Unprofessional Tales: Nerida by Normyx (Norman Douglas)

This is a tiny episode that I’ve snuck into the last few minutes of my monthly podcasting plan.

There’s a story, in Unprofessional Tales by Normyx, called “Nerida”, which he later expanded it into a full novel. I’m going to stat Nerida up eventually: she’s a succubus but here are the perambulations away from that basic idea.

The narrator of the story is an Englishman. He’s a nobleman, or at least he’s very wealthy, and he takes his sister for a tour of the continent because he’s suffering depression of some variety. He’s had some sort of psychic shock and we aren’t entirely sure what it. It has left him not merely misogynistic but misanthropic. His sister suggests that he should find a suitable girl to marry and they have a philosophical discussion where he says that the best girl for him would be no girl at all, essentially.

One day they’re in a museum for the casts of the dead from Pompeii. You’ve seen these in the Internet I imagine. They’re vaguely human shapes: except in this particular museum one figure has been restored to the point where she looks as though she is merely sleeping/ When this man sees this figure he can sense that she is about to wake. He can sense that she is nearby
and that she is interested in speaking to him/

He starts dreaming about her. She says that her name is Nerida. She was
never really a human, actually she was a water nymph, but she is now trapped in this form, and has been trapped asleep for centuries. If he could just touch her, he could let her out.

The narrator tries to find ways of sneaking into the museum. He becomes vaguely obsessed with her and people notice, including the custodian of the
museum. He’s a cashiered officer so he is willing to take the large sums of money the Englishman gives him to let him come in at unusual hours and view the collection.

The Englishman is careful not to let on that he’s particularly interested in
Nerida until he tries to unlock the case, at which point the man from the
museum intervenes. There is a struggle and in a fit of rapturous love for
Nerida the nobleman stabs the museum curator to death, so that his blood may bring Nerida back to life. He then attempt to join her by throwing himself into the sea, which is mistaken for a suicide attempt.

So we have a succubus or False God, pretending to be a fairy that is
demanding human sacrifice. I can’t include the full story in the podcast
because it’s hours long, but at some future stage when I catch up on all of
the backlog for the podcast, stats for this odd hybrid creature will appear here on the blog.