Incubus

by Carol Goodman

  I raised my glass and clinked it against Fiona’s. The crystal rang clear as a bell, echoed by the chiming of all the glasses as my guests – my new friends and colleagues – clinked their glasses against their neighbor’s. It sounded like a hundred tiny crystal bells chiming in a large echoing hall – I could almost see the hall, a vaulted cathedral ribbed with tree branches and paned in brilliant stained glass – a sound that took all the sadness, the homesickness, I’d been feeling and made it swell into something else.

  “To new friends,” I said, holding my glass up to the assembled company. “And absent ones,” I added, thinking of Paul.

  “Hear! hear!,” someone – and then everyone – said. Then there was silence as we all sipped our champagne. A thousand icy bubbles exploded in my mouth. It was so dry I felt as if I were drinking air – delightfully clean mountain air. Only the aftertaste – a strange and subtle combination of oak, crisp apples and honeysuckle – told me that the liquid had gone down my throat.

  “Mmm,” Phoenix moaned, a hand dramatically splayed over her heart. “It tastes like the first drink I ever had, which was a champagne cocktail at the Plaza on a hot summer night.”

  “The first drink I ever had,” Oliver said while passing a plate of sweet potatoes to me, “was a tequila sunrise at Studio 54. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

  “Mine was a vodka martini at the Lotus Club,” Dean Book volunteered, blushing as she spooned mashed potatoes onto her plate.

  We all went around sharing our first drink stories, Mara and Nicky demurely abstaining, as we passed the serving dishes among us. The room filled with the smells of turkey and sweet potatoes, and the clink of china and silverware. The food was delicious – the turkey moist, the sweet potatoes glazed with a delicate carmelized layer of brown sugar. There were roasted chestnuts in the stuffing and tiny translucent pearl onions in the peas. The conversation sailed from first drinks to first kisses to first memorable movies. At first the older – and less human – among us kept their reminiscences somewhat vague or at least confined to the last century. But as we all drank more – although I had seen Fiona arrive with only one bottle of champagne there seemed to be an endless supply – the fairies and other supernatural creatures at the table told stories of parties on Cleopatra’s barge and at King Arthur’s court. Those who weren’t in on the secret of Fairwick seemed undisturbed by these incredible details. Jen Davies was more interested in hearing the details of Phoenix’s childhood than in Casper Van der Aart’s tale of sailing on a merchant ship to the West Indies; Nicky Ballard seemed to think that Dory Browne was describing the plot of a historical novel she was writing; and Frank Delmarco was talking sports with Brock and Ike. Only Mara Marinca sat wide-eyed and silent. Perhaps the single drop of champagne she’d drunk hadn’t been enough to put her under the same spell as the rest of us – or perhaps she simply mistrusted her English.

  I wondered what Paul would have made of all this. I couldn’t imagine him falling under any spell or suspending an atom of disbelief. What would he say if I tried to tell him what had happened last night? Would he think I was crazy? Perhaps it was better he hadn’t made it. I felt guilty thinking that, but then Fiona refilled my glass and I forgot about everything but the present moment.

  After dinner we repaired to the living room where we all rubbed our stomachs and moaned, although in truth I didn’t feel uncomfortably full despite all I’d eaten, or drunk despite all I’d had to drink. I just felt content. Brock built up the fire and Casper produced a bottle of very old cognac. We drank it with pumpkin pie and played Trivial Pursuit. Frank Delmarco won twice, which was pretty impressive considering he was playing against a gnome and two ancient Norse divinities.

  After the third game, Nicky and Mara said their farewells and left with a pile of leftovers that Dory had packed for them. Phoenix took Jen into the library to show her press clippings. I suddenly realized that Fiona, Soheila, Diana and Liz were all in the kitchen, no doubt doing dishes. Guiltily, I collected the pie plates and headed back, pausing at the door to pick up a fork that had fallen to the floor – which put my ear level with the old-fashioned keyhole.

  “Are you sure he’s gone?” I heard Fiona ask.

  “Diana and I performed the banishment spell while Soheila chanted the …”

  I missed the next few words in a clatter of dishes. Fiona asked something else in a low, urgent voice and Soheila answered.

  “He was moments away from incarnating. I’ve never seen an incubus gain flesh so quickly. He must be very drawn to her …”

  “It has nothing to do with her,” Fiona spat back. All her lovely graces had fallen away. Even with a wooden door between us I felt waves of cold rolling off her. Even Liz Book, who had managed to remain poised and calm in the face of a demon’s tantrum, sounded cowed.

  “Of course not, my lady. We were afraid he’d try to find an entrance back through anyone who lived in this house. She is merely a conduit, but perhaps a powerful one. She opened the door on her first day here and today I saw her reach into it and pull a satyr to safety.”

  Fiona sniffed. “So she’s a doorkeeper. Good. We can always use one of those – especially after what happened to the last one. Just be careful whom she lets in. You know as well as I do that there are things lurking on the threshold that make my incubus look like a puppy dog.”

  I stood up then, tired of eavesdropping in my own house. I rattled the dishes in my hand to give them some warning and shouldered open the door. By the time I was across the doorway they were talking about Diana’s recipe for pecan pie as if they were on the Food Network.

  The last of my guests left by eight, except for Jen Davies who was curled up in the library drinking Casper’s cognac and listening wide-eyed to Phoenix’s adventures of growing up dysfunctional in the Deep South. I excused myself and went upstairs to call Paul. He was at the hotel bar, eating Buffalo hot wings with Stacy, Mack and Rita, his three new “survivor” friends.

  “Stacy and Mack live in Ithaca and Rita’s in Binghamton so we’re all going to split a car tomorrow. I should be there by one at the latest.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “I really missed you today. I’ve been thinking … Well, we really have to try to find some way to spend real time together. I could spend the Christmas break in California …”

  “I thought you wanted to spend Christmas in your new home,” he said.

  “That doesn’t matter.” I gripped the phone hard to give myself the courage to say what I had to say. “What matters is that we spend it together. I want you to be my home, Paul, and for me to be yours. If we can’t be that for each other … Well, then, what are we doing?” I swallowed back the tears – a pause long enough that Paul could have filled it with some reassurance, but he was silent. Maybe he didn’t know any better than I the answer to my question. “Because whatever it is we’re doing, I’m not sure I can do it any longer.” I bit my lip and made myself be quiet to give Paul a chance to answer. I waited … and waited. Then I held the phone up and saw that AT&T had dropped the call. I had no way of knowing how long ago.

  Fifteen minutes later when I was in the tub, Paul texted me.

  Lost u! CU tom. < 3 P

  I texted back a heart and my initial, but I was beginning to wonder if we hadn’t already lost each other.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  PAUL NEVER MADE it to Fairwick that weekend. He made it as far as West Thalia and called to tell me that the road leading into Fairwick (one of only two) was blocked by fallen trees. Suspecting that might be the case I had gotten up early (after a sterile dreamless sleep) and started hiking toward the West Thalia road. When I’d reached the outskirts of town I’d found something that looked like a logjam. Trees lay like pick-up sticks across the highway for miles. When I asked one of the road crew clearing the debris how far the wreckage went he told me more than ten miles.

  “The bridge is out here and on the southbound road,” he told me. “No one’s coming into or getting out of
Fairwick until the middle of next week.”

  I stayed on the edge of town for another hour, talking to Paul on the phone, unable to believe that there wasn’t any way to bridge the short gap between us. But Fairwick was wedged into a valley between steep, impassable mountains like some medieval fortress town built to keep out plague and marauding Vikings. After all, its founders – fairy and daemon – probably remembered both threats well enough. Now one of those demons had lifted the drawbridge and flooded the moats, cutting the town off from the world. Had that been his intention? I’d thought at first that the storm and the destruction left in its wake had been the outcome of his temper, but now, looking at this swath of mown down trees, I wondered if the incubus had purposely cut me off from Paul—

  And purposely set out to kill him by bringing down his plane.

  “I could start walking and maybe I’d be there by tomorrow morning,” Paul gallantly offered in our last phone conversation that day.

  I imagined Paul alone on the West Thalia road as night fell, the deep woods on either side full of otherworldly creatures, possibly including an insanely jealous incubus.

  “That’s sweet, Paul, but it’s supposed to go down into the teens tonight. You don’t have to freeze yourself to see me.”

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right. I did forgot to pack my boots and the shoes I’m wearing are pretty thin. I guess I’ll go visit Adam in Binghamton.” Adam was a friend of Paul’s from high school who was in the graduate writing program at Binghamton University. “Rita’s driving there anyway.”

  “Tell Adam I say hi,” I said, and then, glancing down at a particularly savaged tree trunk, added, “And be careful driving there, okay? The weather up here is … unpredictable.”

  It was dusk by the time I got back home, and I was frozen and exhausted. I found Phoenix pacing the house like a caged panther.

  “I can’t believe we’re stuck here,” she said when I told her both roads out of town were impassable. “What if there’s an emergency?”

  “There’s a hospital here in town and they could still Medi-Vac any bad cases out to Cooperstown,” I pointed out.

  “What if there were too many fires for the local fire department to put out … or a serial killer struck … or gangs started looting? This is just like that Stephen King book where a small town is trapped under an invisible dome. The whole town goes to hell in a hand basket!”

  It was my fault Phoenix had read that particular Stephen King book which I’d gleefully devoured a few weeks before. I’d been thinking about it, too, on my walk back through town but Fairwick didn’t seem to be going the way of King’s small town. Main Street had been bustling with cheerful people strolling on the cleared and salted sidewalks, and congregating at corners to compare storm survival stories. A hot apple cider and donut hut had been set up in a little kiosk in the park. Ice skaters were gliding on the pond. I glimpsed Ike skating with a woman who looked like she was one of Dory Browne’s relatives and Nicky Ballard huddled on a bench with a boy in a community college sweatshirt who must have been her boyfriend, Ben. The houses I passed on my way up the hill either had generators on or lanterns in their windows. Many homeowners had put up their Christmas decorations. There were the usual plastic reindeer and inflatable Santas, but also a type of decoration I’d never seen before. Among the branches of the light-trimmed trees hung crystal bells, pinecones, doves and angels. When I got closer I saw that they weren’t made of crystal; they were molded out of ice. Trapped within the shapes were tiny objects – natural things like real pinecones and red berries, but also gold charms, children’s toys (I saw a pink-haired troll doll and a blue Power Ranger), keys, and tiny scrolls of paper tied with red string.

  “Ice gifts,” Brock told me when I got home and found him hanging an ice dove from a holly bush near my front door. He showed me the baking mold he was using to make a frozen angel and explained that there was a local tradition of putting small objects inside as offerings to the spirits of the woods. “Where I came from,” Brock told me as he poured water into more molds, “it was believed that an object left over winter in the ice would gain power. Humans would leave offerings to the gods inside the ice shapes and the gods, in turn, would leave presents for the humans they loved in them. My father courted my mother Freya so. Each year he made a trinket for her – a pair of earrings, a bracelet, a necklace – and encased it in an ice dove. ‘I will wait for you as long as it takes the ice fields of Jotunheim to melt,’ he told her each year. In the fifth year he made her a wedding ring. That year Freya built a fire beneath the tree where the ice dove hung. When the dove melted, Freya held out her hand to catch the ring, crying, ‘Jotunheim is melted. Come to me now!’ When my father arrived the fire leapt up to meet him and it burnt Freya’s little finger.”

  He held out his hand, which, I had noticed before, was missing the tip of his little finger. “My brothers and I were all born missing the tip of our little fingers – testament to the love our human mother felt for our father. Since she was human she died very long ago, but—” Brock looked up at me, his ugly face transformed by tenderness “—I remember her as if she had just left the room, so powerful is the love you humans possess.”

  I blushed remembering what Dory had told me about the relations between fey and human, but clearly Brock’s mother hadn’t been trading sex for magic and Brock’s father must have loved her for his sons to hold her memory so dear. I dug in my pocket and found the fairy stone I’d been carrying since we’d performed the incubus banishment two nights ago.

  “Here,” I said, dropping the stone into the water. “My father gave this to me. He told me that it would keep me from having nightmares. Maybe it will do more good out here than in my pocket.”

  Brock looked at the hollow stone. “It might just,” he said. “Sometimes giving something away gives it more power.”

  After Brock left I tried distracting Phoenix from her doom-laden scenarios by taking her outside and showing her the ice sculptures Brock had hung in the shrubbery – in addition to the dove there were ice deer and ice angels … or maybe they were ice fairies – but she only shivered and retreated back inside to a nest she’d made on the library couch of blankets, magazines, and newspapers. She spent the rest of the holiday weekend there, sipping cognac and reading aloud from favorable reviews of her book. Maybe it was her way of coping with the supernatural revelations of the last few days, or maybe her southern blood really was too thin for the cold. I figured she would snap out of it when classes started on Monday.

  But classes didn’t start on Monday. The roads were finally clear and the bridge on the southbound road was working, but the Trailways bus that ran from New York City was too heavy for that bridge. Dean Book postponed the first day of classes to Wednesday.

  I used the time to read up on the history of Fairwick in the archives of the town newspaper, especially on the Ballard family. In addition to what Dory had told me, I learned that Ballard’s partner, Hiram Scudder, had left town after his wife had killed herself and gone out west to remake his life. I read a graphic description of the collision, along with a heroic account of a track worker named Ernesto Fortino who had crawled into a train car hanging off a bridge. He had got all the occupants to safety before the train car crashed into the river, killing him. I looked long at a heartbreaking picture of corpses wrapped in burlap sacks, lined up like cordwood at the side of the mangled train track. I read the lists of the dead and then the lists of people who went bankrupt after the railroad and ironworks went out of business. The number of people who might have wanted to curse Bertram Ballard was vast. No wonder the witches of Fairwick hadn’t been able to identify who had cast the curse.

  At night in bed I read a Dahlia LaMotte manuscript called The Viking Raider, in which a rugged handsome Norseman kidnaps an Irish princess and holds her for ransom. One particular passage caught my eye.

  The brute tore my tunic away and fondled my breasts. Because my hands were tied I could do nothing but endure the sensatio
n of his rough, calloused hands squeezing my nipples, cupping my breasts, stroking my belly and pushing his hard blunt fingers between my legs. When I cried out he clamped his hand over my mouth … and I sank my teeth into his little finger. I bit so hard I took the tip off. He screamed in pain, but rather than strike me he held up his injured hand and exclaimed, “What spirits you Irish lasses possess! I will treasure this as a keepsake of our courtship for all the years of our long marriage.”

  I wondered if Dahlia had been thinking of Brock when she wrote this scene – and if so, what it said about her feelings for him.

  When I wasn’t indulging in Dahlia LaMotte’s bodice-ripping tales, I set to work re-organizing my closets. Something was rustling in there and I’d begun to suspect that I had mice. Small holes had been gnawed in my cardboard shoeboxes, and my favorite pair of Christian Louboutin silver patent leather sling-backs had been chewed into Swiss cheese. I went to the dollar store in town and bought plastic shoeboxes and mousetraps – which I couldn’t bring myself to set.

  Phoenix used the time to drink and make a scrapbook of her reviews. On Wednesday morning, determined to get her up early enough that she’d make it sober to her afternoon class, I made a big pot of coffee and a stack of banana walnut pancakes. I brought it all into the library on a tray along with the New York Times.

  “Look,” I said, brandishing the paper. “Proof we are once again connected to the civilized world! Tiffany ads! Gail Collins! A recipe for vegan banana-chocolate chip cookies! And hey, here’s an article by that woman Jen Davies …”

  “Is it about me?” Phoenix asked in a very small voice, which held no trace of a southern accent.