Incubus

by Carol Goodman

I sank to the couch onto a pile of cut-up magazines, my eyes riveted to the page. “Um, yes … it appears to be …” I read the entire article and looked up. Two wide, blood-shot eyes stared out at me from a rat’s nest of tangled hair. “It says that you didn’t grow up in a dysfunctional family in Alabama. And that your mother didn’t abandon you with strangers in a trailer park when you were thirteen … and you didn’t spend two years at a state mental hospital. It says that your real name is Betsy Ross Middlefield and that you grew up in Darien, Connecticut, with your father, who is an insurance executive and your mother, Mary Ellen, who belongs to the DAR and runs an interior decorating company.”

  Phoenix shook her head, dislodging a feather that had leaked out of the comforter. “Mother’s name is Mary Alice,” she said, “not Mary Ellen. She’s going to be really pissed when she sees this.” She burrowed down under the blankets and covered her head.

  I took the tray and the paper back into the kitchen, then sat at the table and reread the article twice. Then I sat staring out the back door at the frozen terrain. I’d had a lot of shocks since I’d come to Fairwick. I’d discovered that the man in my erotic dreams was a real incubus, that my boss was a witch and my next-door neighbor an ancient deer-fairy. My colleagues were demons, witches and fairies. My favorite student was under a curse that was going to ruin her life. I lived in a town that straddled two worlds and apparently I had a hidden talent for opening the door between those worlds. I shouldn’t have been thrown by one mendacious memoirist – Phoenix certainly wasn’t the first – but I was. Badly thrown. Phoenix had been my roommate for three months. Although she was a little wacky, I’d come to like her. She was funny and generous and cared about her students … or at least one of them. I’d known her to be careless, silly, and vain, but never mean. I’d enjoyed listening to her crazy stories, but now I knew that they’d all been lies. And it wasn’t as if she’d been lying to cover up some secret supernatural identity. She’d been lying because … Well, I didn’t know why she’d been lying. If she ever got off the couch perhaps I’d ask her.

  But right now I had to go or I’d be late for class. I went back into the library and sat down on the couch by Phoenix’s feet, moving aside a stack of newspapers and the purple folder that contained Mara Marinca’s work.

  “Look,” I said to the frizz of hair peeking up over the quilt. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that I’ve been reading your mem—book, and I think it’s really good. Maybe you were meant to be a novelist and not a memoirist. This story will blow over sooner or later. Look at James Frey! He’s still publishing.”

  “I’ll have to give back my advance,” a small voice moaned from beneath the blankets. “And I’ll be fired.”

  “I don’t know about the advance, but if you like I’ll talk to Dean Book.”

  “Would you?” Phoenix’s sharp nose and big eyes appeared over the edge of the quilt. She looked like the wolf hiding in the grandmother’s bed in Little Red Riding Hood.

  “Sure. I’ll call her on my way to class. Why don’t you get up, take a shower, have breakfast …” Sober up, I wanted to add, but didn’t. “And whatever you do, don’t answer your phone or any emails from reporters.”

  I was going to tell her to stay in, but then I realized that wouldn’t be necessary. She hadn’t left the house in days. Honeysuckle House had its second writer recluse.

  I called Dean Book on my cell as soon as I was out of earshot of the house. She answered on the first ring.

  “I just read the story,” she said without preamble. “How’s Phoenix?”

  “Stricken. She must have realized that minx Jen Davies was on to her because she’s been sulking all weekend.”

  Dean Book called the Australian reporter something rather stronger than “minx.”

  “Are you going to fire Phoenix?” I asked.

  “I have to talk to the board, but I’d like to hear Phoenix’s story first. Is she at your house?”

  I’d reached the entrance to campus. I turned around before entering the gates and looked back at Honeysuckle House, visible now since Ike had trimmed the hedges back. I thought I saw a shadow move near the back of the house, but it was only a shrub swaying in the wind. “Yes, she’s there. I don’t think she’s going anywhere.”

  “Good. I’ll come by in half an hour to see her. May I use the key under the gnome if she doesn’t let me in?”

  I told Dean Book she could without bothering to ask how she knew about the hidden key and was about to hang up when she asked me one more question. “There hasn’t been any further sign of … him, has there?”

  “No,” I answered, making my voice upbeat. “Not a trace. Nada. Zip. Elvis has left the building.”

  Dean Book took so long to reply I thought AT&T had dropped another call. I half-hoped it had and she’d missed my lame attempt at levity. But after a beat she replied. “Good. One less thing to worry about. Have a good class, Callie.”

  I did have a good class. I’d asked them to read a Victoria Holt novel over the break, suspecting that a pocket-sized romance novel might be a better travel companion than one of the heavy eighteenth century novels we’d been reading.

  “It was great,” Jeanine Marfalla, a pretty sophomore from the suburbs of Boston enthused. “I read the whole thing on the train ride home and bought two more of her books at a used bookstore.”

  Nicky said that her favorite part was when the heroine hears the hero murmuring German endearments at her locked door.

  “It gave me chills,” she said. Nicky looked better for the break, rested and well fed. Mara, however, wasn’t in the class at all. When I asked Nicky after class where Mara was, she blushed and told me that she wasn’t sure because she hadn’t been back to her dorm room yet. She’d spent the break in town with Ben. I suppressed a jealous pang that she had gotten to spend time with her boyfriend and I hadn’t.

  I checked my phone and found a text message from Liz Book asking me if I wouldn’t mind taking Phoenix’s workshop for her. I texted back that I’d be happy to and asked how Phoenix was doing.

  Not great, the dean texted back, come back right after you’re done with her class.

  When I walked into the writing workshop the first person I noticed was Mara. She looked embarrassed to see me. “I am so sorry to miss your class, Professor McFay. I got used to sleeping late on the vacation and overslept this morning.” She looked awful – exhausted and bone thin – and yet I’d recalled her eating quite heartily at Thanksgiving. I wondered if she was bulimic.

  “That’s okay, Mara. You can make it up to me by telling me what Phoenix assigned over the break.”

  “Oh, she never assigns anything,” Mara answered. “She just tells us to keep going with our memoirs. To dig down to the bitter roots, as she always says.”

  “The roots of truth,” another student, a boy in leather and piercings, added in a mocking tone.

  “Where the real dirt lies,” another volunteered.

  Clearly Phoenix’s students had memorized her adages. Unfortunately they all revolved on the theme of telling the truth. What would these students think when they found out that her entire memoir was fake?

  I asked if anyone would be willing to read aloud what they’d written over the break. A few students raised their hands, but when Mara raised hers they put theirs down. Wow, I thought, it’s like they’ve been trained. I called on Nicky.

  “Um … I actually wrote about why I don’t like memoirs,” Nicky said sheepishly.

  “Well, then,” I said, exasperated. “Read that.”

  So Nicky got up and read something she called “Household Ghosts,” a vivid evocation of her house and the people who lived in it.

  “Sometimes I think it would be better to forget the past and focus on the future,” she concluded. “I suppose that’s why I don’t really feel comfortable with this assignment. I grew up surrounded by ghosts of the past, ghosts shaped like the silk cotillion dresses rotting inside dusty armoires and like the dead wrapped in burlap sa
cks beside the railroad tracks. Wouldn’t it be better to let those ghosts rest in peace?”

  I walked home haunted by the last image in Nicky’s piece – the bodies wrapped in burlap sacks that she must have gotten from the photographs of the ’93 train crash—a crash possibly caused by her great-great-grandfather’s negligence. What must it feel like to grow up in a town with that family history? You wouldn’t have to be under a curse to feel like you were.

  My musings were cut short by an ear-splitting shriek. It sounded like someone was being torn limb from limb and it came from my house. I broke into a run and nearly fell on the still-slick street. I forced myself into a brisk walk, keeping my eyes on the street for patches of ice. When I reached my house I halted on the front path, as frozen by the tableau on my front porch as the ice doves and angels hanging in the trees. Phoenix – or Betsy Ross Middlefield, as I supposed I should think of her – was standing on the porch in her purple chenille bathrobe, hair wild and loose in the breeze, both arms wrapped around a column.

  “I can’t go!” Phoenix wailed. “The demon will find me if I go outside. We chased it out of the house, but I saw it before looking in through the kitchen window! It’s just waiting for me to leave the house before pouncing on me!”

  A sixty-ish woman with impeccably cut and styled ash blonde hair, wearing a slim camel hair coat, stood beside Phoenix, her lips pressed together, one gloved hand resting on Phoenix’s back.

  “There, there, Betsy,” I heard her saying. “There are no demons at McLean. You remember Dr. Cavett, don’t you?”

  I saw the man she referred to standing in the shadows of the porch with Dean Book. He was a short balding man in a checked blazer and rust-colored turtleneck. He looked frightened of all the females on the porch, perhaps most of all by Dean Book bristling in her heavy fur coat. She came forward when she saw me and the sunlight rippled across the deep brown fur. For a moment the pelt seemed to move on its own, as if a large furry creature held the dean in its grip. I blinked and the illusion faded … if it had been an illusion.

  “Oh, Callie, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been explaining to Dr. Cavett that some of Phoenix’s notions about demons and incubi might have come out of your research.”

  “Her name is Betsy, not Phoenix,” the woman in the camel hair coat insisted. “She was named after her grandmother who was a descendant of Betsy Ross and it’s a perfectly good name.”

  “I hate it, Mother,” Phoenix cried – no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t think of her as Betsy. “I’ve told you that a million times. And I hate being named after my crazy grandmother and I hate McLean. I’m a writer – an artist! – and I have an idea for a new book about what I’ve experienced here at Fairwick, but I need to stay here at Honeysuckle House to write it.”

  “Where there’s a demon waiting outside the house to pounce on you?” her mother asked, her voice icily mocking.

  Phoenix’s bloodshot eyes skittered from her mother to me. If she asked me to corroborate her story, what would I say? I didn’t want it on my conscience that Phoenix was dragged off to a mental hospital … but neither did I want to be dragged off to one myself. But Phoenix didn’t ask me to testify that the house had lately been occupied by a demon.

  “Oh Callie, you took over my class, didn’t you? Did you see Mara? Did she ask for me? Did she give you any more of her memoir for me to read?” Then turning back to her mother, she said, “You see I can’t possibly leave. Mara Marinca is depending on me.”

  Dean Book glanced nervously at me. I imagined she was thinking the same thing I was – that Phoenix’s obsession with Mara was no healthier than her fixation on the demon.

  “All your students asked for you,” I fibbed. “Nicky Ballard read something …”

  Phoenix waved away my mention of Nicky. “It’s Mara who matters!” she shrieked. “Mara who must learn to tell the truth. She mustn’t think I lied. I have to explain.”

  Dean Book sighed. “Perhaps it’s better if you explain everything to your students after you’ve had a nice rest.” Then, turning to Phoenix’s mother and doctor, she added, “I can’t have her upsetting her students in this state.” She turned once again to Phoenix. “But once you’re more yourself, we can consider having you come back.”

  It was an unfortunate choice of words. “I am myself! Who else would I be?” Phoenix screamed, and flung herself at the dean. She only meant, I think, to throw herself on the dean’s mercy, but she came at Liz with such force that she knocked her back several feet. Liz tottered for a moment, her arms flailing to keep her balance. I stepped forward to help her while the doctor and Mrs. Middlefield tried to restrain Phoenix. They were between Liz and Phoenix, their backs to Liz, so they didn’t see what happened next. They didn’t see the shadow thrown by Liz rear up on the wall – a huge bear-like creature with claws and an enormous mouth stretched wide in a toothy snarl. But I saw it, and so did Phoenix. She screamed one more time, a scream that sounded so insane that I couldn’t blame Dr. Cavett for sticking her with a tranquilizer needle. As Phoenix’s screams subsided into soft whimpers, I had half a mind to ask for some of the tranquilizer myself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  WITH PHOENIX GONE, Honeysuckle House felt truly empty. I had driven out the incubus – and the incubus had, in turn, driven out my roommate.

  Liz Book, after explaining to me that the bear-shaped shadow I’d seen on the wall was her familiar, Ursuline (and promising to tell me more about that later), said I shouldn’t look at it that way. Phoenix had been clearly troubled to begin with and the real tipping point for her had been the exposure of her fraudulent memoir. But I felt sure it had been the exorcism and its aftermath that had driven Phoenix over the edge. Why else would she have gone on about demons the way she had?

  “Besides, we don’t know that he didn’t bring Jen Davies here to expose Phoenix,” I pointed out. “After all, he downed a plane two hundred miles to the west and created a ring of ice around a town so my boyfriend couldn’t spend Thanksgiving with me.”

  I knew I sounded paranoid, but I thought I could be excused a little anxiety after what I’d been through. Having failed to gain my love, the incubus had decided that I’d have to be all by myself.

  Well, I’d show him. I didn’t mind living alone and I wasn’t going to flip out like Phoenix. I was determined to buckle down for what remained of the semester. I had plenty of work because I’d offered to take Phoenix’s class until Dean Book could find a replacement, which probably wouldn’t be until after the winter break. The first thing I found out from the class was that Phoenix hadn’t returned anyone’s work since the beginning of the semester. I promised I would rectify that situation right away – and sat myself down to spend the weekend reading the life stories of thirty-four college-age students.

  You wouldn’t have thought they’d have that much life to write about – but you would have been wrong. I read the story of a girl from central Africa who’d fled her native country to avoid genital mutilation. I read a brief, but poignant, account by Flonia Rugova of how she and her mother had fled Albania. Not all the students came from exotic backgrounds. Richie Esposito from the Bronx had handed in a graphic novel in which rival gangs of rats, roaches and pigeons fought for control of the city after a nuclear apocalypse.

  I read Nicky Ballard’s work with particular attention, searching for clues to the Ballard curse, but Nicky hadn’t written much.

  I reread the piece Nicky called “Household Ghosts” that she had read in class. She had written below the last line, “I’d really like to work on poetry this semester.”

  At the bottom of the page Phoenix had scrawled, “YOU MUST CONFRONT YOUR GHOSTS!!!” But I understood where Nicky was coming from. My grandmother Adelaide had made a fetish of our family’s origins, which went back to the Mayflower. She was always going off to some D.A.R. event or to her club – a fusty place called the Grove where all the faded gentry of New York society gathered to compare their family trees. The place had given
me the creeps; I was always afraid I was going to use the wrong fork or break the eggshell-thin teacups.

  I crossed out Phoenix’s comment and wrote: I love the images in your writing. Why don’t you try some poems?

  Then I took out the Xeroxed copy I’d made of the list of the people who had died in the Ulster & Clare Great Crash of ’93. I’d start researching each of the names this week. It was one thing to tell Nicky to move on from her ghosts, but until I found the ghost who had cursed her she was going to be trapped in that moldering house.

  The one student whose work I didn’t get to read was Mara Marinca’s. The purple folder containing her memoir in progress was missing. I spoke to Liz about it and she called Phoenix’s mother to see if Phoenix had the folder when she checked into McLean, but Mrs. Middlefield insisted that she didn’t. “She kept asking us to send for that girl’s writing, but of course we told her we couldn’t.”

  I searched the whole house for the folder – or any stray scrap of Mara’s writing. I recalled seeing the folder in the library before I went to class the day Phoenix was taken away. Perhaps if she had thought that someone – the demon, she’d said – was trying to break in to steal the papers she might have hidden them. But as hard as I looked the only things I found of Phoenix’s were half-empty liquor bottles stashed in a dozen clever hiding places.

  I saved Mara’s conference for last on Monday, dreading the moment when I’d have to tell her that everything she’d written that semester was missing.

  “Phoenix spoke very highly of your writing ability,” I told her. “If you print out another copy I’ll be happy to read it.”

  “Print out?” Mara asked, her pale, tea-colored eyes staring at me dumbly.

  I suppressed a twinge of impatience. Her command of English certainly seemed to come and go randomly.

  “Yes, from your computer. If you don’t have a printer I believe you can send a file to the campus printing center. Or you could just send me a copy by email.”

  “But I don’t make my writing on the computer. I make it with pen. On paper.”