Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  Incubus

  A Novel

  Ann Arensberg

  For Janet and Fran and Christopher and Kathleen

  Christ before us, Christ behind us,

  Christ within us,

  Christ beneath us, Christ above us,

  Christ to the left of us, Christ to the right of us,

  Christ when we lie down, Christ when we sit down,

  Christ when we arise,

  Christ all around us.

  EIGHTH-CENTURY IRISH PRAYER,

  “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”

  “I think we’re property.”

  CHARLES FORT, The Book of the Damned

  Preface

  My name is Cora Whitman and I spent three months in the underworld, the summer of 1974, a season when the rains failed. Or perhaps the underworld erupted in those parched months, covering the land of the living with killing ash, blending the upper and lower regions into one. Perhaps, more correctly, the underworld came to me.

  Every night we pass over the boundaries of the underworld. Are the dreams we bring back from our journeys only dreams, or memories of experience? Sometimes a dream image dogs us as we hurry through the waking world: a man with no face; a house underwater. Like photographic negatives printed on untreated paper, these pictures will blur and fade as the day progresses. We may see them again, but not at our own discretion. You cannot enter the underworld at will. Its regions have never been charted by living mapmakers. There is no consulate that handles applications for passports.

  From our side, the frontiers of the underworld are all but impassable. Are the borders as hard to infiltrate from the other side? Are the flesh eaters, castaways, and scarecrows we meet in dreams content to stay where they belong or do they want to travel? If they start to wander, how do we shut them out? When they get past our sentries, how do we send them back? The day world does not have diplomatic relations with the night world, let alone a recognized treaty of extradition.

  If only we could stay awake around the clock, or discover a way of renewing our cells without sleeping. When we are asleep, our dreams overpower us like spring tides. We are carried through the rivers of the underworld, spinning and sinking, ripped by the beaks of snapping turtles, tangled in bottom weeds. Awake and upright, standing in the light of day, we believe that our dreams are the work of our imaginations. We like to think we “made them up,” as we make up stories for children, tales of giants, elves, and mermaids, and other “imaginary” creatures. We take comfort from this notion. If the monsters we see in dreams were invented by our brains, then they live in a place inside our heads, and cannot harm us.

  There is clandestine traffic from the underworld in every era, but particularly at the end of a millennium. Near the turn of any century, human beings behave like herd animals, driven headlong by panic toward the edge of an overhanging rock face. We see the breach between one century and another as a vertical drop, an abyss, when in fact it is no greater than the time between one year and the next, a single second in duration, the span of a handclap. The inhabitants of the underworld smell our panic, just as lions smell fear in inexperienced trainers. Attracted by the scent, which grows sharper as the century dwindles, they cross over in larger numbers, to claim us and use us for their purposes. Nineteen seventy-four was the beginning of the end of this century, the last year of the known universe, the last time familiar things could be taken for granted: the purity of the seas and waters; seasonal weather; the idea of Africa; the permanence of Art; the ethic of honest work for honest wages.

  As of the census of 1970, the inhabitants of our village, Dry Falls, numbered 1,500. Between April and September of 1974, migrants from the night world swelled that population. Other migrations occurred in the state of Maine, in Oxbow, Whiting, Burnt Island, and suburban Bangor, and one major influx in the town of Haley Pond, which spread across the line to Garretson, New Hampshire. As reports came in from areas around the country, it was clear that Tennessee and Idaho were hit as hard as Maine was. While the nation as a whole was under siege that summer, none of the incidents fitted our local profile. We have documents, with photographs to support them, from Maryland, Missouri, and South Dakota, describing the appearance of human faces on cellar floors, a phenomenon never recorded in northern New England. Red rains fell chiefly in the Finger Lakes region of New York, when, in at least two cases, the substance was identified as blood. Several witnesses at a boys’ camp on the Allegheny River saw three moons in the sky on the night of July 22. (If the sighting had taken place downriver in Pittsburgh, it would have been explained as an optical illusion created by smog layers.)

  Showers of blood, faces on floors, objects in the sky, the Dry Falls entity: they are one and the same. Angels appeared to people in religious times. Twentieth-century man has visions of spaceships. These appearances have physical reality. They cannot be dismissed as illusions, phantoms, or figments. Objects from the sky, by whatever name you call them, leave material evidence of their flights and landings: patterns on radar screens; scorch marks on the grass; fragments of an unknown, heat-resistant metal. In Brownsville, Texas, the Virgin Mary left her image imprinted on a tree trunk. The Dry Falls entity was experienced by its victims as a bodily affliction, the “incubus syndrome”: respiratory difficulties; paralysis of the limbs; autonomic arousal. These psychic extravaganzas are produced by stage managers from the underworld, from dimensions invisible to humans with our limited mind-set, worlds above us and below us, before and behind us, surrounding and pervading us.

  Who are they and what do they want with us? Do they mean to challenge our fixed ideas and expand our consciousness? Or are they trying to keep us in superstitious fear, to block the progress of our psychic evolution, lest we learn too much about them and gain the power to nullify them? Whatever they are, they have business with human beings. There is no way to know if their motives are benign or malevolent. At the moment we are their property and their creatures. They would go to any lengths to keep us from turning the tables.

  My husband, Henry Lieber, and I have set up a private foundation, the Center for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena. In an effort to understand occurrences like the Dry Falls entity, and the larger reality we believe they represent, we will go on collecting case after outlandish case. We will examine every piece of data, no matter how unreasonable. We will cross-reference the facts and see what patterns emerge. As we feed in more facts, these patterns will be replaced by stranger ones. Perhaps in the future there will be no more “anomalies.” The exception will be the rule; the abnormal the norm. All the facts will fit because the system has grown so capacious. Our minds will become so flexible that nothing will daunt us: comets in the daytime, dialogue with the dead, snowflakes the size of wagon wheels.

  It is a lifetime’s work and we are over halfway through our lives. I am forty-two and my husband will be fifty-six. We have no formal training so the work will go more slowly. On the positive side, we are not saddled with preconceptions. Henry has a doctorate in theology from St. John’s Seminary. He was the rector of the local Episcopal church, St. Anthony the Hermit. Until recently my own chief interests were cooking and gardening. I wrote a recipe column that appeared in many Maine newspapers. There are two of us at the foundation, along with Adele Manning, who used to be Henry’s secretary at St. Anthony’s. We have recently been joined on a part-time basis by Jeremy Mulbach. A doctoral candidate in parapsychology from Portland University, Jeremy is an expert in statistics, computers, and spectral photography.

  We need help from the public if we have any chance of succeeding. We need cases to study. We need firsthand reports and descriptions. We guarantee confidentiality. No names will be used without the consent of the subjects. We understand your feelings of shame and your desire for secrecy. When you tol
d your story the first time, no one believed you. Contact with the unexplained sets the victim apart. The community withdraws its support, for fear of contagion.

  By publishing the following account of our own experiences, we hope to make clear that we, like yourselves, are victims. Every aspect of our lives was altered by our encounters. Nothing is the same, either for us or for our fellow villagers. We no longer trust what we see, hear, taste, smell, or touch. When it thunders at night, we cannot sleep until rain begins falling. When we walk across the lawn, we test the ground for firmness. We have lost our sense of security, however false it may have been to begin with.

  I have written up our case history as carefully as I could reconstruct it, using diaries, police records, pathology reports, and exhaustive interviews, corroborated by tape recordings. For the rest, I have relied on memory; but I believe that memory has served me. The events are recent in date and graphic in content. If anything, time only sharpens my recollections.

  Correspondence should be addressed to the Center for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena, c/o Dr. Henry W. Lieber, Box 608, Dry Falls, Maine 04071.

  PART I

  Christ Before Us

  Chapter One

  When I sat down to make a record of the Dry Falls happenings, I made many false starts in my attempt to find some logical sequence. I am a pastor’s wife and I can quote from the Book of Revelation, in which my task, or any writer’s task, is spelled out plainly: “Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter.” St. John was the chosen instrument of God. He transcribed his visions in the order in which God sent them. When it came to ordering events, I had no guidance. Many things were happening around us all at once; some I learned about too late for inclusion in this chronicle. I must choose a beginning blindly and with trepidation, as soldiers draw lots to “volunteer” for a suicide mission. I will mix up past and present as it suits my purposes. The future is still uncertain, so I can only guess at it. I was determined to publish my account, have it printed and distributed through the bookshops in my county. By so doing I will be following the mandate to St. John: “Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book; for the time is at hand.”

  I was not qualified to be the narrator of these incidents, although my stake in making them public was very high. I was an amateur whose experience was limited to one topic. I wrote about food—growing and cooking it—500 words a week, two typewritten pages. My readers in the state of Maine were undemanding. If a measurement was incorrect, they blamed the printers. My readers, after all, were familiar with my subject. They were cooks like me. I thought of them as my colleagues. Many of them sent me their families’ favorite recipes. I reprinted the best in a yearly column called “Readers’ Choices.” I have met my readers at newspaper-sponsored contests. I have spoken at women’s clubs from Kennebunk to Machias. Often they were more knowledgeable than I was, and more ambitious. They took courses in cake decoration. They were casual about croquembouches. If they had no need of advice, why did they read me? They cooked three meals a day. They ran out of fresh ideas. They looked to me to make their kitchen chores more interesting. Since I wrote for a newspaper, my words had the ring of authority.

  Suppose I were to lecture to these groups of nice women on my present subject? I can picture a setting like so many where I have spoken, a community center, recently the scene of a flower show, trestle tables placed against the walls bearing withering exhibits, entries in various categories, on various themes, such as “Fruits of the Vine,” “Table for Two,” “Bringing a Meadow Indoors,” and “One Perfect Rose.” When they were settled on folding chairs with their cups of coffee, I would walk to the front of the room and begin to speak. I would tell them about our town and its time of emergency, about women like themselves whose bodies were used in sleep. I can see them averting their eyes, darting glances at friends, burrowing in their handbags. Two or three who were seated at the back might make a tiptoed exit. Unless I reverted quickly to culinary matters, I would lose my audience along with my credibility. On any issue other than menus and food preparation, my respected regional byline counted for nothing.

  For as long as I wrote it, my little column was a link to humanity. It addressed basic needs—survival, nutrition, celebration. It was concerned with the continuance of life from season to season: planting, harvesting, putting food by for the winter. The document I am presently compiling takes up nonhuman matters, events that make hunger and survival seem benign and attractive. I must catalogue human reactions to nonhuman circumstances: fear, depravity, shame, hysteria, self-deception. I am obliged to spare no one, not my loved ones, my acquaintances, my countrymen. I have tracked down participants who were desperate to forget their experience. I have asked the most intimate questions from an impersonal standpoint. Unjustly, since I was as much a sufferer as anyone, the work I am doing will set me apart from my fellows.

  I am sitting at the desk where I tapped out my column each week, a plank set on two metal cabinets with plenty of drawer space. The desk is the same, but the room it is placed in is different. In the rectory it sat in one of our three guest rooms (although sometimes I carried my typewriter to the kitchen table). Here it occupies a crowded corner of our only bedroom. The rectory was a fine old house, crowned by a belvedere, with Carpenter’s Gothic trim and long French windows, a house that captured and stored the available light. There were many ideal locations for perennial borders: along the proper front walk paved with brick in a herringbone pattern; running the length of the fence by the sidewalk; on either side of the steps by the screened-in back porch. I never dug up the lawn as long as I lived there. I believe that borders should relate to existing structures.

  Our new home is a two-story apartment in a white clapboard building on Main Street recently vacated by a chiropractor. Before Dr. Klinger, the building housed a firm of tax accountants; before that, it was a branch of the Huguenot Society of America. We tore down partitions that divided each floor into office cubicles or examining rooms, leaving us with a large open space on the ground floor (living–dining room and efficiency kitchen) and a bedroom, bath, and storage room upstairs. The place is snug, to put a good construction on it, but adequate to our needs.

  Over the front doorbell is a discreet brass plaque bearing the name of the Center; but Henry and his employees work underground in the finished basement. The basement has a separate entrance down a half-flight of steps. Except for two high windows, it is lit artificially by rows of overhead fluorescent tubing. There is a washroom, a compact refrigerator, and a two-burner hotplate. The Center’s offices and laboratory are self-contained, although we sometimes conduct interviews upstairs in the living room. I should mention that we offer our services free of charge. Many of our clients have been driven out of their homes, lost their jobs, or incurred hospital expenses because of emotional trauma. In the interests of our work we are living in straitened circumstances. Henry inherited money from his father, who made his fortune smoking and canning seafood. Conrad Lieber died when Henry was twenty-three and away at war. Henry rarely touched his legacy when he was a minister. He draws on it now to support the operations of the Center. He still pays himself an Episcopal clergyman’s wages, except that a beautiful house and grounds were once part of the benefice.

  The landing outside our bedroom is stacked with cartons, the overflow from the storage room. The cartons are filled with boxes of slides and tapes, newspaper clippings, and notes scribbled down at the time on anything handy—napkins, deposit slips, the insides of paperback book covers. Each carton is labeled and dated according to incident: the Manning Case, the Burridge Case, the Violette Brook Campgrounds Case, etc. Our bedroom is small, with one logical place for the bed, so my desk must face a wall instead of a window. If my desk faced the window (thereby blocking the major passageway), what would I see through the glass to cheer or please me? Outside there is a concrete yard with a drain in the center and a chain-link fence between us and B
aldwin’s hardware store. If I stared out the window too long at this sordid view, the gardener in me would take over, or whatever is left of her. A hurricane fence makes an excellent support for a vine garden—tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peas, and a splash of blue morning glories.

  Until I finish this chronicle, I am cut off from the natural world. I am living, for the present, in a world of words and abstractions. I am thin, where I used to be sturdy. I have lost my color. I cook by rote, in a hurry, only at suppertime. For the other two meals we open cans, jars, and boxes. We live like students in an off-campus dorm with a communal kitchen. Henry is quite content with these slapdash arrangements. Before we married he subsisted on creamed herring, sardines, and crackers. Sometimes when my back aches from sitting in one position, I invent a new dish in my head, although rarely in practice, such as a cornbread cake made with buttermilk and filled with vegetables—string beans, onions, garlic, red and green peppers. When will I be free to lead a more balanced life? It is more than two years since I put on blue jeans and struggled through the briars on my way up Pumpkin Hill, tearing my sleeves, getting long, mean scratches on my arms, until I found the place where the sweetest wild blueberries were hiding.

  Did my love for the things of this earth bring on the trouble in the first place? Did my heedless, pink-cheeked vitality attract their notice? Did the smells from my kitchen tempt them out of their element? I am dealing in guilt and blame, which serves no purpose. Every woman in Dry Falls was an unsuspecting magnet. Adele Manning took “baths” in the light of the waxing moon. The Roque sisters, Claude and Arlette, who were in their late teens, camped overnight in Parsons Ravine during their menstrual cycle. Ruth Hiram, our librarian, grows old roses exclusively for their fragrance. Jane Morse often nursed her first child on a bench in the common.