Incubus

by Carol Goodman

  “What happened?” she demanded when she saw that I was awake.

  I told her everything I had seen, never once thinking she might not believe me, and when I had finished I saw that she did believe me.

  “Who was he?” I asked.

  “That was the Ganconer, the Love Talker, a demon that robs women of their lives. They say that once he was as human as you or me, but he lost his way in the woods one day and fell asleep and the Fairy Queen came with her Riders and found him. He was so beautiful that she had to have him. She took him back with her to Faerie, where he dwells to this day, more fey than human now after all these centuries, a creature of shadow and moonlight. The little spark of human still left in him longs to be human again, but he can only become human if a human girl falls in love with him. And so he enchants girls, hoping to make one love him, but if he fails, the girl perishes.”

  “But our Katy loved him,” I said. “I saw him becoming human. He was turning into flesh – all but his eyes. And then he saw me …”

  “He would have killed you no doubt, if Katy hadn’t stopped him. There’s where her love of him left off. She must’ve broken free of him and run to save you.”

  “Then it’s because of me she’s dead,” I said.

  My mother – God bless her – looked as stricken then as when she’d been wailing over her dead daughter. She tried to tell me it wasn’t so and in time I let her think she’d convinced me.

  But I have always known otherwise.

  That demon – I have long realized that the creatures we call fairies in my country are indistinguishable from the demons of yours – had killed her, but I had a hand in her death as well. And that is why I’ve made it my life’s mission to track him down and banish him to Hell – or Faerie or whatever dark pit he came from. (Yes, I know my mother’s tale says he was once human, but is that any reason to forgive him? On the contrary, I think it is all the more reason to condemn him.) All my studies – the degrees from the University of Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge, the honors, and papers and publications, even the founding of the Royal Order of Folklorists – were all in service to this goal. And now at last I believe I’ve found the spell to undo him.

  I know that if I had told you what I planned to do you would have tried to stop me, but I have no choice: I must confront him. From the moment when I looked into the blackness beyond his eyes a part of me has dwelled in that darkness. I have felt myself, in these last weeks, growing weaker. I believe he is somehow draining me of my life as he once drained Katy. Unless I confront him I will never be whole. And so, before I embark on this last journey I send you the manuscript of my last book for you to dispose of as you see fit. There is no one whom I trust more, azizam. Know always that I went into the darkness with your face before me and that if I don’t return it was not from want of loving you.

  Dooset daram,

  Angus Fraser

  August 29, 1911

  The signature and date caught me by surprise. I’d assumed the letter was to Soheila – hadn’t she spoken of the writer as a dear friend? – but Angus Fraser had taught at Fairwick a hundred years ago. Perhaps the letter had been written to Soheila’s mother – or grandmother even. I opened the book in my lap to the title page and found his name under the title. Angus Fraser, D.Litt Oxon; Ph.D Folklore University of Edinburgh; Ph.D. Archeology Cambridge. The book had been published in 1912.

  This must have been the book he’d sent the Sohelia in the letter to publish. Had he come back? I wondered. From what Soheila had told me it didn’t sound as if he had. And if he had died using this spell to confront the demon that had killed his sister, was it such a good idea for me to use the same spell to invoke the same demon?

  Assuming it was the same demon.

  I sat with the book open in my lap and the sugar bowl of boiling water in front of me. Soon it would be too cool to use. The instructions said that once the spellcaster entered the circle she shouldn’t step out of it again. So if I was going to do this …

  What finally made up my mind were two lines from Angus’s letter: From the moment when I looked into the blackness beyond his eyes a part of me has dwelled in that darkness … Unless I confront him I will never be whole.

  When I read those lines I felt the spiral coil burning through my flesh.

  I knew it was the same for me.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I LIT THE candles while reciting the names listed in Fraser’s book. They were the same names Soheila had told me at the reception.

  “Lilu, Liderc, Ganconer, hear me.

  Lilu, Liderc, Ganconer, I call you.

  Lilu, Liderc, Ganconer, come to me.”

  When I finished lighting all the candles I uncovered the sugar bowl. A plume of spice-scented steam rose into the air. It smelled like pumpkin pie. Comforting and incongruous at the same time.

  I took out the object I’d removed from my desk drawer. The offering. It was a stone my father gave me when I was six or seven and I’d been having nightmares. He had told me that he found it on the shore of a lake in Scotland – a loch like the one the Loch Ness monster lived in. It was chalky white and had a hole worn through the middle. He said people called stones like these fairy stones because if you looked through the hole at the break of dawn you could see fairies, but that they also protected their owners from nightmares. I’d slept with it under my pillow every night until I was in my teens and my parents were dead. Then, when I was fifteen, I’d talked Annie into going to Central Park with me at dawn. I convinced her by playing the dead parents card, as she put it. We smoked pot and sat on the boulders overlooking Sheep Meadow, waiting for the sun to appear through the buildings to the east. When the first rays of light streamed across the meadow I held the stone up to my eye. I hadn’t seen any fairies, but I’d heard a buzzing in my ears – like a hive of bees swarming over my head – I’d put it down to the pot and lack of sleep. I stopped sleeping with the stone under my pillow then, but I’d kept it in the same box where I kept my mother’s letters.

  Now I dropped the stone into the hot water, reciting the three names.

  “Lilu, Liderc, Ganconer, accept my offer.”

  The plume of steam wavered and then thinned into a long tail, as if it had been funneled through the hole in the stone. It coiled in the air – a party streamer tossed on the breeze …

  There hadn’t been a breeze before, had there? At least not when I was talking on the phone with Paul. But now a stiff breeze blew through the open window. The candle flames danced in it, the wicks guttering in the pools of melted wax. Outside I could see treetops tossing in the wind. The steam twisted in the air, coiling like the tail of a kite. I watched it, mesmerized, for several seconds until I realized that it was no longer coming out of the sugar bowl. It had separated from its source and taken on a life of its own.

  The next gust blew out the candles.

  It’s just the wind and water molecules, I said to myself.

  But those water molecules were glowing now like phosphorescent plankton – as if they also had a life of their own.

  I took a deep breath. The steam eddied toward me as if borne on my breath. The brand on my breast tingled. I exhaled and the steam moved again. It arranged itself into the shape of a face. His face.

  I opened my mouth … amazed, yes, but also suddenly stymied. I hadn’t really figured out what I was going to say if he showed up. The only thing I could think of was “Who are you?” and that hadn’t worked out so well before. Before I could think of what else to say he beat me to the punch.

  “Who are you?” he asked, as if he’d just thought of a comeback to my previous question.

  I laughed out loud, my expelled breath pushing him back in the air. “My name’s Cailleach McFay,” I said.

  “Cailleach.” The name was a sigh on the wind that caressed my face. I found I liked hearing my name on his lips.

  “I know you,” the breeze whispered, tugging at my shirt collar. “Don’t you remember?”

  For a
moment I wondered if that’s why I had dreamed of him all those years – because a part of me had remembered.

  The breeze insinuated itself between my breasts and traced the lines of the spiral pattern on my left breast, making the skin tingle and my nipple harden. The coil flamed up as if I’d just been branded. Oh yes, that I remembered.

  “You don’t know a thing about me,” I said, batting the breeze away. “And I don’t even know your name.”

  His lips formed a smile, stiffly, as if he wasn’t used to moving those muscles – or did he have muscles? This image was different from his earlier visitations. I had a feeling it was just a remote projection. “I have many names,” he said. His voice, I realized now, wasn’t coming from his mouth. It rode the air, billowing in and out of the window, winding around me like a silk scarf. Outside the trees thrashed. “Those you called me by and many others. You can call me Ganconer.”

  “Are you the same …” I hesitated on what to call him. “… man as in Angus Fraser’s story?”

  He frowned at the mention of Angus Fraser’s name and the wind coming through the window turned cold. Gooseflesh rose on my skin where it touched me. “Don’t believe everything that man says.”

  “Did you seduce his sister? Did you kill her?”

  “Katy.” The name was a sigh torn from the wind. “I lost her. It was hissss fault.”

  “I doubt that,” I said, beginning to grow impatient with this apparition. Awake and with my eyes wide open he was decidedly less charming than he’d been in my dreams. “Listen,” I said. “I called you here to tell you to go …”

  The mist rippled and the wind roared. It took me a moment to realize he – it – was laughing. “That’s why you called me? I don’t think so, Cailleach McFay. I think you called me because you want more of me.” The mist unfurled through the air and wrapped itself around me. The air had gotten very cold in the room but the mist touching my face was warm. The warmth seeped through me, spreading like a warm liqueur through my bloodstream and coiling into my pelvis and, God help me, landing right between my legs.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “You’re a phantom, an incubus. You’d suck me dry and leave me dead …”

  “Not if you loved me,” he whispered, his voice a warm wave that lapped at my ear and filled me with longing.

  “That’s a big if,” I replied. “Love comes and goes in my experience. I wouldn’t bet my life on it.” An image of my parents appeared in my mind, but I quickly banished it.

  The coil that had been wrapping itself around me paused. I felt his … its … hesitation. When he spoke again his voice sounded different – less silky, more real. It made me realize he’d been acting up until now. “That’s been your experience?” he asked. “You poor girl …” And then the silky voice was back. “It wouldn’t be your experience with me. Perhaps that’s how you feel with your human lover, but it’s not how you’d feel with me.”

  Maybe it was my loyalty to Paul (I still had some, didn’t I?) or maybe it was the disdain in his voice when he said human, or maybe it was just the cocky attitude that he knew what I wanted, but I was suddenly disenchanted with this creature.

  “You’ve got a lot to learn about women, pal. There’s more to love than being good in the sack,” I said, tensing my muscles and trying hard not to think about how good he was in bed. “Or maybe it’s been too long since you were human to know that.”

  I thrashed my arms out, breaking the coils of mist into tattered shreds. Then, before he could regroup and whisper his sweet nothings into my ear, I dropped the lid over the sugar bowl and recited the three lines I’d memorized from Angus Fraser’s book:

  “Begone, incubus!

  I send you away, demon!

  I cast you into darkness, Ganconer!”

  In the strangely quiet pause that followed, the scattered mist tried to reassemble itself into a face. Outside the wind had stopped as if it were waiting for a cue from its master. I suddenly knew I couldn’t let him take shape again and speak. I knew what I had to do. It wasn’t in Angus Fraser’s book, but it had worked at a bar in the Bowery with an obnoxious bond salesman. I picked up the sugar bowl and, just as a face was appearing again in the air, dashed the hot water into it. For a split second the incubus’s face had the exact same expression that the bond salesman’s had had when I threw my mojito into his face – and then there was no face. The mist was sucked out the window in a gust so strong it knocked me flat on my back. My right hand hit one of the candles, spilling hot wax over my knuckles. I scrambled to my knees and crawled through spilled wax and salt to the window with the idea of closing it, but when I pulled myself up to the windowsill what I saw there froze me in place.

  The trees, which had been thrashing a moment ago, were still now, but they weren’t upright. They were leaning east, every twig and leaf pulled taut as though by an irresistible magnetic force away from the house. The only movements outside were of animals running across the yard … raccoons and squirrels and even deer … all of them fleeing the forest as if it were on fire. I felt a tingling on my scalp and, looking down, saw my hair rising in the air, pulling in the same direction. It was perfectly still outside, as if the world were holding its breath …

  It reminded me of something … a description I’d read from a survivor of the Indonesian tsunami several years ago, how the moment before the tidal wave hit all the water was dragged off the beach …

  I heard it coming before I saw it. A sound like a freight train bearing down on the house. Then I saw it, a tidal wave of air mowing down the forest, snapping hundred-year-old oaks like toothpicks. I ducked a split second before it hit the house. Glass shattered above me and rained down into my hair. I pasted myself on the floor and covered my head with my hands. Something hit my head – one of the candles from the smell of it. For some reason that pissed me off. I raised myself up onto my elbows and shouted at the wind.

  “If this is how you act when a girl says no, I’m glad I sent you away. I sure as hell wasn’t going to fall in love with you.”

  A clap of thunder shook the house, followed by a flash of lightning that lit up the room. It occurred to me that I’d better get away from the window and leave the room. I got gingerly to my feet and duck-walked across the floor, glass and salt crackling under my boots. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get the door open, but the moment I touched the iron doorknob the door swung open. “Thank you, Brock,” I whispered under my breath. The minute I stepped through the door it slammed behind me. The sound was echoed by another crash, this one coming from downstairs. Shit, I thought. I’d forgotten all about Phoenix.

  When I got downstairs I found Phoenix sitting up on the couch, her eyes wide with fright, her hair standing up like an Andy Warhol wig, but otherwise okay. All the windows downstairs had been closed and miraculously they’d all held against the wind. The banging was coming from the front door.

  “Shouldn’t we get that?” Phoenix asked.

  Could a disanimate creature knock at the front door? Maybe, but it was far too polite for my incubus.

  I went to the door, wishing it had a peephole. I could have asked who was there, but I doubted I would have been able to hear any response over the lashing wind and rain outside. I opened the door.

  The three figures standing in the light of my front porch were so muffled and wrapped in layers of wool, down and fur that I didn’t recognize them at first. They might have been the three magi – or the three witches in Macbeth. Only when the middle one turned down the collar of her fur coat and spoke did I recognize my boss, Elizabeth Book.

  “Hello, Callie, dear. Won’t you invite us in?”

  I looked from her to Diana Hart, zipped up to her wide-open eyes in a bright red down parka, and then to Soheila Lilly, muffled in a burgundy wool cloak.

  “It’s a little early for Thanksgiving dinner,” I said.

  “We’re not here for Thanksgiving, dear,” Dean Book said with a sigh. “We’re here for an intervention.”

&nbs
p; CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “FOR PHOENIX?” I asked in a whisper. “She has been drinking a lot.”

  “No, dear,” Dean Book said with another sigh. “For you. Can we please come in? This weather you’ve raised is quite chilly.”

  “And likely to get colder as the night goes on,” Diana Hart said, shaking the water from her down coat before stepping in. “I do hope it doesn’t freeze. We lost so many trees in the last ice storm.”

  They all came into the foyer. I had to struggle to close the door behind them. “How did you know …?”

  “I saw that you took the demonology book from my office,” Soheila said, handing me her cloak. “I was at Liz’s house telling her when the wind came up.”

  “And I saw the animals breaking from the forest and then heard the wind,” Diana said, handing me her damp down coat. “I called Liz right away and confirmed it was coming from Honeysuckle House.”

  “We knew then that you must be trying Angus’s spell for banishing incubi,” Liz said handing me her heavy fur coat which gave off a spark of static electricity.

  “I could have told you the spell has its drawbacks,” Soheila said. “It certainly should never be used by the person possessed by the incubus.”

  “I am not possessed,” I said huffily. I was going for righteous, but since I was weighted down by the women’s three heavy coats – Elizabeth Book’s fur alone must have weighed twenty pounds – I sounded more like an aggrieved housemaid. Or, I realized as the women exchanged pitying looks, a dope addict in denial.

  “No one ever thinks they’re possessed, dearie,” Diana said, patting me on the arm. “Now why don’t you put those coats away and we’ll sit down with some hot tea. I brought homemade donuts.” She plucked a fragrant paper bag from her quilted purse.

  Of course, I thought grumpily as I wrestled the heavy coats into the hall closet – Elizabeth Book’s kept slipping off its hanger as if it didn’t want to go – donuts and caffeine, staples of twelve step programs everywhere. And speaking of rehab … where was Phoenix? She’d been in the library when I went to the door. Had she passed out?