The police found no sign of Richard at the house. The place was deserted. I changed the locks and put it up for sale. Lili was gone too, of course. The police shook their heads when her descriptions failed to add up. Untrained observers, they said. It happened all the time. Richard and Lili would turn up, they assured me, probably at some resort hotel in Mexico. I shouldn’t worry.
One night last week the phone woke me up. There was breathing on the other end. It sounded like someone fighting for air. I told myself it wasn’t Richard. It was only breathing. Only a stranger, only a run-of-the-mill obscene phone call.
Some days I still wake up at five in the morning. If lamias are serpents, they can’t interbreed with humans. Like vampires, they must somehow turn human children into their successors. I have no doubt that was what Lili was doing with Emily when I found her.
I can’t say anything, not even to Darla. They would tell me about the stress I’ve been under. They would put me in a hospital somewhere. They would take Emily away from me.
She seems happy enough, most of the time. The only changes in her appearance are the normal ones for a healthy, growing baby girl. She’s going to be beautiful when she grows up, a real heartbreaker. But puberty is a long way away. And I won’t know until then whether or not she is still my daughter.
Time is already moving much too fast.
In college back in the early seventies I took a course called “The Bible as Literature.” This was great fun and something our current climate of religious extremism would no longer permit. We dared treat Christianity like any other myth, as a source for allusions, metaphors, and plots. We also talked about the Bible as a piece of literature unto itself—asking who wrote the various sections and when, what earlier works were swiped to create it, why various pieces of writing were included or left out. I added several words to my vocabulary, like “pseudepigraphal” (which friends have hounded me for using in conversation). I also got interested—even a little obsessed—with Lilith.
Lilith, you all remember, was Adam’s first wife, who was kicked out of the Garden for fornicating with demons, and so on. She is the dark, sexy underbelly of the Judeo-Christian myth. She is Keats’s Belle Dame sans Merci, horror’s succubus, Greece’s Lamia. She is the first vamp and the first vampire. She is the Kind Men Like.
I’d wanted to write a Lilith story for years. I’d also toyed with the idea of writing a companion piece to “Love in Vain,” a story that used a serial killer to talk about men’s ideas about women. I wanted to tackle the same subject from the woman’s perspective, a literary “answer record” if you will, like “Dance with Me Henry.” I would have written something like the present story eventually, but I have to give Ellen credit for pushing me to it.
I should also mention that, in struggling desperately for a title during the final draft, I hit upon “Scales” without remembering where I’d first seen it. I later realized I had stolen it from a brilliant, but unpublished, mermaid story by fellow Austinite Nancy Sterling. My thanks to her for being generous enough to let me keep it.
