Incubus

by Carol Goodman

  I put my hand on Nicky’s arm, which felt alarmingly thin. “Sure I do, Nicky. I lost my parents when I was little and was raised by my grandmother.” I guessed by the way her eyes flicked to mine that it must be Nicky’s grandmother who was doing most of the raising at her home.

  “She made sure I didn’t want for anything,” I went on. This was what I always said about my grandmother, as if I were afraid she was somewhere nearby, eavesdropping on my assessment of her guardianship. “But of course she was much older and couldn’t really relate to a teenager.” An image of my grandmother, her mouth squared with disapproval when I showed up for tea at her club in jeans, flashed before my eyes. I shoved it aside. “So I know it’s hard being around people with intact families.”

  Nicky nodded, a tear spilling down her cheek. She batted at it with the sleeve of her sweatshirt which she’d pulled over her hand. “I think that’s why Dean Book chose Mara for my roommate. Mara’s lost everything. My problems seem really miniscule compared to what she’s been through.”

  “I guess that it’s always good to put your problems in perspective,” I said, thinking with embarrassment of my own snit this morning. “But as my friend Annie’s mother always said, ‘When your shoe pinches, it hurts you.’ It’s natural that you should feel stressed out in a new environment and need someone to talk to … How about your friends from high school, are they still around?”

  “Just my boyfriend, Benny. He and I had planned to go to S.U.N.Y. Oneonta together, but when I got the scholarship he decided to stay here and go to the community college. I told him he was being stupid, that we could see each other on weekends and he shouldn’t be making sacrifices for me, but then he said someone had to make some sacrifices or we might as well just hang it up. So now he’s here in town, miserable at the community college and, of course, blaming me for that.”

  “I hope you know that’s not fair, Nicky. He made that decision, not you.” Thank God, I thought, that Paul and I hadn’t gone down that road. I understood now why Nicky looked so miserable and fatigued. Between the lack of support from her family, her boyfriend guilt-tripping her about his own lack of ambition and stupid choices, and the academic stress of college it was a wonder she was holding it together at all.

  “Look,” I said, “if you ever need to talk, don’t hesitate to come to me. I live right near campus …”

  “In the old LaMotte house,” Nicky said, brightening a bit. “I used to play in the woods behind there when I was little. I always thought it was the prettiest house in town. I’m glad someone’s living there again. No matter what anyone says about it being haunted.”

  The boost I’d gotten by attending to Nicky’s troubles instead of my own was gone by the time I left Fraser Hall, shot down by Nicky’s innocent comment about Honeysuckle House being haunted and the conversation after. I tried to dismiss it as harmless local gossip. An old house left empty for many years, once inhabited by an eccentric woman writer – no wonder it had gained the reputation of being haunted. But it was what Nicky said next that had set my teeth on edge. I’d asked her if the townspeople thought that the house was haunted by Dahlia LaMotte.

  “No,” she’d answered, “they say it’s haunted by her lover.”

  “Her lover? But I thought Dahlia LaMotte was a recluse.”

  “Yeah, but people say that the reason she locked herself away in that house was because she had a secret lover. There were stories of a man seen standing in the woods behind her house and then a man’s silhouette in her bedroom window. Some people say she was engaged to a man who jilted her and that she’d killed him and his ghost was the figure they saw at the window.”

  I snorted. “I believe William Faulkner wrote a story along those lines. It’s called ‘A Rose for Emily.’” I tried to laugh off the story as I left Nicky at the door to Phoenix’s class and walked briskly across the quad, but I was remembering the man-shaped pillar of mist at the edge of the woods and picturing the face of the man in my dreams – the man who had fled as soon as I confronted him. The truth was that I’d been in a foul mood all morning because the dream had ended before the demon lover made love to me.

  I froze on the path – so abruptly that a boy humming to the tune on his iPod bumped into me – at that realization. What was wrong with me? Was my actual sex life so dismal that I’d become addicted to a fantasy?

  Because that was all it was, wasn’t it? A fantasy.

  Only what I’d experienced last night – that moment of recognition and shock in his eyes – hadn’t felt like a fantasy or a dream; it had felt as real as the broad-trunked sycamore tree to my right and its yellow leaves drifting down around me, and as solid as the granite towers of the library rising up at the end of the path.

  It struck me suddenly as odd that although I’d written about supernatural creatures – vampires, fairies, incubi – I’d never once stopped to think they might be real. Or that the creature who had been making love to me every night was real. He was a fairy tale just like the fairy tales my parents had read me at bedtime, a more sophisticated kind of “bedtime” story. I’d dismissed the phantom figure in my adolescent dreams as a manifestation of grief over the loss of my parents. I’d analyzed his appearance in Dahlia LaMotte’s novel as a symbol of Violet Gray’s sublimated longing. I’d treated the appearance of the demon lover in literature as a psychological manifestation, a literary trope, a symbol of repressed longing, domination fantasies, or rebellion against the status quo. But what if Dahlia wrote about a demon lover because she’d been visited by one? And what if the same demon lover was the creature who had visited my dreams when I was young and had returned now to consummate our relationship?

  What if the demon lover was real?

  I stood still for another few minutes, measured by the clock on the library tower, which tolled the hour while I waited for the return of rationality that would dismiss such a notion. Students in sweatshirts and down vests walked around me, leaves fell, squirrels plucked acorns from the ground and swished their tails at me, but the idea that the man who made love to me in my dreams was somehow real didn’t go away.

  “If he is real,” I said to myself out loud, “then I’d better find out all I can about him.”

  No one stopped to look at the teacher frozen on the path talking to herself. They probably thought I was talking on a cell phone ear set. I wondered how long I could hide my craziness though, if I’d really come to believe in incubi! As long as I could, I’d better use the library to find out all I could about my own personal incubus.

  I’d researched demon lovers before but never with an eye to proving they existed. For that, I’d come to the right place. The Fairwick College Library’s folklore collection was vast. In fact, there was a whole room dedicated to fairy tales and folklore, named the Angus Fraser Room.

  Much I already knew: the incubus was a demon in male form who lay with sleeping women, sometimes to have children (Merlin was the oft-cited example of a child born of an incubus and a human woman), but most often to drain the woman of her vital life force.

  Well, I hadn’t gotten pregnant and up until this morning I’d felt just fine .. although I had been losing weight …

  A feeling of pressure on the chest often accompanied the visitation.

  Yes, I’d felt that, but there was probably a physiological explanation for that breathless sensation during sleep. Asthma, perhaps, or sleep apnea …

  The oldest tradition I could find came from ancient Sumeria. Gilgamesh’s father was said to be the incubus Lilu (I recalled that Soheila Lilly had mentioned him), but he existed in many cultures by many names: El Trauco in Chile, the alp in Germany, Popo Bawa in Zanzibar, the liderc in Hungary, and the Celtic Ganconer, who was also called a love talker. That, I recalled, was the name of the incubus in the Briggs Hall triptych.

  I’d read before that one way to get rid of the incubus was through exorcism, but now I learned that if that didn’t work (and apparently it didn’t often enough), one could try iron locks on
the doors and windows.

  Is that why Brock Olson had put new iron locks on my doors and windows and hung that cast-iron dream catcher in my window? I blushed at the thought that he knew about the demon lover and looked around the library, wondering who else might know I was having sex with a demon on a nightly basis, but the only other person in the Angus Fraser room was a ponytailed boy with his head pillowed on an open art history textbook, sound asleep.

  I read on in A.E. Forster’s Compendium of Folk-Lore and Demonology that in Swedish homes virtuous housewives hung up charms made of birch branches and juniper sprigs tied with red ribbon to ward off the advances of the demon lover.

  Just like Brock’s little air fresheners.

  But the best way to send away an incubus was to confront him directly.

  “It takes an enormous effort to speak during the incubus’s visitation, but if the victim can summon the preternatural will to speak and ask him to identify himself, then the incubus is sure to flee forever.”

  I raised my head from the book and stared over the head of my sleeping companion out the leaded glass window at red and gold leaves falling in the quad.

  Who are you? I had asked.

  The lozenges of wavy glass swam before me. I supposed I should feel pleased with myself for summoning “the preternatural will to speak,” but all I felt was bereft.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE DEMON LOVER didn’t appear that night … or the night after that or the night after that.

  I should have been grateful, but instead I was restless. I lay awake watching the shadows of branches quivering in the moonlight until the moon passed over my house and the moonlight faded. Then, since I still couldn’t sleep, I would pad barefoot into the spare room and take one of Dahlia LaMotte’s handwritten manuscripts back to bed with me. I read them quickly and uncritically, devouring the lurid tales of governesses and brooding masters, orphans and mysterious benefactors, with the added bonus material of extended sex scenes.

  The demon lover insinuated himself into every one of Dahlia’s books just as he insinuated himself between the legs of her heroines … and under their skin. In each book the heroine found herself addicted to a demon lover.

  I crave him as an opium addict longs for his pipe, India Wilde exclaimed in The Far Moor. He is my opium. I inhale him and he comes to life. I take him inside me and I come to life. He is my life. Without him I would wither and die.

  As I began to fear I would if I couldn’t shake off his hold on me.

  I would read until the gray shadows of dawn fell where moonlight had fallen before. Then I would go out jogging before classes, choosing the woods again for my route. I ran as far as the honeysuckle thicket where I’d stop and listen for a moment to the thickly intertwined branches rubbing against one another in the breeze. I would listen for birds caught in the underbrush, but the thicket was empty and melancholy. I thought of the painting in Briggs Hall of all those fairies and demons marching out of this world and into another through a thicket like this one and felt a peculiar tug at my heart. What would it feel like to leave one’s home and wander for eternity through an ever-tightening maze, the passage back narrower and more twisting with each passing year? It was a strangely evocative metaphor for exile that haunted me on my cool-down walks back to the house with the feeling that I, too, was an exile. Not from my old life in New York City – that I hardly missed at all – but from the demon lover I’d scared away.

  Although the long runs and colder weather should have increased my appetite I found myself eating less in those first weeks of October. It was just as well since Phoenix abruptly stopped cooking.

  “Do you mind?” she asked, handing me the takeout menus for the local pizzeria and Chinese restaurant. “I’m a little swamped right now reading my students’ work. They’re really on fire, especially Mara.”

  “Does she write about her experiences in Bosnia?”

  “Sort of. She’s writing a parable that stands for her real-life experiences, which are too painful for her to face. I’m encouraging her to keep writing the parable with the hope that she’ll eventually confront the real facts of her life – as I urge all my students to do – but the parable itself is so vivid and violent, so disturbing, I can only begin to imagine how horrendous the truth behind it is.”

  “Really? Do you think you should show it to anyone … professional?” I was thinking of the shooting at Virginia Tech a few years ago and the violently disturbed writing the shooter had submitted to his creative writing classes, which might have, if it had been seen by a mental health professional, given a warning. But Phoenix was appalled by my suggestion.

  “Oh no! I’d lose her trust entirely! I’ve promised her I won’t show it to anyone until we’ve worked on it together. I’m meeting with her every day to go over her drafts.” Phoenix held up a two-inch thick purple folder. “So I’m sure I’ve got the situation under control.”

  I wondered how well she had it under control. I’d been so absorbed in my own obsession that I hadn’t noticed right away how absorbed Phoenix was in hers. She was always reading Mara’s work. When I came down at dawn for my runs I’d find her asleep on the library couch with the purple folder lying open on the floor, red-marked pages strewn all over the floor like blood splatter. When I passed her coming into Fraser Hall in the afternoon she was always clutching the purple folder.

  Once, delayed in the hall by a student asking for an extension on a paper, I passed by Phoenix’s room fifteen minutes into the class and noticed that the teacherless room was full of students texting and playing games on their fancy cell phones. I caught Nicky Ballard’s eye and motioned for her to come out into the hall.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Is Phoenix here?”

  “So to speak,” Nicky said, biting her lip, which I noticed was chapped and peeling. She also looked like she’d lost more weight. Guiltily I recalled that I’d meant to keep an eye on her, but I’d been too deep in my own funk to notice how bad she looked. “She’s in her office with Mara having another ‘writing conference.’” Nicky made air quotes with her fingers – the nails of which were bitten down to the quick. “We’re supposed to be working on our memoirs until she calls us in for conference, but she never gets around to anyone but Mara.”

  “Uh oh, that must not be going over so well. Has anyone complained to the dean?”

  Nicky shrugged. “I don’t think anyone wants to. The little bit of Mara’s writing that she reads out loud in class is so … painful. No one wants to complain about the time Phoenix devotes to her.”

  “But it’s not fair for one student to shanghai the whole class …” I began, but then, seeing how uncomfortable Nicky looked, changed tack. “How are you doing? Are you adjusting okay to Fairwick?”

  She shrugged again – a gesture which I was beginning to see had become a sort of nervous tick for her. “There’s a lot of work. I keep trying to explain to Ben that I can’t hang out all the time because I have more work than him, but then he just accuses me of lording it over him for being at ‘my fancy private college.’” She air quoted again and I wondered how much of Nicky’s new life required the ironic distance of finger brackets.

  “It’s hard on a relationship when one partner – especially the female one – is more successful.” I was thinking of how hard Paul tried not to mind when I’d gotten into Columbia and again when my thesis got a big commercial publishing contract and he had to rewrite his at his advisor’s request. “But that doesn’t mean you should feel guilty or not take full advantage of the opportunities you’ve earned. If Ben really cares about you he’ll understand.”

  Nicky nodded, but she looked like she was about to cry. “Yeah, but the girls at community college don’t have to stay in the library on Saturday night. How long will it be before he figures out it’s easier to hang out with one of them?”

  I sighed. Of course I’d wondered the same thing with Paul – not that U.C.L.A. was community college – but L.A. was full of leggy blondes
and surfer chicks who weren’t 3000 miles away. To keep myself from being tortured by jealous fantasies I’d had to shut off a part of my brain – and, I had to admit, a piece of my heart. I worried sometimes that the result was that I didn’t love him as much. Lately when we talked at night I found myself impatient to get off the phone. I should have been counting the days until his arrival on Thanksgiving, but instead I was mooning over a phantom lover. Was that why I’d summoned the demon lover – because I wasn’t satisfied by Paul?

  “If it’s meant to work out it will,” I said, wishing I could think of less lame advice to offer Nicky. But she nodded as if I’d said something sage.

  “Thanks, Professor McFay. It’s nice of you to spend the time talking to me. I know you must be busy.”

  Guiltily I thought about the stack of ungraded papers lying on my desk at home and the ones weighing down the messenger bag strapped across my chest. I’d been feeling so despondent that I’d let myself get behind in my work.

  “I do have your last essays to grade,” I said, patting my bag. “I’d better be going … but, please, if you need to talk …”

  “Thanks, Professor. I will.”

  Nicky went back into class and I headed across campus. Although it was only the last week in October, most of the leaves had fallen from the trees already and it was cold enough for a winter coat – but I hadn’t worn one. I was wearing the Armani tweed blazer, turtleneck, skinny jeans and thigh-high boots that were my favorite fall outfit. Back in the city it got me through the season to Christmas, but here I saw I was going to have to put on a down coat and long underwear by Thanksgiving. I was so cold crossing the quad that I decided to pop into the library and do some work there. Every time I tried to grade papers at home I ended up in the spare room reading a Dahlia LaMotte novel. Maybe working in the library would give me the discipline I needed to finish grading these papers.

  In the library I set myself to grading essays, managing only marginally better to concentrate on what my students had to say about The Mysteries of Udolpho and Northanger Abbey than I had at the house. Every few sentences I would look up and stare out the window at the bare trees on the quad and feel a pang of sadness as if someone I’d loved had just died. What was wrong with me? I wondered, forcing myself to stare back down at a paper. I’d never been so unfocused. Was I really going through some kind of withdrawal from the demon lover? Or was I coming down with something? I read the next paper with a head full of imagined ailments: swine flu, Lyme disease, and early-onset Alzheimer’s danced through my head. Maybe the demon lover visitations were a symptom of a brain tumor.