Incubus

by Carol Goodman

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  I TOOK THE box inside and put it on the kitchen table. Then, after a moment’s thought, I stuck it in the pantry on a shelf with the cleaning supplies and the mousetraps I’d bought and never had the heart to use. Great, I thought, I couldn’t use a mousetrap. What were the chances I was going to use an incubus trap on the man I …

  Loved?

  Did I love Liam? I’d never said it to him. I’d told him that I wanted him, but I’d never said I love you.

  Did I?

  I opened the pantry again and took out a bucket, rubber gloves and a bottle of ammonia. I filled the bucket with hot soapy water and went out onto the porch. It was measure of how much I didn’t want to think that cleaning up vomit seemed a preferable activity.

  I scrubbed until the paint started coming off the porch boards and I’d mixed a pint of my tears in with the dirty water. Then I brought the bucket and sponge back into the kitchen, washed them out in the kitchen sink and put them back into the pantry. I took the box Brock had given me out, put it on the kitchen table, and opened it. I squeezed the two iron bracelets into the two front pockets of my jeans and slipped the chain with the key over my head, sliding the key under my shirt where it lay against my breast bone, cold and heavy as my heart. Then I sat down on the couch in the living room – not in the library where Liam and I had watched movies and made love – and waited for Liam to come home.

  The minute I wasn’t moving, my mind became active again. What if it was all a mistake? a desperate voice whined inside my head. Even if there was an incubus on the loose there was no conclusive proof that it was Liam. It could be some other size-thirteen shoe, J. Peterman shirt wearing old movie buff, not my Liam.

  I heard the key click in the lock. There! It was an iron lock and an iron key. If Liam was an incubus he couldn’t use it, could he? I was so excited by the discovery that I leapt to my feet and ran to meet him at the door. He was in the foyer, his head bowed, a lock of dark hair falling over his eyes as he closed the door behind him. He slid the key back into his wallet – a leather wallet with Eddie Bauer stamped on the outside flap – and he took off his leather cashmere-lined (Land’s End) gloves, folded them carefully and put them in his (L.L. Bean) coat pocket. His fingers never touched the iron key or the doorknob.

  He looked up. The lock of hair still lay over his eyes, like the wing of black bird shadowing them. The late afternoon sunlight streaming through the stained-glass fanlight above the door threw a streak of red across his cheek, like a smear of blood. As if he’d been devouring something bloody and wiped the blood from his mouth.

  “Callie! I didn’t see you there. What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  He took a step forward and I stepped back. “Hey,” he said, his voice husky. “Are you upset I’m late? Didn’t you get my text?”

  “Yes,” I answered, sliding my hands in my pockets. “What did the dean want?”

  “Damned if I know. Honestly, I think she might be going senile … or she’s not entirely over her illness. First she wanted to talk to me about starting a poetry reading series. She had a list of poets and she wanted to see what I thought of their work and their ‘characters.’ I explained I didn’t know a lot of American poets personally. Then she got a call and kept me waiting while she took it and then she wanted me to call some of these poets with her. It was strange … but not as strange as how you’re looking at me right now.” He took another step forward – into a swath of blue light from the fanlight that cast a deathly pall over his features – and reached for me. I knew that if I let him touch me it would be all over. Already I could feel myself melting in his eyes. I’d let him kiss me and make love to me right there on the foyer floor. So what if he was an incubus? He was my incubus.

  I pulled my hands out of my pockets and, as he reached for me, desire and concern mixed in his eyes, I clamped the iron bracelets around his wrists.

  The effect was instantaneous. He fell to his knees like a puppet whose strings had been cut, his iron-bound wrists clanking loudly on the wooden floor. My name in his throat came out a scream of agony.

  “Good,” I said, making my voice cold. “You can still talk. I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to, and I think you owe me an explanation.”

  He lifted his head – slowly, painfully – and looked at me out of the hollow shadowy pits that his eyes had become. His skin, always pale, had gone nearly translucent. The only color in his face came from the play of light from the fanlight which spread itself on the floor around him like stage lights.

  “You know … what I am … what more … do you want to know?” he gasped through gritted teeth.

  I knelt down so I could look straight into his eyes. “I want to know why you picked me and what you intended to do with me. When you drained me dry would you have gone on to another victim?”

  He shook his head slowly, like an injured animal. “I didn’t … pick you. You … picked me. You wanted … me.” He took a long shuddering breath and then his words seemed to come easier. “You wanted me enough to give me flesh … even as you were telling me to leave, I felt your pity for what had happened to me. And I heard you answering my question …”

  “What question?”

  “I asked you what more you wanted and you told me … in between the words of the banishment … You told me you wanted decency and caring and a man who really bothered to see who he was trying to seduce.” He looked up at me. “Haven’t I given you those things, Callie? I care about you. I’ve spent three months getting to know you … really know you … and falling in love with you”

  I shook my head. “You lied to me. All the facts of your life that you told me were lies. The whole story about Jeannie and Moira … it was all a lie!”

  “I had to pretend to be someone else to get the chance to know you better. As for the story about Jeannie … that was what happened to me with only the details changed to modern times. I did love a girl from my village who had a touch of the fey about her and could open the door to Faerie, but I was seduced away by a fairy temptress. You’ve met her. You’ve seen how powerful she is.”

  “Fiona? The Fairy Queen?”

  “Yesss.” He hissed the word. “She stole me away from my village. I was her captive. She kept me in Faerie so long I lost my humanity … I faded into a shadow … Only a human’s desire can give me flesh, and only a human’s love can give me a soul. But still I broke away … When the fairies were exiled from the old country, when we were on the march to the door, I broke away and came for you, Cailleach …”

  The dream rose up inside me again: the long march, my comrades fading around me, the dark figure on the white horse coming toward me, his hands reaching for me … I looked up at Liam. The dark eyes were the same, the hands reaching for me were the same. I felt the iron key, hot now, burning against my bare skin. Turn right to send him to the Borderlands, left to free him.

  “So you’re saying that I’m … what? The reincarnation of the girl you loved centuries ago? Is that why you want me? Because I remind you of her?”

  He shook his head. “Her spirit lives inside you … and yes, at first, that’s why I was drawn to you, but then I got to know you … who you are now … Callie McFay. You’ve got a piece of the ancient Cailleach inside you, but you’re more. I love who you are now … If you loved me, I could be mortal again.”

  “Then I must not love you,” I said, pointing at his iron-cuffed hands. “Or those wouldn’t be bothering you.

  A tear slid down his face. “No. You don’t love me … yet … but you are close to loving me. I can feel it.” He lifted one hand. It was a struggle, I could see, but still he lifted it and brought his hand to my face.

  He won’t be able to move, Brock had said. So if he was moving it meant the iron only had some effect on him … and maybe that was because I almost loved him. How hard would it be to really love him? And then he would become fully human and we could be together.

  He pulled me toward hi
m, his hand shaking with the effort. His lips when they touched mine were on fire. They seared my skin like a hot brand, but I didn’t care. I opened my lips for him and felt the heat of him flooding me. He was peeling me open, the way a boy peels back the petals on a honeysuckle blossom and sucks the nectar off the stamen. He was sucking the life force out of me …

  I pushed him back. “No!” I cried, “You lied to me. I could hear the indecision in my voice, feel my resolve wavering. “How can I trust anything you say?”

  “Is a lie really the worst thing if it’s told out of love?”

  I smiled sadly and touched his hand. I saw where the iron had burned through his skin. There was no bone there, only darkness—the shadow he came out of and would return to if I didn’t do something soon. I pulled the key out from under my shirt. If I released him we could still be together and when I loved him he’d become mortal. We could be together without him draining me dry …

  I had already fitted the key into the keyhole of the left bracelet, but I stopped and looked into the shadowy pits that had been his eyes. “The students,” I said. “And Liz. You were feeding on them.”

  He flinched. “No!” he cried. “I would never …”

  “Then why have they been getting sick? Flonia, who you see every day? Nicky, who you went to visit? Even poor Scott Wilder …” I froze, recalling that day I sat in the infirmary. “All the students who were sick were in your class. You had private conferences with them. You were feeding on them.” My stomach clenched, nausea rising in me again. I tried to find something in his eyes to convince me that I was wrong, but there was nothing in his eyes but darkness and his voice when he tried to protest was the merest creaking of dry branches in the wind.

  “I didn’t, Callie, I swear. I didn’t feed on my students.”

  But how could I trust him? He’d lied about too much already.

  I turned the key right. He screamed. The sound tore through me, but I made myself move the key to the bracelet on his right hand. Before I reached it, though, he grabbed my hand and wrapped his fingers around my wrist. I felt them digging into my skin with the same cold bite as when the shadow-crab had attacked me. They were made of the same thing, weren’t they? I looked up into his face and saw that the shadows where spreading out from his eyes, eating into his flesh. He was dissolving right in front of me, turning back into the darkness he was made of. How could I love that darkness?

  But I knew even as I saw him dissolving in front of me that it was the darkness in him that called to me. I still wanted him. I looked down at my hand, where his fingers gripped my wrist. My own skin was dissolving under his touch, merging with him. I felt the pull of him, like an undertow dragging me out to sea. I might not love him, but I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anyone or anything. That might not be enough for us to stay together in the light, but maybe it was enough for us to stay together in the dark.

  And all I had to do was … nothing. As long as I didn’t turn the key in the second lock I would dissolve with him.

  I lowered my hand … and waited, my eyes locked on his. He saw what decision I’d made. In what was left of his eyes I saw surprise and I heard a gasp from what was left of his mouth. I felt his grip loosen on my wrist. He held out his arms to me. I closed my eyes and dropped the key to hold him … As we embraced I felt the darkness rush around me with a sound like wings. I opened my eyes and saw a wasteland of shadows – no color, no light, no heat. Ghostlike shapes flitted around me like bats but each one had a human – or nearly human – face. I recognized them as my comrades from the long march. This is where they had faded before reaching the door to Faerie. They had counted on me, their doorkeeper, to let them into Faerie, but I had failed them. Instead of going with them I had gone into the woods with my demon lover. Now I had come back to join them. It seemed only right.

  A tug brought me back into the real world, into the foyer of Honeysuckle House crouched beside Liam, who had all but dissolved into the shadows. He was holding the key to the lock on the right hand bracelet. He inserted the key in the lock … and turned it to the right.

  “Why?” I screamed.

  “I couldn’t let you destroy yourself for me.”

  They were the last words that he spoke before his lips dissolved. I reached for him, but he was already gone – a shadow that melted into the colored light pooling on the floor beneath me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  I DON’T KNOW how long I would have lain there watching the last vestiges of colored light drain into the shadows on the wooden floor if Brock and Dory hadn’t come for me. I dimly heard the sound of Brock’s key in the lock, but it seemed to come from a long way away. I thought for a moment that it was an echo of the key turning in the iron bracelet on Liam’s wrist and I reached out my hand into the shadows to stay his hand.

  “He might still be there,” I explained to Brock and Dory when they found me creeping along the wall. “In the shadows.”

  Brock waved his hand through the shadows to show me there was nothing there. Dory turned on the overhead light. The shadows scurried into the corners. I screamed at her to turn it off. I screamed again when Brock tried to carry me to my room upstairs.

  “Not there,” I begged. “I can’t sleep in that bed.”

  They put me in the back bedroom on the first floor – Phoenix’s old room and Matilda’s before her. Liam had never gone in there, not even the one time I’d asked him to fetch an extra blanket from Phoenix’s bed. Now I knew why. The room was filled with the smell of iron from the iron bed frame. I felt the cold of it on my wrist where Liam’s fingerprints were seared into my skin—five ice splinters lodged in my flesh. Brock made me a salve for the wound while Dory got me undressed and into bed. “Don’t worry, dear,” she said over and over, “you’ll be all right now.” But after Brock had bandaged my arm and spooned some bitter tasting tea down my throat I heard them whispering in the kitchen.

  “I’m afraid the shadows got in under her skin,” Brock said.

  “Will it spread?” Dory asked.

  “There’s no telling,” he answered. “We’ll have to watch her.”

  So that was the creeping I felt under my skin, like a drug moving through my veins. I drifted off then into the darkness beneath my eyelids. I could feel it rushing up to drown me, pull me under. When I was little my parents had taken me to a beach out in Montauk and I’d been pulled under by a wave, tossed and tumbled like a sock in a washing machine until I couldn’t tell which way was up. The darkness I went into now was like that, just deeper than the ocean. Was Liam somewhere in this darkness, waiting to drown me for sending him away? I swam deeper and deeper, passing the phosphorescent faces of drowned swimmers – half-eaten faces with crabs crawling out of eye sockets and eels wriggling where their tongues used to be – but no Liam.

  Then I would surface, into Phoenix’s room, the shadows lapping around the great iron bed like a retreating tide. Dory would be there, trying to get me to drink some tea or broth. Liz Book came and told me that everyone who had been sick was getting better now – Flonia and Nicky and all the other students from Liam’s class, proof that it had been Liam making them sick. The only one who was still recuperating was Mara.

  “He must have drained her when she came here to work on the LaMotte papers,” she said. “Poor girl. After all she’s been through. I feel so responsible – to be taken in by a love talker at my age!” She patted my hand and bent down to whisper in my ear, even though we were alone in the room; maybe she sensed the shadows listening. “He was a very charming one, my dear. No one could blame you for falling for him. No one blames you at all.”

  But she was wrong. The shadows blamed me. I could hear them whispering, their voices growing louder as the day lengthened their tongues, their briny breath lapping at my ears, rough as cats’ tongues, flaying my skin from the bone. You brought him to life, they whispered. You are a thing of darkness. That’s where you belong. With us.

  “No,” I whimpered back, but I was a
lready sinking back under the black water beneath my eyelids, where the rotting corpses of the drowned waited to embrace me. We’re your demon lovers now, they whispered. They latched themselves to me with their suckered tentacles and hungry mouths and I gave myself to them, glad to feel the pull and suck of their hunger.

  Once, though, instead of slipping into the dark I found myself standing in a green meadow, the dew on each blade of grass new-touched by the rising sun. I was wearing a long dress, the hem of which was soaked by the dew. Ahead of me, where the sun had not yet penetrated the mist, was a young man, his slim legs rising out of the mist like reeds rising out of water, his loose white shirt a swan’s wing cleaving the fog. He turned to me, his faced blurred in the mist, but then the rising sun reached him and drew Liam’s face on the white mist. He held his arms open for me and I ran into his embrace. For a moment I felt the strength of his arms encircling me and the heat of his lips on mine, but then he was gone, vanished into the mist. I woke up, grasping the knotted bed sheets and weeping. I got up out of bed for the first time and ran out into the backyard, my bare feet sinking into the melting slush. The yard and woods beyond were filled with a white mist rising off the melting snow, as if the earth was exhaling a long-held breath into the cold. Liam was out there in the woods, I knew now, not in the darkness, but wandering somewhere in the Borderlands. I would have run into the woods, but Brock caught me and dragged me back. I wasn’t strong enough to put up much of a fight. I’d have to wait until I got my strength back.

  I began drinking the tea and broth that Dory brought and nibbling on the bread and scones that Diana baked for me. I could see that the iron bed made Diana uncomfortable, so I asked to sit in the kitchen with her … and then the living room. Once I was able to sit in the living room I had more visitors. Soheila came on the first warm day of the year, which happened to be the first day of spring, with almond and rosewater cookies for the Persian New Year. I was glad she had come because I had some questions for her.