Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  I was suffering from a form of sensory deprivation. The world outside my windows was losing color. I looked out on a landscape of sapless browns and yellows. A shimmering veil of heat changed every familiar object into a pale, two-dimensional counterfeit. Every day this past month I drew the curtains downstairs against the sun, so the house was darker in daytime than it was at night, putting time out of gear. I began to feel like a prisoner in the house, cut off from normal pursuits, condemned to inactivity. I had no heart for cooking. There was nothing to do in the garden but clip dead stalks and prepare the beds for winter, two months early. I couldn’t sew and was no great reader.

  There was no one to keep me company. My friends were involved with their husbands, and my husband was involved in raising spirits. In bodily form, I had no chance of getting his attention. On previous leaves at the North Woods camp, Henry read morning and evening prayers in a grove of birches by the lake, with me as his congregation. He kept his pocket-sized copy of the prayer book on his person. Some of its pages were foxed with dampness. Its limp leather covers smelled faintly fishy. This year he’d abandoned the ritual, or simply forgotten it. The dry cleaners found Henry’s prayer book in the pocket of his windbreaker. I put it on his desk, where it was currently buried under a pile of psychical research monographs, topmost of which was “Witch-Riding: Sleep Disorder or Supernatural Assault?” from the Occult Science Quarterly.

  There was an atmosphere of oppression in the house, my own projection. My domestic surroundings no longer had the power to confirm me. I felt somewhat detached, light-headed, as if my sinuses were congested. Physical exertion was the surest cure for the doldrums. How long had it been since I’d dusted the living-room bookshelves? I started to sort through my kitchen files, determined to scrap any recipe clippings for dishes that were too complicated (pastry shells filled with minced pheasant, truffles, and wild mushrooms) or not complicated enough (Seven-Can Church Social Casserole). I kept it up for half an hour or so, fighting an urge to sleep. At last I put my head on my arms and dozed off at the kitchen table, like a grade-school pupil in rest period.

  Afternoon naps, like breakfast in bed, were linked in my mind to illness and convalescence. When I slept in the afternoon, I slept too deeply. I woke up feeling seasick and hesitant, as if I were in the wrong body. When I finally came back to myself, it was usually time for bed.

  That afternoon, something woke me before I touched bottom—a bell-like tone, like the chimes outside the window in a season when breezes were blowing. With the greatest reluctance, I began the long passage upward. Through half-parted eyes I could tell it was still daytime. My cheek was resting on the surface of the table. One arm had fallen into my lap. The other was stretched out in front of me. I registered a crick in my neck, not yet painful enough to prevent me from nodding off again.

  I heard another sound behind me, coming from the hallway or the entrance to the dining room, a kind of swishing and crackling, like a large plastic sack being slowly dragged across floorboards. The sounds stopped and started at irregular intervals. Henry must be bringing the garbage bags downstairs, lugging two at a time. The bags were overstuffed and awkward. I knew I should get up and help him, but each of my limbs weighed as much as a sack of woolen clothing.

  I heard footsteps on the kitchen floor and felt a hand placed gently on my shoulder and quickly withdrawn. Henry thought I was sleeping. He dropped a kiss on the top of my head and went out the back door. The spell was broken.

  I arched my back like a cat, raised my arms above my head and leaned back in my chair, yawning deeply. I got up slowly and took a few steps. I was on solid ground. I went into the dining room to pick up some of the bags Henry had been wrestling with, but the bags weren’t there. He must have left them in the hallway or on the stairs. The hall and staircase were empty. I walked up to the second floor, around past the bedroom and down the steps that led to the back landing outside Henry’s office. The bags were piled where I’d left them. The stacked cartons blocking the doorway were tumbled on the floor. Henry must have barged straight through them, knocking them any which way. I thought the noises I had heard were softer and closer to me, but perhaps they had been only the echo of Henry’s passage as he toppled the cartons and jostled the plastic lawn bags.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The next morning after breakfast, while I was staring into the icebox trying to make a grocery list, Ruth Hiram showed up at the kitchen door. She had a child in tow, a girl about ten years old with a pointed chin and wise eyes, a pale-faced city child wearing a dress and ballet slippers. “This is Ralph’s grand-niece, Angela,” said Ruth. “I hoped I’d catch Henry.”

  Henry had gone to the post office to send a package by registered mail to Carlos Ring at the New England Center for Psychical Research. After a conference on the telephone, Dr. Ring had asked to see Henry’s notes on the Dry Falls incidents, Xeroxed and unedited. Henry had said he might swing by the garage on the way home; one of the brake lights on the station wagon was out.

  Ruth was happy to sit and visit until he came back. “I’ll take my chances,” she said. “Are you sure I’m not disturbing you?” I wasn’t glad to see her, but I was embarrassed to think she might have picked up on it. I felt so disconnected that contact with other people was an exertion, friends no less than grocery clerks. I offered Ruth a cup of coffee. Angela refused a glass of orange juice. There was nothing in this house for a child to do. A minister’s wife should know enough to have a drawer for young visitors, full of coloring books, crayons, and board games.

  Angela was quiet enough. She had brought a kit for making pot holders, a plastic frame and a bag of nylon loops in primary colors. Ruth was brimming over with talk. I could tell she was on one of her hobbyhorses, bit between her teeth. She had a theory, or one of her notions, and she intended to round up as many supporters as she could to endorse it. Ruth was counted as one of our local intellectuals. She handled books, read books, and had even compiled a few of them. She had a master’s degree in education. When her name came up, someone always said she should have been a teacher. The didactic mode was second nature to her. From behind her desk at the center of our little library, she dispensed advice five days a week on what to read, guiding uncultivated minds, young and old, on the path to literacy. If a subscriber wished to borrow a gothic novel, Ruth urged her to take out Wuthering Heights as well as its degenerate modern offshoot. No one took offense. Ruth was so positive; she surely had their good in mind.

  Ruth, who was also childless, was no more experienced with children than I was. She belonged to the school of thought that favors treating them like adults. In my opinion the subject of Adele was inappropriate for young ears, but Ruth plunged right in, pressing me for details to round out what Sally had told her. “I don’t think …,” I began, with a nod in Angela’s direction. Ruth brushed off my reluctance. “Did she remember any of it? How did she react?” “We weren’t with her,” I said. “We left before she woke up.” “I know that,” said Ruth impatiently. “What did she say when Henry spoke to her?”

  I didn’t like Ruth’s interviewing techniques or her proprietary attitude toward the subject. Once she heard a piece of information, she thought she owned it.

  “She was very shaky,” I said. “She talked about recurring nightmares.” “Did Henry set her straight?” asked Ruth. “She could use a dose of reality. I hope he didn’t try to coddle her.” Ruth’s vindictive tone repelled me. “You blame Adele,” I said. “You think she brought this on.” “It’s stopped, hasn’t it?” said Ruth. “She’s out of the territory. We don’t want her back.” “You want a scapegoat,” I said. “She was a dabbler,” said Ruth. “Those silly spells and charms and vegetarian diets. She had black candles in her apartment. Do you think that’s harmless?” “She also had white candles and rainbow-colored candles. And candles shaped like bunny rabbits.” “You’re not involved, Cora. You were spared because your husband is a minister. The rest of us had no such safeguard.”


  For several weeks I had been living in retreat, too torpid and discouraged to relish human society. I had withdrawn of my own volition, or so I imagined. I didn’t know I was being ostracized, “left out” of an exclusive sorority of victims. Bigotry is blind and unempathic. They thought I was safe with Henry, when it should have been plain to anyone that he was halfway to opening his home and his church as a soup kitchen for vagabond spirits. All comers welcome. Free counseling services provided.

  Ruth put down her cup. I rose from my chair, thinking she was ready to go. She assumed I was getting up to serve her more coffee. I reminded her that Henry might be delayed, but she was determined to try her ideas out on me. A captive audience was as good as a willing one. “This will interest you, Cora,” she said, with the complacency of someone who rarely met with any argument, and who would ride over it if she did. I poured coffee for myself as well. I felt ominously sleepy, knowing I was bound by politeness to hear Ruth out for as long as she cared to detain me.

  She began by reviewing her credits, as if she were both introducer and speaker at a meeting of some scholarly institute. “You’re familiar with my books,” she said, referring to two short volumes of Maine legends and ghost stories, published by a printer in Windham, who distributed them, along with a line of postcards, to area gift shops, museums, and historic houses. “You may not know,” she said, affecting modesty, “that I’ve been in correspondence with one of the top folklorists at the university. He asked me to donate copies of my books to the department library.”

  I smiled and nodded, hoping Ruth would get on with it. “I’ve been going through rejected transcripts, as well as written legends I didn’t use for one reason or another. With all this interest in my work, I decided to reassess the discards. I thought I might have enough for a new volume.” Even Angela was growing restive at this point. She had put down her pot holder and was drumming on the linoleum with her slippered heels. “Go in the other room, Angela,” I said. “You can look at the magazines.”

  Ruth drew her chair close to the table. “I’ve found something,” she said. “I’m sure Henry will grasp its significance.” “One of your legends?” I asked. “The Bethel haunting,” she said, implying that any person of average intelligence would know what she was talking about. “I don’t write these books for their entertainment value, Cora. I’m a student of supernatural belief traditions. The Bethel woman’s case bears some striking resemblances to ours. Conversely, our cases have some of the traditional features of a haunting: the sound of footsteps, doors opening and closing, a threatening presence, paralyzing fear.” “I thought hauntings were associated with specific places,” I said. “Good for you,” said Ruth, “and our incidents have been spread all over town, five or six venues at the latest count.”

  “Then we don’t have a ghost in Dry Falls?” I asked. “They believed in ghosts in the early nineteenth century,” she said. “They lumped any unexplainable event under that one heading.” “We don’t believe in ghosts any more,” I said. “That’s right,” answered Ruth. “We don’t know what to call them.” In spite of myself, I was caught up in Ruth’s line of reasoning. I was surrounded by amateur sleuths of the supernatural. It seemed everyone wanted to get in on the act. Ruth, who had been terrorized nightly, was back in possession of her objectivity. For her, the antidote to terror was scientific investigation. “Bear with me,” I said. “Was the Bethel case a haunting or wasn’t it?” “We need a new name for both of them,” said Ruth. “Our experience and the Bethel woman’s.”

  I folded my hands in my lap and prepared to listen. There are people who enjoy surrendering their will to a narrator. I wasn’t one of them. Stories unfolded in time, and I was a clock-watcher. You were tied to your chair for the duration, awaiting release, locked in silent conflict with the storyteller, whose goal was to prolong the tale and delay the ending. Part of my resistance to Ruth’s story was based on superstition. By concentrating on the occult, we were sure to attract it. The spaces we inhabited were already darkened by shadows. Behind everyday noises you could hear the rustle of wings.

  Ruth had started to speak, pausing slightly at the end of her sentences. I had missed the beginning, probably the name of the woman and a description of the house in Bethel, one of the oldest in Maine and listed in the National Register of Historic Places. I have compressed Ruth’s tale, which contained inordinate digressions, and set it down in my own words, not hers.

  There was a widow, recently bereaved, whose husband had been a volunteer Indian fighter. She was left to bring up their young son, a handsome, sickly child. In the spring of the year 1747, the boy came down with chills and fever. Bethel was little more, at that date, than an outpost in the wilderness. There was a doctor at the fort, but the garrison was on maneuvers. To quiet the child’s shivering, she held him in her arms during the day and took him in bed with her at night. Toward the end of the second week, the boy expired. Half distracted by grief, the mother dug his grave herself and planted seeds of deadly aconite upon it to keep wild animals from digging in the soil.

  One night, approaching Midsummer Eve, she awoke to hear the bedroom door creaking. Soft footsteps padded over the floorboards. Something climbed in bed beside her, pressing up against her. She lay very still, thanking God for answering her prayers. Her child had returned to comfort her and be comforted. The following night she felt his gentle weight on her chest, but when she tried to embrace him she found her arms were paralyzed. On successive nights, the weight on her chest grew heavier. She welcomed the pressure, knowing her child craved her body heat. The weight increased nightly, until it seemed as if it might smother her. The creature above her weighed as much as a full-grown man.

  Then one night, when her lungs were nearly bursting, she felt a hand on her throat, choking her. It came to her all at once that grief had ensnared her. Her nocturnal visitor was not her child. It was a spirit who had taken on his guise in order to deceive her. With her last ounce of strength she managed to move her right hand. The weight lifted off her chest and fell to the floor with a sound like a cat jumping down from a windowsill.

  “In God’s name be gone!” she cried out. She heard footsteps retreating with the slow, halting gait of a cripple, down the narrow stairs toward the doorway. Fearing its return, she lay huddled beneath the covers, unable to get out of bed to light a candle. At the first rays of dawn she fled the house and took to the road. A soldier on horseback, returning from Indian territory, found her clinging to the trunk of a tree, barefoot and wearing her nightclothes.

  It was the soldier who passed on her story, which was relayed from mouth to mouth down the generations. In the mid-1800s the story assumed written form. It is preserved in a letter in the archives of the Lewiston Historical Society.

  Attracted by the sound of Ruth’s voice rising and falling, Angela had crept back to the kitchen to listen without our noticing her. “I know that story,” she said, when Ruth had come to a standstill. “I read it in my purple fairy book. It’s the same as the hairy goblin who sits on the princess, only she thinks he’s a prince, but the real prince was turned into a rock at the bottom of the pond.” “It’s just a bad dream,” I said, unwilling to be led into a discussion in front of Angela. “Apparently it’s a common type of nightmare,” I persisted. “You’re alone in the house with a prowler. A lot of people have them.” “I had one,” said Angela, who probably got glowing reports for classroom participation. “He was coming to get me and I tried to call my mother but I couldn’t.” “I wonder if Angela would like to go outside and play on the porch swing?” I asked. Ruth ignored my appeal. “I can see you’re uncomfortable,” she said, “but you’ll have to take my word for it. It wasn’t a dream. In each case the sleeper wakes up and sees the room accurately. Mariette and Sally bear me out. Jane and I live in the village. While it was going on, she could hear her neighbor’s television. I heard the Congregational church clock strike the hour and the half hour.”

  Ruth was waiting for a reaction. I had m
issed my cue. “You seem distracted, Cora,” she said. “I realize this is difficult material. I asked our friends to supply me with dates and, if possible, times and duration. Of course, my task would have been simplified if they had kept journals, as I do. I drafted a table comparing the data. Henry will find it useful. Eighty percent of the incidents took place on the same nights and within the same general time frame. I’m sure you understand the implications.” “Telepathy?” I suggested. “Call it a mental operation, if you prefer,” said Ruth. “Better than facing the fact that it might be a genuine experience. Easier than coping with the notion that there might be more than one of them.”

  Angela was standing by my chair, leaning against me the way large dogs do to remind you to pet them. “One of what?” she asked. I put my arm around her little waist. There was no hope Ruth would change the subject, or give a childproof answer. She might condescend to her adult intellectual inferiors, but she never talked down to children. It obstructed the learning process.

  “The experience is real,” Ruth continued. “Different traditions give it different names—witch-riding, possession, haunting. They attribute it to different agents, such as Pan, ghosts, incubi, succubi, vampires. The legends vary in detail but the gist is the same. None of us had puncture marks on our necks or loss of blood. All of us were pinned to our beds by a force that overpowered us.”

  Angela pressed in closer and grasped my hand. I couldn’t tell if she was clinging to me or I to her. “There must be some physical explanation,” I said for Angela’s benefit. “It only seems to happen when you sleep on your back.” “Sleep paralysis,” said Ruth. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? There’s plenty of research on the subject, but it doesn’t account for the basic contents of the experience, or its persistence from culture to culture. All it does is describe a physiological state in which the experience can occur.”