Incubus

by Carol Goodman

  He took off at a good clip that belied his antiquated clothing, his coattails flapping. I quickly saw why he was so abundantly clothed. The library was freezing.

  “They don’t leave the heat on for you?” I asked when I caught up with him at the elevator.

  “Budget cuts,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re lucky you found me here today. I.M.P. can’t afford to pay overtime, but those of us who take the job seriously wouldn’t think of leaving the library unattended.”

  “That’s very conscientious of you,” I remarked as we got into the elevator.

  Justin Plean shrugged but looked pleased. “It’s my job. Do you need help with the genealogical records?”

  “I probably will. I’ve never used them before.”

  “They’re a little … tricky,” he admitted. “You said you wanted to look up two witches? I’ll get you started on one and then see what I can find on the other.”

  Delighted to find someone so helpful, I wrote down both names in a small notebook Justin took out of his coat pocket.

  The door opened onto blackness. For a moment I had the dreadful thought that mild-mannered, bookish Justin Plean was a psychotic serial killer who’d lured me to the library’s basement to dismember me, but as he strode out the door motion detector lights flicked on revealing row upon row of floor to ceiling bookshelves as far as the eye could see.

  “Wow! Are all these about magic and witchcraft?”

  Justin turned to flash me a grin. It made him look about twelve. “Cool, isn’t it? These are the grimoires.” He splayed his long fingers along a row of leather-bound books. “And these are bestiaries. The genealogy records are in the back bay.” He walked so quickly I had trouble keeping up with him. I would have loved to stop and explore, but I didn’t dare be late for tea with my grandmother.

  Justin led me to a small carrel in a dusty corner lit by a flickering fluorescent light. He plucked a large book bound in a standard library binding off a shelf and handed it to me. “R through T of CROSB which stands for …”

  “The Central Registry of Supernatural Beings,” I said quickly, proud to know something.

  Justin gave me a rather condescending smile. “Just look up your Scudder. The most current descendants should be listed there. I’ll go looking for Abigail Fisk.”

  I thanked him, sat down and opened the books. Puffs of dust rose from its delicate, print-crammed pages. How new could it be? I wondered, peering at the miniscule type. Would it really have the latest descendants of Hiram Scudder?

  But as I paged through to “S” I noticed that a more modern type font alternated with the old fashioned print. In fact, there were half a dozen different specimens of type in evidence. I guessed that each time the book was updated a different type was used. My eyes jumped over the uneven type until the lines on the page seemed to be vibrating in the flickering light. I could feel the muscles of my eye contracting and spasming with the effort. By the time I got to “Sc” my eyes stung.

  Scales, Scanlon, Scarlett, I read.

  Scott, Scott, Scott.

  Scu …

  My finger ran into a black ink splotch that swelled in my bleary vision.

  Maybe I needed reading glasses, I thought, leaning back and closing my eyes for a moment.

  When I opened them the splotch had grown six inches and sprouted legs.

  I screamed and sprang back, knocking the chair to the floor.

  The splotch quivered and launched itself through the air directly at my face. I screamed again and ducked. I heard a wet splat behind me and turned, hoping the thing was dead but the gelatinous mass was gathering itself for another leap. As it sprang I grabbed a book from the shelf next to me and swung it like a baseball bat. The splotch squelched like a rotten tomato, but I didn’t stop to see if it was dead. I ran, screaming for Justin Plean and pulling down books behind me to impede the splotch’s progress. I could hear it chittering wetly at my heels. Not dead. Desperately I tried to remember a spell that would be useful. The thing wasn’t attacking me from above, so that one wouldn’t work. There was one, I recalled, to prevent bedbugs but then this wasn’t a bedbug … or – gruesome thought! – what if it was? The city was supposedly overrun with them. What if this was a mutated magical version? Ugh! I recalled the spell as best as I could and turned around to face the creature … and wished I hadn’t. The splotch had ballooned to the size of an overweight pit bull and it had grown pincers. Horrified, I watched as it gathered itself for one more attack. I raised my hands to shield my face as best as I could and began to recite the spell, but before I could I heard someone else reciting the words: Pestis sprengja! Then I heard a shriek that sounded like something’s death throes. I lowered my hands and saw Justin Plean standing over a puddle of yellow ooze with an open book in his hands.

  “What the hell was that?” I gasped, leaning against a shelf to steady my trembling legs.

  Justin took out a handkerchief from his vest pocket and wiped yellow flecks from his glasses.

  “A lacuna,” he said, his voice trembling. “A biblio-parasite that nests in books and grows when it smells blood. Nasty things.” He closed the book in his hands and wiped its cover clean with his handkerchief. It was in a plain library binding like mine, but there were a dozen or so slips of paper sticking out marking pages.

  “Geez, do you get a lot of them?”

  Justin shook his head. “Almost never. We dust twice a year with repellant and check all new acquisitions for signs of contamination.” He slipped the spellbook in his pocket and looked at me. “Where did you find it?”

  “In the book you gave me … under ‘S’. I had just gotten to Scudder when I saw this … spot.” I shuddered recalling that I had touched it. I wiped my hand against my skirt and noticed that I had yellow specks on my sweater.

  Justin nodded. “I suspected as much. Someone planted the lacuna there, blotting out the Scudder lineage and discouraging anyone who tried to go looking for it. One of his descendants, I suspect, who doesn’t want to be connected to Hiram Scudder.”

  “That could mean that Hiram Scudder was the witch responsible for the curse.”

  “Maybe,” Justin said, removing his notebook from his pocket, “but I found out something interesting about Abigail Fisk’s descendants. One of them teaches at Fairwick.”

  “Well that’s not unusual. Lots of witches teach at Fairwick.”

  “Yes, but no one knows this one’s a witch. He’s there under false pretenses.” He handed me his notebook. Under Abigail Fisk Justin had written a name I knew. It was Frank Delmarco.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I DIDN’T HAVE a lot of time to digest the news that Frank Delmarco – blunt, proletarian, Jets fan Frank! – was a witch. And a witch descended from a Fairwick witch who had known and been wronged somehow by Bertram Ballard! I was late for tea with my grandmother and I wasn’t about to incur her wrath. It was bad enough that my sweater was damp from the Oxi-clean Justin had sprayed on it to remove lacuna-ooze.

  I arrived breathless at the Grove Club, which was located in a town house in the East 40s, not far from the Williams Club and the Century Club. Unlike those august New York institutions, though, it had never been clear to me what purpose the Grove Club served. On the few occasions I’d been invited to share tea with Adelaide there, I got only the vaguest impression of the other club members tucked away in the recesses of their high-backed chairs: a glimpse of a thick ankle encased in support hose and a handmade English walking shoe, a charm-braceleted wrist reaching for a china tea-cup, the rare male voice (the membership was strictly female) murmuring in restrained tones, as if afraid he might be thrown out if he rattled the spindly eighteenth century furniture, gilt-framed portraits, and eggshell-thin china cups with his manly bass. Since my grandmother was a well-off, unmarried woman with interests in genealogy, nineteenth-century novels, and American folk art, I assumed the other members must be sedate older women of a similar background with similar interests. But today as I passed the dus
ty, oak-paneled bar beneath its mural of classically robed women dancing in a forest, I noticed two smartly dressed young women drinking martinis and laughing loudly.

  So maybe the current membership was not so old and not so sedate.

  One of the women was wearing skinny black slacks tucked into riding boots and a well-cut wool riding jacket. She looked vaguely familiar to me, but her back was to me and she was also wearing an enormous fur hat that masked her hair color. The other woman was blonde, wearing a Missoni knit tunic, leggings and pale suede boots. Models, I decided while climbing the grand curving staircase to the second floor. Maybe the club loaned out its rooms for fashion shoots. You certainly couldn’t find a better facsimile of “Ye olde stodgy English club” in the city. The Laurel Parlour looked exactly the same as the first time I had tea there when I was twelve – the same high backed wing chairs upholstered in forest green, the same varnishy oil paintings of elderly gray haired ladies looking down their noses disapprovingly – or so I had felt then in a scratchy lace and velveteen dress from Bergdorf’s. I struggled not to feel looked down upon now as I scanned the islands of chairs for my aunt. “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” Adelaide would say, quoting from Eleanor Roosevelt, when I complained of feeling uncomfortable in some environment. The effect of the admonition, though, was often to make me feel worse, as if I were somehow complicit in my degradation, but today it made me lift my chin and square my shoulders. I was twenty-six, not twelve, I had a Ph.D and a good job. Just because Adelaide had sniffed when I told her I’d taken the job at Fairwick meant nothing. What did she know about the academic job market …?

  “Miss McFay?” An Asian man in a dove gray suit had appeared soundlessly beside me on the thick Persian rug. “Miss Danbury is waiting for you over here.” He waved a white-gloved hand, like a magician performing a conjuring trick, toward the grouping of chairs nearest the fireplace. I followed him across the room, keenly aware of eyes following me from the dim recesses of the deep, plush chairs. Was it my imagination or had the hum of conversation ceased as I crossed the room? I had the unnerving feeling that I was being tracked by raptors hidden in their arboreal roosts and found myself nervously listening for the rustle of feathers. When we reached the chair by the fire, my escort bowed to me and backed away, his shoe soles sliding on the carpet as deftly as Michael Jackson moonwalking in the “Thriller” video.

  “Adelaide?” I asked, addressing the back of the chair.

  A gnarled hand grasped the wooden chair arm, which was carved like a bird’s talons, and began pulling her up.

  “Don’t get up,” I said, edging around in front of the chair and leaning down to plant a kiss on my grandmother’s cheek. The feel of her cool skin and the familiar scent of Chanel No. 5 instantly brought me back to my childhood, but when I moved back and got a good look at my grandmother for the first time I really thought I had time-traveled back to my twelfth birthday. I hadn’t seen Adelaide since she’d come to my college graduation five years before, and so I’d been preparing myself for her to look older. After all, she was in her eighties and the hand I’d clasped was an old woman’s hand. But except for her hands, which remained crabbed around the carved talons, she didn’t look any older than the sixty-something woman who had taken me in. Same thick blue-black hair (maintained by weekly appointments at the hairdresser), worn in the same neat, but dated, chin-length pageboy, same keen close-set gray eyes and sharp hawk-like nose. Even her outfit – a cherry red wool suit, cream silk blouse, and pearls – was one I felt sure I’d seen before. Albert Nipon, I thought. The black onyx intaglio brooch she wore was the same one she’d always worn.

  “You look great,” I said truthfully. “The southwestern climate must suit you.”

  She waved her hand, the fingers remaining curled, to dismiss the compliment. “The dry air is good for my arthritis, but the minute I set foot in this city it flares up. Sit down. You’re making me nervous hovering there.”

  I sat down in the chair across from her, perching on the edge rather than settling back in its recessed depths. The Asian man reappeared with a tray, which he placed on the table in front of us, containing a hobnailed iron teapot and two china cups decorated in a branch pattern that when I was little I’d thought looked like skeleton hands. He placed a silver strainer over my cup and poured a stream of fragrant jasmine tea from the squat iron pot into my cup, repeated the procedure with my grandmother’s cup, and then bowed himself away. All through this ritual my grandmother’s gunmetal gray eyes remained fixed on me.

  “You’re looking well,” she admitted grudgingly. “Although I don’t see how that damp, cold upstate climate can agree with anyone.”

  “I don’t mind it,” I said. “The campus is very pretty in the snow …” Unbidden an image of Liam kissing me on the snowy path above the southeast gate flashed before my eyes. “And I have a lovely Victorian house. You should come visit …”

  “I can’t abide those drafty old Victorian houses,” she said, ignoring my invitation. “And those small college towns …” She shuddered, a movement that made her collar-bones stand out against her neck. Her skin, I noticed, although unwrinkled, looked thin where it stretched over her bones, like a fine silk gone threadbare at the seams. “It must be like living in a fishbowl, everybody knowing your business.”

  My grandmother, I recalled, had always maintained a meticulous layer of privacy between the compartments of her life. She never socialized with the neighbors in our building or invited guests home. She lunched at her club, attended meetings of the various boards she belonged to, and went to the annual parties of arts institutions she supported, but I never heard her refer to anyone as a friend.

  “I like that part,” I said. “People look out for one another. During the ice storm I went house to house with Dory Browne to make sure everyone was okay—”

  “Dory Browne? Is that one of your colleagues at the college?”

  “No,” I said, lifting the teacup to my lips, “she’s the realtor who sold me Honeysuckle House and she’s friends with the dean, Liz Book …”

  “Elizabeth Book? Is she still there? She must be ancient. How do you get on with her?”

  I looked up from my teacup, surprised. “How do you know Liz Book? You didn’t mention it when I told you I got the job.” A second-tier college with a second-rate staff, is what she had said then.

  “Our paths have crossed. I always found her a bit … diffuse. And perilously naïve. That whole philosophy the school practices of recruiting students from all over when there are plenty of qualified young people right here.” She tapped the arm of her chair as if she literally meant right here, and I looked around the muted parlor as if candidates for admission were going to pop out of the recessed chairs.

  “I had no idea you were so well acquainted with Fairwick.” I put my teacup down on the table and leaned forward. “Just how well acquainted are you anyway, Adelaide?”

  Her gray eyes widened at the direct question and she retreated even further into the shelter of her wing-backed chair, but then she smiled, her thin lipstick-red lips parting over yellowed teeth. “Quite well acquainted. I see you’ve been initiated into their little cult. Tell me, did they promise to train you to be a witch?”

  “You know about that?” I asked, my voice shrill in the hushed room. Normally I would have struggled to remain composed in front of my grandmother, but I’d just been chased by a blood-sucking parasite and found out my most normal colleague was secretly a witch.

  Adelaide looked surprisingly pleased at my reaction. “Of course I know, dear. What do you think the Grove is?” She waved a crooked hand to indicate the gloomy room.

  “You’re … witches?” I whispered.

  “The Grove is an old name for a coven, from when our ancestors met in the forest. But just because our ancestors had to lurk around dark cold forests doesn’t mean we do. The membership of the Grove practices a more refined version of the Craft.”

  I thought about the
rite Soheila, Liz, and Diana had held to cast out the incubus from my house. It hadn’t been refined, but it had worked. But then they hadn’t all been witches …

  “Do you know about the fairies, too?”

  Adelaide clucked her tongue disapprovingly. “The Grove does not admit fairies, gnomes, elves, or dwarves. We consider dependence on such creatures a sign of poor discipline in the Craft. Besides, those creatures can be so … disruptive. And dangerous. I do hope you haven’t gotten involved with any up there at Fairwick. It’s what I was afraid of when you took the job.”

  “So it wasn’t Fairwick’s academic standing you disapproved of?”

  “Well, there’s that, too. They didn’t even make the U.S. News & World Report top one hundred colleges, which I attribute to their liberal admissions policy, letting in refugees from all over the world … and off world. I mean, would you want your daughter to sit in class next to a hobgoblin … or room with a phouka?”

  “I really like my students,” I said, shocked by the venom in Adelaide’s voice. “And I haven’t seen any hobgoblins …”

  “That you know of. What we at the Grove hear is that Elizabeth Book allows otherworlders to attend – and teach – in human guise. Who knows what sort of creatures you’ve got in your classes! It’s irresponsible not to let people at least know what they’re dealing with. I wanted to warn you when you took the job, but you’ve never listened to me.”

  “But you never even told me I had fairy blood!”

  Adelaide leaned forward and grabbed my hand so quickly I gasped aloud. Her crabbed fingers dug into mine like pincers. “Of course I didn’t tell you that you had the taint of the fey. Your mother, although she never chose to practice the Craft, was descended from a long line of distinguished witches. She disgraced her heritage by marrying a man with fairy blood.”

  “What heritage?” I asked, ignoring the slight to my father. I’d always known my grandmother didn’t like him, but I’d thought it was because he was Scottish.