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“She made sure I didn’t want for anything,” I went on. This was what I always said about my grandmother, as if I were afraid she was somewhere nearby, eavesdropping on my assessment of her guardianship. “But of course she was much older and couldn’t really relate to a teenager.” An image of my grandmother, her mouth squared with disapproval when I showed up for tea at her club in jeans, flashed before my eyes. I shoved it aside. “So I know it’s hard being around people with intact families.”
Nicky nodded, a tear spilling down her cheek. She batted at it with the sleeve of her sweatshirt which she’d pulled over her hand. “I think that’s why Dean Book chose Mara for my roommate. Mara’s lost everything. My problems seem really miniscule compared to what she’s been through.”
“I guess that it’s always good to put your problems in perspective,” I said, thinking with embarrassment of my own snit this morning. “But as my friend Annie’s mother always said, ‘Whenyourshoe pinches, it hurtsyou.’ It’s natural that you should feel stressed out in a new environment and need someone to talk to…How about your friends from high school, are they still around?”
“Just my boyfriend, Benny. He and I had planned to go to SUNY Oneonta together, but when I got the scholarship he decided to stay here and go to the community college. I told him he was being stupid, that we could see each other on weekends and he shouldn’t be making sacrifices for me, but then hesaid someone had to make some sacrifices or we might as well just hang it up. So now he’s here in town, miserable at the CC and, of course, blaming me for that.”
“I hope you know that’s not fair, Nicky. He made that decision, not you.” Thank God, I thought, that Paul and I hadn’t gone down that road. I understood now why Nicky looked so miserable and fatigued. Between the lack of support from her family, her boyfriend guilt-tripping her about his own lack of ambition and stupid choices, and the academic stress of college, it was a wonder she was holding it together at all.
“Look,” I said, “if you ever need to talk, don’t hesitate to come to me. I live right near campus…”
“In the old LaMotte house,” Nicky said, brightening a bit. “I used to play in the woods behind there when I was little. I always thought it was the prettiest house in town. I’m glad someone’s living there again. No matter what anyone says about it being haunted.”
The boost I’d gotten by attending to Nicky’s troubles instead of my own was gone by the time I left Fraser Hall, shot down by Nicky’s innocent comment about Honeysuckle House being haunted and the conversation after. I tried to dismiss it as harmless local gossip. An old house left empty for many years, once inhabited by an eccentric woman writer—no wonder it had gained the reputation of being haunted. But it was what Nicky said next that had set my teeth on edge. I’d asked her if the townspeople thought that the house was haunted by Dahlia LaMotte.
“No,” she’d answered, “they say it’s haunted by her lover.”
“Her lover? But I thought Dahlia LaMotte was a recluse.”
“Yeah, but people say that the reason she locked herself away in that house was because she had a secret lover. There were stories of a man seen standing in the woods behind her house and then a man’s silhouette in her bedroom window.Some people say she was engaged to a man who jilted her and that she’d killed him and his ghost was the figure they saw at the window.”
I snorted. “I believe William Faulkner wrote a story along those lines. It’s called ‘A Rose for Emily.’” I tried to laugh off the story as I left Nicky at the door to Phoenix’s class and walked briskly across the quad, but I was remembering the man-shaped pillar of mist at the edge of the woods and picturing the face of the man in my dreams—the man who had fled as soon as I confronted him. The truth was that I’d been in a foul mood all morning because the dream had ended before the demon lover made love to me.
I froze on the path—so abruptly that a boy humming to the tune on his iPod bumped into me—at that realization. What was wrong with me? Was my actual sex life so dismal that I’d become addicted to a fantasy?
Because that was all it was, wasn’t it? A fantasy.
Except what I’d experienced last night—that moment of recognition and shock in his eyes—hadn’t felt like a fantasy or a dream; it had felt as real as the broad-trunked sycamore tree to my right and its yellow leaves drifting down around me, and as solid as the granite towers of the library rising up at the end of the path.
It struck me suddenly as odd that although I’d written about supernatural creatures—vampires, fairies, incubi—I’d never once stopped to think they might be real. Or that the creature who had been making love to me every night was real. He was a fairy tale, just like the fairy tales my parents had read me at bedtime, a more sophisticated kind of “bedtime” story. I’d dismissed my fairytale prince in my adolescent dreams as a manifestation of grief over the loss of my parents. I’d analyzed the incubus’s appearance in Dahlia LaMotte’s novel as a symbol of Violet Grey’s sublimated longing. I’d treated the appearance of the demon lover in literature as a psychological manifestation, a literary trope, a symbol of repressed longing, dominationfantasies, or rebellion against the status quo. But what if Dahlia wrote about a demon lover because she’d been visited by one? And what if the same demon lover was the creature who had visited my dreams when I was young? After all, the fairy tale he had told about a boy stolen by fairies was almost the same as the story Soheila had told me about the demon lover in the triptych. What if my fairytale prince had returned now to consummate our relationship?
What if the demon lover was real?
I stood still for another few minutes, measured by the clock on the library tower, which tolled the hour while I waited for the return of rationality that would dismiss such a notion. Students in sweatshirts and down vests walked around me, leaves fell, squirrels plucked acorns from the ground and swished their tails at me, but the idea that the man who made love to me in my dreams was somehow real didn’t go away.
“If he is real,” I said to myself out loud, “then I’d better find out all I can about him.”
No one stopped to look at the teacher frozen on the path talking to herself. They probably thought I was talking on a cell phone earset. I wondered how long I could hide my craziness though, if I’d really come to believe in incubi. As long as I could, I’d better use the library to find out all I could about my own personal incubus.
I’d researched demon lovers before but never with an eye to proving they existed. For that, I’d come to the right place. The Fairwick College Library’s folklore collection was vast. In fact, there was a whole room dedicated to fairy tales and folklore, named the Angus Fraser Room.
Much I already knew: the incubus was a demon in male form who lay with sleeping women, sometimes to have children (Merlin was the oft-cited example of a child born of an incubus and a human woman), but most often to drain the woman of her vital life force.
Well, I hadn’t gotten pregnant and up until this morning I’d felt just fine…although I had been losing weight…
A feeling of pressure on the chest often accompanied the visitation.
Yes, I’d felt that, but there was probably a physiological explanation for that breathless sensation during sleep. Asthma, perhaps, or sleep apnea…
The oldest tradition I could find came from ancient Sumeria. Gilgamesh’s father was said to be the incubus Lilu (I recalled that Soheila Lilly had mentioned him), but he existed in many cultures by many names: El Trauco in Chile, the alp in Germany, Popo Bawa in Zanzibar, the liderc in Hungary, and the Celtic Ganconer, who was also called a love talker. That, I recalled, was the name of the incubus in the Briggs Hall triptych.
I’d read before that one way to get rid of the incubus was through exorcism, but now I learned that if that didn’t work (and apparently it didn’t often enough), one could try iron locks on the doors and windows.
Is that why Brock Olsen had put new iron locks on my doors and windows and hung that cast-iron dream catcher in my window? I blushed at the thought that he knew about the demon lover and looked around the library, wondering who else might know I was having sex with a demon on a nightly basis, but the only other person in the Angus Fraser room was a ponytailed boy with his head pillowed on an open art history textbook, sound asleep.
I read on in A. E. Forster’sCompendium of Folk-Lore and Demonologythat in Swedish homes virtuous housewives hung up charms made of birch branches and juniper sprigs tied with red ribbon to ward off the advances of the demon lover.
Just like Brock’s little air fresheners.
But the best way to send away an incubus was to confront him directly.
It takes an enormous effort to speak during the incubus’svisitation, but if the victim can summon the preternatural will to speak and ask him to identify himself, then the incubus is sure to flee forever.
I raised my head from the book and stared over the head of my sleeping companion out the leaded glass window at red and gold leaves falling in the quad.
Who are you?I had asked.
The lozenges of wavy glass swam before me. I supposed I should feel pleased with myself for summoning “the preternatural will to speak,” but all I felt was bereft.
