Incubus

by Carol Goodman

  She gave me such a meaningful smile that I felt sure she must know how much trouble I was having with my second book. How for the first time in my life the folklore and fairy tales that had seemed so alive to me felt dull and flat as pasteboard. But of course she couldn’t know that and she had already moved on to more practical issues.

  “The committee does have to meet this afternoon. You’re the last applicant we’re interviewing. And just between you and me and the doorpost, by far the best. You should hear from us by tomorrow morning. You’re staying at the Hart Brake Inn, correct?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying not to cringe at the twee name of the B&B. “The owner has been very nice …”

  “Diana Hart is a dear friend,” the dean said. “One of the lovely things about teaching here at Fairwick is the good relationship between town and gown. The townspeople are truly good neighbors.”

  “That’s nice …” I was unsure of what else to say. None of the other colleges – and certainly not NYU, which had all of Manhattan to boast of – had bothered to talk about the amenities of the town. “I certainly appreciate you taking the time to consider my application. It’s a fine college. Anyone would be proud to teach here.”

  Dean Book tilted her head and regarded me thoughtfully. Had I sounded too condescending? But then she smiled and stood, holding her hand out. When I placed mine in hers I was surprised at how forcefully she squeezed it. Beneath her pink suit I suspected there beat the heart of a steely-willed administrator.

  “I look forward to hearing from you,” I told her.

  Walking through the campus, past the ivy-covered Gothic library, under ancient leafy trees, I wondered if I could stand to live here. While the campus was pretty, the town was scruffy and down at the heels. The heights of its culinary pretensions were a handful of pizzerias, a Chinese takeout and a Greek diner. The shopping choices were a couple of vintagey-studenty boutiques on Main Street and a mall on the highway. I paused at the edge of the campus to gaze out at the view. From up here the town didn’t look too bad, and beyond were forest-covered mountains that would look beautiful in the fall – but by November they would be bare and then snow-covered.

  I had to admit I had my heart set on New York City, as did Paul, my boyfriend of eight years. We’d met our sophomore year at N.Y.U. Although he was from Connecticut he was passionate about New York City and we agreed that someday we would live there together. Even when he didn’t get into graduate school in the city he had insisted I go to Columbia while he went to U.C.L.A. Our plan was for him to apply to New York City schools when he finished rewriting his doctoral thesis in economics and got his degree next year. Surely he would tell me to hold out for the N.Y.U. offer rather than leave the city now.

  But could I really say no to Fairwick if I hadn’t gotten a definite yes from N.Y.U.? It would be better if I could find a way to put off my answer to Dean Book. I had until tomorrow morning to think of a delaying tactic.

  I continued walking past the high iron gates of the college onto the town road that led to Hart Brake Inn. I could see the blue Victorian house, with its decorative flags and over-spilling flowerboxes, from here. The opposite side of the road was bordered by massive pine trees, the beginning of a huge tract of protected state forest. I paused for a moment at the edge of a narrow trail, peering into the shadows. Even though the day was bright the woods were dark. Vines looped from tree to tree, filling every crevice and twisting into curious shapes. This is where all the stories start, I thought, on the edge of a dark wood. Was this why the dean thought that living here would be an inspiration to me? Because the woods were the natural habitat of fairies and demons? I tried to laugh off the idea … but couldn’t quite. A wind came up and blew out of the woods toward me, carrying with it the chill scent of pine needles, damp earth and something sweet. Honeysuckle? Peering closer, I saw that the shadowy woods were indeed starred with white and yellow flowers. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. The breeze curled around me, tickling the damp at the back of my neck and lifting the ends of my long hair like a hand caressing me. The sensation reminded me of the dreams I’d had as a teenager. A shadowy man would appear at the foot of my bed. The room would fill with the scent of honeysuckle and salt. I’d hear the ocean and be filled with an inchoate longing.

  The psychiatrist my grandmother had sent me to said the dreams were an expression of grief for my parents, but I’d always found that hard to believe. The feelings I’d had for the shadow man were not at all filial.

  Now the invisible hand tugged at me and I stepped forward, off the pavement and onto the dirt path. The heels of my boots sank into the soft, loamy soil.

  I opened my eyes, stumbling, as if waking from a dream, and started to turn away … That’s when I saw the house. It was hidden from the road by a dense, overgrown hedge. Even without the hedge the house would have been hard to see because it blended in so well with its surroundings. It was a Queen Anne Victorian, its clapboard painted a pale yellow that was peeling in so many places it resembled a cleverly camouflaged butterfly. The roof was slate and furred with moss, the decorative cornices, pointed eaves and turret were painted a deep pine green. The honeysuckle from the forest had encroached over the porch railings – or, more likely, the honeysuckle from the house’s garden had spread into the woods. The vines and shrubs circling the porch were so thick it looked as though the house were sitting in a nest. I stepped a few feet closer and a breeze stirred a loose vine over the door. It waved to me as though it were beckoning me to come closer.

  I looked around to see if there were any signs of habitation, but the driveway was empty, the windows were shuttered, and a green dust, undisturbed by footprints, lay over the porch steps. Such a pretty house to be deserted, I thought. The breeze sighed through the woods as if agreeing. As I got closer I saw that the verge board trim along the pointed eaves was beautifully carved with vines and trumpet-shaped flowers. Above the doorway in the pediment was a wood carving of a man’s face, a pagan god of the forest, I thought, from the pinecone wreath resting on his abundant flowing hair. I’d seen a face like it somewhere before … perhaps in a book on forest deities … The same face appeared in the stained glass fanlight above the front door.

  Startled, I realized I’d come all the way up the steps and was standing at the front door, my hand resting on the bronze door knocker, which was carved in the shape of an antlered buck. What was I thinking? Even if no one lived here it was still private property.

  I turned to leave. The wind picked up, lifting the green pollen from the porch floor and blowing it into little funnels around my feet as I hurried down the steps, which groaned under my boot heels. The vines that were twisted around the porch columns creaked and strained. A loose trailer snapped against my arm as I reached the ground, startling me so much that I stumbled. I caught my balance, though, and hurried down the front path, slowing only because I saw how slippery it was from the moss growing in between the stones. When I reached the hedge I turned around to look back at the house. It gave one more sigh as the wind stopped, its clapboard walls moaning as if sorry to see me go, and then it settled on its foundation and sat back, staring at me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “WHO OWNS THE house across the street?” I asked later while having afternoon tea with Diana Hart on the porch. Diana, a slim, copiously freckled woman in her fifties, shifted in her wicker rocker.

  “What house?” she asked, her large brown eyes widening. She wore her chestnut brown hair so closely cropped that it accentuated the size of her eyes.

  I pointed across the street even though the house wasn’t visible. “The one behind the overgrown hedge. A pretty yellow Queen Anne with green trim. It has a very unusual stained glass fanlight over the front door.”

  “You went up to the door?” Diana asked, setting down her delicate china cup in its matching saucer. Milky tea sloshed over the brim.

  “The house looked empty …” I started to explain.

  “Oh yes, no one’s lived there f
or more than twenty years. Not since Dahlia LaMotte’s cousin died.”

  “Dahlia LaMotte, the novelist?” I asked.

  “Oh, you’ve heard of her?” Diana had her head down while she added more sugar to her tea. I could have sworn she’d already put in two teaspoons, but then she had quite the sweet tooth, as evidenced by the pink frosted Victoria sponge cake and chocolate-chip scones spread out over the wicker table in front of us. “I thought her books had gone out of fashion long ago.”

  Diana was right about that. Dahlia LaMotte had written a half dozen bodice ripper romances at the turn of the twentieth century – the kind of books in which a young girl loses her parents and then finds herself at the mercy of an overbearing Byronic hero who locks her up in a Gothic tower and makes threats against her virginity until he is reformed by her love and proposes honorable marriage. Obviously influenced by Ann Radcliffe and the Brontës, her books were avidly read in the beginning of the twentieth century, but then fell out of favor. They’d been reprinted in the sixties when authors like Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt made Gothic romance popular again. You could still find copies of those reprints – tattered paperbacks featuring nightgown-clad heroines fleeing a looming castle on their covers – on the internet, but I hadn’t had to buy them there. I’d found them hidden behind the “good books” on my grandmother’s bookshelves, a dozen books all with the name Emmeline Stoddard written on their flyleaves, and devoured them the summer I was twelve – which was another theory of where the shadow man of my dreams had come from: reading all those steamy Dahlia LaMotte books!

  “I’m interested in the intersection of fairy tale and the Gothic imagination,” I said primly – a primness ruined by the blood that rose to my cheeks at the memory of a particularly salacious scene in my favorite Dahlia LaMotte book, The Dark Stranger. “I knew she lived in upstate New York, but I didn’t know she lived here.”

  “Oh yes, we’ve had quite a number of famous authors in Fairwick. Dahlia was the daughter of Silas LaMotte, who made his fortune in shipping tea from the Far East. He built Honeysuckle House in 1893 for his wife and daughter. He planted Japanese honeysuckle all around it because his wife, Eugenia, loved the smell of it. Sadly, Eugenia died a few months after they moved into the house and Silas died soon after that. Dahlia lived all alone in Honeysuckle House, writing her novels, until her death in 1934. She left it to a younger cousin, Matilda Lindquist, who lived there alone until her death in 1990.”

  “Matilda never married?”

  “Oh no!” Diana widened her eyes and then looked down, noticed the spilled tea in her saucer, and blotted it with a cloth napkin embroidered with hearts and flowers. “Matilda was a sweet, but rather childlike woman of very little imagination. Really the perfect one to live in Honeysuckle House.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Just that living alone on the edge of the woods might scare some people if they had active imaginations,” she said, pouring herself another cup of tea. She held the pot over my cup and raised a tawny eyebrow. I indicated I’d take another cup, even though I’m more a coffee person than a tea person.

  “But Dahlia LaMotte lived there alone,” I pointed out. “And she certainly had an imagination.”

  “Yes,” Diana conceded, “but Dahlia liked to scare herself. That’s how she got the ideas for her books.”

  “Hmm, that’s an interesting notion,” I said. “I’d love to see the house. Do you know who owns it now?”

  “Some LaMotte relation in Rochester. Dory Browne of Browne Realty holds the key, sees to repairs, and shows it to the occasional house hunter. A lovely gay couple from the city looked at it last year and almost bought it. They would have been perfect for it, but they changed their minds.”

  “So Dory Browne could show it to me if I wanted to see it?”

  Diana looked up from her tea and blinked her long dark lashes. “Are you thinking of buying it?”

  I began to protest, but I stopped. Really I only wanted to see the house out of literary curiosity, but if I told Diana that she might not be able to convince Dory Browne to show it to me. “Well, if I get an offer to teach here I’d have to find someplace to live. And I’m tired of living in a cramped little apartment.” That part was at least true. My studio apartment in Inwood was the size of a closet.

  Diana was studying me carefully. For a moment I was afraid she’d caught me in a lie. But then it turned out that wasn’t it at all. “I’ll call Dory and ask her to come by tomorrow morning to show you the house. I’m not sure if Honeysuckle House would be right for you,” she said. “But I think you might be perfect for it.”

  After consuming Diana’s ample tea, I decided that although I was too full for a run, I’d better take a long walk to burn off the scones and clotted cream. I walked down toward Main Street, past Victorian houses, some lovingly restored like the Hart Brake Inn and others in various stages of disintegration or restoration. As I neared Main Street the houses grew larger, but also shabbier. Clearly the town of Fairwick had enjoyed a time of prosperity at the end of the nineteenth century. Faded signs on brick walls advertised long gone businesses: LaMotte Tea Company, Miss Fisk’s Haberdashery, and, in giant letters across a huge brick building, the Ulster & Clare Railroad. I vaguely recalled that the town had been an important railroad hub in the late nineteenth century, but then the Ulster & Clare had failed, the trains had stopped coming to Fairwick, and the town began its long slow decline into shabbiness and poverty. It still had elegant bones, though. A Greek Revival library stood in a green park that had once been prettily landscaped. Now the rose bushes were leggy and a strange looking bush with feathery gray blooms – like a giant dust mop – had taken over the paths and flowerbeds. The yards of once stately Victorians were overgrown and crowded with garden statuary. The residents of Fairwick were apparently partial to red-capped gnomes, plastic deer statues, and metal cutouts of winged fairies. No Madonnas, no baby Jesuses, but maybe those came out at Christmas.

  Main Street itself was sad and dreary. Half the storefronts were abandoned. The businesses that looked to be flourishing were the tattoo parlor (ubiquitous in college towns, I’d noticed from my recent lecture tours), an old airstream diner, the head shop, and a coffee place called Fair Grounds. At least the latter smelled like it brewed a decent cup of coffee. I bought a soy latte and the New York Times and a sandwich in case I got hungry later, although I suspected that Diana’s tea would hold me till bedtime.

  Walking back uphill to the Inn, I passed Browne Realty. Looking at the listings pasted onto the window I saw that the houses in town were going for even less than I’d imagined. For the price of a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan I could get a five-bedroom Victorian here. I wondered what Honeysuckle House would sell for.

  It started to drizzle then, so I walked faster up the hill. It wasn’t raining hard when I reached the inn, so I stopped on the other side of the road and peered through the hedge at Honeysuckle House. The face on the pediment seemed to look back at me. The raindrops streaming down its cheeks looked unnervingly like tears. Suddenly the rain began to fall harder. I crossed the street and sprinted up the steps to the porch, stopping to shake the rain out of my hair and off my jacket so I wouldn’t shed water all over Diana’s hooked rugs and chintz-upholstered furniture. A thump on the wooden steps behind me made me turn around, sure that someone had followed me up the steps, but no one was there. Nothing was there but the rain, falling so hard now that it looked like a gray moiré curtain that billowed and swelled in the wind. For a moment I saw a shape in the falling water – a face, as if just behind the watery veil, a face I knew, but from where? Before I could place it, the face was gone, blown away in a gust of wind. Only then did I recall where I’d seen that face. It was carved into the pediment of Honeysuckle House.

  It was an afterimage, I told myself later when I was lying in the too-soft four-poster bed, listening to the rain that hadn’t let up all evening. I’d stared at the face on the pediment long enough that I’d f
ashioned it out of the falling rain. A face, after all, was the easiest pattern to find in random shapes. And that face – the wide-set dark eyes, the broad brow, the high cheekbones, aquiline nose and full lips – was particularly striking. So striking that I’d even imagined for a moment that it was the face of the shadow man from my adolescent dreams, but that was impossible because I’d never seen his face. He’d always stood on the edge of the darkness, inches from the moonlight that would have revealed his face. I could almost see him now, taking shape behind the veil of my eyelids instead of the scrim of rainwater.

  I forced my eyes back open. I was tired, but I’d told Paul I would call him at nine California time so I was struggling to stay awake until midnight. At a quarter to, I called him, hoping he was back from his evening seminar early. He was.

  “Hey you,” he said. “How was the interview?”

  “Good, I guess. I think they’re going to offer me the job.”

  “Really? So soon? That’s unusual.” I thought I detected a faint note of jealousy – the same edge I’d heard in his voice when I got into Columbia and he didn’t and when I’d gotten a publishing contract for my thesis just after his thesis had been turned down by his reading committee. “What are you going to say if they do?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t imagine living here and it seems ridiculous to leave the city when you’ll be applying for jobs there next year. I suppose I could just turn it down …”

  “Hmm … better to try to put them off until you have a firm offer from N.Y.U. How far did you say it was from the city? A couple of hours? I could visit weekends.”

  “It’s three hours over mountainous roads,” I told him. “It’s really the back of beyond. The place where I’m staying is called the Hart Brake Inn.” I spelled it for him and he laughed. “And there’s a place across the way called Honeysuckle House …”

  “Let me guess, there are plastic cows everywhere and the town bar’s called the Dew Drop Inn.”