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Not many make it in my game. Prospecting is the hardest life. They call us gougers - dirt scratchers scraping away a meagre living by picking over abandoned mines, hoping to earn enough to pay for another trip into untried country in search of the big one.
I'd been doing it for 20 years. I didn't want to be around people. I didn't like them and they didn't like me. At Holt's Creek there was only me, my dog Blue, great mounds of dirt, and rusted machinery. Plus a halfway habitable shack I called home. It kept out the wind and the rain.
I hadn't seen a soul for seven weeks, since last I drove to town, when the kid walked in. It had just gone dark and I'd lit the hurricane lamp inside the shack. She walked in through the open door and stood there, looking at me.
She was wearing a blue-checked uniform dress and sandals, and it made her look as if she'd just come home from school. But the nearest school was 250 miles away, and she carried nothing. Just her. Just a kid.
"Who the hell are you?" I asked. "Where the hell did you spring from?"
She said nothing. Such a grave little face. Deadpan. She just stood there, looking at me.
How did she get here? How come the dog didn't bark? I stepped around her and shouted out through the door. "Blue, you mongrel." I whistled for him. Where the hell was the dog?
"Your dog is dead," the kid said. She had a soft but clear voice.
Dead? Blue? I turned back to her and she looked calmly into my face. She had flecked eyes. Grey-greenish, but flecked. I tore myself away and headed out into the dark with a torch. Dead? How could that be?
I found him 50 yards away, on his side, still warm. But he was dead, all right. No marks. No sign. Damn. He'd been with me so long I'd forgotten to count the years.
Back in the shack the kid still stood where she'd been standing. Maybe she wasn't so much a kid. She had long brown hair past her shoulders, and she stood as high as my chin. I took hold of her by the shoulders and shook her demandingly, wanting answers. "Who are you? Where did you come from? What's your name?"
Her expression stayed the same. Her eyes held mine. She wasn't afraid of me, although she should have been. She moved her shoulders fractionally and I took my hands away. Had to. Didn't seem to have a choice. I backed off a couple of paces, perplexed.
Unhurriedly, she pulled the blue-checked dress up her body, over her head, and dropped it on the floor. Under it she was wearing girlish underwear - a plain white bra with cups so slight they barely curved, and light white pants that showed a hint of pubic hair behind them. She kicked off her sandals, unhooked the bra, and took it off. Looking at me coolly, she slid the pants down her legs and stepped out of them.
She stood naked in front of me. A girl. Just barely a woman. Her breasts were only just breasts. Between her legs the little puff of pubic hair was thin and sparse. Her legs and arms were thin, undeveloped. She lacked the waist and hips of a woman. Her body said she was maybe thirteen. Her face said something else. So calm, so controlled, so sure of herself.
"Hell and damnation," I said. "Who are you?"
"Your dream woman," she said. "Hello, Uncle Charlie."
My blood froze. "No," I said, and I could hear the utter dread in my voice.
"Yes," she said. "It's time."
Yes. It was time. After all these years. Blocked out, but never really forgotten. "I didn't mean to kill her," I said.
She stood there, beautiful, flawless, perfect, unresponsive, merciless.
"It all went horribly wrong," I said. "She was willing, I swear it. It was afterwards the trouble started."
She said nothing.
"I tried to stop her crying," I said. "I panicked. Then she was dead. Her throat was so small."
She stood there, her throat thin, vulnerable.
"The body was never found," I said. "Nobody knew."
She waited, naked, eyes watching me.
"Who are you?" I asked. "What are you? You're not Angie. You look nothing like her."
"I am the woman you dream about," she said. "This body, this face. It's what you want, what you have always wanted."
"No," I said. "It was an accident. I loved her."
"It's time," she said, stepping forward. "You have wandered, alone, but you have always been marked." She placed a hand flat against my chest, over my black heart. "It is Samhain and the Day of the Dead, and I claim you."
As it was on that day 22 years ago, I lost sense of time and motion. A stranger was inside me, in control. Things were happening that should not have happen. I was naked, on my back on the hard and rough floor, and the girl with the deadpan face and the flecked eyes sat on me, rocking, my hard penis buried inside her.
She looked like a girl. She felt like a woman, a hell of a woman. She took all of me easily inside her, smoothly, warmly, wetly, sucking and drawing, plunging and pulling, doing it like she'd done it a thousand times with a thousand men. And all the while her face was calm, expressionless.
I spasmed and released, letting it go, giving her what I knew she wanted and what she came for. Her lips drew back from her teeth in a snarl. It was inhuman, and in that moment I knew my doom.
I lay back, panting, watching her, waiting without hope. She stopped moving on me. "It is done," the succubus said. "Welcome to forever, Uncle Charlie. You belong to me."
The light from the lamp was fading fast. Poor Blue. The dog had done nothing but be faithful. The only one I needed to wish farewell had already gone.
It was time. Let it be.