Incubus

by Carol Goodman

  “Cursed?” Dory asked, stopping on the sidewalk. “They are. I’ll tell you, but let’s first go into the Lindisfarnes’ house. They’ve left to spend the winter in Florida, so I just want to make sure their pipes don’t burst.”

  I followed Dory up a bluestone path bordered by orange chrysanthemums – now encased in ice – to a neat fieldstone and clapboard bungalow. She upended a stone gnome half hidden in the hydrangeas (their tawny globular blooms looking like giant snowballs under their glaze of ice) and retrieved a key. She let us into an immaculate Craftsman bungalow decorated in period Stickley furniture.

  “Okay, the Ballards,” Dory began as she headed to the kitchen. “Have you ever heard of Bertram Hughes Ballard?”

  “Wasn’t he a big nineteenth-century robber baron and railroad magnate?

  “Uh huh,” Dory said from beneath the kitchen sink where she was doing something to the pipes that involved blowing on them and telling them Ne fyrstig glaciare! “He was the son of a French trapper – hence all the French names the family’s still fond of – who made his fortune in lumber and then, as JayCee said, in railroads. He and his partner, Hiram Scudder, took over the Ulster and Clare in the 1880s and founded the Ballard & Scudder Ironworks here in town to supply the railroad with tracks. At the height of his fortune Ballard built that huge monstrosity we were just in.”

  Dory emerged from under the sink and cast an appreciative glance around the Lindisfarnes’ cheery, neat kitchen. “Ballard and Scudder bought up most of the town between them, but then there was the Great Crash of ’93.”

  “A stock market crash?”

  “No, a train crash. The westbound train out of Kingston crashed into the eastbound train out of Binghamton. A hundred and three lives were lost, including a crew of workers whom Ballard had ordered out that morning to remove a section of track that was in poor repair. The crash was blamed on shoddy tracks manufactured by Ballard and Scudder. In the aftermath both the railroad and the ironworks went bankrupt. Scudder’s wife, Adele, committed suicide. Ballard lost all his houses but the one here in town. He came back to Fairwick a broken man, but it wasn’t until the curse started manifesting itself that we knew he must have done something to get on the wrong side of a powerful witch.”

  “Curse?”

  Dory held up a finger to her lips and cocked her head, listening. The only sound I heard was the ticking of the Stickley grandfather clock in the hall and the drip of melting icicles outside the kitchen window. Dory shook her head. “Sorry, I thought I heard something. Anyway, as I was saying,” she continued as she marched briskly into the downstairs powder room, “the curse: the year before the crash Bertram had married a young society girl from New York. She was pregnant when the crash happened, but lost the baby, a boy, in her sixth month. She got pregnant half a dozen times after that, but they all died at birth – all boys – until she finally gave birth to a live girl and then was told by her doctor that she couldn’t have any more children. Bertram was so upset at the idea that the Ballard name would die out that he had a lawyer draw up a will stipulating that his daughter would only inherit the house and the Ballard fortune if she kept the Ballard name and that unless there was a male heir all female Ballards must keep their surnames to inherit.”

  Finished with the downstairs powder room (she’d given the pipes a good talking to in Spell and set the tap to drip) Dory started up the stairs, continuing her story. “That’s when we all guessed that Bertram was under a curse that he couldn’t conceive male children. It took a while longer to make out the rest of the curse …”

  She paused at the top of the stairs, again cocking her head as if to listen. Her face scrunched up, but then she shook her head and went on as she repeated her ministrations on the upstairs plumbing.

  “Bert’s daughter, Estelle, grew up with every sign of becoming a grand lady. She was beautiful, talented, smart, and witty. What was left of the Ballard fortune went into her debut at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. I suppose Ballard hoped to recoup his fortunes by marrying her off to money. She had half a dozen rich suitors, but then when she turned eighteen it was like she’d become a different person. She started drinking, she turned down all proposals of marriage, and finally she showed up back in town pregnant. Old Bert locked her up in the house, and when the little girl was born he christened her Nicolette Josephine Ballard and started all over again, raising her to be a grand lady of society while her mother drank herself to death locked away in that mausoleum of a house.”

  “And when Nicolette,” – I shuddered at the repetition of my student’s name – “turned eighteen?”

  “The same thing happened all over again …” Dory paused at the threshold to the Lindisfarnes’ bedroom and sniffed the air. Then she crossed the room toward the bathroom but stopped at the Mission-style slat bed to smooth the rumpled coverlet, her face thoughtful.

  “And has it been like that ever since? One girl born each generation who falls apart after her eighteenth birthday?”

  Dory looked up, her face distracted as if she were listening to something. Then she shook her head and waved a hand in front of her face as if clearing away a cobweb, although the room was spotless save for the rumpled coverlet and a damp towel lying on the bathroom floor. It looked like the Lindisfarnes might have left in a hurry and hadn’t quite lived up to Dory Browne’s code of neatness. “Every few generations there’s a boy born, but then he runs away from the Ballard house – who could blame him? – before he’s old enough to inherit and his sister follows the same pattern again. Arlette went off to Smith College, but came back after her first semester pregnant. Even JayCee finished high school and had a good job at a hotel up in Cooperstown before she came home pregnant and started drinking.”

  “And Nicky? She’s not like that … Wait, how old is Nicky?”

  Dory smiled sadly. “She turns eighteen on May second. Liz thought if we got her into the college and kept an eye on her maybe we could save her. The witches of Fairwick have been trying for generations to avert the Ballard curse, but the only person who can revoke a curse is a descendant of the witch who cast it. So without knowing who cast the curse … Well, I’m afraid it’s like trying to cure a disease without a correct diagnosis.” Dory wrapped her arms around her chest. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “It’s freezing.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  DORY AND I checked in on a dozen more houses – some occupied, some empty. Most of the people we visited were well prepared for the blackout and didn’t need our help, and most offered their help to anyone who needed it. The resourcefulness and generosity of my new neighbors would have cheered me if I hadn’t been so worried about Nicky Ballard, and missing Paul. I tried him several times on my cell phone and got his voicemail each time. Maybe he was busy calling airlines or rental car companies to find a way to get here.

  I remained gloomily preoccupied until we got back to Honeysuckle House in the late afternoon and I saw how it had been transformed in our absence. Brock and Ike Olsen were outside stringing electric lights in the shrubbery, which Brock turned on as we approached. The tiny white lights glittered amid the frozen branches like … well, like fairy lights. I hugged Brock, making him blush madly, and asked if he and his brother would like to stay for dinner. After a hurried confab in something that sounded like Old Norse, he said yes. When I stepped through the door I was greeted with the smells of roasting turkey and pumpkin pie, and the sounds of a crackling fire and classical music. Diana’s city guest, Jen Davies, was in the living room stoking the fire and talking to Nicky and Mara. Nicky smiled sheepishly at me – embarrassed, I guessed, that I’d seen her house and met her family – but she looked healthy and young in the firelight. I was damned if I was going to let her succumb to some stupid old curse!

  I squeezed her shoulder and accepted a glass of punch from her. “I’m giving you the hard stuff,” she said. “Mara and I found some regular cranberry juice.”

  Mara held up her glass and smiled politely. “Ni
cky and Jen have been explaining that here in your country young people are not allowed to drink alcoholic beverages until their twenty-first birthdays. Strange that they can vote and drive and fight in your wars, but not have a glass of wine or beer.”

  “Yeah, it’s a strange country, all right,” Jen said, taking a generous swig of the spiked punch. “Where did you say you were from …?”

  I left Jen to wield her reportorial skills on Mara and went into the kitchen. Phoenix and Diana were basting the turkey while Liz Book, looking like Donna Reed in pearls and a frilly white apron, lined a pan with sweet potatoes, and Casper Van der Aart and a slim, dark-skinned, gray-haired man whom he introduced as Oliver arranged cream-cheese-stuffed celery sticks and raw vegetables on a tray.

  “Oh good, you’re back!” Phoenix crowed when she saw me. “Do you think you could set the table? We’re going to be twelve according to the most recent count … Oh, and your boyfriend called. He says he can’t get a plane out of Buffalo and there aren’t any more rental cars. He’s going to stay in Buffalo until tomorrow and see if he can get a car then.”

  “So he’ll have to have Thanksgiving dinner in a hotel!” I wailed.

  “He didn’t sound too unhappy,” Liz said “Phoenix had him on the speaker phone so we all heard him and it sounded like there was a party going on. He said all the stranded passengers were going to have Thanksgiving dinner together. I imagine after sharing a life-threatening experience like that they all feel very close.”

  “Well, that’s good, I guess … but still, I wish he was here. I wanted him to meet everybody.” As I looked around the room – at a witch, a manic-depressive, a Mesopotamian wind spirit, a fairy and a gnome – I reflected that maybe it was just as well that I had another day adjusting to my new friends.

  I was so busy for the next few hours that I didn’t have time to worry about Paul. I set the table with Mara and Nicky’s help (adding Brock and Ike to Phoenix’s count and wondering who the additional guest was), then ran upstairs to shower and change. I was relieved to see that someone had straightened my room and thrown a shawl over the scarred headboard. The only signs of last night’s debacle were the boarded up window and a drop of melted iron on the floor. While I was standing in my closet trying to decide what to wear (casual sweater and corduroys, or dressy velvet mini and satin camisole?) I thought I heard something rustling in my shoeboxes, but I decided it was unlikely that the incubus had taken up residence in among my loafers, pumps, and boots.

  I decided on the velvet mini with an emerald green cashmere sweater that brought out the green in my eyes and the red in my hair. I ran downstairs just in time to let Frank Delmarco in. He was carrying a case of beer and asking Brock and Ike if there was a set to watch the game on. All three men followed me into the kitchen. They were right behind me as I opened the door, surprising my crew of supernatural cooks in some rather surprising maneuvers. Casper van der Aart had levitated the turkey out of the pan and was rotating it in mid-air while basting it. Liz Book was caramelizing the tops of the sweet potatoes with a flame that came from her right fingertip, while Diana was coaxing a bag of potatoes to peel themselves by commanding them Nudate unmicelettes! As soon as they all saw Frank they dropped what they were doing – the turkey splattered grease all over the stovetop and two potatoes rolled to the floor – which is how I learned that Frank Delmarco was not in on the whole supernatural thing. (Casper’s boyfriend Oliver was, though; he’d been catching the potato skins as they came off and dropping them into the trash.)

  I shooed Frank, Brock, and Ike into the library and then, catching Phoenix adding more vodka to the punch, lured her into the living room with the promise of introducing her to a real New York Times reporter. I’d just gotten those social niceties worked out when the doorbell rang. Phoenix’s count had included one more guest than I knew about, but she hadn’t said who it was. I opened the door with a little prayer on my lips. Please God, let it be a human. I didn’t think I could take any more supernatural beings today.

  No such luck.

  I knew instantly that the creature standing on my porch had never been human. She must have been hiding her nature before in order for me to miss it. Now, with the sun setting behind her and creating a corona of blazing light around her (I felt sure she had timed her entrance for the lighting effect), she looked unmistakably like what she undoubtedly was.

  “Good evening, Professor Eldritch. Or am I supposed to address you as your majesty, Queen of the Fairies?”

  “We’ve dispensed with such formalities since leaving Faerie,” Fiona said, casting a gimlet eye on my green sweater. She was wearing a green cloak. I wondered if there was some rule of fairy protocol that only the Fairy Queen could wear green. Too bad. I looked good in green. “I hope you don’t mind my inviting myself. I heard about what happened last night and I wanted to have a word with you about my incubus.”

  “Your incubus? You mean …” I didn’t know why I didn’t see this earlier, either. She looked like the Fairy Queen in the triptych – the one riding next to the Ganconer on the white horse. “The story’s true? You kidnapped him and made him into a … demon?”

  Fiona laughed – a high-pitched sound that splintered the icicles hanging from the porch roof. “Kidnapped? I wouldn’t quite put it like that. For one thing, he was no kid. For another, he came quite willingly. As for what he became after … Well, I’m afraid that’s what happens sometimes to humans who spend too much time with the fey. We tend to bring out the best and the worst in our human consorts. You might want to think about that if you plan to spend time in our company – especially with one as volatile as my Ganconer. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

  She smiled at me and I heard those bells again. I suddenly forgot what I’d been angry about a moment ago – forgot where I was and what day it was. I just wanted to stand here looking at Professor Fiona Eldritch, at the way her pale hair was edged with fire against the sunset, and the way her green eyes glinted like chips of ice in a deep glacial crevasse, one you might fall into and dream away an eternity …

  “Callie, you’re letting in a draft!”

  It was Phoenix, shouldering me aside to see who was at the door. “Oh, Professor Eldritch. I see you found the house. Come in, let me take your cloak … Oh, and you’ve brought champagne. What fun!”

  I let Phoenix escort Fiona Eldritch into the living room as if it were Phoenix’s house and not mine. I was still reeling from the effects of Fiona’s smile. I felt as if I’d inhaled some powerful narcotic … and that I’d like some more of it, please. If that was the effect of two minutes in her company then what might be the consequences of years spent with her? What good – and bad – might the company of fairies bring out in me?

  It soon became clear that Fiona was set on bringing out the best in all of my guests – human and nonhuman. She told Jen Davies that she’d read her Vogue article and complimented Phoenix on her earrings. She told Nicky and Mara that they’d both done well on their midterms. She asked Casper to give one of his “lucid” explanations regarding the chemistry term “London dispersion force” – such a lovely name! – and complimented Oliver on his holiday display window in his antiques shop. Even gruff Frank Delmarco preened when she handed him the champagne bottle to open, and he and Brock and Ike all jockeyed for the seat next to her when we sat down to dinner.

  She was so much the center of attention that it seemed natural that she sit at the head of the table, but she demurred and made me sit in the place of honor. When the champagne had been poured she stood and held up her crystal flute to me. An expectant silence fell over the table.

  “To our gracious hostess, Cailleach McFay,” she began. “Fairwick has long had a tradition of providing a refuge for the hounded and the weary—” Her green eyes travelled the length of the table, resting on each of my guests in turn. As her gaze fell upon each one their eyes brimmed and shone, as if she’d poured a drop of the sparkling champagne straight into their souls. I heard the sound of distan
t bells and felt that strange elation I’d felt earlier at the door “—and in opening her home to all of us, Cailleach McFay has shown herself to be truly worthy of Fairwick. May she find a home here. Slainte!”

  Slainte! A murmur of approbation rose over the sound of bells and I found my eyes filling with tears. I ducked my head to hide my emotion. When had I last really felt like I had a home? I barely remembered the apartments I’d shared with my parents before they died. Archeologists, they were always moving from dig to dig or college to college. When they died I’d been lucky to be taken in by my grandmother, who’d done her best to take care of me – but I’d always felt like a visitor in her apartment. Living in dorm rooms and tiny sublets in college and grad school had felt natural to me. The “home” Paul and I spoke of sharing one day was an elusive mirage.

  And what of Paul? A home didn’t have to be made out of mortar and wood. I knew couples – my parents, I suspected – who had found their home in each other. When I met Paul in college and we talked about both working as academics I thought we’d have what my parents had: but my parents had always managed to stay together while Paul and I couldn’t even manage to spend Thanksgiving dinner in the same house.

  I looked up and met Liz Book’s eyes. I recalled that she and Soheila and Diana had risked at least their own safety to protect me from the incubus last night. Diana had definitely risked her very life. And Brock had been trying all these months to protect me with his iron locks, dream catchers, and doormice. I looked over at Nicky Ballard, who was holding up a champagne flute of cranberry juice to which had been added a drop of champagne. What did she think of when she heard the word home? I’d promised her grandmother today that I would look after her, and I’d promised myself that I’d avert the curse that hung over her. What bound a person more than obligation? I had only been in Fairwick for a few short months and already I felt more at home here than I’d ever felt anywhere else.