Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  Pulling up a stool to the counter, I made ready to consult the oracle, an oracle with chapped, red hands, frog-eyed behind her thick glasses. Like most oracles, my mother was inclined to be obscure and roundabout. I expected riddles for answers. I should have brought along an offering of chocolate truffles, Emily’s only weakness.

  “With all due respect, mère,” I ventured, “you don’t look rested. Did you have Bill Washburn take down the storm windows?”

  “Cluck, cluck,” said my mother. “I know how I look. I’ve been having those infernal cave dreams again. It’s impossible to get back to sleep afterwards.”

  “Is that why you came to church?”

  “You have such a curious attitude for a minister’s wife. You don’t trust the religious impulse.”

  “I certainly don’t where you’re concerned.”

  Emily laughed at me. “Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s the coolest place in town.”

  “That means you’re bothered by the heat.”

  “Of course I am. It’s very strange for this time of year. What will be left by August?”

  “By strange, do you mean abnormal? You think there’s something wrong with it?”

  “Cora, you’re hanging on my words. What are you pressing for? I can’t imagine where you got your rigid notions about the weather.”

  “Don’t be evasive, mère. Remember how squirrelly you got at Hannah’s cabin. Is this ‘wrong’ the way that was ‘wrong’? Explain it to me.”

  Emily checked the flame under the steamer and lowered it a little. She turned to face me, or her own oblique version of facing me. She was incapable, optically speaking, of staring you directly in the face. With glasses on, her eyes were so magnified and, without them, so myopic that she seemed to be looking around you and some distance beyond you.

  “These dreams about your sister are a burden to me,” she said, pressing her hands together, summoning her dignity. “I would like to be able to talk to you, but you won’t let me. You dismiss the subject and badger me about the weather.”

  “I am honored to be a listener,” I said, “but you can’t expect me to be a believer.”

  “There may be nothing to believe in but the extent of my anxiety for your sister.”

  “You mean the dreams have changed for the worse.”

  “Now she is standing at the mouth of the cave and beckoning me. I try to follow her inside but the opening closes over, like a sliding door.”

  “You heard her scream before. Did she scream?”

  “No, she doesn’t scream. She seems joyous. Last night the door to the cave slid open and she came outside for a moment with another person.”

  “Who was it? A man or a woman?” I was caught up in Emily’s dream in spite of myself. It was like the fairy stories she had read to me at bedtime out of books with covers in every color of the rainbow. I almost called out, “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” just as I used to each night in childhood.

  Emily cut her recitation short, breaking out of that trancelike mode common to people who are telling their dreams. She turned off the flame under the steamer. I refrained from warning her that leaving the broccoli in the pot with the lid on would only make it browner and limper. She rummaged in a drawer for a knife and fork, making an angry clatter.

  “I need sleep. I have to keep fit. What would happen to the garden if I lost my health?”

  “I can give you three hours a week. Would that be a help right now?”

  Emily ignored my offer and went on with her grievances, like an actress complaining to a director about repeated script changes.

  “I’m tired of dreaming. Dreaming all night and deciphering dreams all day, when there’s no sense to them. I’m just reliving the day Hannah left us. That’s what they’re about. Why do I have to contend with caves? Why bring in that strange girl, Henry’s secretary? I can’t remember her name.”

  “Adele Manning. What about her?”

  “That’s who was standing with Hannah at the mouth of the cave. They hardly know each other.”

  “Dreams are supposed to be symbolic, mère.”

  “Well, it’s an aggravating detail. It preys on my mind. I have no relationship with her. Why should she be there?”

  Emily lifted the steamer from the pot and turned it over. The broccoli was so soft it flattened out when it hit the plate. Unappetizing as it was, it reminded me that I wanted my own lunch—Ernie’s sour cream and cottage-cheese omelet, or his scallop stew with green peppers. I kissed Emily on the cheek. She turned her back to me. She never liked to say goodbye, even at a bus station or an airport, where farewells are the principal agenda. At the last moment, with departure well under way, she ducked her head and lost the power to speak. While you were waving and calling to her, she had already begun to walk away. As a child (bound for camp or to Portland to visit my grandparents) I found this habit of hers unconsoling, but I gave up trying to change it. Leave-takings affected her so strongly that she was literally unable to go through the amenities.

  If we slipped through the nets of the weathermen during that ten-day heat wave, Adele Manning somehow slipped through our nets on Easter Eve. She was lost to us or stolen for an interval not longer than two hours and a quarter, between ten p.m. and fifteen minutes after midnight. I did not credit my mother’s dreams with any magic, since some word of the incident might easily have reached her, then escaped her memory. There were fifty people at the Violette Brook Campgrounds lodge on Holy Saturday, sharing a meal and waiting for the break of Easter morning. Only fifteen or so of the hardiest lasted until sunrise, but there was still a full house around midnight when Adele burst in from outdoors in the middle of the service. “He hath set me in dark places,” Henry was reciting. “As they that be dead of old,” the congregation responded. Those in the front row of folding chairs heard a murmur of voices on a rising inflection coming from the back. I looked around and saw Adele being helped, or, rather, compelled into a seat, several gray heads bent over her, blocking my view of her, trying to stamp out the disturbance before it spread.

  “He was unto me as a bear lying in wait,” Henry continued. Sally Bissell, who was seated in the next to last row, forgot to join in the response because she heard Adele, unsubdued, asking her guardians where all the food had gone. She demanded to know how they could have “hidden” it, as she put it, in the five or ten minutes she’d been absent. Sally left her seat and moved swiftly to the back. Waving away the three elderly vestrymen (one of them her father-in-law), she put her arm around Adele and held her hand, patting and soothing her, whispering in her ear, keeping her quiet through the “Christus Factus Est,” the psalm (“The Lord Hear Thee in the Day of Trouble”), the final prayer, and the lighting of the candle on the serving cart that doubled as an altar. Every hour until dawn, a short service would be conducted. Only as the sun rose, giving light enough to see the risen Lord by, would we be permitted to sing the canticles and psalms instead of speaking them.

  Sally found Tim Webb, the park warden and a St. A’s communicant, and asked him if she and I could take Adele to his office, the only private space in the lodge. Tim got his key and unlocked the door for us. By rights, he should have backed out discreetly, leaving us alone; but Adele had started to talk and he stayed on, caught in the torrent. He heard Adele tell us she had gone outside after her crew had served dessert, just long enough to bathe her face and hands in the brook, a matter of a few minutes. She was certain she had left at exactly ten o’clock. She wanted to know how long it would be before the services started, so she had asked Ruth Hiram for the time. Tim saw her grab Sally’s wrist, push up her shirt cuff and stare at her watch, a sporty, very legible job with a gold-and-stainless-steel bracelet. She asked to see my watch, with its fraying leather strap, and Tim’s heavy chronometer, the kind used by pilots and submarine commanders. Each of these timepieces told her the same unacceptable story: over two hours of her life were missing, one hundred and thirty-five minutes by any clock.

  Tim made a
good warden because he had a cool head. In other words, he was a person of little or no spontaneity, whose feelings went numb in a crisis. It was a useful trait when dealing with a camper whose gas stove has just exploded, and just as efficient for pulling Adele back from the brink of hysteria. While she spoke his expression was blank, although his square-cut beard may have concealed a tremor. His very woodenness reassured her, and soon she was talking only to him, grasping his sleeve, begging him to listen and believe her. Tim questioned her with about as much concern as an allergist investigating the cause of a patient’s sneezing fits: had she felt ill; been imbibing alcohol; tripped and hit her head; heard or seen strange noises or movements, anything threatening; ever been subject to blackouts; taken mind-altering drugs that could repeat without warning; gazed at the moon or especially the reflection of the moon in the water and brought on a trance? Was there any item she could remember, no matter how small or irrelevant?

  At last Adele was getting into the swing of it, enjoying the attention, the appeal to herself as an expert. Tim was helping her to view the experience from a slight remove. “I saw a fly,” she said, as proud as an amateur magician who pulls a quarter from behind your ear without flubbing the trick. Tim allowed that it was still too early, officially, for the black fly, which appeared the first week in June. “I know black fly,” said Adele. “This was a large housefly. It buzzed me. I thought it was trying to sting me. I swatted at it but it kept on coming. Then I tried to throw water on it.”

  Unfair as it was, I suspected Adele of playing to the gallery. I was fond of her; I endorsed every molecule of her except her fey streak, which had widened as the spirit world went on cold-shouldering her year after year. I knew what she was after with the housefly: she was trying to pin a supernatural tag on the missing two hours. Any Christian knows that the Host and Ruler of Many, the Lord of the Dunghill, the Prince of Darkness was a shape-transformer whose principal disguises were a ram and a fly. It was obvious to me that Adele’s problem was either (1) temporary or permanent amnesia or (2) whimwham. If she was in flight from reality, what trauma was she fleeing from? The sound of a coyote killing a grouse? A bone-chilling sound, in fact, a concerto of snarls and screams with some rich, hog-like grunting for a coda. Another red-eyed cloud, like the one seen by the girls from Burridge Academy? Or something much more terrible, a human lurker with sexual intentions? According to Tim’s records, the park was empty. No campers had made reservations or signed the logbook. If we had called in Mark Centrella, our resident state trooper, he would have opted for sexual assault before Adele had finished giving her statement. Trooper Centrella, like myself, was a materialist.

  If Adele was inventing reality instead, wouldn’t that be more alarming than escaping from it? It was typical of Adele and her elfin fancies to “bathe” rather than “wash” her face and hands in the brook, when there was a sink with running water (brook water) right outside the lodge door. Following the advice of Dr. Mary Yerkes, author of Resacralizing Your Life, Adele made up all kinds of rituals. Adele hoarded rituals like a magpie. Somewhere she had learned that steeping nasturtium flowers in the bathwater invited a visit from your guardian angel. Whenever she went to Lake Sebago, she brought away a stone from its shores and put it in a growing pile at the foot of the stairs to her apartment. “You’re only allowed to take one stone at a time,” she told me, making reference to some unidentified higher authority. Water figured prominently in her rituals. She made a distinction between still and running water. The former was for revelation, divination, communication with the all-in-one and the one-in-all, while the latter was for cleansing both the physical and the etheric body. Adele regarded running water as a kind of karma wash.

  I have mentioned that Adele bathed in moonlight as well as water. By preference she took a blanket outdoors on nights of full moon, but the yard behind the garage was exposed to the Bissells’ neighbors, a pair of tax lawyers (husband and wife) who came up from Boston some weekends and a month in the summer. When it was cold, or the Coolidges were in residence, she let moonlight wash over her body through the windows, left open as often as possible so the rays could reach her unfiltered and undiluted. Adele was as methodical as her daytime equivalent, the sun worshipper, turning from her back to her left side to her stomach to her right side at intervals of fifteen minutes in each position. Although she claimed these immersions did not affect her sleep, I noticed that her vitality was low at these dates of the calendar. Her eyes were glassy and her movements languid. Ancient peoples bared themselves to the moon in adoration, but they knew, while we have forgotten, that the moon rules over death as well as fruitfulness—the moon waxes but it also wanes, dwindling to black before it can appear again.

  Adele collected rituals the way she adorned her person or her apartment, picking and choosing from various eras and styles, some of them conflicting. Hunks of amethyst quartz, spears of crystal, and fat black candles sat on her counters and windowsills. The black candles, used by witches and magicians in their conjuring ceremonies, were draped with strings of rosary beads—very pretty beads, made of millefiori glass, and such a nice effect, the brilliant colors contrasting with the black. Instead of lunches, dinners, concerts, or movies, her appointment book was marked with the feast days of many cultures. She celebrated Midsummer Eve by keeping a bonfire going all night (with Sally Bissell’s reluctant permission) and August 15, the Assumption of the Virgin, by wearing a Mary-blue dress. Adele said that the Blessed Virgin and the goddess Persephone had a lot in common because they had both been kidnapped. The fact that one of them had been snatched up to Heaven and the other down to Hades was completely unimportant. Christian, Greek, Celtic, Norse, Egyptian: all traditions were one and the same to her.

  Adele was leaning back in Tim’s office chair with her eyes closed. Tim held her right hand, pressing the acupuncture point for acute anxiety, Heart 7, located on the crease of her wrist in line with the little finger. He was concentrating hard, frowning slightly as he set about his task, rotating the point first clockwise, then counterclockwise. If only Adele could find a decent, practical man who would bring her down to earth. Tim knew how things worked, and when they broke, he could mend them. When a family of goslings lost their mother, Tim raised them himself. From my point of view his brows were too heavy and his nose tilted so far upward that you were faced with more nostril than you cared to be, but Adele might not mind that. Usually it was women who grounded men, instead of the other way around, but Adele needed ties and obligations or she, too, might be snatched away to some never-never land. Adele was a walking target for the paranormal, just as a person can be marked for sorrow or even murder. Adele and her unconscious were already drumming up uncanny happenings, of which this time-loss incident was just the first and the least notorious.

  All victims, whether of crime, fraud, accident, loss, or lovelessness, are compelled to tell their stories many times over, in puzzlement at first, and then with increasing conviction, a touch of the soapbox. They have to repeat them to give their ordeal some meaning. Adele had finished with Tim. She sat up abruptly, releasing her wrist, turned to Sally and me and beckoned us closer. In case we had missed something, or let our thoughts wander during her recital, she was giving us a chance to pick up the thread and fill in the gaps. It was a generous impulse, in part, but it derived from the assumption, shared by a majority of victims, that her story was interesting. Her story was worthy of sympathy or, rather, she was, so we gave her our respectful attention.

  “Those trays are so heavy, you know how awkward they are; the dried fruit thing was delicious, Cora; it’s too bad we didn’t have heavy cream; oh, no, was it me? Was I supposed to bring it?” I said no, it was my fault entirely; and she continued in that vein, inconsistently, with digressions, entreaties, and unessential detail, such as the fact that Ruth Hiram’s watch was a brooch that she wore pinned to her sweater. Adele’s progress to the lodge door was so lengthy that I wondered if she were going to drag out her story for as many hours as
she had lost, by way of compensation.

  At last she stepped outside into the chill night. We were told that she tripped on her way to the brook, she couldn’t imagine how, since the path she took was smooth and well trodden. She told us how silent it was when she reached the edge of the brook, only thirty paces from the lodge. She wondered why she heard no voices or clatter and reckoned that the storm windows acted as soundproofing. It seemed to her now, no, she was certain, now that she thought of it, that she had seen the brook running but couldn’t hear the water, had watched the tops of the white pines swaying and heard no wind, no branches creaking.

  Sometime during the narrative Henry had eased the door open and let himself into the office, just out of Adele’s line of vision. He had taken off his starched white surplice to keep it fresh for the next performance. I noticed that his cassock was a little frayed at the sleeves and short in the skirt. He wore all his clothes until they were shabby, including his clerical vestments. His face looked strained from the effort of getting Our Lord resurrected single-handedly. He had taken all the services in Holy Week himself because his sometime assistant, a young itinerant pastor who served Episcopal parishes in both Cumberland and Oxford counties, had been granted compassionate leave after the death of his mother. Henry had come by to find out if Adele was in need of help. His reasons for staying were not so altruistic. I could tell he had caught a whiff of the unaccountable, of something beyond the pale, something he used to find in the rites and sacraments of the church. He was watching Adele as if she were a reliquary containing a martyred saint’s dried blood that was reported to liquefy, or a statue of the Virgin Mary that was supposed to shed real tears on Good Friday. When Adele became aware of Henry, she dropped my hand and shifted her gaze to him.

  It was all coming back to her, she said. The more she concentrated on the scene the more details she recaptured. She remembered testing the silence, not wanting to admit she was testing it, “accidentally” dropping a penny from her pocket onto a rock. Then she picked up a sizable stone, let it fall on the same flat surface, and watched as it too landed noiselessly. Enveloped in silence, “fogged in,” as she described it, she kneeled down and put her hand in the brook water somewhat tentatively, as if it might have suffered a change into another element. The water was shockingly cold on her hands and face and it steadied her nerves. She tried one more experiment, shouting the vowel O into the night, projecting her voice upstream as far as it would carry. She could hear the sound in her head, but not outside around her. The darkness absorbed every wave and reverberation. From this point on her memory failed her until she found herself back on her feet and walking toward the lodge, disconcerted as she looked through the windows and saw people assembled in prayer instead of at table, where she had left them.