I turned, hearing heels click on the polished floor. "Thanks," I said, and ran into the hall.

And froze.

She looked at me for no more than a second or two. Afterward I couldn't say how tall she was, or describe the color of her hair. All I saw were her eyes, huge and black, like the eyes of a snake. It must have been some chemical in her sweat or her breath that I reacted to on such a blind, instinctive level. I could do nothing but stare at her with loathing and horror. When her eyes finally let me go I turned and ran all the way back to my car.

I picked Emily up at the sitter's and took her home and held her for the rest of the afternoon, until Richard arrived, rocking silently on the edge of the couch, remembering the blackness of those eyes, thinking, not one of us. She's not one of us.

That Friday Richard came home at four. He was a half hour late, no more than that. Emily was crawling furiously around the living room and I watched her with all the attention I could manage. The rest of my mind was simply numb.

Richard nodded at us and walked toward the back of the house. I heard the bathroom door close. I put Emily in her playpen and followed him. I could hear water running behind the bathroom door. Some wild bravado pushed me past my fear. I opened the door and walked in.

He stood at the sink. He had his penis in one hand and a bar of soap in the other. I could smell the sex he'd had with her, still clinging to him. The smell brought back the same revulsion I'd felt at the sight of her.

We looked at each other a long time. Finally he turned off the water and zipped himself up again. "Wash your hands," I said. "For God's sake. I don't want you touching anything in this house until you at least wash your hands."

He washed his hands and then his face. He dried himself on a hand towel and carefully put it back on the rack. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet, looked up at me, then back at the floor.

"She was lonely," he said. "I just ... I couldn't help myself. I can't explain it to you any better than that."

"Lili," I said. "Why don't you say her name? Do you think I don't know?"

"Lili," he said. He got too much pleasure out of the sound of it. "At least it's out in the open now. It's almost a relief. I can talk to you about it."

"Talk to me? You bastard! What gives you the idea that I want to hear anything ... anything about your cheap little slut?"

It was like he hadn't heard me. "Every time I see her she's different. She seduces me all over again. And there's this loneliness, this need in her-"

"Shut up! I don't want to hear it! Don't you care what you've done? Doesn't this marriage mean anything to you? Are you just a penis with legs? Maybe you're sick of me, but don't you care about Emily? At all?"

"I can't ... I'm helpless. ..."

He wouldn't even offer me the dignity of putting it in past tense. "You're not helpless. You're just selfish. A selfish, irresponsible little prick." I saw myself standing there, shouting at him. It wasn't like me. It was like a fever dream. I felt weightless and terribly cold. I slammed the bathroom door on my way out. I packed a suitcase and put Emily in her carseat and carried her outside. It wasn't until we were actually moving that she started to cry.

For me it took even longer.

Darla knew everything to do. She told me to finish the story while she drove me to my bank. I took all but a hundred dollars out of the checking account, and half the savings. Then she called her lawyer and set up an appointment for Monday morning. By midnight I had a one-bedroom apartment around the corner from hers. She even loaned me some Valium so I could sleep.

Even with the Valium, the first few days were hard. I would wake up every morning at five and lie there for an hour or more while my brain wandered in circles. Richard had said, "Every time I see her she's different." And everyone I asked about her had a different description.

Helpless. He said he was helpless.

After a week of this I saw it wasn't going to go away. I left Emily with Darla and spent the evening at the library.

Back when I was a lab assistant, back when I first met Richard, I took English courses too. Richard was a first-year teaching assistant and I was a love-struck senior. We read Yeats and Milton and Blake and Tennyson together. And Keats, Richard's favorite.

I found the quote from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy in Keats's Selected Poetry. "Apollonius ... by some probable conjectures, found her out to be a serpent, a lamia; and that all her furniture was, like Tantalus' gold ... no substance, but mere illusions." The lamia had the head and breasts of a woman and the body of a snake. She could change her appearance at will to charm any man. Like Lilith, her spiritual ancestor, she fed off the men she ensnared.

I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death pale were they all; They cried-"La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!"

I drove back toward my apartment. The night was hot and still. Suppose, I thought. Suppose it's true. Suppose there are lamias out there. And one of them has hold of Richard.

Then, I thought, she's welcome to him.

I brought Emily home and went to bed.

By the second week it was time to look for work. With luck, and child support, I hoped to get by with a part-time job. I hated the idea of Emily in day care even half days, but there was no alternative.

I left her at the sitter's at nine o'clock. I came back a few minutes after noon. The sitter met me at the door. She was red-faced, had been crying.

"Oh, God," she said. "I didn't know where to find you."

I would stay calm, I told myself, until I found out what was wrong. "What happened?"

"I only left her alone for five minutes. We were out here in the yard. The phone rang and I went inside, and-"

"Is she hurt?" I said. I had grabbed the sitter's arms. "Is she alive? What happened?"

"I don't know."

"Where is she?"

"I don't know!" she wailed. "She just ... disappeared!"

"How long ago?"

"Half an hour? Maybe less."

I turned away.

"Wait!" she said. "I called the police. They're on their way. They have to ask you some questions ..."

I was already running for the car.

Subconsciously I must have made the connection. Lamia. Lilith. The legends of stolen children, bled dry, turned into vampires.

I knew exactly where Emily was.

My tires screamed as I came around the corner and again as I hit the brakes. I slammed the car door as I ran for the house. A fragment of my consciousness noticed how dead and dry the lawn looked, saw the yellowing newspapers still in their plastic wrappers. The rest of my mind could only say Emily's name over and over again.

I didn't bother with the doorbell. Richard hadn't changed the locks and the chain wasn't on the door. There were no lights inside. I smelled the faint odor of spoiled milk.

I went straight to the bedroom. The door was open.

All three of them were in there. None of them had any clothes on. Richard lay on his back. Lili crouched over him, holding Emily. The smell of spoiled milk was stronger, and the smell of sperm, and the alien sex smell, Lili's smell. There was something else, something my eyes couldn't quite make out in the darkness, something like cobwebs over the three of them.

Lili turned her head toward me. I saw the black eyes again, staring at me without fear or regret. I couldn't help but notice her body-the thick waist, the small drooping breasts.

I said, "Let go of my baby."

She pulled Emily toward her. Emily looked at me and whimpered.

I was shaking with rage. There was a gooseneck table lamp by the bed and I grabbed it, knocking over the end table and spilling books across the floor. I swung it at Lili's head and screamed, "Let her go!"

Lili put her arms up to protect herself, dropping Emily. I swung the lamp again and she scrambled off the bed, crouched like an animal, making no effort to cover herself.

Emily had started to cry. I snatched her up and brushed the dust or whatever it was away from her face.

"Take the child," Lili said. I had never heard her voice before. It was hoarse and whispery, but musical, like pan pipes. "But Richard is mine."

I looked at him. He seemed drugged, barely aware of what was going on around him. He hadn't shaved in days, and his eyes seemed to have sunken deep into his head. "You can have him," I said.

I backed out of the room and then turned and ran. I drove to my apartment with Emily in my arms, made myself slow down, watch the road, stop for red lights. No one followed us. "You're safe now, Tater," I told her. "Everything's going to be okay."

I bathed her and fed her and wrapped her in her blanket and held her. Eventually her crying stopped.

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.

LEWIS SHINER.

SAVING THE WORLD AT THE NEW MOON MOTEL.

ROBERTA LANNES.

Since 1985, when she sold her first horror story to Dennis Etchison for his seminal anthology Cutting Edge, Roberta Lannes has contributed short stories for anthologies in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, some translated into Russian, Japanese, Finnish, French, Spanish, and Italian. She has also published numerous articles, interviews with fellow authors, and essays in the science fiction genre. Her collection The Mirror of the Night was published in 1997.

Lannes currently lives in Southern California. After thirty-eight years of teaching high school art and English, she retired and is now working on a young adult dark fantasy trilogy, a Japanese vampire novel, numerous short stories, and a story collection. Her digital artwork and photography has appeared in magazines, in website designs, on CD covers, iPhone app screens, and book covers. Visit her author website at www.robertalannes.com.

THE BRASS BELL CLANGED over the screen door of the New Moon Cafe. Terri turned, once again, to see if it might be Earl come to beg her forgiveness and haul her butt home. It was a trucker. She sighed heavily and held out her cup for a warm-up.

"Go home Terri. That's your eleventh cup of coffee. I wouldn't be surprised if you're still up in a couple of days and can't, for the life of you, remember what coulda kept you from sleepin'."

"Please, Mary Ann, I want to be wide awake when Earl gets here."

The coffee sloshed over the top and into the saucer. Terri giggled, giddy with caffeine. "Thanks."

"He ain't gonna come, Terri. He's a stubborn man. And he ain't in the prettiest spot, either, with you knowin' about his affair with Florence and all ..."

Acid bit her stomach. A twist of pain in her heart made her gasp. She didn't need to hear anyone speak of it again. She just wanted him to say he was sorry. Grovel a little. Then maybe they could go on with their lives and not be hurting each other like that anymore. Hell, it wasn't the first time, and she'd done her share of messing around, but this was different.

She drank down half the cup of coffee, filled it back up with cream, and added five teaspoons of sugar. She opened the menu then let it slap closed. She ordered her third piece of apple pie a la mode. Or was it her fourth and she'd had three brownies? She couldn't remember.

The bell. She looked over her shoulder.

A man. Short, maybe five feet tall, but thickly built. And handsome in an exotic way. His round dark eyes reminded Terri of a snake's. He wore a smart-looking leather jumpsuit. He moved smoothly, gracefully, like someone with a foot more height and the agility of a dancer.

She turned back to her coffee. The bars closed at two. Much of their clientele trickled into the cafe, nearly filling the place. But Terri sat alone at the counter. He sat down beside her.

She shifted uneasily on her stool. She hadn't had a man interested in her since before she'd had little Earl and put on sixty pounds. Maybe this one was one of those guys she read about in Real Romance that like their women large. She needed this. Badly.

Mary Ann noticed the man's obvious interest and gave Terri a wink. Terri smiled at the man as she picked up her fork to dig into her pie.

The man smiled back. He reached for a food-stained menu wedged behind the napkin dispenser.

Terri cleared her throat. "If you're looking for dessert, they have the best apple pie. ..." She pointed to hers.

"Thank-you." He looked up at Mary Ann. "I want same."

"You won't be sorry. Hi. My name is Terri Sipes." She held out a hand. He looked at it curiously, took it in his, and turned it over, examining it. She pulled it away.

His eyes met hers. "Thank-you. My name." He paused, took a gulp of air. "Name is Pauldor."

His voice was strange. Deep, brittle, emotionless. It was like Earl's when she'd asked for an explanation of his behavior with Florence. He'd droned on and on in that same tone, not making much sense. Her stomach churned.

"Paul Door? A nice name. Where are you from?"

He looked blankly at her, then smiled. He gulped air again and whistled. "Thank-you. I am from the other side of the world." He made a giggling noise at some private joke. "And you are from here?"

Terri looked to Mary Ann and back to Paul. He seemed nervous, she thought. A foreigner.

"Here? Yes, I live in town. Up the highway a few miles." She slipped her wedding ring off under her napkin and put it in her coat pocket. "What are you doing so far from home?"

"I am in travel." He smiled, licked his lips. A long pale tongue. Terri shivered.