The decision to dress for dinner was entirely spontaneous. Was Sally our sartorial inspiration, with her inborn sense of style and grooming? Or was it the aroma of my succulent ragout wafting from the oven? British foreign officers and their wives, assigned to equatorial Africa, preserved the social rituals of home in their hilltop bungalows, sipping gin cocktails in their yellowing dinner jackets and beaded sheaths. On nights when the native drums were a little louder, the lions a little closer, the houseboys surlier, they played American dance tunes on the wind-up phonograph to drown out their misgivings.
We were having a party, a celebration without a cause. We lacked paper hats, crackers, and favors but we were full of convivial spirit, hearty appetites for food and drink. Henry made more than one trip to the basement during the evening. He kept our wineglasses filled and surprised us with champagne at dessert. Toasts were drunk, both respectful and irreverent, to my cooking, to Sally’s elegance, to Jupiter and Thor, who bring lightning and thunderstorms. Walter picked up the saltcellar and shook it over his left shoulder. “Salt for the tail of the Devil,” he said, raising his glass to us.
Catching his mood, Ruth got up from her chair and pulled it back from the table with a flourish, as if she were offering her seat to an unexpected guest. “Come join us,” she called, gesturing toward the ceiling. For an answer we heard a loud knock, obligatory sound effect at any séance, coming from the living room. The ladies cowered in their chairs, all hilarity stifled. Henry dashed toward the scene, followed by Walter. “Stand back,” ordered Henry, who entered the living room alone, still gripping his white damask napkin in his left hand. By now we were huddled together at the threshold. I peered over my mother’s shoulder. Ruth was armed with a dessert spoon and Sally had seized the salt shaker.
Henry advanced to the center of the room and pointed at the floor. From one of the bookshelves a sizable volume had fallen and lay face upward, its back out of line and probably broken. Henry picked up the book, holding it a little away from him. Making a kind of stretcher of his napkin, he carried it back to the table and began to unwrap it. “Would you hurry?” I said. “What is it?” “It’s a message,” breathed Ruth. “What section did it fall from?” asked Walter, whose library, unlike ours, was organized into categories. Henry made a production of closing the book and straightening its spine. We leaned in to read the lettering on the jacket. “Drug what?” asked Sally, pushing me aside to get a clearer look. “Drug Prescribing for the Elderly,” read Walter, “by Dr. Norman J. Ross and Carol Benedetto, Ph.D.”
I heard them carrying on in the living room as I loaded the dishwasher—I could never leave the dishes till morning. They were daring books to fall from the shelves. Walter wanted to start with a paperback. Henry picked a collection of Ogden Nash’s light verse because it was “less resistant” than the Penguin Lives of the Saints, Walter’s earlier choice. There were a few seconds of silence, interrupted by bursts of laughter, scolding from Walter, Sally demanding more champagne. Ruth suggested they each try a separate volume and see who won. Emily said they were working too far from the target. Henry decided to give them a handicap, allowing them to pull their books out two inches from the shelf. Sally was accused of cheating and Walter came into the kitchen to ask me for a tape measure. At one point they were quiet long enough for me to finish washing the casserole and a saucepan; then they all turned on Walter, who was standing too close to his book, “nose to nose,” protested Sally.
I smiled with pleasure to hear them so high-spirited. Laughter was a benefit, restoring balance, relaxing tensions, improving the circulation and the elimination of waste products, mental as well as physical. They were laughing so hard they had to abandon the book game. Telekinesis was too competitive. They wanted something they could play together in a circle, not the usual guessing games or card games, something with the same forbidden character as moving books mentally.
“I’ve got it!” exclaimed Walter, who was always in the vanguard. “Where’s your Ouija board, Henry?” Henry said no reputable parson would keep a Ouija board in the house; it was grounds for unfrocking. Walter announced they would make one. All that was required was a piece of brown paper, cut in a rectangle, a black Magic Marker, and a teacup. You wrote the letters of the alphabet at the top, the numbers one to ten at the bottom, and the words “Yes” and “No” in the space in the middle. Everyone had played with the Ouija at some time or another, though not for decades. When the Ouija is brought out at a house party, one of the guests always expresses dire misgivings. “It’s nothing to fool around with,” said Ruth, piping up right on cue. I was pressed into service to find a large paper bag, some scissors, and a marker. I donated a blue-and-white willowware cup that had long ago lost its saucer.
As I passed back and forth, clearing the salts and peppers, wiping the placemats and crumbing the table, I saw them gathered around the living-room coffee table while Walter lettered the brown paper. Henry and Sally had taken off their shoes. Ruth was kibitzing. “Leave more space between the two rows of letters. Your ‘I’ looks like an ‘L.’” Emily perched on the edge of an armchair, bright-eyed and expectant. Walter said Henry should bring the mirror above the fireplace to their end of the room and prop it against the wall so that it reflected them. “When there are spirits in the room, a mirror darkens.”
This brought on fresh laughter and moans of simulated terror. Sally was drumming her heels on the floor. Wiping her eyes with her hand, Ruth managed to smear her lipstick. Emily rocked back and forth, but emitted no sound. They could scarcely contain themselves. Walter started joking about what he would ask. “Maybe it can tell me who stole my snuffbox at the Framingham Antiques Show.” Sally gasped, “Let’s ask it if Ford has a mistress.” Walter said, “Let’s give it the acid test. Ask it if I have a mistress.”
Drying the silver knives, I listened indulgently to their foolishness. None of it was as funny to me as it was to them. I could hang up my dishrag and join them, or I could start polishing silver—the cutlery, the saltshakers, the covered serving dish. I was happier in the role of auditor. It was too late to catch up with them. They were shedding constraints right and left, while my first priority was the housework. Laughter was liberating, perhaps overliberating, a way of tempting fate. Here was Sally hinting at, or wishing for, a rift in her marriage. And Walter, who guarded his respectability as fiercely as any curio in his inventory, making fun of his sexual inclination. Laughter tempted you out on a limb that might not hold you. If it prompted self-exposure, what other forms of rule breaking might it lead to?
They had laid down rules for insuring my protection and already broken most of them: alcohol was flowing; I was in one room and they were in another; they were embarking on a game with an uncertain reputation, considering the circumstances.
The Ouija was popular with teenagers. We used to play it at slumber parties. The questions were usually innocuous: Does Tommy like me? Who will ask me to the prom? Did I pass my algebra test? The plastic message indicator, shaped like a heart, wobbled haltingly around the board, interrupted by recurring squabbles: “You’re pushing”; “I am not”; “Well, someone is!” The indicator was slow-witted and obedient. I had never seen it acting on its own, zooming from letter to letter, diving off the edge of the board or refusing to budge, as it was supposed to do when the magic was working. Even to feel its slightest movement was a thrill, which had satisfied me and my girlhood chums and left a lasting memory.
Why should the group in my living room have a more intense experience? Surely the oracle responded to the seriousness—and sobriety—of the players. The lore of the Ouija was full of warnings to dabblers and smart alecks. The oracle, a creature of the light, was only as strong as the good faith of its petitioners. When the latter were frivolous or disrespectful, it could be ambushed and hog-tied by thugs from the realms of darkness, usurpers of its office. According to the evidence, to which the living-room group seemed temporarily oblivious, there were ruffians of this class in our vicinity.
Serve everybody right if the Ouija were shanghaied by the Dry Falls entity. In its control, the message indicator would lead the players on a breakneck chase, scaring the wits out of them. I was going to bed to finish reading Murder at the Vicarage, unnoticed by my so-called guardians.
At the top of the stairs I heard Sally’s voice. The game was under way. She spoke loudly, as if she were calling the oracle long distance. She addressed it by name in a courtly style. “Tell us, O Ouija, if the fog was natural or supernatural.” She had let it slip, and now Henry would go after it, keen as a scent-hound. The alarm would be raised, people rushing to the windows to see if the fog had returned, bursting into my room to make sure I was still intact. Emily would be sent up to sit with me, making it impossible to read, spoiling my peace with her cloying watchfulness.
The inquest was beginning. “What fog?” asked Henry. “Where was it?” Ruth interrupted him. “No talking, Henry. We can’t concentrate.” “You’ve broken the connection,” said Walter. “We’ll skip Sally’s turn. Someone else ask a question.” For a minute or two they were quiet, focusing their attention, a long interval for a rowdy gang of tipplers. I expected an outburst momentarily—Sally protesting the loss of her turn, Walter shushing her, Ruth lobbying to be the next one in line. Then Emily spoke up in a tone of prayerful humility. “Please help me, Ouija. When will I find my lost daughter?”
As I slipped between the sheets my nightdress rode up above my hips. There was some kind of grit in the bed, prickling my bare backside. I got out of bed and inspected the bottom sheet. It was scattered with gray-green crumbs, dried vegetable matter. I picked up the pillows and saw a bunch of leafy stems tied together with white ribbon. I had asked Emily not to put herbs in my bed. The first night I found sprays of mugwort, because Emily had read that John the Baptist wore a girdle of it in the wilderness. This time it was common garden sage, for its cleansing properties, I supposed, and for its reputation as a demonifuge. Grumbling at Emily and her good intentions, I shook out the bottom sheet and remade the bed, propped my pillows against the headboard, and settled down to read myself to sleep.
I had chosen the right book—not enough blood to cause bad dreams, nor human interest to inspire wakeful empathy, a quaintness in the atmosphere suggestive of unchanging values as upheld by the Church of England. Soon my eyes began to close and the book slid out of my hands. I turned off the lamp. The moon was high and almost full, its bright rays streaming through the windows. Moonlight magnified the objects in the room, outlining them with shadow. I fell asleep as I was wondering how I would manage to fall asleep in so much brightness.
In my dream I was lying on my stomach and he was on top of me. He had already entered me. I was waiting for him to begin the lunging motion that would bring him to orgasm. I was both a participant and an observer in the dream, able to stand apart and comment on the action. I remarked that Henry and I had never used this position before. There was no climax in it for me unless he pushed his hand under my belly and found my clitoris. It would be difficult to maneuver a finger with the combined weights of two bodies pressing down on it. The position was the wrong one for a man with an average sized penis and untrustworthy erections, but Henry was long in the shaft and, once hard, remained serviceable even after he had reached completion.
With him inside me I felt full, stretched beyond my normal capacity. In waking life Henry was always aware of the difference in our dimensions. He would move slowly and carefully at the beginning, waiting while I expanded to receive him before he abandoned himself. In the dream he went off at a gallop, riding me at top speed, bareback, in a contest with no finish. Tireless, unspent, he spurred me into regions of pleasure evoked in sexual mythology, the country of the natural orgasm, accessible only through the male—continuous, self-renewing. He was competing at the height of his form, exceeding human limitations, breaking any previously established records for sexual endurance. I was resonant with pleasure, mindless and ultimately bodiless, a unit of pure sensation.
What woke me? Or was I not awake at all but transported to another dream, flung from one circle of the unconscious to another? All at once my eyes were open. I was lying on my back as if I’d fallen there, arms thrown outward, legs twisted to one side. It was an effort to roll over and face the windows, as if I were shifting many times my usual weight. Then I thought I was back in a dream because my bed seemed much wider, extending halfway across the room. The sheet was rumpled. In the moonlight the creases looked like ripples on a body of water. My eyes were as heavy as my body. I let them close again. I didn’t like this dream with its strange, yet too familiar setting. I wanted to tune in to another channel, but I had forfeited possession of the tuner.
I felt a movement at the far side of the mattress. There was someone in bed with me. Was he returning to perform in another episode of my continuing erotic dream? Would it be as strenuous as before? What fresh exertions did he have in mind for me? I reached out my hand and opened my eyes to look at him. I froze in unspeakable shock, unable to withdraw my hand, which lay, open-palmed and inviting, on the wide expanse of sheet.
It was not my husband I saw, but a small-boned, soft-skinned, fair-haired woman staring back at me. Only her head was turned toward me. There was something in her posture that gave an impression of sickliness. One shoulder was hunched. Her arms were draped slackly across her middle. Her pudenda were expunged by shadow. Moonlight painted her features with a shiny, tubercular pallor, pinched childlike features in an almost triangular face. Her hair was fine and quite sparse, like the wig of a balding old doll marred by too much handling.
Her eyes were black and expressionless, huge in that little face. Her condition was pitiful. I wondered how much life she had left in her. Her lips were moving. In her weakness she was trying to form words, and I knew I must stop my ears against them, block my ears with my palms to drown out her entreaties or disclosures, which would somehow be the end of me. My arms were paralyzed. I could no more bring them up to my head than lift the bed I was lying on. Her body was trembling, taxed to the limits of its strength by her attempt to speak. Her fingers fluttered. She was trying to raise her knees. I let my eyes travel down her legs. What was hidden was now made plain. The thing had no feet.
I shut my eyes, the only part of me that moved at my behest, as if I could obliterate the vision of those appendages. Her legs ended in two spade-shaped stumps, undefined by toes and toenails, heels and arches—the raw material for human feet, such as a sculptor might rough out when he was modeling a figure, before he filled in the details. In the annals of defective births there were cases of human infants with the same crude extremities, but this ailing feminine entity was not deformed. She was uncompleted.
I forced myself to look. What I was witnessing was not a demise, but a monstrous birth. Instead of dying, she was coming alive. Instead of trying to recover her powers of speech, she was struggling to speak for the very first time. Already she was learning, stretching her lips and rolling her tongue, making sounds like a child born deaf, all vowels and no consonants. With each sound she grew stronger, gaining a measure of mobility. She was able to lift her arms, as yet no more than several inches. Soon she would manage to turn over, then to crawl, with the mattress as her playpen. At the thought of her approach, of her touch, panic overcame me. What did she want with me or one of my kind? To steal my breath, to feed on me? For a moment I lost consciousness, or dreamed I did.
When I revived I was dazzled by moonlight, but I sensed I was alone in bed. As my vision cleared I saw the room in accurate detail. The bed had narrowed to its normal size. My dress was draped across the armchair, where I’d left it. I could see the scar on the closet door, the fraying edge of the carpet, the motley collection of objects on the bedside table—lamp, mystery book, emery board, hand lotion, traveling clock. The clock was ticking. It was light enough to watch the second hand rounding the dial. The time was still early, ten minutes to one. I heard a loud whoop of laughter and remembered the party downstairs, fo
oling with the Ouija board. The Ouija was supposed to be a solemn game. Perhaps they had graduated to strip poker. Weak with relief, I realized the nightmare was over. I was wide awake and everything was in its place, exactly as it should be.
I felt something sharp and irritating under my right shoulder. Chips of Emily’s dried sage, overlooked when I had brushed off the sheets. Crumbs in bed were self-generating, like those plant lice that reproduce by parthenogenesis. I would have to turn on the lights and conduct another sweep. In my mind I could see myself reaching toward the lamp, but my arm was inert. I was paralyzed, just as I had been while I was dreaming. If I was back in the dream, how could I hear real sounds—the ticking of the clock, the drone of an airplane overhead, a truck changing gears as it picked up speed on the empty road? Since I was fully conscious and still unable to move, I was forced to accept the conclusion that except for the erotic dream, I had never been asleep.
A cloud passed over the moon, plunging the room into blackness. There was a movement from the opposite side of the bed. The mattress went down, as if someone climbing on had put a knee on it. Someone heavier than a cat and lighter than a full-grown person. The little starveling woman had returned, hungry for life. As ghastly as she was to look on, she would be more terrible to contemplate in the darkness. As the cloud made its way across the moon, I envisioned her altered and active, fattened and fanged, with bright, greedy eyes. But nothing I imagined prepared me for what I saw when the cloud departed.
Incubus Page 29
