sybil as inhumus

Oh ye of little faith, observe. These are citations from the text, Claw, Timescape edition. 284: "...and as I studied her face I had come to doubt that she was an old woman at all, and to recall only too clearly the hideous faces of the cacogens who had removed their masks when Baldanders had rushed among them." 286: [says Hildegrin of Jolenta] "'And a bat bite did it? They've grown uncommon strong lately then. I've been bit a couple of times myself.'" 291: "As I suspected, the Cumaean was not a woman at all; yet neither was she one of the horrors I had beheld in the gardens of the House Absolute. Something sleekly reptilian coiled about the glowing rod. I looked for the head but found none, though each of the patternings on the reptile's back was a face, and the eyes of each face seemed lost in rapture." Remark, please, the difference between entirely plausible suspicion (even if slightly jocular) and fan fiction. If you can figure it out. -alga-

The Cumaean is certainly extraterrestrial (it says so in one of the afterwords) and the reptile/inhumu link has been mentioned before; but tying in the bat bite is very ingenious! I would really like to believe that this is a deliberate link, but there are difficulties. I discount that this happens some distance from where they meet the Cumaean. Severian doesn't see any wings, but that's not an insuperable objection. What makes me think it was a real vampire bat is that the blood would not clot. That's true of vampire bats, but I don't recall it being mentioned for inhumu.

We need a new term for "things that might have happened because the story doesn't say they didn't". "Reichenbach" is too long and too hard to spell; how about "gap fiction"? SBear.