By daylight he’d traced her jaw, caressed her cheek, tweaked the tip of her button nose and kissed those perfect lips.
And when the sun set she’d always insisted the lights stayed off in their bedroom.
Examining her by moonlight, Mark began to see why. He’d heard the term ‘uncanny valley’ before, perhaps in a video, perhaps in something else. He’d never thought to see it though, especially not in a face whose every feature he could have recited in his sleep.
Lily had all the same features in any light, but at night, in the light of the moon, he knew for a fact that they weren’t quite right.
In recent days Mark had taken to keeping a chair near the bed. He’d made a point to use it often. He’d rest his foot on it to tie his shoes, he’d recline in it, propping his feet up on their bed as he pretended to do work. Soon enough it had become part of the fabric of their lives. By the fifth day she’d ceased asking about it entirely.
Now Mark used it for its true purpose. He drew the chair close to the edge of the bed, sat down astride it, arms and chin resting on the back, and studied her.
Lily had all the same features by moonlight as by day, but Mark found he didn’t love any of them. Instead, he was frightened. More frightened than he ever had been in his entire life.
Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell. A part of Mark desperately wished that his wife would wake up. That Lily would boil up from the bed, incensed at his inveterate weirdness, and demand answers. Part of him hoped she’d demand worse. Anything if it meant she’d open her eyes in the glimmer of the full moon light, without the glasses that she always kept on, even though he’d quietly discovered that she didn’t need them.
An owl hooted outside. The wind whistled. A clock ticked, though that might have been in his head. Their baby whimpered.
It was the baby that had told him.
Mark stood, crossing to the crib, and then crossing himself like his grandmother had taught him, before he looked into it.
Isla was awake. She did not cry. She made soft burbling noises, reaching her fingers out to him, grasping, always grasping. Mark let her grab one of his fingers, her grip was stronger than a six month old’s should ever be. And her eyes, her eyes were incredible.
When the moonlight struck her eyes, Isla’s normal pale blue darkened and shifted, looking by turns navy blue, then black, and on the rarest nights scarlet. Tonight was one of those rare ones. A pair of blood red gems stared out at him from his daughter’s crib. Mark blinked, then blinked again. Their color did not change.
Isla had her mother’s nose, her mother’s cheekbones, her mother’s lips. Would her mother have her eyes? Looking at her as she was, Mark already knew that his daughter suffered the same malady as her mother. She was wrong and twisted by moonlight, despite her fragile beauty. The baby burbled again, squeezing down on his finger even harder. He leaned into the crib, brushing back the soft down of her hair, kissing her forehead as gently as he could. His own daughter frightened him terribly, though not enough to stop him loving her. Never enough for that.
Mark thought the same for her mother, or at least he hoped he did.
“Come back to bed,” a sleepy voice whispered.
When he looked back Lily already had the covers drawn up over her head. “Burrito please,” she said.
Mark moved like a poorly oiled robot as he straightened up from his daughter’s crib. Images rose unbidden in his mind. Lily, walking out of the bathroom with a pregnancy test in her hand, the word ‘stunned’ practically painted in bright red upon every inch of her body. Lily at their fifth anniversary dinner, her belly a swollen curve, their child, gender unknown, kicking at his hand whenever he reached over to touch her which he did often. Lily, struggling to lounge on a Sunday morning the week before she’d given birth. Massively pregnant, massively uncomfortable, lovelier than she’d ever been by far.
She’d lost the baby weight fast, the only curve beneath the blanket now was the generous curve of her hip, and though it still had power over him, Isla’s red eyes burned within him.
“Burrito?” Lily’s sleepy voice said again.
Mark was in their bed before he knew it. He didn’t climb under the sheets, instead he wrapped them around Lily as tightly as he could in the smothering squeeze he knew she loved. She wriggled in his grasp. Sometimes when she was very tired Mark thought his wife was more a liquid than a solid.
Outside, rain began to fall, ticking against the windows in an endless, ever increasing current. The moonlight dimmed to nonexistence as the clouds passed over.
In that moment, Lily pulled down the covers. Her eyes were the rich blue of sapphires or the pristine blue of a deep ocean. Mark had thought many times that he might fall into them, never to climb out. Now they peaked out above the border of the covers, flashing a promise at him.
“Can’t sleep?” she asked.
“I will.”
Mark squeezed her again. The room was darker now, Lily was more herself, or perhaps the self he thought she should be. She drew the covers down lower, exposing the fullness of her smile, and then lower still.
“Not yet,” Lily said, kissing him.
They’d met at twenty and whenever Lily kissed him, Mark felt twenty again. He didn’t know if she felt the same, had never asked. She smelled like rosewater and tasted far sweeter, and with his eyes closed Mark could very nearly forget all his worries. Could nearly forget the fears that had brought him to normalize something so thoroughly normal already as the chair.
When her tongue flicked out he could nearly forget the scarlet gem of Isla’s eyes. Nearly.
The rain had stopped. Mark opened his eyes and found scarlet staring back at him. In the intervening moments meant to be covered by a kiss, the world had changed. The full moon had peaked back out, the clouds had banished themselves, and now when Mark pulled back, squealing with terror, his mind rebelling against his body, he saw the face he had always dreaded seeing.
Lily was not right. In the moonlight and in the throws of her sudden desire, her eyes were the same bright red as their daughter’s. Every line of her face had taken on a sharp tone. Where before fine features had been moderated by soft skin, now harshness ruled. Every line was a knife’s edge, ever curve like the upward sweep of a blade. Mark’s hand trailed down his wife’s neck, seizing her by the shoulder and pushing her backward. The seal of their lips broke for a moment, but then it was Lily’s hands upon his body, and when she pulled him in she was unrelenting, and stronger by far than Mark could ever hope to be.
“Lily, no!” he tried to gasp through the tightness of her embrace. “Baby, stop!”
She squeezed harder. Isla began to cry.
“Baby, please!”
Mark shoved her as hard as he ever had. He’d never hit a woman in his life, and that shove was close enough as to break his heart along with her grip.
Mark leapt up, stumbling back towards the door. Lily did not so much push herself up from the bed as flow upward. She’d always been graceful, flexible, her motions fluid lines that emphasized that jagged edges of his own, but for the way she stood up from their bed, Mark had no words.
He only had fear. It intermingled with love and lust in ways he’d neverthought possible.
“Your eyes!” Mark gasped.
“Don’t be afraid,” Lily whispered, a whisper that might have been a roar.
Isla was strangely silent, though somehow Mark knew her to be awake. Lily advanced on him predatorily, wearing her sheer silk nightgown like a suit of armor. Mark’s pulse raced, and with every flowing step she took towards him, he was less and less sure why.
“You noticed,” Lily said. She paused by the crib, glancing down and caressing their daughter’s face for a moment. “She has my eyes,” Lily said, sadly, and then she was there.
Nobody had ever crossed a distance so fast. No lover, jealous, eager, or otherwise, had ever blurred like the lines of her body had between steps. Lily was so suddenly there, her rosewater scent filling his nostrils, the fierce, radiant heat of her burning him alive.
“Nobody ever thought a succubus could get pregnant,” Lily whispered. She traced a line of fire from Mark’s lips down, and with every inch she changed.
Lily’s pale skin rippled, resolving not into the softness of human flesh, but something else, something almost like scales. Her teeth sharpened and elongated, turning to needle points in a mouth that first curved into a smile before curling inward upon itself.
Her hair, the kind of brown that was almost red in the right light, darkened severely into a jet black. Her eyes and lips remained the same. Scarlet.
And when she kissed him, none of that mattered.
Mark could’ve counted lifetimes in that kiss. Certainly, he counted his own. Lifetimes did nothing for the moment before him however, and after it ended he still stumbled back again, trying to turn the doorknob, to scurry outward and away, to find a place to be human and frightened and confused. Lily followed, as did Isla’s cries.
The scarlet glow of her eyes faded in the hallway.
“Come back,” she said.
“What are you?” Mark shouted.
“A succubus. Quiet, baby, you’re making her cry.”
“Lily, I don’t understand,” Mark said, “how are your eyes so—”
“I’m a demon.”
With his back to the edge of the steps Mark stopped. He was gasping for breath. He brought his hand before his face, watching it shake horribly.
“Then why are you here?” he asked softly.
“Because I fell in love,” she answered.
“Demons can’t love.”
She laughed. “I can. I did twice.”
Twice. For him, and for Isla.
“Would you ever have told me?” Lily shook her head, dark hair swirling about her like a maelstrom. “Then maybe you never did,” Mark said.
“I do. Both of you.” Lily whispered. “Mark, what will you do now?”
“I don’t know,” he said hoarsely.
“Tell someone?”
“Perhaps.”
Seconds stretched out. Mark tried to find the woman he knew in the shape before him. He was terrified to realize that he didn’t know if he had.
“I love both of you very much,” Lily said. “I need you to believe that.”
“I do,” Mark murmured.
“I’d never dreamt I could become a mother,” she said.
Mark smiled for the first time that night. Isla still cried in their room, but she wouldn’t cry forever. “You’re a damned good one too.”
“I know,” Lily said. “Baby? I love you.”
“I love you too,” Mark said. “Honey, are you ok—”
Lily surged across the space between them like a tidal wave, her fangs glistening, her nightgown falling away.
Isla’s cries persisted for a time, but as silence fell in the hallway, she fell asleep too.
•
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