Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  Henry knew the names of the demons that persecuted his patients and his parishioners—Anxiety, Depression, Lust, Anger, Self-Loathing; and he knew these demons by their ancient and medieval names as well, from Asmodeus to Zizzubabel. In the consulting room he gave demons short shrift, since to him they were nothing more than stumbling blocks on the way to self-realization. However, he remembered very clearly that there was a time in the history of the Church when demons were perceived as something denser than neurotic figments. According to many generations of churchmen and inquisitors, demons could assume a certain earthly reality in order to appear to us. By borrowing from energies in us and in the atmosphere, they could create a kind of semi-body, a spurious organism. Just as human beings longed for union with the spirit, so incorporeal beings, both angels and demons, yearned for contact with matter. Angels contented themselves with exerting a benign influence over men’s bodies—snatching them out of the path of a boulder during an avalanche, guiding the surgeon’s hand during a long and difficult operation—but demons had no such ability to hold their natures in check. Their desire to be familiar with flesh was ravenous, insatiable, the more urgent because they possessed no generative powers. Night after night they assaulted human beings in their beds, striving to produce life—but all that came of their efforts were empty wombs swollen with air. Night after night they persisted, taking the topmost position with women and the lowermost with men, in a sterile parody of passion.

  “Speaking entirely theoretically,” said Henry to Walter, “there is a name in the annals for a demon who disturbs women’s sleep.” Walter was planting the first Green Dragons, five bulbs to a pot, with a mothball at the bottom of each hole to keep rodents away. “An incubus,” Henry continued. “Plural ‘incubi.’” Walter smiled and nodded encouragingly. If he hadn’t been holding a spoon and a bag of bulb food, he would have patted Henry on the back. “I don’t like being led by the nose,” said Henry. “If you already knew all about it, why not name it yourself?” Walter held a good-sized bulb up to eye level and flicked old dirt off the roots with an artist’s soft-bristled paintbrush. “And why are you cleaning the damn thing if you’re going to stick it right back in the dirt again?” Walter began to laugh, a big laugh for such a scrawny man. “Ruffled your fur, didn’t I?” he said. “That’s all right,” Henry said. “I asked for it.”

  Their comradeship restored, Henry stayed on a while longer. It was six o’clock and the afternoon was over. Henry lingered pleasurably, declining the offer of something stronger than iced tea. They discussed the evidence for and against an incubus, as if demonic assault in our neighborhood were as matter-of-fact an occurrence as infestations of tent caterpillars. Walter had been given to understand that demonic forces were much more potent away from towns. Such attacks were most likely to take place in the country or in the mountains, where human settlement was sparse. “That Burridge student,” he said. “The one who didn’t fall asleep. I hope someone is keeping an eye on her.” They argued about whether the West Dorm seniors were dreaming or under attack. Walter reminded Henry that an incubus devil may or may not elect to manifest to onlookers. Walter had become so animated that he paused in his labors, turning away from his workbench to speak to Henry face to face. With a gleam in his eye, he predicted we weren’t “out of the woods”: the dreams would become more lascivious, and the line between dream and waking reality would be blurred past recognition.

  If Henry minded hearing that his own wife, among others, was going to be besieged by recurring erotic nightmares, he was soon distracted by the view of the hills changing color in the golden light, and the sight of several sheep playing tag on the upland pasture. He was always soothed by high places and reluctant to leave Walter’s terrace for the Dry Falls flats. He was only half listening to Walter, who was holding forth on the subject of “bedroom invaders” from vampires to extraterrestrials. Walter was exercised because authors and scholars (“pseudo-scholars, Henry; the field is a magnet to them”) tended to lump all nighttime intruders together under a single broad heading: “hauntings.” A phenomenologist by instinct—although he would have called it “training your eye”—Walter felt that strange happenings should be classified with at least as much attention to detail as furniture. If it was possible to distinguish an eighteenth-century chair carved in Newport from one made in Providence, then there was no excuse for mixing up one kind of paranormal occurrence with another. First and foremost, ghosts merely appeared to people, whereas vampires, demons, and aliens interfered with them. “Everything on its own terms,” said Walter.

  Henry settled deeper into his chair. Here on Walter’s terrace it was possible to ignore the unchanging heat for a little while. It was pleasant to lie quiet, aspiring to inertness, but he was failing in his conversational duties. His host was looking at him impatiently. “Sorry, Walter,” he apologized, and went on to say that psychologists were just as bad as psychical researchers. They, too, filed all nocturnal visitations under a single heading: “hallucinations.” Walter and Henry continued conversing until Walter invited his guest to share his supper—nothing but sandwiches; he usually ate standing up while he potted. With great reluctance Henry left his chair, the view, and his friend. Later he would remember what a luxury it was to be discussing anomalous events from a vicarious distance with no special urgency—like two undergraduates at the end of term lying by the river and arguing about whether the cow on the opposite bank existed in her own right or only when they were looking at her. That evening, and for a short time to come, all secret, black, and midnight agencies were still just airy abstractions deriving their existence from men’s footloose intellects.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sometime during the fork luncheon served on the Main Building lawn after graduation, Jean Leatherbee stole away without collecting her paycheck or leaving a forwarding address. I had nothing to do with the food except make a sporting attempt to eat it, and I wondered if Jean had decided to leave before or after tasting the chicken salad, so dry from overpoaching that no amount of mayonnaise could moisten it. The tension behind the scenes must have communicated itself to the kitchen staff, accounting not only for the chicken but also for the choice of dessert—bricks of vanilla ice cream garnished with multicolored sprinkles. The cook had simply given up and taken the easy way out, just as Miss Leatherbee had. Jean’s departure affected Helen Akers particularly. She had agreed to be with Helen throughout the day and to stay the night. Poor Helen had no claque in the audience at the ceremonies. Her father and mother were dead, and there was only a brother, who’d been posted by the foreign service to Capetown, South Africa. The day after graduation Jean was to have put Helen on the bus for Boston, where she lived with her grandmother, who was confined to her bed with bouts of crippling arthritis. Apparently Helen’s story—almost Victorian in its accumulation of pathetic detail—made no appeal to Miss Leatherbee’s conscience. Myra Littlefield thought it would be distressing for Helen to stay at the school, so she asked us to take her.

  Before I knew Helen was coming, I’d already started to prepare an old-fashioned farm supper: chicken stew with a biscuit topping; three kinds of vegetables (green beans, wax beans, and mashed potatoes); sliced beet–and–red onion salad dressed with oil and vinegar; stewed rhubarb with whipped cream for dessert; and a pitcher of iced mint tea to wash it down. Sometimes I began to free-associate in the kitchen and forget I was cooking for only two people. Having another mouth to feed gave me fresh incentive. I dashed off a batch of ginger cookies, which were still in the oven when Myra and Jane dropped Helen off and handed me Jane’s report. By the time Henry came home, I had given Helen a tour of the bedrooms. She had chosen to sleep on the third floor because her room in her grandmother’s house was in the attic. “There’s no room to stand up straight except in the middle,” she said with a grin, as if that were an ideal arrangement for someone who had hurt her leg.

  If Henry could be said to have a favorite dish, it was a mound of buttery mashed potatoes w
ith a well of chicken gravy in the center, but he was ready to give up the sight and taste of it in an instant for the chance to question Helen at the dinner table. During the crisis at West Dorm Helen had been overlooked. No one saw to her psychological welfare. If she had managed to stay awake, she must be all right. The sleeping seniors were “sick”; therefore, Helen was “well.” Since she had slept on the third floor, she had been questioned only perfunctorily. She had been neglected as a source of information. Henry wanted to correct this oversight as soon as possible, before Helen could take another portion of green beans (rich in vitamin A, which helped rebuild broken bones), before she was distracted by the sweet/sour flavor of the salad, before the rhubarb fool (two cups sugar to three cups of fruit) made her drowsy and inattentive.

  He began by asking her if she had applied for a single dorm room or had been assigned one. I changed the subject by reminding Henry that the adult confirmation class had been put off for a week because its only two members, Cass and Bert Nolan, had Bert’s eighty-year-old mother visiting. Next, Henry wanted to know if she had gone to bed before or after the other seniors. This time I tried several wifely gambits all at once: frowning at him, kicking him under the table, interrupting him to ask Helen if I could refill her iced-tea glass. After that, he stuck to questions that concerned her intention of majoring in ancient history in college and her ardent desire to go on a dig with a Professor Fennerman, who was excavating the ancient city of Sardis. When supper was over, I served coffee in the living room instead of at the table, as I usually do. I lingered behind, clearing away the dishes, leaving Henry and his subject seated opposite each other.

  Before I heard Helen’s story, I was a curious bystander. After I heard it, I was less secure in my skepticism. When I asked Henry how she had told it, he answered “stoically”—as befitted a girl who had sat two hours in the emergency room waiting for her leg to be set after the bicycle accident and then insisted, when her turn came, that the feverish child sitting next to her be attended to first. Above all other virtues, New Englanders prize self-control. Henry and I were impressed by Helen’s testimony right away because she tried to hide her suffering. If we put less stock in Adele and my sister, it was because they made a display of their pain; and there is an element of pleasure and release in the process of self-disclosure. We credited them less than Helen, even wondered if they might not be “getting a kick out of it.” Adele and Hannah told their stories from start to finish without brooking interruption. They had no use for captions, headlines, flash bulletins, or any other synoptic devices. Once under way, the story flowed like a river, carrying the listener helpless in its waters.

  The Trojan prophetess Cassandra was locked up in a tower as much to spare her hearers the style of her delivery as its gloomy substance. In order to make sure no one would believe her, far-seeing Zeus gave her a grating, high-pitched voice. Cassandra and her kind are remembered best as bores and windbags, no matter how high their scores for accuracy. Looking back on it now, Helen’s story was taken seriously not on its own merits but because Helen herself had a high degree of credibility. If it hadn’t been for that steady gaze, that brave tilt of chin, that artless, sober way of speaking, we would have attributed her experiences to any number of reasonable causes: fatigue, fear of the dark, a bid for the spotlight, the increasing burden of virginity.

  There were two single rooms in West Dorm. They were both on the second floor and one belonged to the housemother, Miss Leatherbee. At the end of spring term Burridge students drew lots for roommates and room assignments for the next academic year. Helen wanted the single, although the rest of her dorm mates thought it was undesirable, even bad luck. After she drew it, she found out where the misfortune lay. When laughter from the twin-bedded rooms seeped under her door, her heart froze with loneliness. She had looked forward to being by herself—reading, studying, doing research on the arrowheads she found in plowed fields. After a year of sharing a room with Abigail Hardy, she was ready for solitude. The notion of privacy was threatening to Abigail. If two people were sitting in a room reading instead of conversing, that meant one of them was mad at the other.

  Helen was especially aware of her own isolation on weekend nights and special occasions like the Rumsey School dance. She had no one with whom she could endlessly review any number of trivial incidents, such as how long exactly Pickle and her freckled partner had been missing from the dance floor; and whether the punch tasted weird and what was saltpeter anyway? Mercy used to say that if something was worth discussing once, it was worth discussing a hundred times, but Mercy hadn’t been her roommate since sophomore year. On Saturday nights Helen fell into the habit of sneaking into Mercy and Pickle’s quarters after room check until she began to catch tireless, good-time Mercy stifling a yawn and Pickle making no attempt to keep her eyes open.

  On the eve of graduation Helen kept to her own room, in spite of an invitation from Mercy and Pickle to “try and stay up all night.” The world seemed to be organized into couples and she was sick of being the leftover person. She and Mercy did go down to raid the icebox and found its contents disappointing. They parted in the kitchen, Mercy taking the front stairs and Helen the back. Helen’s trunk was packed, but her suitcase lay open on the bed, waiting to be filled. She was folding sweaters when the sounds of merriment reached her—giggling, music, and chatter muted by solid oak doors. At one point she heard doors opening and closing. She peeked out and saw Pickle Raines gliding up and down the hallway, showing off her white graduation dress. She visited every room except for Helen’s and, of course, Miss Leatherbee’s. Helen grabbed her favorite book, Jane Eyre, a self-pitying choice, turned out the lights, and stole quietly upstairs to the juniors’ floor. She let herself into the room nearest the stairwell, the room Connie Jessup had shared with Nancy Cole. She stretched out on Connie’s bed, propped her head up with several pillows, and began to read by the light of a forty-watt bulb. Up here, with the door closed, she could hear an occasional thump from downstairs, but no merry voices. She read only as far as Jane’s first morning at the Lowood School, when the porridge is burned, before her eyes closed.

  “I think I dozed off with the light on,” Helen told Henry. She heard the door click open, too small a sound to wake her out of a deep sleep. She heard the click—and the next thing she knew the door was wide open, but she never saw it opening. When she looked around, she couldn’t see much. The light was dim, as if the bulb was dying, and it was brownish, or yellow-brown. She thought a fog had come in through the window, but it was a dirty city fog—not the silver-white fog you see in the country. She thought Miss Leatherbee must have looked in, seen her sleeping, and decided not to wake her.

  She turned over on her stomach and composed herself for sleep again. On the point of nodding off, she became aware that the low-lying brown fog was issuing from the door, not the window. It was moving, swirling, gathering itself into a shape that filled the doorway, a mass of vapors imitating a solid material body. She couldn’t see through it. It was taking form, a restless, amorphous form about the size of a man, now hooded and caped, almost realistic; now a circular blob; now a tall, narrow rectangle, something on stilts. It had no face as such. There were two dark holes in the place where eyes should be. “There was no face,” she said, “no facial expression. But I’m sure it was staring at me.”

  Lying on her stomach with her face turned toward the door, she was able to see the murky presence through half-closed eyelids. Her body was paralyzed, except for her eyelids. When Henry asked why she couldn’t move, she said something was weighing her down, a uniform, all-over pressure, not terribly heavy but strong enough to hold the threat of suffocation. Who was pressing on her, or what? Could she feel the imprint of hands, a knee, a foot? She said no, it was only weight, but a weight with a purpose, a will of its own, related to the presence in the doorway—“split off from it” was how she put it. The shape moved as she watched it, billowing across the threshold, then receding into the corridor. How far
beyond the threshold it moved depended on her. Helen was sure of two things: she knew she was fully awake because everything in the room was in its place, and she knew that if she tried to struggle it would penetrate the room.

  Therefore it was her job, as she construed it, to stay alert as long as the shadow stood in the doorway. It never occurred to her that there might be only one of him, that he was “acting on his own.” She saw him right away as a kind of sentinel, warning others of his kind against the approach of danger. But why were these “others” mounting a guard on her? In what way could she represent a danger to their plans? While the night wore on, Helen lay there breathing as shallowly as someone in a faint. She fell heir to numerous small afflictions—stiff neck, itching nose, jumping nerves, numbness and tingling in the limbs, an urgent bladder. It took all the willpower she had to keep from trying to change position and alerting her warder. In fact, these sources of discomfort were a godsend. As long as she was trying to combat them, she was protected from an experience of fear. She said, “I think if I had known I was afraid, I would have died of fear.” Sometime before full light, her eyelids closed from exhaustion. When she opened them again the form was gone and Miss Leatherbee was bending over her. “I never saw him leave,” said Helen. “I was hoping when daybreak came I could see him better.”