Victoria and The Incubus
The painting haunts the edges of my thoughts even as I climb into bed. Fuseli's The Nightmare—that wretched thing I stood before at the exhibition, pretending scholarly detachment while something in my gut twisted. The woman draped across the mattress, her arm hanging limp, and that creature perched upon her chest. An incubus. A demon of the night. I told myself it was mere Gothic sensationalism, the fevered imagination of a painter who trafficked in shock.
Nonsense. All of it.
I extinguish the lamp beside my bed. The room plunges into darkness, broken only by the thin moonlight slicing through the gap in my heavy curtains. My sheets are warm against my skin as I settle into the mattress, forcing my breathing to slow.
Sleep comes in fragments—strange images of shadow and heat, the sensation of being watched from the corner of my chamber where the darkness pools thickest.
I drift.
Time becomes meaningless.
Then something shifts.
I cannot move. The realisation arrives slowly, the way water seeps through cracked stone. My limbs feel weighted, pinned by invisible iron. My eyes open, but my head cannot turn. The moonlight has shifted, casting the room in silver and obsidian, and the air has changed—thicker and carrying the scent of something animal and ancient. Brimstone and musk.
A pressure settles across my chest.
My breath catches. Something is sitting on me. I can feel its weight—dense, impossible, pressing down on my ribcage until my lungs strain for each shallow gasp.
My eyes strain in the darkness, and slowly, horribly, the shape resolves itself.
It is the creature from the painting. Not imagined. Not metaphor.
Real.
The incubus crouches upon my chest, its form darker than the darkness around it. I can make out the suggestion of a face—hollowed cheeks, eyes that burn like dying embers, a mouth that curves with ancient hunger.
Its skin, if skin it is, glistens like wet slate. Its hands rest upon my shoulders, claws dimpling the linen of my nightgown, not piercing, not yet.
Just holding.
Claiming.
My pulse hammers against the weight of it. I should scream. Every rational faculty I possess demands that I scream, that I fight, that I throw this impossible thing from my body and flee my chamber.
Sleep paralysis holds me in its merciless grip, and something else—something worse—keeps me still.
I do not want it to stop.
The thought arrives unbidden, shameful, scorching through my mind like a lit match dropped into dry kindling.
The creature's weight upon my chest is suffocating, yes, but beneath the fear, beneath the impossibility of what I am experiencing, there is something else.
A heat pools low in my belly. A throbbing ache between my thighs that I have not felt with such intensity.
The incubus leans closer. Its breath ghosts across my throat, hot and damp, carrying that same animal scent. One clawed hand releases my shoulder and trails downward, over the linen covering my collarbone, tracing the swell of my breast with agonising slowness. The fabric bunches beneath its touch. My nipple hardens beneath the cloth, straining toward that monstrous caress despite every protestation of my civilised mind.
"Ah—"
The sound escapes me, barely a whisper. I cannot move my arms, cannot push it away or pull it closer. I am utterly at its mercy.
The creature's mouth curves wider. It knows. It can smell the wetness gathering between my legs, the arousal blooming despite—because of—the terror.
Its claw catches on the neckline of my nightgown and pulls, tearing the fabric down the centre with a sound like whispered secrets.
Cool air kisses my bare skin.
My breasts spill free, nipples peaked and aching, and the incubus makes a sound low in its throat—a rumble of satisfaction that vibrates through my chest.
Its palm—cool and scaled and impossibly smooth—cups my breast. I arch into the touch as much as my paralysed body will allow, a moan catching in my throat. The creature's thumb finds my nipple and circles it, pressing, rolling the hardened bud until pleasure sparks through my nerves like lightning seeking ground.
My private girly folds clench around nothing, empty and desperate.
"Please—" I gasp. Seeking? Release or something wicked?
The incubus obliges. Its hand abandons my breast and slides lower, over the trembling plane of my stomach, past the ruined linen bunched at my waist. It finds the soft skin of my inner thigh and strokes, deliberate, teasing.
My legs fall open of their own accord—some ancient instinct overriding every lesson of propriety drilled into me since childhood.
I am wanton. I am desperate. I am exactly what this creature wants me to be.
Its fingers reach the soaked cotton of my drawers. It pauses there, pressing against the wet fabric, and another rumble vibrates through my chest. I feel it's satisfaction like a physical touch—it's pleasure in my shame, it's hunger for my surrender.
I surrender.
The paralysis loosens, not entirely, but enough.
My right hand twitches, then obeys. I reach down, past the incubus's wrist, and find the waistband of my drawers.
I yank them aside with clumsy, desperate fingers, exposing my soaked gash to the creature's touch. My fingers brush against its—and then I am touching myself, two of my own fingers sliding through the slick folds of my pussy while the incubus watches with those burning eyes.
I find my exposed bead and press. The pleasure is immediate, devastating. I stroke myself in tighter and tighter circles, fingers slipping through my own wetness, the obscene sounds filling my bedchamber.
A squelch of slick. A splish-splash of released girly dew.Then the squelch. The delicious squelch. The finger jabbing, poking squelch.
The incubus shifts its weight, pressing harder against my chest, and its free hand returns to my breast—pinching my nipple hard enough to make me gasp. Pain and pleasure twist together, inseparable.
My hips buck against my own hand. I am fucking myself for this creature, performing for it, chasing a climax that builds like a wild storm on the horizon.
The incubus leans down and drags its tongue—hot and rough and impossibly long—across my throat. I feel teeth. I feel hunger. I feel my orgasm rushing toward me like a freight train.
An insanely long tongue twirls and twirls around my cowl. My unprotected nub pulses and shudders with a quivery, quivery delight.
The throbbing palpitations, pushing through each other, as my fingers, the beast's tongue, my slick and my clit combine in my release.
"Ah—ah—! I can't—I'm going to—"
The words fragment on my tongue.
My fingers move faster, grinding against my swollen clit, my thighs clenching and releasing in a desperate rhythm as a tongue pokes inside my dripping girly cavern.
The pressure in my belly builds to an unbearable peak.
The climax hits me like a thunderbolt.
"Arragh! Hngg!"
My back arches off the mattress, a scream tearing from my throat as my cunt spasms hard, gushing slick over my fingers, soaking the beast and the sheets beneath me.
The pleasure crests again and again, wave after wave, my body shaking with the force of it.
The incubus holds me down through it all, its weight anchoring me as I come apart. Positioned again and laughing on my chest.
The moans pour from me, broken and shameless.
"Mmm! Aahh! Mmm! Aahh!"
My fingers don't stop, can't stop, working my throbbing clit through the aftershocks until I am wrung dry, trembling, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes.
Somehow the beast forces an impossible second gasm from me.
I enter the world of the swoon.
My eyes open in the darkness.
A calm, a calm, so calm.
I gasp, sitting upright in bed.
My nightgown is torn open, my breasts bare, my hand still shoved between my thighs.
The sheets beneath me are soaked—drenched with my own fluids, the fabric clinging to my skin.
The room is empty. The moonlight falls across the floor in innocent silver.
I am alone.
I sniff.
A scent lingers—brimstone and musk and something else, something like desire.
And when I bring my trembling fingers to my lips, I taste more than my own salt.
I taste something ancient. Something hungry.
Something that will return.