Jeff The Incubus

By Nathan Ritzo

Jeff Nichols is an insurance fraud investigator in a decaying steel town, scraping by. He is 54, overweight, with high blood pressure, balding, short, all of it. He has a miserable marriage, two sons in their early 20s involved in dubious activities, ("At least they're out of the house." he rationalizes.), a mortgage always on the verge of turning on him, and a worthless car. His sole joy in life is working on his claims while drinking on Friday nights when the office is closed. He indulges Friday one night while working on a fraud investigation of Shem Rosenberg, a 90-year-old man who beat him earlier that evening. Jeff stumbles inside the office building, hits his head, and dies.

Upon dying, he is sent to Limbo, the highest rung of Hell, where he is met by Lucifer and learns his true identity. Jeff Nichols is an incubus named Xaopza who was sent to live a mortal experience as punishment for being too merciful to the damned souls passing through Limbo to the lower rungs of Hell. Xaopza denies his true identity, and his mother, a succubus named Elysia, sympathizes with him out of love. However, she is met by an avenging angel (Nephilim) named Baulin, the immortal soul of the priest she seduced to give birth to Xaopza, and they clash as their son escapes. 

Upon Xaopza's return to mortality through the portal known s the Lake of Chydon, he is Jeff again. Jeff realizes that he now has a new energy and power that he lacked before, having touched immortality and escaping Lucifer's clutches. Furthermore, Jeff realizes that his two sons, who are part demonic and driven to commit crimes without knowing why, can be saved as he was by his adoptive parents. He is joined by Lula Velasquez, a woman drawn to him immediately upon his return for reasons unknown to her, and a forgiven Shem Rosenberg. The unlikely trio sets out together to save Jeff's sons, who stage a daring prison break with their wives and rob a bank to fund their flight to their safe house in Florida, where all six of them (two wives per brother) will change their identities and leave the country together.

Lucifer is enraged that he has lost not only his incubus but his prized succubus as well, and has released the Dybbuks, an army of demons, to possess every law enforcement agency involved in finding both the fugitive sons and their father, who is now wanted for arson. Jeff and his companions follow the brothers and their wives in an actual "Race With The Devil", an adrenaline-soaked car chase as they fight off the demons chasing them in a showdown for their souls.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nathan Ritzo
• Release date: Feb 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224308323

Nathan Ritzo

I am an Army Veteran, college graduate, father, and motorcycle enthusiast who loves to write. I am from New Hampshire and cannot get enough of it. Thank you for your interest in my books.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The dark crimson lava of Hell’s lava ran down the walls of the chamber of Limbo as sweat ran down one’s cheek. It spread toward them when it reached the floor of Hell’s foyer. The newly deceased beings appeared soaked in the flaming sludge from the Lake of Chydon, a portal that linked the mortal world with the immortal realm of the damned. The Creator designed the dark realm to hold the number of souls it would need to keep for its entire existence upon its creation. Only the Creator knew the incalculable number of souls would be due to its omniscience, as it had written the tale of reality and calculated how many billions of souls would exist there at the start of mortal existence. However, that number would never be known by any other human or immortal being. This led to the insanity of Hell, as it kept getting increasingly packed with souls. The souls smashed together, packed tightly, and climbed over each other on their passage. The discomfort caused more fights and chaos and amplified all the other factors in the realm. The Lake of Chydon was sacred to the afterlife, a second womb for the souls of the sinners. As they bathed in their mothers’ wombs' placental waters before birth, they drowned in the Lake of Chydon’s hellish wake after death. The bodies of their mothers nurtured them, giving them mortality. The Lake of Chydon stripped that from them, rewarding them for lives spent in opposition to morality by exacting the pain they inflicted upon victims of all kinds in life upon them as soon as they passed. And this was just the beginning for them.

With every second spent in this new reality, a million years passed in their minds. The pain began, for they appeared from the Lake of Chydon, the portal connecting the mortal realm with Hell. Leading to the Lake of Chydon was the River of Elodon. A passageway that numbed their beings, the River of Elodon was the last peace they would have. The damned souls blended into the world of the dead within its waters, which was a horrific experience. It resembled a mother’s womb, with its seas of acid and flame torturing, singeing, and horrifying them, so they were ready for their collective fate. This was part of the cruel reality of their damnation. The River of Elodon altered the souls while submerged so they would be accepted in the Lake of Chydon. When they went under the waters of the Lake of Chydon, they were left with the illusion that they had done what the Creator had intended for them to do in their lives, that they had maximized the gift of free will correctly and contrary to how they had been led to believe they had used it when they were alive. The damned souls felt actual pain for the first time when submerged in the Lake of Chydon. They were conditioned to be comfortable and pampered so that when they appeared in Hell, they would be soft and weak, susceptible to maximum pain and torture. These were the hardest, harshest, and cruelest people in the mortal realm when they were alive. They were cold, brutal, and uncaring. These were the psychopaths and sociopaths who cared nothing for anyone else and never wanted to do any good. They cried as they left the lake of fire, just as they cried when they first felt the world’s light and appeared from their mothers into mortal life.

The River of Elodon was the link between the mortal world and Hell. It was the sole tributary to the Lake of Chydon. It was a warm, comforting, loving experience for the damned souls, making them rejoice in their passing from mortality into immortality. They floated through it with the greatest of joy, thinking they were being rewarded for the lives they led, despite assuming they would be damned and punished for their deeds while alive. The River of Elodon dulled the senses. It gave the damned a false sense of security. They were disarmed while traveling in the soma-like vessel to their destination. The damned souls frolicked as the river’s current carried them without effort to the Lake of Chydon. They played, made love, laughed, and enjoyed themselves, thinking they had succeeded in cheating fate for lives of sin. The submersion in the River of Elodon primed them for maximum punishment when they appeared in the blazing waters of the Lake of Chydon to appear in Hell. The dreamy travels into the lake’s fiery waters stripped the damned souls of their hardness, making them vulnerable children again, causing them to let down their collective guard and soften so the torturing blade of Hell could sink as deep as possible.

The Lake of Chydon was more than a portal, however. It also served as a looking glass for the immortal beings of Hell to see potential new tenants of the realm and tempt them. The succubae used it to target their victims in seduction. The demons used it to find the ones they would delight in torturing when they arrived. Lucifer used it to plot and plan what it would do with the changing face of the mortal world. The human trends and pathways of society were in a state of constant change, always open to manipulation by Lucifer through his succubae and incubuses, who would often disguise themselves as regular humans with their human side and sway vulnerable people into the ways of addiction, adultery, betrayal, and disobedience of the will of the Creator. Human free will made this possible. It was the opening purposely left in mortality by the Creator. A mortal person had to choose the path they would be on eternally with free will. The Creator left their destiny open-ended, which meant they would be free to choose their eternal life. In this respect, mortals were more potent than immortals, as a soul could not figure out its path once it left the mortal realm. It had to dwell in Heaven, be purged in Purgatory if thought worthy of salvation through immortal restitution, or the souls would be damned to stay in Hell for eternity.

The horrors of the underworld swirled about them in a maelstrom of visible agony that gave pleasure to the one who created that world from its pain: Lucifer. Nothing would ever placate the foul, fallen angel, which had never recovered from the spurn received from the Creator, the omniscient one that loved all, even his fallen child, Lucifer. That stung Lucifer’s heart the most. The Creator would torment the leader of the fallen angels with that love for eternity. The creator of Hell would never live down the fall from grace predicated on its reign over the dominion, where it punished the souls for doing the same in mortality. The Creator never stopped loving them, either. This love rained upon them in flames from the lower level of immortality’s ceiling, searing their flesh, howling, and wailing in screams of terror. The flames were holy, blessed by the creator, making their impact on the cursed skin of the damned acidic douses. They were reduced to nothing but nerves, which were amplified to meet the sins of their former mortal existence, then regrown in hellish bodies before being reduced again for eternity in a constant cycle of anguish. In its infinite wisdom, the Creator had rationalized that they lived for the sensual in their mortal lives, so they should be content to dwell in the enhanced sensuality of Hell, where every sin they committed was celebrated in an orgy of suffering. None suffered more than the being fated as their keeper, Lucifer. Lucifer was given what Lucifer wanted by the Creator; Lucifer had bitterness for being punished already. Hell’s ruler needed to have that, as there was the sin for which he was responsible, for which he had to atone. The lord of the dark realm

Thick sulfur clouds caked the eternally punished with a searing, flesh-burning coat that seared their eyes and nostrils, spreading to their throats and lungs when they screamed in agony. Their nostrils welcomed the sting as it prevented them from experiencing the horrific stench of death compounded into the billions, accounting for the presence of all the evildoers who had been sent to the unholy realm for eternal punishment. Eventually, that stench ate through the sulfuric coating, engraining into their psyche like a bolt of iron. The fetid corpses alive here never gave a welcoming signal of any kind. There were constant fights between them for no reason whatever. It pleasured the immortal keepers of this realm to watch, and if they ever tired of the constant battling, the tormenting incubuses were at them to cause suffering that their peers could never cause. The damned were never without fights. If they didn’t battle each other for their masters’ amusement, those masters made sure they went back to it by causing more anguish than they could do to each other. It befitted them to fight each other for the demonic incubuses and hellish-pure demons there. They would do it amongst each other for no reason other than that.

The damned were a race unto their own. They competed to outdo one another in their fights. Lucifer and its servants were entertained by it, making those begotten souls think it would gain their favor if they could outfight each other. That was never the case; Lucifer and his minions hated each other equally, the opposite of the Creator loving them alike. They would look to their immortal tormentors after destroying a fellow damned soul as a child looked to a parent for approval. They got an incentive to keep moving along the path to the level of Hell they were assigned to for all eternity. That incentive was torture for hundreds of years, which was a drop in the chronological bucket in Hell. To the damned, it was the same amount of time it would have taken in the mortal world; that was part of the torment. It also meant that they could regrow torn-off limbs and die in the human sense before being reanimated just to be killed again. It meant being skewered on the various torture instruments and appendages given to the immortal such as horns, nails, and beaks, to heal instantly and have the act done on them again until the immortal was tired of them and moved to another soul. Tiring of such an act could take a millennium in the human chronological sense, but the eternal beings of Hell had no concept of that. Neither did their master.

Lucifer looked on as his demon horde tormented the souls on their journey from Limbo, Hell’s entryway into the lower world. The souls fought amongst themselves, burning each other with hot lava-like flaming Hell-sludge, which also burned off the hands of the aggressor who used it. That aggressor was too afraid of being tormented by a hellion creature to care. The wrath of the Hellish beings was horrific. They wailed and screamed, tearing at their skin out of dread for the deeds they committed while alive. The consequence of those acts was now upon them; they felt remorse yet could not atone for them at this stage. It was now too late, and they couldn’t go back. The demons and incubuses would throw weaponry of all kinds at the combatants who chose to torment each other to see them try to use them. These weapons often killed the souls to whom they were thrown. The souls would then reanimate and pull them out of their bodies before they attacked their fellow soul combatants. Damnation was dying and being reborn for eternity. The weapons were too heavy for the damned souls to use effectively. However, they still tried to make the Hellions laugh heartily.

The hellions often fought each other at Lucifer’s behest to win his favor, as the damned did. Lucifer often reveled in this but never rewarded the winners. These beings were supposed to hate each other. The demons hated the incubuses for being part human. The incubuses hated the demons out of jealousy because they were full-blooded Hellions. The incubuses were jealous of the monsters as they were half-human, and the demons were full-blooded immortal knights of Lucifer in Hell. An incubus was challenging, however. There was a third class of hellions: the succubae. These female demons were damned to Lucifer’s realm and were prized by Lucifer for being seductive to mortal men. These demon-women were promiscuous in mortality, as well as deceitful and cunning. They often used their sexuality to destroy lives and distort the human purpose set before a person by the Creator. The succubus was a weapon of Lucifer against the Creator to sow discord and chaos on Earth through sexual temptation. The men could impregnate the succubus even though she was demonic. She could bear the child in Hell as a half-immortal demon, half-mortal human, an incubus. With Lucifer’s blessing, the human side of the incubus would never be harmed by the tortures of the dark realm.

The full-blooded demonic hellions looked down on the half-human incubuses. The demons considered them weak and ineffectual, a general nuisance. Their wicked mothers looked after the incubuses with a mother’s love. This meant that the succubae often conflicted with the demons over their children. Incubuses were tough on their own, however. They had a purpose that the demons could not replicate, making them especially useful to Lucifer. They could enter the mortal realm by diving into the Lake of Chydon and swimming up the River of Elodon. Their human side gave them this ability. Lucifer favored them for this reason, making the demons extremely jealous. However, they could never be harmed by the demons as their human part allowed their injuries to heal instantly in Hell, as all wounds did for mortal souls there. They also had a human spirit, which meant never giving up. Their persistence to prove themselves as Lucifer’s better servants never subsided because of this spirit. So, the incubus and demons’ fights never ended, with the succubae fighting alongside their sons. The stratification of the immortal hellions was something Lucifer cherished as lord of the realm. It added to the general chaos and confusion conducive to the eternal punishment that defined it. If there were harmony and unity in Hell, it would be nicer to be there, which was unacceptable to the Creator. The irony of Lucifer’s existence was that it served the Creator despite hating that master. Lucifer defied the Creator and now found itself damned to rule the damned, despite not wishing to. That was the irony of Hell. The Creator’s love was still present, central to the hatred its inhabitants felt. That hatred translated into punishment for those sent to the dark realm, and Lucifer led the supreme disorder.

Hell was in a constant state of confusion, violence, and chaos. It was every war ever fought in the mortal realm. It was the natural and human-made disasters amplified to an incalculable amount. It was the constant reincarnation of death, with life being the water offered to the tortured and tormented souls sent there. They all protested about not belonging there, begging for forgiveness and salvation. They asked to be purged of their sins in Purgatory, where the souls that could be saved did their penance for the mere imperfect indiscretions of their lives. Everyone was sent to Purgatory for their sins and acknowledged they had done so, begging for forgiveness through restitution while still in the mortal realm. The damned never promised compensation to their victims or asked forgiveness in the human realm. They only did so when they experienced what that behavior got them after death.

The torture never stopped in Hell, and it was never going to. The cries of anguish rose high, up to the ceiling of the damned reality that was their new home, hitting its ceiling and echoing back down to the surface where they emanated from in a ghastly echo that drove the damned souls further from sanity with each passing second. Their minds were being torn apart from the sensory overload they experienced, as their human senses remained intact, adding to their insanity. Often, they tried to commit suicide, throwing themselves into the flames deliberately, cutting themselves open with the blades thrown to them by the hellions. They went as far as beheading their bodies to have the hellions put their heads back on their necks again. They would intentionally let other damned souls kill them to realize they were reanimated and then destroyed. Their mortality was constantly hammered as they stepped one step further on the flaming path before them, marching into the massive burning cauldron of post-death eternal torment awaiting them. The march was millions of years long in mortal chronology and eternal.

When they got to the level where they were destined, they were returned to Limbo, and the vicious cycle occurred again. The depth of hell they were individually headed to depended on their level of damnation. The journey was longer for those guilty of worse sins, meaning they endured higher levels of agony than those who didn’t commit sins as grievously as they did. The torture was in the journey to the assigned level they were going to, not at that destination. The worse the sins, the longer the trip, and the journey never ended. They all had in common: that journey of constant pain, death, rebirth, and death again. The never-ending journey, where sanity was chiseled away to insanity, only to have that same sanity restored and eroded again. The eternal cycle of Hell was one of the journeys to nowhere, just the constant motion forward with no rest and never-ending torment at the hands of the hellions. The damned soul merely went back to Limbo, Hell’s entrance, when it had reached its destination point and started it all over again, with constant pain and chaos coming from all directions and in all manners.

The servants of Lucifer were demonic beings that tormented the souls as they appeared from the flaming waters of the Lake of Chydon, giving them the rudest of awakenings after the River of Elodon disarmed them. The damned were at once covered in plasma-like flames that they frantically tried to shake from their limbs. They wailed and cried in pain; the softness of the passage through passed through to the lower levels of their new home. They were the incubi, creations of the union between a mortal man and the succubae. The immortal female servants of Lucifer traveled in the dream-ether of the human world, somewhere between the tangible and unquantifiable. They skimmed the surface of earthly reality, keeping part of themselves anchored in the immortal realm of Hell while being able to travel to Earth for one purpose: to make half-demons capable of torment and servitude to Lucifer while having the necessary link to the mortal realm that Limbo needed.

The incubuses were a race unto themselves. They detested the demonic part of their souls yet didn’t respect the mortal half. This led to the necessary anger they needed to conduct their mission. Their purpose was to enter the human realm to inflict sin upon vulnerable mortals there, mortals identified as prone to temptation by using their free will. They were never seen unless they wished to be, and even then, they were never suspected of being partially immortal. They were agents used to bolster the number of damned souls in Hell, which meant that the fathers whom the succubae seduced had to be candidates that were unpalatable men. Killers, rapists, thugs, the worst of the worst. The succubae were crafted from women attracted to the bad boys unnaturally. They wanted to sin and craved sensual overload. They were lustful, base women who would manipulate and use men to ruin their lives and not care about doing so. However, they were always looking for men as lovers who would not tolerate that. That appetite worked well for them when they were damned after death, as Lucifer, the ultimate bad boy, would seduce them into working for him.

Lucifer granted them partial mortality as a reward for doing his deed of creating incubuses by mating with evil men only. This human side allowed them to enter the mortal realm, seducing men and making incubuses for Lucifer to send to the mortal realm to sway them into giving the dark lord their souls for eternity. The incubuses were especially cruel by design. They were to torment the souls passing through Limbo when they were not being sent to the mortal realm for other reasons. The nature of the incubus was one of conflict. The human side of them hated that they were part demonic. The immortal side hated that they were part human, which meant they were weak and ineffectual. They hated themselves, which was part of the nature of Hell. They were created by men who had that same trait. While alive, they denied it to others, yet they couldn’t lie to themselves. The incubus was the ultimate unwanted child, born of pure lust and no love in the mix. Love only complicated Lucifer’s ambitions for the incubuses, which were to enter the mortal realm and create disorder and disunity.

Lucifer stood by the Lake of Chydon as a new arrival of fresh damned souls arrived on the shores of the Lake of Chydon. By his side was one of his slaves, a succubus named Elysia. A former prostitute in her mortal existence, Elysia was selected by Lucifer to become a succubus due to her alluring presence. She was chosen to be the prime succubus by him as she hated her fate, unlike the other succubae. The other ones all loved the lives they had led, so they viewed their fate as incubus breeders as a reward. Elysia hated it; she never enjoyed the life of forced prostitution she engaged in while alive. Lucifer saw this when she arrived in Hell and put her above the rest. At one point, she was a perfect servant to Lucifer, but she made an inexcusable error. She made an incubus with a holy man, a priest. She did it in defiance of Lucifer, of course. She knew that he would never accept that but did it anyway. She never wanted any of the things Lucifer offered, so making an incubus with a blessed man was her way of getting her revenge. Of course, Lucifer found this unacceptable and punished Elysia for her poor choice by making her the keeper of succubae. No longer was she to travel to the mortal realm to satisfy her urges to reproduce. She was being punished on top of being damned by making sure the new succubae knew they were only to bear with men of bad intentions and deeds. They were to create incubuses from beings of sin, as evil incubuses could not be made from men of virtue.

Elysia was now a succubus, selected by Lucifer for her seduction skills upon her passage to Limbo to create demons in his world. Her mortal life gave her a sense of resentment that she would not ignore, making her want revenge against the being that made the world so unpalatable. One night, she gazed into the Lake of Chydon to find her next target. The Lake always fixed succubae up with whatever they looked for in the men shown there. Elysia had seduced thousands of noble people in her career, yet none were virginally pure. They were soldiers, judges, and good men but weren’t pure. Then, Father Michael Griffin appeared in the Lake of Chydon one night. Father Griffin was a young man of 29 years who was handsome and athletic but tormented. He became a priest at the behest of his parents, who were strictly religious and poor. As a kid, he was caught trying to steal food for his impoverished family, and they wanted their son to have security and morality. Afraid of his going down the wrong path, they sent him to religious schools, and his way was set. He always wanted something else, in any case. He was a family man at heart.

Elysia saw everything she had ever looked for in a partner when she saw his visage in the Lake of Chydon. The bad boys never attracted her, as she had a loving and kind father toward her. Unfortunately, she lost him at an immature age, forcing her to search for him in the men she seduced as she got older. Life was not easy for her, and she became a prostitute despite loathing the men who sought her services. She jumped into the Lake of Chydon as soon as he appeared, swimming through the River of Elodon to his bed as he slept. She found him to be receptive to her. Sleep allowed him to access his secret desires for family and companionship. Elysia brought love to that which he never knew. He woke the following day knowing he had more than a dream; he had a vision. He could not define it, but it was beautiful. That vision came at a price, however. He knew he could never pursue it as his parents had socially hobbled him into becoming a priest, so he committed suicide. That was not Elysia’s concern. She gave birth to the child, an incubus dubbed Xaopza by Lucifer. Xaopza was odd for a demonic being. He showed love and compassion to the souls he was supposed to torment in Limbo, where he existed. He was honest and virtuous, making him unfit for the lower realms of Hell. Lucifer pondered where these traits came from, and Elysia told him that she seduced a holy man to produce his incubus.

For the transgression of producing an incubus with a blessed man, as that child was also blessed, Elysia was cemented to Limbo and no longer allowed to venture to the mortal world for the conception of incubi. Instead, she stayed Lucifer’s concubine as punishment. The task was as sinister as it was dispiriting. Her despair and resentment were never-ending. The other succubae mocked her without any respect. Elysia was the virgin hunter, an anomaly in her community. Lucifer further punished her by making her his prime concubine and keeper of order in the succubae community of Limbo.

The incubus created from Elysia’s union with a priest was Xaopza. Xaopza had kept his father’s compassion in Limbo for the souls passing through and could not torment and torture the newly admitted damned when they appeared from the Lake of Chydon or returned in their eternal cycle of travel in the dark realm. When the doomed souls couldn’t continue through Limbo to the lower rungs of Hell, Xaopza consoled and even carried them. The other hellions mercilessly mocked Xaopza for doing so, but the incubus acted charitably anyway. It was in his nature, and he could not help it. It saddled him with many conflicts, however. Lucifer repeatedly remanded the incubus for his kindness, warning him that his nature would lead to a cruel fate as punishment if it continued. However, it never ended. Xaopza’s refusal to torture the souls passing by him made him an outcast amongst the other incubuses and demons. Xaopza would empathize and sympathize with the damned as they passed by. The blessed incubus would tell damned souls