In an unnamed city shrouded in mist, Valent Kosmina is a retiree living quietly yet discontentedly with his doped-up, TV-addicted wife. To escape the claustrophobia of home and city, he masquerades as a man of means and takes to spending his nights strolling through an opulent suburb&mdash;but when news comes of a gruesome murder on his new turf, Kosmina fears that he may be a suspect. Increasingly anxious and paranoid, Kosmina begins to see a mysterious dark-haired girl following him everywhere&mdash;and as this succubus takes hold of him, Kosmina finds his familiar city becoming indistinguishable from the landscape of his own nightmares.<br /><br />from <em>The Succubus</em>:<br /><em>This was hardly the first time Valent Kosmina had been unsettled by the thought that someone had pushed or seduced him&mdash;or that he had himself, perhaps out of clumsiness or carelessness, simply strayed&mdash;into a situation that would later be difficult to get out of. This idea, this fear, was in fact quite familiar to him, and naturally it unnerved him, but never to the degree that he couldn&rsquo;t shrug it off. A sensible person, after all, manages in one way or another to per- suade himself that he is all right, that he is sufficiently in control of himself, and that life will therefore run its course, peacefully and properly, to its bitter end.</em>