Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  It was Helen herself, without any prompting from Henry, who noticed she had been referring to a faceless, bodiless collection of gases as “he.” This late in her story, her shoulders were drooping and her cheeks were a hectic, patchy red. From the back of the living room I tried to catch Henry’s eye. I pointed at the ceiling, to indicate that Helen needed to go to bed. He had no intention of sparing her at such a juncture. His questions began to come faster. If she vacillated, he pinned her down relentlessly. I advanced into the room until I was standing a few feet behind the sofa where Helen was sitting. Watching Henry in pursuit of knowledge made me apprehensive. I could see Helen sitting up straighter, bracing herself for the onslaught. Why did she think it was a he? Did it make some typically masculine gesture? Did it communicate in any fashion, in speech or by thought transference? Did any sound emanate from it? Was there an odor? Had she perceived the pressure on her back as sexual? As pleasurable? The opposite of pleasurable? When Henry paused for breath I got his attention. I made the arm movements an umpire makes when he calls the base runner “out.” I believed my usually kind and sensitive husband had been about to ask an orphan and a virgin if she had been afraid of (1) anal penetration or (2) entry from behind, using the vagina.

  As much as Henry pushed her, Helen could produce no good reason why the shape in the doorway was masculine. Her conviction seemed to be based on the degree of menace it generated: the fact that it was in control, that it was “bigger and stronger” than she was, that she “had to do what he wanted” or suffer the consequence. These statements revealed more about her image of masculinity than they did about the presence. But when it came to the question of odor, she was very specific. “I smelled meat,” she said. “No, wait. It wasn’t meat. It’s the way the butcher paper smells when you leave meat in the fridge and you don’t change the wrapping. It smells like blood, stale blood. It makes you think the meat is bad but it’s really the blood on the paper.”

  If Helen was clear and precise about the odor, she was less satisfactory when it came to describing the pressure. She said it was like having too many covers on, layers of quilts and blankets of different thicknesses. As she described it, the “covers” were heavy but not hot. From time to time a layer would be added, or one would be taken away. Toward the end of the night she felt she had fewer covers on than she had at the beginning. “It seemed like a reward for good behavior.” Who or what was rewarding and/or punishing her? Helen was certain it wasn’t the sentry at the threshold. “He was only a minion,” she said. “I don’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.”

  So far, Helen had been doing her best to give complete, thoughtful answers, as if she were a graduate student taking her orals and Henry one of her examiners. All at once, she got irritable and began to show some spirit. She wondered how Henry could possibly imagine the sensation of pressure as pleasurable. It was one more trial in the mass of discomforts she had endured. And she didn’t think that whatever was pressing down on her was trying to rape her, if that’s what Dr. Lieber meant by “sexual.” Helen leaned forward, challenging Henry. “You think my friends were raped,” she said, as if the idea had struck her for the first time. “Is that it? Is that what happened?”

  If Helen was forced to keep going over her experience, she would soon be too agitated to fall asleep. We had to get her up by seven the next morning. The bus to Boston left at nine o’clock, and the bus station was twenty minutes away in East Windham. Henry motioned to me, inviting me to join them. Seated to either side of Helen, we managed together to calm her down, reassuring her—truthfully enough—that clinical tests had proved none of her classmates had been raped. As to her own ordeal, Henry told her there was a name for the strange, shifting images you see just before sleep: they were called hypnagogic hallucinations, and they often occurred in connection with sleep paralysis. Helen was an intellectual girl, who aspired to a career in scholarship. In spite of her experience, so fresh in her mind, she was able to hear an appeal to reason and be influenced by it. Before accompanying her up to her room, I made her swallow two tablets with a glass of water. Clear thinking combined with aspirin would guarantee her rest.

  That same prescription had the opposite effect on her hosts. We sat up until the small hours, trying to solve the puzzle by approaching it logically. Four people had dreamed the same nightmare with certain differences that might be significant: Helen was lying on her stomach, not her back; she never heard the presence coming or going, or the footfall described by Adele as “someone using a wet mop.” Three out of four preferred to believe they were awake through it all. At what point did a series of dreams form a pattern that deserved a name? When the dreamers numbered in the hundreds? In the hundreds of thousands? For a few minutes Henry allowed himself to think aloud about a new way of life in which he was no longer a corporate functionary but a free agent, practicing at the secular end of the mysticism business, conducting private research projects and supporting his research with scores of interviews, interviews with dreamers, hallucinators, out-of-body travelers, automatic writers, seers of ghosts, angels, and demons—anyone reputable, or disreputable, who might have some information about the existence of God and other incongruous phenomena.

  Henry shook off this reverie by reminding himself that the shadowy invader was probably nothing more than an archetypal figure, a symbolic formation of the collective unconscious. Jung’s archetypes were disappointingly human in origin—patterns of behavior and responses inherited from the cave man, well-worn grooves in our primitive memory. The shape in the doorway derived from an ancient fear of the darkness and from a deep-seated instinct to safeguard the integrity of the body. No matter how powerful an archetype like Helen’s “form” might seem, it was not an independent entity. Archetypes did not, and never would, constitute grounds for believing in the spirit world. After several hours or discussion we came up with nothing but questions—such as why had Helen merely been restrained instead of sexually stimulated, like the others? Colored by fatigue and frustration, our speculations on this and every item were as vaporous as the sentinel in Helen’s doorway. Perhaps Helen was inviolable by nature, we conjectured, a born spinster, a kind of prep-school Joan of Arc. When we finally went to bed, Henry was suffering from dejection as much as fatigue. “We don’t know what happened,” he said. “We don’t know if anything happened.”

  The nine a.m. bus to Boston left without Helen Akers, and so did the eleven o’clock. We didn’t have the heart to wake her up. At noon Henry decided to drive her down himself, seeing no reason why he shouldn’t be back in time to meet with the church festival committee at six-thirty. I stayed behind because I had promised Ruth Hiram to provide canapés and a cheese board for a little cocktail party at the library in honor of several outgoing volunteers. Ruth had enough money in the budget to pay for my services. I was pressed for time, but I packed picnic lunches for Henry and Helen—egg-and-watercress sandwiches, tangerines, and some of the ginger cookies I’d made. I tucked my red sleeveless tee shirt and a copy of A Girl of the Limberlost in with Helen’s things—she had admired the one and asked to borrow the other.

  I wanted to do what I could for her. For no medical reason, Henry and I were childless. Most of the time it suited me fine, but occasionally I felt regret, as I did that morning at the sight of Helen fighting back tears. I wanted to be the one person in the world who was allowed to see her weeping and to hold her until the sobs passed. As it was, I could only hover in the background, refilling her glass of milk at breakfast, finding her an extra toothbrush and a comb because she’d left her own at the dormitory, fetching her suitcase so she wouldn’t have to climb the stairs again. Helen had come downstairs at ten-thirty, while Henry and I were having a second breakfast. Henry turned off the coffee grinder when he saw her. I put down the bread knife. She walked into the kitchen with her hands clasped behind her back and her head bowed, like a child expecting a scolding. She looked up and met our eyes without a trace of resentment in her expression. She said, “He fol
lowed me. How did he find me here? Is he going to follow me to Boston?”

  Henry told Helen’s grandmother that a group of Burridge seniors had been put in the infirmary just before graduation. They were fully recovered, but no one knew what they’d come down with—probably an intestinal bug. Henry hoped Mrs. Reid would watch Helen carefully over the next few days for an outbreak of symptoms and instruct her staff to do so as well. Mrs. Reid was a bright-eyed, fine-boned old woman who was exasperated by her inactivity and welcomed any diversion. If anything, Henry wagered, she would supervise Helen too closely. She thought she might ask Helen to sleep on the folding cot in her dressing room for several nights. “I’ll make up some excuse. Give the night nurse time off to visit her daughter.” It seemed that Mrs. Reid’s flair for coloring the truth in a good cause was at least as well developed as Henry’s. What else could he have said? That her granddaughter had been frightened by a hypnagogic image? That she believed she was being pursued by a baneful specter? That her fears might be well founded?

  Since Helen had been my guest, I was distressed that she’d spent a bad night under my roof. It might have been more solicitous to insist she take one of the guest rooms on the second floor, but to have done so would be the same as conceding that the attic was contaminated. In my opinion, Helen would have conjured up her phantom pursuer no matter what bedroom I had put her in. Her encounter in our attic, however, had tallied in several particulars with testimonies by Adele and Hannah. She claimed she had heard him climbing the stairs. He walked slowly. His footfall was soft and gliding. She said, “It flashed through my mind that his feet were wrapped in rags.” Thereafter the encounter replicated her experience in the dormitory: “He” remained at the threshold, willed her into immobility, and disappeared at sunrise.

  Henry came back from Boston energized rather than depleted. The five-hour trip had not tired him. When the church festival committee meeting was over, around eight o’clock, he went straight to the telephone to call Walter Emmet. He told Walter he had decided to let Lorraine Drago have a whiff of our third floor. Dazzled by opportunity, he also wanted to waltz her through the bedrooms in West Dorm. Walter fell in with his plan. They would be using Lorraine the way miners used a caged canary when they were checking underground passageways for poison gases. Torn between fear of failure and a desire to play a part in this enterprise of Henry’s, Lorraine agreed to be used.

  The following morning Henry went off to meet her at the Borden Cramer house (1760), where she was conferring with the building inspector on behalf of interested clients. From thence they would proceed to the school, ending up at the rectory. I had no stake in what they got up to as long as I was not obliged to give them lunch. I had July’s columns to finish and mail to the paper: “Fireworks Picnics,” “An Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Social,” “The Summer Vegetarian,” and “A Choice of Cobblers.” I walked Henry out to the car. He kissed me goodbye and said, “I think we have enough to go on.” I forbore to tell him he had nothing to go on except coincidence and wishful thinking. Instead, I stood in the driveway waving until his car turned out of sight.

  Lorraine’s performance at West Dorm was “less than amateurish,” according to Walter, but he had never seen Lorraine in trance before. Most psychics appeared to be undergoing some kind of torment. Lorraine went into a stupor, glassy-eyed, mouth hanging open, speech thick and off-key, as if her tongue were swollen. Some psychics remembered nothing when they came to. Lorraine Drago was alert and sensible right away, with excellent recall and an unusual ability to be objective. All she had picked up on the second floor of the dorm was something she called “room noise,” a kind of humming perceived as silence by the unaided ear. Then, out of the blue, she asked Henry who was living in the dormitory. Was it possible Miss Leatherbee had come back? Who was roasting a cut of meat that early in the day? Lorraine was certain it was beef. The odor was distinctive, sharp and sweet and a little sickening so soon after breakfast.

  At Lorraine’s insistence they explored the dorm kitchen and the housemother’s suite, both of which were clean and empty. From the kitchen they could see the back end of the infirmary, sixty feet away. In Jane Shufelt’s apartment on the second floor the windows were wide open. A figure, Jane herself, was moving back and forth in one of the rooms. She reached up to open a cabinet, turned around and stooped down out of view, then stood up and walked out of the frame, carrying a pot or a dish in gloved hands. From which they deduced, all but Henry, that the room they were observing was Jane’s kitchen; that Jane was in her kitchen, cooking; and that Jane’s cooking was the source of the odor Lorraine had reported. But why, Henry asked, was Lorraine the only one who had noticed it? Walter’s sense of smell was well developed and Henry’s was perfectly normal. Walter played the part of the rationalist. “You and I were too focused on Lorraine to notice it,” he said. Henry reminded Walter that the windows of West Dorm had been closed while Lorraine was in a trance, and that several students had also smelled meat. He could see that Walter was losing interest in the idea of a manifestation that took the form of cooked, or cooking, flesh. Walter had tightened his mouth into a firm line and was rubbing an imaginary spot on the knees of his trousers.

  Waiting silently on a straight-backed chair, Lorraine Drago was embarrassed by her lack of success. She had brought back one small pearl from the depths and now its authenticity was being questioned. She was more than ready to believe her perceptions were false. Her gift had begun to dwindle in the last few years, perhaps from lack of practice, perhaps because she was too successful in business. She had been foolish and vain to respond to pressure from Henry and Walter. Except for those few sessions in the Duke University laboratories, she had never performed well when she was the center of attention. However unreliable her gift, Lorraine was too fair-minded to back out before her task was finished. She had promised to examine our attic and she always kept her promises. I was typing at the kitchen table when the front door opened. I heard Lorraine say, “Let me just nip upstairs for a minute. I’ll go by myself.”

  Lorraine was gone a short time, only twenty minutes or so. She came up dry, for Henry’s purposes, although I learned she had seen the figure of a woman in a long-sleeved nightdress and ruffled nightcap on her knees by the Beaulac bed, saying her prayers. A young woman with a pronounced nose and heavy, dark eyebrows that met in the middle, she resembled the miniature portrait, inherited by my mother, of my great-great-great Aunt Sévérine. There was nothing to account for Sévérine’s appearance on this occasion, or any other. Her life had been fruitful but humdrum. She lived seventy years, bore nine children, and died in her sleep in the early 1850s. Of course, it is possible she was praying for the soul of her youngest daughter, Laure, who had eloped with a dissolute French Catholic.

  What was Henry left with after all his sleuthing? A considerable deficit, in my opinion. His recruits were showing signs of vacillation. Walter began talking about how tied up he’d be with the antiques show in Portland, for which he’d been commissioned to supply the flowers and do the arrangements. Lorraine pleaded that summer was the busiest season for real estate agencies. She was unlikely to want to risk failure soon again. She was too mortified to take heart from the fact that she had seen a real ghost, if I may put it that way. Her sighting delighted my mother, but it disappointed Henry. Henry had lost a measure of confidence in Lorraine. Any other time he wouldn’t have felt he had to double-check her findings. Since she had proved herself to be an ineffective lightning rod, he offered himself up instead, “just to see if I get anything.”

  It was a genuine sacrifice to sleep in the attic in the current heat wave. All an electric fan could do was push the hot air around. Henry came down the next morning with black circles under his eyes from tossing and turning, but not from encounters with specters.

  PART VI

  Christ to the Left of Us

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ever since the First World War the church festival had been held on August 15, the feast of the
Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The wartime incumbent and his vestry picked that date because the festival was, in large part, a celebration of women’s work—needlecraft, cookery, gardening, flower arranging. Contributions from the kitchen, the garden, and the Dorcas Guild still produced most of the income from the fair, although we had added booths to display and sell local arts and crafts. Headed by Ralph Hiram, the men of the parish ran the lunch room and the pancake tent. When I married Henry, I immediately put myself in charge of the bake sale, which was now so well stocked and so superior it attracted people from the summer colonies along the coast. Our standard was high: no cakes with the top layer slipping sideways; no items made with packaged mixes; no recipes that called for the inclusion of jelly beans, gumdrops, or any other candy sold in movie theaters; piecrust made with Crisco only; a large selection of breads, rolls, and muffins. As a spur to vanity as well as enterprise, ribbons were awarded in five categories: yeast breads, quick breads, cookies, pies, and cake decoration.

  This year—like most years—I was one of the judges, along with Jane Morse, Sally Bissell, and Ruth Hiram. I had scarcely seen my friends since the Burridge exigency. In early July I called a meeting of the bake sale committee, hoping it would give us a chance to spend time together.

  At the small-town level, all committee meetings were two-thirds gossip and one-third work. This meeting was a disappointment in both respects. Everyone was late and no one apologized for it. When we were all assembled, it took them a while to settle down. Sally made a telephone call. Ruth got up twice to get more ice for her glass of lemonade. Jane leafed through the magazines on the coffee table. At last they sat back in their chairs and looked at me expectantly. Instead of jumping in and all talking at once, which was our custom, riding over the ends of one another’s sentences, reading thoughts, they were waiting for me to take the lead.