Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  I had nowhere to go when Hannah was in the house. I couldn’t camp in another room and let her find me there. I heard her going upstairs just after we turned out the lights, walking with a heavy tread, missing a step, dropping something she was carrying, swearing. It was one of those nights when the bathtub began to seem appealing, except that our tub is high-sided and curving, too short to stretch out in. I could make up a bed on the floor with a pile of comforters, a nice, ostentatious solution designed to give Henry the message. I was strong and fit. I could go without sleep for one night without breaking my health. I needed a glass of milk, a plate of crackers spread with butter and peanut butter, or a British detective story. Reading in bed never disturbed Henry.

  Propped against extra pillows, with a heating pad warming my back, I opened one of Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver mysteries. The girl in the book thought her husband had hired someone to kill her. His family estate was exorbitantly taxed and she was an heiress. When Miss Silver was called in there had already been three attempts on the heroine: brake failure, a trip wire on the staircase, a misdirected bullet. On each occasion the husband’s cousin had been the first on the scene. Was he Johnny-on-the-spot because he was the killer, or because he was keeping watch over her? With each murder attempt my body grew more relaxed. I was reading through half-closed eyelids, lulled by the mechanical motion of the plot unwinding. Another member of the house party drank hot milk intended for the heroine. The milk was doctored with a tasteless poison. I never reached the end of the story. I fell asleep with the light on, Till Death Us Do Part slipping gently out of my fingers.

  I had nights of insomnia related to sexual anger; but once I passed out I was a perfect sleeper, a eusomniac. Lying on my back, rarely changing position, I sank to a level where my dreams were not retrievable. Unlike my mother and my sister, and Henry with his combat experience, I had never had a nightmare, even as a child with a fever. The most graphic and urgent of dreams, nightmares force themselves on our attention. They remind us that our grasp of the world is insufficient, that we need to consider the demands on the unconscious.

  I often envied people who dreamed, who had an open channel to the unconscious. They might be troubled by their nighttime visions but they were connected to the greater mysteries. The unconscious was both personal and impersonal. It contained forbidden desires and shocking memories, the debit side of the ledger of the conscious mind; but there was far more below than buried injuries to our childish psyches. It was as if there were a tunnel in each of us, a shaft leading down to the center of the earth and back in time, to when our ancestors adored and feared the sun and moon and lived as equals with the animals. The tunnel opened out onto stormy infinity beyond space and time, where human history had its ending. Even the most experienced travelers in the unconscious lost their compass and the last shreds of identity in this termless region. Christians believed infinity was a realm of white light; but I thought it must be black, blue-black, booming with the thunder of colliding atoms, a theater of energy. Out of this chaos particles formed and reformed into shapes of dread and desire, evil and enlightenment. We called them angels, elementals, demons, ghosts, gods and goddesses. They approached us spirit to spirit, taking physical shape because our understanding was limited to the material. They had messages for us, which we received as scrambled images or riddles, since our material minds could not take the truth directly. They told us, if only we would listen, that Reason was the sleep of fools and the Self was a mirage.

  Experienced dreamers came back from the unconscious trailing clouds of darkness. Until they readjusted to the light, they might see the natural world in shades of gray, as moving shadows. Sometimes the twilight prevailed. The unconscious can produce casualties, diagnosed by the experts as depressives and schizophrenics. The rest of the dreamers, the safe returners, learned to straddle two worlds. They learned to give house room to the invisible. According to individual temperament, the world around them became magical or fearsome. Empty spaces were filled and resonant. Every stone was made up of secrets as well as molecules. Every tree might address them familiarly.

  In the years before the Dry Falls emergency, when I had no dreams, I felt inferior to these night travelers with their open tickets to other worlds. Of course I had dreams of a sort, all related to physical functions, such as dreaming I was in a rowboat that was filling up with water, a signal from my body that I needed to go to the bathroom. In those years it was enough of a miracle that yeast made bread rise and that cream, when churned, turned to butter, that a foal came out of the womb and could stand immediately. I believed that Lorraine Drago’s brain cells were organized in a pattern different from mine. I believed my mother’s garden flourished during hailstorms, heat waves, and insect blights because she worked so hard tending it. Henry had heard God speak to him in Belgium because he needed to find a refuge from the shelling, if only in his mind.

  Henry used to charge me with having a joyless view of the universe. I answered that his view was the bleak one, the anemic one, that belief in the supernatural drained the sap from creation. Why look further than your own home county for meanings and justifications? Outside our wood and stone shelters everything was in order, in the sequence of the seasons and the tides, the movement of the stars, the health and disease of all species. I told him human beings should try to emulate plants and surrender to the life cycle. All our woes came from thinking, from imagining we were better than life. Mystics and meditators did nothing but subdue their bodies and fool with their brains. Their spiritual certainties were the purest invention, products of mind. Henry asked me why I’d married a priest instead of a farmer if I was such a materialist. Since I’d chosen a man who traded in invisible currencies, I must have a hidden spiritual agenda of my own. I asked Henry why he’d married a skeptic instead of a believer. I suggested that he enjoyed lording it over a less evolved creature, a metaphysically obtuse female.

  My sleep was so heavy that I wakened on Holy Saturday half blind and half conscious, weaving as I walked. I stood in the middle of the rug on my way to take a cold shower, trying to remember why I was getting up or what life I led outside the bedroom. I saw by the clock that it was eight a.m. Christ was in his tomb and Henry was already in church for morning Communion. I pulled up the blinds, wincing at the bright morning light. The Great Easter Vigil at the campgrounds began at seven this evening. I had promised to organize the food for the community supper. At noon several women from the parish—Ruth Hiram, Mariette Roque, and Adele Manning—were coming to help me assemble the meatless casseroles and the dried fruit compotes. Minnie McNeil was baking her unyeasted Lenten raisin rolls. The men’s committee was supplying cold drinks and coffee. Who had volunteered to take charge of glasses, dishes, silverware, napkins? I sat down in the armchair and leaned back to rest my eyes, a rash undertaking, since I quickly dropped off again.

  What was making that unholy racket? A truckload of coal was being poured down the coal chute—except that the rectory furnace had been converted to oil in the late 1940s. It took me some moments to trace the source of the noise to the attic instead of the cellar. Hannah was yelling, taking the Lord’s name and mine in vain, running across the floor. She had a heavy tread at the best of times. I had no intention of hurrying to the scene in my nightgown because she had stubbed her toe or knocked something over. She could deal with the breakage while I washed my face and put on a sweater and trousers. I wanted with every fiber of my being to make her wait until I had drunk a cup of coffee.

  When I opened the attic door I found her huddled in a corner wearing a pajama top. She was crouching behind a dozen packed cartons that had been piled three or four to a stack and collapsed in a jumble, forming a kind of barricade. The cartons falling had made the noise I’d heard. I lifted and restacked some of the boxes so I could get to her, asking her if she could move. As I bent over, I saw spots of blood on the back of her pajama collar.

  “You’ve hurt yourself,” I said, thinking she had fallen and
hit her head on a corner of one of the boxes. I tried to lift her to her feet but she nearly dragged me down with her, clinging to me. “You’re cold,” I said. “You have to put some clothes on.” She shook off my hands and jerked away from me. She was coming back to normal, scowling, blaming the first person who was handy. “I’m not going near it. I’m not going to sleep here. I won’t spend one more night here.”

  Generally the wisest course with Hannah was to let her rant until she wore herself out. I went over to the chair by the bed to get the blue jeans and sweatshirt she had dropped there, the low lace-up boots with her socks jammed into the toes, yesterday’s underwear.

  So soon after waking I often saw things but could not interpret them. Until I approached the Beaulac bed, I had failed to take stock of it. One pillow lay on the floor some five feet away. The second one was mashed against the headboard as if fists had pounded it. The top sheet and blankets were tangled into a coil. The bottom sheet was rumpled in a pattern like choppy water. The mattress had slid out of place, on a sharp diagonal. The bed itself had moved forward, a foot from the wall. Anyone, including myself with my bleary vision, could have drawn the conclusion that more than one person had slept there, that several people had engaged in a fight for available room, or even, by the look of it, in some kind of sexual scrimmage.

  I backed away, wary of drawing nearer, waiting, perhaps, to be sure all activity had subsided. From my post I observed that the sheet was stained with wetness, patches of damp drying with a faint brown outline, from a discharge that might be heavy perspiration. A patient with pneumonia who had undergone a crisis in the night, or a dreamer held hostage by a nightmare with a violent plot line, might have created this exceptional and repellent disorder, as could a pair of lovers who had swallowed an exciting substance, such as grated root of mandrake. All this had happened on the night when Jesus hung dead on the cross and Joseph of Arimathea, a good man and a just, was petitioning Pontius Pilate for his body.

  I knew I should strip the bed and change the sheets, but I resisted the prospect of touching them. I had an idea that the mattress should be replaced and an even more peculiar impulse to burn the bed linen. I wanted to turn my back on this lurid scene, which was none of my doing. I felt like that stock-in-trade character in detective stories, the backpacking hiker who stumbles on a corpse in the woods, goes out of his way to inform the local authorities, and finds himself inconveniently detained throughout the course of a murder investigation.

  When I was cooking, I needed my full attention. Since I had no children, I had never learned to prepare food with other people milling around me, wanting to talk to me. Most of the time mothers were required to do several things at once, which is why their cooking suffered and their interest in cooking waned until the children left home. I could sympathize with all mothers and their perpetually fractured concentration, pulled as I was between Hannah and the vegetable casseroles. She sat hunched over her coffee mug, using it as a hand warmer. She didn’t want to be alone and I was confined to the kitchen until the dishes for the church supper were prepared. I lent an ear to my sister while I separated heads of broccoli and cauliflower into florets of uniform size.

  Hannah kept repeating herself, requiring little of me except murmurs of reassurance, small change for the jukebox. Over and over she said, “I didn’t do it,” as if she were defending herself against criminal charges. “It didn’t get that way by itself and I didn’t do it.” She couldn’t have done it, because she remembered having a nightmare “about not being able to move.”

  “I knew there was something wrong with the attic,” she said, and I didn’t like to remind her that she usually called before her visits, asking me to get the third floor ready for her. I told her the rectory was clean. There were no legends connected with it except the story that Father Kurtz (two rectors ago) used to bring his laying hens inside for the night when the temperature fell below zero. Hannah said she would have to borrow my clothes unless “somebody” brought her belongings down to the blue guest room. Irritating people are rendered no less so by hardship and distress, and so it was with my sister. She was milking the incident, if it was an incident, and not just her own rambunctious sleep behavior. Down here in my warm kitchen with my hands busy, I had demoted the chaos in the attic to the level of a nasty housekeeping chore. I could hire Mary Fran to deal with it. I could get Ollie Swope at Yonderhill Galleries to take the Beaulac bed on consignment and put it up for sale at the first auction of the season, on Memorial Day weekend.

  I started making the white sauce, using chicken broth and milk instead of plain milk or milk and cream. I could have made white sauce in my sleep, even in large batches, but this time I kept forgetting how many tablespoons of flour I had measured out and was obliged to start counting over again. Hannah was distracting me. Her aggrieved, insistent voice was a little too loud to be background noise. Then I began to realize that she was interfering with my thought process, simple as it was, because of what she was saying and not how noisily she was saying it.

  She was describing her dream, but now she thought she had been awake instead of asleep. She said she heard footsteps coming across the room, “whooshy” footsteps like several pairs of feet in felt-bottomed slippers. A moment later the bed “went down,” as if a knee were pressing on the outside edge of the mattress. “Then my head went down. I thought I was going to roll out. I wanted to scream but my voice got stuck in my throat.”

  “It was a nightmare,” I said. “Nightmares often seem real.”

  “The awful thing was I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even move a finger. There was a weight on my chest forcing me into the mattress.”

  “Well, of course,” I reassured her. “That explains it. You were hyperventilating during the nightmare.”

  “Are you a doctor?” asked Hannah.

  “Oh, shut up. I read about it somewhere.”

  “Find me the book and show me the page.”

  “They call it sleep paralysis,” I said. “It happens from overeating and with people who have heart conditions.”

  “I know you,” said Hannah. “You get all your medical information from women’s magazines.”

  “It’s true,” I laughed. “They condense it into such dainty, digestible portions.”

  By the time I had finished the white sauce and grated the Swiss cheese, Hannah was talked out and sensible again. Talking was a miracle cure, far more effective, say, than helping me chop the scallions and parsley. She was full of spunk, raring to go to the cabin and spend Easter Saturday prying up worn-out floorboards. Now that it was daylight, with the sun attaining its zenith, the attic was an ordinary room to her. I assured her that the beds in the middle guest room were always made up, in case she had another bad dream. I asked her to join us at the campgrounds for supper around seven-thirty, or ride over there with me and Henry and the casserole dishes at exactly six o’clock. “I’d rather be hung by the ears,” she answered from the dining-room doorway.

  I kept my eye on my wristwatch while she was upstairs. She came back down again in nine and a half minutes. She was buttoned, zipped, straightened, tucked in, and laced up. None of her clothing was on backwards. Her hair was uncombed, but restrained by a nylon headband. She had even brought down the sheets and stuffed them into the washing machine; so she had stood by the bed, bent over it, touched it, without a panic attack or any other evil consequences. Hannah departed by the back door, pink-cheeked and smiling. There were many incidents like the bed scare in my sister’s life, opportunities for emotion and high drama, shit fits in teacups. She took them in stride; in fact, they seemed to pep her up. On the whole, she took them much better than her unwilling audience did.

  Hannah was setting out for a day of invigorating manual labor, leaving me indoors to perform more gender-appropriate tasks. She would be working alone in the cold, using her muscles and getting stronger. I would be one of a nest of women working together in a snug enclosure, no one of us taking the credit for our culinary ach
ievements. My sister had this effect on me, that she could bring on discontent like a spreading rash. She was a lone gun and I was a herd animal, penned and tethered. Her inner life as well was more enterprising, more freewheeling. Other people’s nightmares were usually diminished in the retelling: nothing remained of their power but a rambling anecdote. My sister’s nightmares left behind actual evidence of their passing. Awake, she could carry stacks of two-by-fours on both shoulders; asleep and dreaming, she could apparently move a bed that weighed several hundred pounds. When envy was upon me, I forgot that she was also something less than an Amazon: she was a person who suffered; who saw her hope for recognition eluding her; who had no close companion; who set impossible trials for her friends and family, like a king testing suitors for the hand of his daughter. I forgot that she told herself lies to make things come out the way she wanted them to, that she covered hurts with sarcasm and fears with bluster, as she was probably doing now. I forgot about the small, fresh wounds behind her ears, marks she’d dismissed, as I had, as self-inflicted.

  I had helped Hannah belittle her fears. She had had an unusually vivid dream, so “real” she believed she was awake and perceiving the attic bedroom in accurate detail. I supposed it was common for sleepers to incorporate their real setting into their dreams. For all I knew, half the adult population wakened from bad dreams and routinely discovered little bleeding cuts at the base of their skulls on the mastoids, exactly the way Hannah had. She had seen the blood on her collar and looked in the three-way bathroom mirror. She said there was only a little blood, that the cuts “smarted at first” but seemed to heal very fast. By the time she showed me the cuts, they were two pink lines about a half an inch in length, running horizontally, or parallel to her shoulders. Hannah was sure she had scratched herself in her sleep before the nightmare started. Once the nightmare was under way, every part of her, she claimed, was immobilized. The cuts were so straight and fine they might have been made by a scalpel. My sister’s fingernails were by no means precision instruments. They were bitten flat across and down to the quick, incapable of leaving a mark on any surface.