Incubus

by Carol Goodman

  “Callie McFay. I’m at the college. And actually I came by your house with Dory Browne after the Thanksgiving ice storm to check on your pipes. Everything looked fine then.”

  “Oh my, I hate to tell you this but from the dates on the fraudulent credit card charges the home invader was already in the house on Thanksgiving Day! We noticed some unusual charges on the AmEx in December and we cancelled all our cards. But who knows what other information he might have taken! He might have stolen our identities!”

  She glanced nervously up and down the street as if clones of Cheryl and Harald Lindisfarne might be strolling brazenly in broad daylight along Elm Street.

  “Well, that is upsetting,” I agreed, unsure what the woman wanted me to do about her problem. “But if you haven’t seen any more fraudulent charges maybe it was just a vagrant trying to get warm …”

  “Do you think?” she asked, laying her hand on my arm. “He ate an entire Hormel ham and all the peaches I’d put up last summer, but he was very neat. He washed out the peach jars and put back all the D.V.D.s from Harald’s collection. Harald is a bit of a movie buff …”

  “He put back the D.V.D.s?” I asked. “Then how do you know he took them out?”

  “Oh, because they’re out of alphabetical order … Oh dear, maybe he was an illiterate vagrant! Maybe he turned to a life of crime because he never had a proper education. I’m a literacy volunteer, you know,” she added. “I work with newly arrived immigrants in Florida and migrant workers up here in the summer. Gosh, do you think it could have been one of the men I tutor?”

  Thankfully the new conjecture was cut short by the appearance on the porch of a short, bald, rotund man in khaki shorts, a T-shirt that proclaimed the owner was a RETIRED SNOWBIRD AND PROUD OF IT!, and red suspenders.

  “The sheriff’s on his way, Cherrybaby,” the man called as he picked his way across the snow toward us. “He says we need to make a list of everything that’s missing. You’ll have to do the pantry.”

  “Oh,” Cherry said, squeezing my arm, “I’d best go in. Thank you for being such a good listener. I just had to tell someone! And I’m glad to meet you. Dory told me we had a nice new woman professor at the college. You’ll have to join our book club and Harald’s Friday night movie club. We watch classics and new movies. My favorites are the romantic comedies …”

  I’d been trying to come up with a polite way to get away from Cherry Lindisfarne when the words romantic comedies brought me up short.

  “Which movies did the thief watch?” I asked, interrupting Cherry’s personal review of the new Nancy Meyers film.

  Cherry Lindisfarne blinked at my rudeness, but recovered herself quickly and turned to her husband. “Do you remember, Harald?”

  “I made a list for the police,” he said taking a folded piece of paper out of this shorts pocket. “Let’s see …” While he adjusted a pair of bifocals on his sunburned nose I suppressed an urge to throttle him. “Beauty and the Beast – the French one, not Disney – It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally.”

  “He was apparently quite the fan of romantic comedy!” Cherry exclaimed. “I bet he’d been disappointed in love and was trying to figure out how to get back with his girlfriend. Those movies are practically primers on the art of love!”

  “Yes, a person could learn a lot from those movies.” Like how to lie to your girlfriend, I reflected bitterly. “And those credit card charges. Do you recall what companies they were from?”

  “Oh yes,” Cherry said. “L.L. Bean, Land’s End, and J. Peterman. All Harald’s favorites so we didn’t notice at first. But then we looked closer at the orders and saw that the pants were a narrower waist size and longer inseam and the shoes were way bigger …”

  “What size shoes?” I asked.

  “Thirteen!”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling my heart grow heavy in my chest. “That’s … big. I guess there aren’t too many men with that size shoe.”

  “No! It will be a good clue for the police. But you poor thing, you look pale! I can imagine realizing he was in the house when you came by is upsetting. I don’t blame you for feeling shocked. It makes you feel violated somehow.”

  “Yes,” I told Cherry in perfect honesty. “It does. I think … I think I’d better go home now.”

  “You do that, dear. Make yourself a cup of tea with plenty of sugar in it for the shock. And make sure you lock your doors. Who knows? Our home invader might still be lurking around.”

  I walked back to the house going over what I’d learned from the Lindisfarnes. The day after I’d banished the incubus someone had broken into the Lindisfarnes’ house and used their credit card to buy clothes from the same catalog companies that Liam favored, and then less than two weeks later Liam Doyle showed up in Fairwick.

  When I turned the corner onto my street I saw three women sitting on my porch. Two of the women were the same as the ones who had arrived on the night of the ice storm: Diana Hart and Soheila Lilly. The third was Fiona Eldritch.

  As I walked up my porch steps my legs felt heavy. I had been feeling tired lately, hadn’t I?

  “You don’t have to do an intervention,” I said. “I know what you’re here to tell me. Liam Doyle is the incubus.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “AREN’T YOU THE clever one!” Fiona said. “It took you long enough to realize.”

  “That’s not fair,” Diana pointed out. “You didn’t know either.”

  “Well,” Fiona huffed, “He wouldn’t let me get close to him and he was so very solid I thought he couldn’t really be my incubus. You made him incarnate, Callie. It’s very impressive, actually. In order for an incubus to become flesh his love object has to have a strong mind and strong desires. You must have wanted him to become flesh.”

  I shook my head. “I tried to vanquish him. You saw me do it!” I turned to Soheila and Diana. Soheila, who hadn’t spoken a work yet looked stricken, but remained silent. Diana looked unhappy, too, but she answered me. “We saw you go through with the ceremony, Callie, and I’m sure you meant well, but we couldn’t see what was in your heart. No one can see that …” She glanced at Fiona with a nervous but determined look. “No one is saying you brought him to life intentionally.”

  Fiona glared at Diana, but reluctantly agreed. “No, I suppose not intentionally.”

  “But,” Diana continued, turning so pale under Fiona’s disapproval that her freckles stood out, “if you had just the teensiest bit of hesitation when you performed the rite … if just a little bit of you wanted the incubus to stay, then it might have been enough to allow him to become flesh.”

  I stared at Diana, remembering the night before Thanksgiving when we’d vanquished the incubus. Had I harbored a small desire to keep him with me? “But,” I said, noticing a look of triumph pass over Fiona’s face and one of even greater sadness over Soheila’s. “How did he do it? Liam has professional credentials … degrees from Trinity and Oxford, publications in magazines … a Facebook page, for goodness’ sake. I Googled him!”

  Diana and Soheila exchanged looks. Fiona just laughed.

  “Yes, I have, too!” Fiona crowed. “It’s all quite cleverly done, isn’t it? The degrees and the residencies at writers’ conferences … Did anyone think to call any of them? And the poetry – it’s lovely, isn’t it? He always did have a way with words.”

  “He created a virtual web using the Lindisfarnes’ computer,” Diana added, “much like an identity thief would …”

  “But his whole identity couldn’t have just been virtual!” I cried.

  “Did you ever find any of the actual print magazines that carried one of his poems?” Fiona asked smugly. “No, I didn’t think so. Neither did Dean Book, I’m afraid.”

  “She was ill,” Diana said defensively. “He bewitched her and compromised her judgment so that she didn’t look into his credentials thoroughly.”

  “You’re telling me she didn’t call any of his re
ferences?” I asked.

  Diana sighed. “She read his resumé, his letters of recommendation, and then met with him. She emailed with a professor at one of the colleges where he taught and tried to call another professor, but couldn’t get through. In hindsight, she says that all his credentials were digital and therefore could have been faked. She should have realized that, of course, but she was charmed by him and happy to get a replacement for Phoenix so she didn’t investigate as much as she should have.”

  “And you …” I said, turning to Fiona. “You seem to be suggesting that Liam is the incubus you knew hundreds of years ago. Didn’t you recognize him?”

  “I suspected it was him, but I couldn’t be sure. I have to have actual physical contact in order to tell and when I lured him into the cloakroom to kiss him you interrupted us.”

  “But he didn’t want to kiss you, did he?”

  “No … he probably knew that it would give him away.”

  “Or he just didn’t want to kiss you because he liked me better.”

  Fiona’s eyes blazed and she seemed to grow three inches taller.

  “Remember she’s still under his power,” Diana told Fiona in a small voice. “She’s not responsible for what she says.”

  “I know exactly what I’m saying. You have no proof that Liam is your incubus, do you?”

  Fiona and Diana remained silent at my outburst, but Soheila finally spoke. “No, Callie, we don’t. But we do have proof that there is an incubus-like creature sucking the life force out of students on campus. All his victims – Dean Book, Flonia Rugova, Scott Wilder, Nicky Ballard, and Mara Marinca – had the same symptoms: fatigue, troubling dreams, and anemia. I should have seen it earlier, but I never like to think that one of my kind would behave so … so indiscriminately. Preying on young people!” She made a face. “Even my sisters are more principled. But when I visited Nicky Ballard and held her hand. I could feel the signature of the incubus.”

  “Before you said incubus-like,” I pointed out.

  “There are a number of creatures who prey on the life force of humans – incubi, succubi, love talkers, lamias, lideres, undines. They’re all related. I can feel the presence of a creature feeding off the life force …” She reached out her hand to grasp mine and I took a step backward … right into Fiona. It was like stepping into a wall of ice.

  Soheila reached for my hand. I tried to pull it away, but Fiona held me steady with a touch on my arm that was light but compelling. I was powerless to move away. Soheila took my hand in both of hers. She closed her eyes and stroked my skin. Her eyes moved rapidly back and forth beneath her eyelids as if she were dreaming … then flicked open, releasing a tear that slid down her cheek.

  “I can feel him, Callie. His presence is strong in you. I can feel his love …”

  “An incubus is incapable of love,” Fiona hissed. “And if he did love her why would he prey on all those students? Does he love them, too?”

  I turned away from Soheila’s grief-stricken eyes to face Fiona. “I can believe that Liam is an incubus – that he preyed on me – but I can’t believe he preyed on his students.”

  “He’d have to if you weren’t enough to satisfy him.”

  My hand was in the air headed toward Fiona’s mocking smile before I knew I meant to slap her, but Soheila and Diana grabbed me before I could make contact. A wind knocked the three of us back against the wall of the house and a white light blinded me. I heard Fiona’s voice inside my brain, piercing my head like an ice pick. Don’t you ever defy me again, little doorkeeper, or I will turn you into dust. I spare you now only so you can send your demon back to the Borderlands. I want him to know what it feels like to be rejected by the one he desires.

  A high-pitched screech filled my brain – I felt sure my head was going to explode – and then it was gone, leaving an ache, a ringing in my ears and a coppery taste in my mouth. I fell to my knees and threw up. Dimly I felt Diana holding back my hair and Soheila murmuring.

  “It’s okay, she’s gone. She’s angry because he’s chosen you over her, but she knows she can’t destroy you. Even the Queen of the Fairies needs a doorkeeper to open the door to Faerie.”

  “She said she spared me so I’d send him back, so he’d know what it felt like to be rejected by someone he loved … but she herself said that an incubus couldn’t love … and if Liam’s really the incubus …” Another wave of nausea rose from my stomach as the reality finally penetrated. Liam, whose body I knew so intimately, was not made of flesh and blood, but was a creature of shadow and moonlight, a golem fashioned from the clay of my own lust. “If he’s an incubus … if he’s lied to me and fed off his students … then he doesn’t love me. He can’t love anyone.”

  Soheila winced but said nothing. Diana smoothed my hair back from my damp forehead.

  “I think he must love you as best as he can,” Diana said. “But it doesn’t matter. You have to send him back. He’ll suck you dry if you don’t.”

  Soheila nodded. “Diana’s right. He can’t help it. It’s how he’s made.”

  “But then how am I supposed to make him leave?”

  Soheila and Diana looked at one another and for a moment I thought – hoped? – they would throw up their hands and tell me they had no idea. Oops, sorry, once an incubus is made flesh there’s no way to disincarnate him. You’re stuck. You’ll just have to make the best of the situation. But instead, at a nod from Soheila, Diana took out her cell phone and punched in a number.

  “She’s ready,” she said without greeting, and then hung up without a good bye.

  Across the street the front door of the Hart Brake Inn opened and Brock came out carrying a box. He crossed the street with the box held out in front of him, like a waiter carrying a tea-caddy to a customer in a restaurant.

  “Neither Soheila nor I can help you with this part, Callie, because we can’t handle iron. Brock will explain what to do.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said as both women got to their feet. “If an incubus doesn’t like iron, then why are all his victims drained of iron?”

  Diana bobbed her head up and down. “Good question. It’s not fully understood, but apparently there’s a sort of symbiotic relationship that develops between the incubus and his victim that makes his victim shed iron so that the incubus can continue feeding. We think it’s why the victim eventually weakens and dies. If we understood it better then the incubi – and succubi—” she glanced at Soheila “—could have normal relationships with humans.”

  Soheila smiled at Diana but shook her head. “Casper Van der Aart has been working on the problem for decades. I’m afraid there’s little hope for a solution. Meanwhile …” She glanced behind her at Brock, who had stopped midway up my front path. “We have to go. The iron that Brock has forged is especially powerful. Diana and I can’t be near it.” She took my hand in hers. “Good luck, Callie, and remember, he can’t help what he is, but if he truly loves you he doesn’t want to destroy you. He’ll be better in the long run banished to the Borderlands than living with your death.” She gave my hand one final squeeze and got up to go. Diana patted my shoulder and followed her. I got up, too – mostly to move away from the place where I had thrown up – and met Brock on the steps.

  “I’m so sorry, Callie. I should have protected you better. I should have recognized him. I just never thought that he could become flesh – he never did all the years he haunted Dahlia.”

  “I think she kept him at bay with her writing,” I said, thinking of the pattern that Mara had discerned in Dahlia’s handwritten drafts. “She gave him flesh – of a sort – in her fiction when he grew too strong and then she was free of him for a while. She must have had a strong incentive to keep him at a distance. She had a man in the flesh who was enough for her.”

  Brock’s eyes widened and brightened with unshed tears. “That’s a generous thought, Callie. Thank you. I think Dolly believed that he was her muse, that he enabled her to write. But I think she was wrong there. It was her w
riting that drew him to her. I don’t think he loved her, though, not the way he loves you. Still …” He opened the box. Lying on a piece of embroidered white linen were two bracelets made of cast-iron braided into intricate knot designs. At the center of each knot was a keyhole. An iron key attached to a chain lay between the two bracelets.

  “You’ll have to slip these on his wrists.” He showed me how they opened and clicked shut. “And then you’ll have to turn the key in each lock. Keep the key around your neck and he won’t be able to touch you.”

  “And you think he’ll stand still for that?”

  “Once the iron’s on his wrists he won’t be able to move. Just make sure you turn the key to the right. If you turn it to the left, you’ll unlock the bracelets and he’ll be free. Then … Well, he’s sure to be angry and you saw what he did the last time he was angry.”

  I shuddered, recalling the destruction of the ice storm – the acres of ravaged forest, Paul’s plane downed. Could that really have been Liam? Could I really believe that of him? A part of my brain – and my heart – still resisted the idea, but the evidence was overwhelming. My own doubts … Well, as Diana had said I was still under his power. I couldn’t trust my instincts.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “The dean agreed to keep him in her office until she got a call from me. If you’re ready I’ll call now.”

  “Wait. There’s one other thing. If I do this … if I put these things on him, what happens to him?”

  “He’s banished to the Borderlands between this world and Faerie. The iron will keep him from materializing in this world, but it will also keep him from being able to enter Faerie since nothing iron can pass through the door.”

  “Does it … hurt?” I asked.

  Brock didn’t answer at first. I could tell he was considering whether he could lie, but I held his gaze and he finally nodded. “Yes, it will hurt him. He’ll be bound in pain for all eternity, imprisoned with all the other tortured souls who have lost their way between the worlds. My people call this place Niflheim, or Fog World, where dwells a goddess whose house is called Rain-Damp; her plate, Hunger; her knife, Starving; her threshold, Stumbling-Block; her bed, Sickbed; her bed hangings, Misfortune. From her name, Hel, comes your hell. But there’s no other choice. He’ll drain you dry if you don’t banish him.” He placed the box in my hands and then turned around and left without another word, leaving me with the means of torturing my lover for all eternity.