Alien Sex: 19 Tales by the Masters of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy

THE JAMESBURG INCUBUS ^{SCOTT BAKER}

AT FORTY-THREE, LAURENT St. Jacques (né Lawrence Jackson, he’d changed his name in hope of improving his image after the third and last college at which he’d taught French failed to renew his contract) was tall, willowy, elegant, and thoroughly unattractive, as he himself was only too aware. He liked to think of himself as a rationalist and freethinker and idolized Voltaire, though unlike Voltaire he usually kept his opinions to himself and was thus able to avoid their consequences. His wife, Veronica, was slight, somewhat angular, and aggressively healthy; she was five years younger than he, and Catholic. They both taught at St. Bernadette’s School in Jamesburg, California: St. Jacques was responsible for French and Italian while she taught geology and coached the swim team. Their marriage was not particularly happy: she stayed with him because the Church said it was her Christian duty; he stayed with her because, even though she irritated him most of the time, he was comfortable and had long given up hope he could do any better by leaving her.

They had no children, to her disappointment and his satisfaction.

Despite his wife’s faith, the name he’d chosen, and the religious context in which St. Jacques underwent his transformation into an incubus (St. Bernadette’s School being run by the Sisters of Sanctimony, a splinter group of nuns still awaiting the Church’s official recognition of their order), there was nothing in even the slightest way Satanic about what happened.

Some years before, the U.S. Army had secretly and erroneously disposed of a small quantity of radioactive wastes and outmoded neurological toxins in the same abandoned mine shaft where the navy had previously dumped the supposedly harmless byproducts of an unsuccessful experiment in breeding a new strain of wheat rust to be used against the Soviets. The army finished filling in the shaft and the land was sold to a commune of Christian organic farmers, none of whom, of course, was ever told anything about the uses to which their farmland had been put. They, in turn, used it to grow the various grains for their seven-grain, guaranteed all-organic bread. This bread tasted so much better than anyone else’s seven-grain bread that it was an immediate commercial success, all of which the farmers attributed to the workings of a munificent God.

By the late eighties the bread was so renowned that a distributor was selling it to health-food stores nationwide—after, to be sure, surreptitiously treating it with various chemical preservatives to make sure it stayed fresh-seeming on the shelves long enough to make its distribution commercially viable.

By itself the bread would have been insufficient to bring about the changes that made Laurent St. Jacques an incubus. An opened loaf, however, had been sitting on his pantry shelf for a week, ever since his wife had taken out a slice to finish up the sandwiches she was making for Mother Isobel, who’d stopped by for tea. (Mother Isobel was the nun who ran both the Sisters of Sanctimony and St. Bernadette’s School, as well as the person who’d hired St. Jacques and his wife; she was also, and not at all incidentally, Veronica’s older sister.) In any case, during the time the bread had been sitting open on the shelf it had developed a spot of some blue-green mold that looked like, but wasn’t, penicillin. St. Jacques saw the mold spot while fixing breakfast for Veronica and himself and, priding himself on his manly and rational lack of squeamishness, merely scraped as much mold as he could off the bread before toasting it, then hid what was left by buttering the toast and smearing it with green apple jelly. Because, though he wasn’t squeamish, he knew quite well that his wife was.

As usual, she merely picked at her breakfast, so he ended up eating most of her toast in addition to his own.

Some of the mold, which had already been getting pretty strange as the result of its diet, survived the toasting process with a few minor, but significant, alterations, and then survived the effect of St. Jacques’s digestive juices. It took up residence in his body where, without doing him any harm, it flourished and grew and eventually interacted in quite complicated ways with his nervous system.

All of which explains how he came to be an incubus, if not the actual physics and biochemistry of the process.

The first night after the mold he was hosting had completed its work, St. Jacques was looking for a book with which to put himself to sleep when he overheard Veronica discussing Edgar Cayce over the phone with somebody who could only be her sister. Fearing the worst—both women had a tendency to go on periodic New Age astrological, dietetic, and spiritualistic binges despite their outwardly almost excessive practicality—he got down his copy of The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud and took it into the bedroom. Whenever he found himself being assaulted by the Forces of Unreason, St. Jacques retreated into the works of Freud, Zola, Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and, of course, Voltaire until the crisis passed.

Which it always did, sooner or later, when Mother Isobel finally realized what should have been obvious from the start: that whatever she was so excited about was in direct contradiction to the teachings of her Church.

St. Jacques had fallen asleep, still reading his Freud, before Veronica joined him. Thus, when he found himself, after a momentary vertigo and a sudden, horrible falling sensation—as though he were falling with ever-increasing speed through the back of his head—reliving the day over again in exact and precise detail, while at the same time remaining totally conscious of the illusory nature of the events he was reexperiencing, he accepted it all as a dream brought on, quite logically, by the interaction of his reading and the psychological reality that reading had so well described. The fact that he was experiencing everything reversed, backward, up to and including not only the words he’d heard and spoken but his very thoughts, while at the same time thinking about what he was reexperiencing normally struck him as just another example of the wondrous and baffling—though ultimately rationally explicable—workings of his unconscious mind.

He’d never imagined a dream could feel so real. Every detail, every sound, odor, physical sensation, seemed to be really taking place, even though reversed. Finally, though, after what must have been nine subjective hours, he found himself getting unbearably bored. It was about two in the afternoon and nothing strange, interesting, or in any way dreamlike was going on: he was just sitting behind his desk, fidgeting a little, while he listened to a class of fourteen-year-old girls answer the questions he was posing them about irregular verbs not only backward, but incorrectly. His mind had been wandering when he’d first experienced the class period, and it was embarrassing and even somewhat painful having not only to listen to the girls with their horrible accents and ridiculously wrong answers, but to be going over his remembered self’s repetitious and futile erotic daydreams again. At the moment he was having the one in which Marcia—the tall, tanned girl with the long, smooth blonde hair and slightly too-large Roman nose, sitting alone in the back of the classroom where he’d had to put her because she was such a disciplinary problem—caught his eye, smiled mischievously at him while she licked her lips the barest instant with the tip of her tongue, then started to unbutton her school blouse a button at a time while he somehow found an immediate excuse to let everyone else in the class out early, but of course asked her to stay behind—

The last of the other girls was closing the door behind herself and Marcia had her blouse completely off, was reaching languidly back to unhook her bra before St. Jacques realized that not only had the day’s progression of events changed completely, but that things were no longer happening in reverse order. And by then Marcia had her bra off and was undoing her green plaid skirt, while he himself was struggling out of his rumpled gray suit—

He’d never imagined a dream could be so real. Marcia’s breasts were fuller than he’d imagined them, her belly flat and tanned and muscular, her thighs long and golden and smooth, with just the faintest hint of sun-bleached blonde hair on them… but somehow he was having an impossible amount of trouble getting his own clothes off, his rumpled suit and wilted, stinking socks and clumsy shoes clinging to him with a will of their own, while the skin he was uncovering was warty and covered with coarse, curling iron-gray hair, his flesh mottled bruise-purple where it wasn’t fish-belly white… his legs were impossibly skinny and twisted, like the legs of an octogenarian who’d spent the last forty years in a wheelchair… he could smell the sweat and grease on him, the sick old man’s stench from the clothes he should have changed days before, the grayish boxer shorts with the ridiculous clocks on them… yet Marcia was still looking at him with that incredible, impossible mixture of adoration and provocation as she deliberately tossed her skirt aside and, still wearing her panties, was coming up the aisle to him… her small, hard nipples brushing against his chest as she helped him out of the last of his clothing, and then she was kneeling, bending forward… but somehow he was wearing those ridiculous boxer shorts again even as he realized that she was about to take him in her mouth, there in front of the empty classroom with her blonde hair sliding silky soft over his thighs as she swayed forward and Mother Isobel’s office was just down the hall where she was only seconds away if she started wondering why he’d let the class out early and the door wasn’t even locked—

“You didn’t lock the door?” The boxer shorts were gone again but she’d pulled back just before her lips touched him, was staring up at him, amazed, angry, and somehow infinitely scornful. “You mean you forgot?”

“Yes, but, don’t worry, it’s all—”

Only it wasn’t all right, because at that very instant Mother Isobel burst into the room wearing a white baseball uniform with a bright red Maltese Cross on the chest and carrying an equally bright red baseball bat with a pair of silly white wings on it just above where she was holding it. She began belaboring him over the head with the bat while chanting at him, “You’re fired for cheating on your wife, St. Jacques, you’re fired, you’re fired!” over and over again.

He woke up with a throbbing headache and the events of the dream still perfectly clear in his mind. The bedside clock said 4:00 A.M. Veronica was still asleep. He got out of bed without waking her, staggered into the hall bathroom to get some aspirin, closed the door and turned on the light. In the mirror on the medicine cabinet he saw he had two large goose eggs on the top of his head and a swelling purplish bruise over his left eye.

He was almost ready to believe Mother Isobel really had been hitting him over the head with that ridiculous winged bat, but then rationality reasserted itself. I must have been thrashing around, hit my head on the headboard, he decided. That would explain the bumps and bruises and the way the dream ended; the rest of it was obviously a normal product of libido, association, and memory.

He’d never had a dream that vivid before. Maybe that’s why his unconscious had chosen such a violent way of censoring his dream-scenario, while at the same time reminding him that if he ever divorced his wife, or was unfaithful to her in some way that Mother Isobel found out about, he’d have to deal with her. She wouldn’t just hit him over the head, she’d fire him like she’d fired Ted Adelard, the art teacher who’d been working nights in that gay bar in Monterey.

He went into the kitchen and put on some coffee, gulped down the four aspirin he’d gotten out of the medicine cabinet. He needed more sleep, but the memory of Mother Isobel smashing him over the head was too vivid for him to trust his unconscious to program any more dreams for him, so he went into the living room and tried to read. But the headache made concentration impossible and he had to give up.

He went back to the bathroom for more aspirin. Suddenly remembering how old and filthy he’d looked in the dream, and how horrible his skin and legs had been, he took off his pajamas and examined himself naked in the full-length mirror. He didn’t look young, but he was more dried out and wrinkled than mottled and flabby, and he wasn’t nearly as hairy as in the dream. His legs were still good, a little scrawny around the ankles, maybe, but otherwise almost shapely for a middle-aged man’s legs. He walked a lot.

Somewhat satisfied, he took extra care bathing and shaving, then went back to the living room to read and drink coffee until it was time to fix breakfast. But the dream kept coming back to him and destroying his concentration. At last he gave up and got out a batch of tests he hadn’t planned to grade before the weekend.

Halfway through his second period Dante class, Mother Isobel announced over the intercom that all third- and fourth-period classes were being cancelled for a special assembly in the chapel. All students and faculty were required to attend. St. Jacques was happy enough to skip his classes, since his lack of sleep was beginning to catch up with him.

On his way across the parking lot he saw Marcia coming toward him, accompanied as usual by June and Terri. June and Terri were both dark and slender with long brown hair and huge dark eyes, a way of staring straight at you that was somewhere between childlike and provocative, and high-cheekboned faces that were from some angles smooth and almost babyish, from others angular and striking; the two were never apart more than a few minutes and the faculty had taken to calling them The Twins.

Marcia didn’t see St. Jacques at first, but when she did she shot him a look of such pure loathing and contempt that it astonished him. She said something to the others—he thought he heard the word goat—then all three looked at him and snickered loudly.

He must’ve let his feeling show when he’d been fantasizing about her in class the day before. He told himself it didn’t matter, that their derision couldn’t mean anything to a mature man like himself, but he knew that ridiculous though it was to let such things bother him, they probably always would.

The front row of pews was reserved for the faculty. St. Jacques sat in his assigned place, between Veronica and Russell Thomas, the insipidly handsome Christian mystical poet who taught English, and whose poetry and conversation Mother Isobel and Veronica found so edifying. St. Jacques was glad to get off his feet; he’d felt stiff and heavy all day, and the bumps on his head hurt when he stood up and walked around. Thomas returned his greeting; Veronica was reading and just nodded back to him when he said hello.

Mother Isobel made her way determinedly to the front, accompanied by a short, rotund priest St. Jacques didn’t recognize. The priest was robed in a surplice and violet stole; his roundness and slight rolling walk set off the nun’s rigid carriage and severe figure; if Veronica was slightly angular, her sister was skeletal. Veronica marked her place—St. Jacques saw she was reading something about New Age Christian Calisthenics, undoubtedly in hope of finding ideas she could use for her swim team—and St. Jacques allowed himself to relax. Veronica would remember her sister’s every word, so he could doze off and ask her what happened later.

When Mother Isobel and her priest reached the front the lights dimmed, leaving only the podium and the open book on it brightly lit. A typically theatrical touch. St. Jacques straightened in his pew and closed his eyes; he knew from long experience that Mother Isobel would undoubtedly talk for some time before introducing the priest. She never really looked at the people she addressed, though she made a point of staring searchingly at her audience.

Her voice was as harsh and pompous as usual. St. Jacques had just started to drift off when he was brought wide awake by the first titters and suppressed laughter from not only the girls behind him but from some of the other faculty members. He opened his eyes and looked at Mother Isobel, realizing with a shock that she was staring fixedly and purposefully straight at him, and had probably been doing so the whole time.

“…as the Malleus Maleficarum’s authors proved beyond the shadow of a doubt,” she was saying. “Unclean spirits known as Incubi can take on the form of any man weak or lustful enough to consent to their urgings. They visit the dreams of young and innocent girls in his shape, to tempt and torment them with the lusts of the flesh and so lead them to perdition….”

One such spirit, she explained grimly, ignoring the giggles and suppressed laughter until they finally died away, had visited the school only the night before, though with God’s help she’d driven it away. But the girls at St. Bernadette’s had been entrusted not just to her personal care, but to the care of the Holy Mother Church—and Christ’s church would not let itself be mocked by Satan and his filthy minions. So she’d called upon Father Sydney to perform an exorcism and rid the school once and for all of the unclean spirit that had sought to invade and pollute it….

Sometime during this rather amazing discourse St. Jacques realized she was talking about him. He wanted to see how Marcia was reacting to Mother Isobel’s tirade, but he couldn’t turn around to look, not with Mother Isobel glaring at him.

Father Sydney had started the exorcism, spraying holy water everywhere. He rushed through a Litany and a Psalm, implored God’s grace, went through a Gospel and some prayers, made the sign of the cross a number of times, then began intoning:

“I exorcise thee, most vile spirit, the very embodiment of our enemy, the entire specter, the whole legion, in the name of Jesus Christ, to get out and flee from this assembly of God’s creatures.

“He Himself commands thee, who has ordered those cast down from the heights of Heaven to the depths of the Earth. He commands thee, He who commanded the sea, the winds, and the tempests.

“Hear, therefore, and fear, O Satan, enemy of the faith, foe to the human race, producer of death, thief of life, destroyer of justice, root of evils, kindler of vices, seducer of men, betrayer of nations, inciter of envy…”

Around “kindler of vices” St. Jacques quit listening. Whatever had happened the night before—and he could no longer deny that something had—he categorically refused to believe that Satan, demons, or anything equally ridiculous had been involved. Nothing of the sort had ever existed or ever could exist, and in any case the exorcism certainly wasn’t having any effect on him.

The only possible explanation, he finally decided, after having gone through and rejected everything else, was telepathy. A sort of organic radio that worked only when the sleeping brain relaxed its normal barriers. It was the logical explanation, too, for all the Inquisition’s witch trials and wild reports of demonic possession. How could the Church, with only humbug, ritual, and authority to offer, compete with people who became gods in their sleep, who could create their own pocket realities and draw other people in to share them? It couldn’t, obviously, and so the Church had tried to kill off all the earlier telepaths. A sort of selective breeding, removing the telepaths from the gene pool so as to produce a race of telepathic deaf-mutes. He was some sort of sport, a genetic throwback.

Father Sydney was still droning on about how God, the Majesty of Christ, God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, aided and abetted by the sacred cross and Holy Apostles Peter and Paul and all the saints united, were going to command the spirit, when it finally struck St. Jacques that what had happened the night before had been real. Not the classroom, no, but he’d been somewhere, in a private reality that he himself had created. And even though his anxiety had drawn Mother Isobel into that reality and so ruined everything, Marcia and the rest had been ready to do whatever he wanted them to—

And still would. Because, he was instinctively certain, he was the one who controlled and shaped the reality he’d created. He was the telepath, the one who could enter people’s dreams and reshape them the way he wanted, and no one could stop him. Even Mother Isobel had only been playing the part he’d chosen for her.

No one could ever even prove he was responsible. He would always be lying peacefully asleep in his bed, with Veronica there by his side.

They’d married while she was a sophomore in college and looked a lot like Terri and June looked now, when he’d still been convinced he had a brilliant professorial career ahead of him. She’d been conservative, a devout Catholic, though given to transient mystical and psychic enthusiasms—geomancy, positive thinking, even self-hypnosis—that had made him think her basic ideas were much more malleable than they really were. He’d married her in the confidence that a few years of concentrated exposure to his vastly superior way of thinking would be enough to turn her ideas completely around. But in fact, by the time the third and final college at which he’d taught refused to renew his one-year contract he’d given up trying to impose himself in either his career or marriage, allowed himself to sink unprotesting into what he recognized as Thoreau’s prototypical life of quiet desperation. Veronica took care of him, mothered him almost, and though they had nothing in common and she often irritated him, he liked her well enough. She was generous and indulgent and still attractive for her age, though their sex life had dwindled over the years to what they both had come to see as a sort of hygienic minimum. He loved his comfort and security too well to risk losing them; he knew he had too little glamour or enthusiasm to hope that he could find himself someone better by leaving her. She believed in marriage until death; he was too settled, despairing, and lazy to carry on extramarital affairs behind her back, and he had no desire to hurt her pointlessly.

But if he could have his affairs, his perfect fantasy adventures, without leaving her side… It was the perfect solution. Or would be, if he could deal with Mother Isobel.

The priest was finishing up:

“Therefore, O impious one, go out. Go out, thou scoundrel, go out with all thy deceits, because God has willed that man be his temple.

“But why dost thou delay longer here?

“Give honor to God, the Father Almighty, to whom every knee is bent.

“Give place to the Lord Jesus Christ”—and here Father Sydney sketched the sign of the cross in the air a final time—“who shed for man his most precious blood.”

The exorcism was over. St. Jacques exhaled, realized he’d been holding his breath, that he’d actually been afraid something would happen to him. If telepathy was real, then perhaps the Church’s ceremonies could focus a congregation’s latent telepathic powers against people like himself…. But in any case, the exorcism had done him no harm.

Still, he should get some books, find out as much as he could about incubi. To protect himself from Mother Isobel, if for no other reason.

Mother Isobel announced there’d be a short faculty meeting after lunch, then dismissed the assembly.

As he turned to leave, St. Jacques saw Marcia staring at him from the back of the chapel. He had enough time to seize the expression on her face before she realized he was looking at her: no longer the loathing and contempt she’d affected before her friends, but rather a troubled, confused, almost terrified look.

He ate lunch with Veronica and the poet. Thomas was talking, as usual, about Divine Inspiration. Not just any old Divine Inspiration, but rather that Divine Inspiration (something here about “the force that through the green fuse,” which St. Jacques was sure he had stolen) that enabled Russell Thomas to write his paeans of praise and thanksgiving.

St. Jacques detested him, but thought that this once it couldn’t hurt to be seen in his company. Unfortunately, Mother Isobel never put in an appearance, so it was a wasted effort.

Thomas’s monologue left St. Jacques free to worry about what, he finally realized with a certain surprise, was an ethical question. The vulnerable look on Marcia’s face had awakened him to the fact that what he was contemplating was perhaps more a sort of rape than it was the consequenceless, if scandalous, series of aventures he’d been contemplating.

Though perhaps it would be better to picture the whole thing as a kind of irresistible seduction. There was no force involved; the Marcia of the night before had been willing; it was only her reawakened self who’d been troubled. And that perhaps more because of the interpretations Mother Isobel had put on her experience than because of anything inherent in the experience itself. Or, at least, in what had happened when it had been just the two of them, before St. Jacques’s own fears and self-censorship had brought the avenging nun into the scenario.

He’d done nothing to harm Marcia by involving her in his sexual fantasies: her own unconscious must be serving her up similar fantasies constantly. What he’d done wrong was fail to protect her from her subsequent memory of what happened: he had to find a way to censor what she remembered on awakening so as to ensure that she was no more troubled by her memories of his erotic scenarios than she would have been by the memory of one of her own.

Maybe all he’d have to do would be to tell the girls to forget everything that happened, then let their own unconscious censoring mechanisms do the work for him. The same way hypnotized people could be told to forget they’d even been hypnotized.

The faculty meeting was short and pointless. As it was breaking up, Mother Isobel asked some of the faculty members to stay behind, but there was nothing to indicate that St. Jacques was the one she was interested in. All she did was tell him she wanted to see him in her office after her last class, then dismissed him.

He was thankful she hadn’t attacked or ridiculed him in public, furious at himself for his gratitude, since he knew her well enough to know she never did anything for anybody without expecting something back in return.

Sixth period was a study hall. Most of the girls had been excused to work on the Mother-Daughter Fashion Show. St. Jacques divided his time between rereading The Interpretation of Dreams and surreptitiously watching Liz, a compact, heavy-breasted but athletic blonde he’d had in class the year before; in a few years she’d probably be getting fat, but for the moment she was supremely sensual.

He’d just reread the passage in which Freud relates how he’d told the “intelligent lady patient” that “You know the stimulus of a dream always lies among the experiences of the preceding day.” St. Jacques wanted to make sure he was primed with all the proper stimuli for the night to come.

The bell rang. Liz jumped up, grabbed her books, and ran. St. Jacques watched the play of her buttocks and thighs beneath her slightly too-tight plaid uniform skirt, then picked up his own books and made his way to his seventh-period class.

Seventh period was French I. Terri handed him a note signed by Mother Isobel herself excusing Marcia from class indefinitely for reasons of health. St. Jacques couldn’t tell if Terri, June, or any of the others remembered their brief participation in his dream-scenario.

In any case, he did his best to make the class a perfect example of classic enlightened pedagogic method as practiced at St. Bernadette’s: he started out asking the girls difficult questions about the imparfait du subjonctif that he knew they couldn’t answer, was abusively critical of their answers, tried even trickier questions about the accord du participe passé that no one volunteered to answer, then sent Terri and June and two other girls to do them on the board. Since none of them proved capable of getting the problems right, he gave the class a spur-of-the-moment quiz, as well as a long homework assignment for the next day. This gave him a good half hour to watch and fantasize about them uninterrupted while pretending to busy himself with other matters.

June was having trouble with the quiz. On impulse, he decided to go easy on the grading this once.

His final class he spent going over the tests he’d graded that morning. None of the girls in the class interested him, though some had attracted him strongly in previous years. As he’d gotten older, his fantasy life had become increasingly detached from any real-world possibilities and involvements and the girls he desired had become younger and younger, so that it was the incoming thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds who excited him most, the seniors far less, the other adults he encountered almost not at all. Knowing his fantasies to be impossible, he’d never felt compelled to realize them, or blame himself for not having done so. A perfect example of his unconscious mind arranging things for his ease and comfort.

Mother Isobel was waiting for him in her office. The Malleus Maleficarum and various other leather- and cloth-bound books were stacked on her desk.

A stage setting. She probably hadn’t even opened any of the books, just stuck them where they’d look impressive.

“Sit down, Lawrence.”

He sat.

“You know what I called you in here to talk about.”

“Not really. I—”

“Of course you do. You were in the chapel, even if you slept through the first half of what I said.”

“Mother Isobel, I’m not a Catholic, I don’t believe—”

“You’re always trying to find an excuse, Lawrence. Make people believe what you’ve done isn’t really wrong after all, so you can come up smelling like a rose. You’ve been here more than ten years, and that’s been long enough for me to learn how you lie to yourself and everybody else. But you were married in a Catholic church, by a Catholic priest, to a Catholic wife, and this is a Catholic school. So if you really don’t know what I’m talking about, why don’t you tell me where you got that bruise on your face and those bumps on your head?”

“Please, Mother Isobel… I had some kind of nightmare last night, I don’t know what exactly, but I must’ve hit my head thrashing around—”

“Quit lying! You remember as well as I do. There’re just three reasons I haven’t fired you yet. One, you’re Veronica’s husband; if I fire you I’ll probably have to let her go, and she deserves better than that. Two, the Sisters of Sanctimony haven’t yet been given official approval by the Church—we’re still in a probationary period—and I’d rather not complicate matters any more than necessary, especially with something as controversial as demonic possession. Three, I think what’s wrong with you is more basic spinelessness than out-and-out evil. I watched you carefully during the exorcism, and even though you squirmed a lot—”

“Because of the way you were glaring at me!”

“—still, you didn’t seem to be in any real torment. Sinistrari distinguishes between those persons who are visited by incubi and succubi through no fault of their own, and the witches and sorcerers who receive such visitations as the result of pacts signed with demons. My guess is you’re one of the first kind. Along for the ride, as it were. I’m assuming you haven’t signed any sort of pact—”

“Of course not. I don’t even believe in the Devil!”

“Yes or no?”

“No!”

“No real harm was done the girl, so I’ll take your word for it, this time. And perhaps it’s a point in your favor that you don’t believe in the Devil. According to Sinistrari, those who consort with incubi and succubi while believing them to be demons are as guilty of demoniality as those consorting with real demons.”

“I don’t understand. They aren’t supposed to be demons?”

“Sinistrari states that they’re actually a lower sort of angels, who themselves sin through their lust for men and women. That’s why he considers sexual relations with them as crimes against chastity, but not against the Church.”

“I told you I don’t believe in any of that.”

“And I told you I’d take your word for it this time.” She opened one of her desk drawers, brought out a sachet of herbs. “Here.” He took it warily. “It won’t hurt you. Put it inside your pillow before you go to sleep tonight. And keep it there: if I learn you’ve removed it I’ll have no choice but to assume you’re in conscious collusion with the forces of evil. In which case not only will I fire you, but I’ll do my best to make sure no one ever hires you again. Have I made myself clear?”

“Perfectly clear. Though I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

He sniffed the sachet. It smelled of cinnamon and spices and made his head spin a little, not unpleasantly, when he took a deeper breath.

“What’s in it?” Knowing that by asking he was implicitly recognizing her right to force him to keep something in his pillow so long as it was harmless.

“Sweet flag, cubeb seeds, root of aristolochia, ginger… herbs and spices. The recipes in here.” She pushed a leather-bound book at him. The Collected Works of Ludovico Maria Sinistrari was stamped in flaking gilt on the cover. “You can look it up for yourself if you want.”

It was a challenge. St. Jacques declined it, shrugged. “I’ll try it for a while. Since you insist. But the whole thing’s absurd.”

On his way to his car, he saw Russell Thomas sitting in a lawn chair by the pool, talking to some students. Veronica was away with the swim team—they had a meet in San Jose—and the poet was acting as lifeguard.

Thomas was young, blond, tanned, muscular, everything St. Jacques wasn’t. He had a rich theatrical voice and the total self-confidence of someone so in love with himself that he can’t imagine anyone failing to share his passion. The girls were listening to him in wide-eyed admiration, hanging on his every word: St. Jacques recognized Liz in her white two-piece swimsuit on the far side of the group. He stopped and watched them for a while, registering everything for future reference. Finally, having endured all he could, he left.

On the way home he stopped by a bookstore specializing in mystical and occult books where he’d picked up things for Veronica now and then. The clerk directed him to something called Demons, Demonologists, and Demoniality: An Encyclopedical Compendium in three volumes; leafing through it he found a translation of Sinistrari’s De Daemonialitate. The introduction stated the book was on the Church’s prohibited index, which could only mean that Mother Isobel was already lapsing into heresy in her attempts to deal with him. Pleased, he bought the books.

Back at the house he took the sachet out of his briefcase and sniffed it again before tossing it on the kitchen table. It smelled quite nice, actually. He pulled up a chair and stared at it for a while. It didn’t seem likely that the herbs and spices could do him any real harm, but he couldn’t be sure: the Church had had centuries to devise effective methods for dealing with those it considered its enemies, even if it had worked them out by trial and error. He was tempted to toss the sachet out or empty it and replace its contents, but even if Veronica were loyal enough to refuse to spy on him—something of which he was by no means certain—Mother Isobel would undoubtedly continue dropping by for tea several times a week, and St. Jacques was certain she’d have no trouble convincing Veronica to let her search his bedroom.

In fact, he was pretty sure Veronica would have no real objections to spying on him for her sister. She no longer had any real personal loyalty to him, but only to the institution—and to be sure, the sacrament—of marriage. Mother Isobel would be able to persuade her to see that role and those duties as subservient to a larger, religious responsibility, toward not only God and the Church, but toward her husband’s immortal soul.

He went into the bedroom, dug a little hole in the foam rubber inside his pillow and stuck the sachet in, zipped the pillow closed. As an afterthought he opened the bedroom window, to keep the air as fresh as possible.

Veronica wouldn’t be back before midnight. He started grading papers, but quit halfway through and showered instead, then shelved most of the books he’d bought in the bookcase by his side of the bed. Veronica would never even notice them, though he’d have to find somewhere else for them before her sister’s next visit.

He read awhile, trying to tire himself out so he could get to sleep. Most of what he read disgusted him and he dismissed it as the product of the Inquisitors’ diseased imaginations and expectations, but some things stuck in his mind: the supposed irresistibility of demon lovers coupled with women’s insatiable desire for them, the fact that incubi were sometimes described as having double or even triple penises, as well as the ability to make even their seemingly more normal members expand and contract, throb, pulse, and spin inside women they seduced, so yielding titillations no mere man could ever hope to rival.

All of which, if true, was certainly something to look forward to. He put the book away and turned off the lights, found himself going over and over the erotic scenarios he’d thought up during the day—endless successions of tangled willing bodies, breasts, and thighs, mouths, buttocks, and vaginas—so nervous with anticipation he couldn’t relax. He’d had his erection so long it was painful. The herbs seemed to be stimulating his imagination, not helping him lay it to rest. He tossed and turned, twisted the sheets and covers around him so badly he had to get up and make the bed all over again twice. Finally he switched his pillow with Veronicas but even that didn’t do any good.

About 12:30 he heard her come in. He switched the pillows back and pretended to be asleep.

The bedroom door opened but the light stayed off. “Larry?” she whispered. “Larry, are you awake?”

He could hear her breathing, though she was still standing in the doorway on the far side of the room, smell the swimming pool on her clothes and hair. All his senses seemed unnaturally acute, as though the sachet in his pillow had been filling the room with some airborne stimulant. Maybe that was how it was supposed to work: keep him awake all night so he’d never get a chance to dream.

Veronica slipped off her shoes, tiptoed across the wooden floor. He squeezed his eyes completely shut. She stopped by his side of the bed and he could hear the crinkling of whatever she was wearing as she bent down beside him. He felt her breath on his face—clean and sweet-smelling and warm—heard her suck in two, three deep lungfuls of air, felt her let them out again.

Checking up on him, to make sure he’d put the sachet in his pillow.

He wanted to yell at her that neither she nor her sister had any right. Instead, he lay rigidly immobile until he heard her straighten and sneak out of the room, closing the door softly behind her. Then he stretched slightly, unkinking his tensed muscles, and heard her pick up the hall phone and dial.

“Hello… Yes. No, nothing’s wrong, he put it in his pillow and he’s already asleep. You must’ve made some kind of mistake. He’d never—Of course not, if you say that’s what happened I believe you, but it couldn’t have been him, you see, not really, maybe some evil spirit pretending—Of course I’ll make sure he keeps it there. I like the way it smells. So I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye.”

He heard her go into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, pull out a chair, and sit down. The worst of it was that she’d never do anything to hurt him unless she was convinced it was for his own greater good. Whereas he, with no transcendent goals, morality, or justifications, was perfectly aware that whenever he did anything to wound or hurt her, it was always merely for his own convenience and satisfaction, when it wasn’t just selfish indifference.

With the exception of one brief affair with a student at the second college at which he’d taught (and which had hurt Veronica deeply when she found out, though she’d never reproached him for it), he’d never done anything, had always known he’d never do anything. Until now, if he could just lull Mother Isobel’s suspicions while keeping the girls sharing his dreams from conscious guilt over their unconscious willingness to participate in his fantasies.

Veronica came in a little later, undressed in the dark, and fell asleep almost immediately. St. Jacques stayed awake, nervous and agitated, but afraid to wake her. When he finally did drift off he found himself falling through the back of his eyes again. He felt a surge of triumph: the sachet hadn’t been able to stop him after all!

Only this time what he was reexperiencing in reverse was not the previous day, but the time he’d spent lying in bed feigning sleep, and nothing he could think of seemed to make the process go any faster. So he took control of the dream, willed himself to get out of bed. Time reversed its backward flow, became normal again. The bedside clock said 4:00 A.M.

He imagined Terri and June opening the bedroom door and tiptoeing in, but nothing happened. He fantasized the phone ringing, with Liz calling from a phone booth to tell him she’d snuck away from school and would be there in five minutes, but the phone didn’t ring. He told himself a car had just entered the driveway and was coming to a halt outside his window, and still nothing happened.

He was suddenly terrified Mother Isobel had found a way to take control, that she’d burst in in her white satin baseball uniform and smash him over the head or try out some of the tortures he’d been reading about in the books on the Inquisition.

For an instant, he was sure he must have come awake again despite what the clock seemed to say. He glanced down at himself, told himself that if he really were dreaming, he could change his pajamas into anything else he wanted, like his swimming suit.

His pajamas were gone. He was wearing his swimming suit. So he was dreaming.

He left the dream-Veronica sleeping soundly and padded out into the hall. Dreams were symbolic; if he wanted to get in touch with somebody what better way than by telephone? He switched the dial so that each number became a different girl’s name, picked up the phone, and dialed Marcia. No answer, not even a busy signal. He tried the others. Nothing.

Closing his eyes, he imagined himself lying in the sun by the swimming pool, but when he opened his eyes again he was back lying on the bed, though he’d seemed to feel the sun on his chest and face for an instant. He imagined himself a three-piece tweed suit over his swimming trunks, then added the shirt, tie, socks, and shoes he’d forgotten, and went out into the hall to get his car keys out of the ashtray where he kept them. The phone was next to the ashtray; he saw that the dial had reverted to normal.

No one was waiting in romantic ambush outside. When he tried to drive off in his car, the whole night landscape around him faded out of existence and he found himself back in bed, wearing his pajamas. The clock said 4:20.

A few more experiments convinced him he couldn’t get more than a few hundred yards from his sleeping body, and couldn’t alter more than a few things at a time before finding himself back where he’d started from.

Further experiments convinced him he couldn’t bring anybody from the previous day into his dream. Except perhaps Veronica, who was still sleeping in the bed, part of the dream decor, but he didn’t want to bring her any further into the dream—there were too many chances that whatever happened would get back to Mother Isobel if he didn’t hit on the right way to suppress or distort her memories. Feeling silly, he went through the magazines in his living room until he found the latest issue of L’Evenement du Jeudi, leafed through it until he found the picture he remembered, an aspiring Italian starlet swimming nude at a hotel in Cannes.

With a little experimentation he found he could enlarge the picture, extract the girl and make her life-size and more or less three-dimensional, but he couldn’t make her look like a real human being, only a big, glossy inflatable doll. When he tried to make the doll move it twitched once or twice, and he found himself back in bed with his pajamas on.

So he needed other people to play the other roles in these dream-scenarios. Maybe that was how all dreams really worked, by telepathic contact between people’s sleeping minds. Immersion in a truly collective unconscious for purposes of wish fulfillment. In which case, being a telepath wasn’t what made him different, because everybody was a telepath; the difference was that he’d somehow learned to enter that collective state while maintaining his conscious will and lucidity.

If he was correct he could put his last doubts about morality to rest: he wasn’t doing anything anyone else wasn’t doing; the only difference was that he was able to take conscious control of his participation. So he wasn’t just inventing excuses for himself, no matter what Mother Isobel said.

But that still left unanswered the question of how to make contact with the girls’ sleeping minds. Perhaps he only had access to the dreams of people he’d already come across in his re-experienced waking time. Which meant that tonight there wouldn’t be anyone but Veronica.

He looked at her, sleeping, realized he could use her to find out if he could make the people he brought into his dream world forget what happened, so long as what he did was innocuous enough that it wouldn’t give her reason to suspect anything, even if she did remember. In any case, he’d probably be safer experimenting with her, for all her loyalty to her sister, than with someone with no reason to dream about him.

He climbed back into bed, closed his eyes, pretended to be asleep again, then made the phone ring. You can wake up now, Veronica, he thought. The phone’s ringing.

She took a long time to come awake. She seemed confused and recalcitrant, so he just kept the phone ringing until she got out of bed, stumbled into the hall, and picked it up.

“Hello?” he heard her say. “Hello?”

There’s nobody on the other end of the line, he thought. Put the phone back and come to bed.

He opened his eyes, watched her coming back into the room. There was a little light, not much, from the moon, and in it she looked younger, more graceful than usual. Almost the way he remembered from when he first met her at the University of Wisconsin and she’d looked like a slightly older Terri or June, before she’d taken on the solidity and practicality she now shared with her sister.

That’s how she sees herself in her dreams, who she really is inside, he realized. He felt an unexpected surge of desire for her, suppressed it: he couldn’t risk complicating his experiment too much, at least not this first time.

When she started to climb back into bed, he made the phone ring again. She answered it, found there was no one there, hung up, and was on her way back into the bedroom when he made it ring again.

He went through the whole thing three more times before he was satisfied. The last time he didn’t make the phone ring, just suggested she could hear it ringing—but then as she went back wearily to pick it up again he heard it ringing, too, as loudly and realistically as when he’d made it ring himself, though this time she had to be the one who was sustaining the experience’s reality. When she picked it up he suggested she leave it off the hook this time and come back to bed, go to sleep. As soon as she was asleep he told her that she wouldn’t wake up again until the alarm went off in the morning and that she wouldn’t remember having heard the phone ring when she did.

St. Jacques spent the rest of the dream-time practicing altering himself in front of the bathroom mirror. He added and subtracted tans and mustaches, changed his clothing, haircut, age, race, and features, made himself skinny, fat, and muscular, then tried on Russell Thomas’s form, face, and way of moving. Finally, feeling greatly daring, he went back to the living room and picked up the Evenement du Jeudi he’d been looking at earlier, and using it as a guide turned himself into the woman in the picture. The change was wholly convincing; in the mirror he looked like the woman and yet as real as his real self had ever looked; he could feel the weight of her breasts on his chest, a strange confusion of sensations where his penis and testicles should have been, but weren’t, problems with his equilibrium when he took an involuntary step back.

For some reason it was easier to make complex changes in himself than it was to change the things around him. But having a woman’s body was disturbing; he changed himself back to normal just before the alarm woke him.

It was Veronica’s turn to make breakfast. As usual, she sipped her tea, picked at her eggs, and left most of her toast untouched, finally offering what was left to him. He waited for her to mention Mother Isobel’s accusations or what had happened the night before; when she did neither he finally asked, “Did the phone ring last night? I had this dream in which it kept ringing and ringing—”

She thought a moment, concentrating, then shook her head. “I don’t think so. If it did I didn’t wake up either.”

So he could insert himself into people’s dreams without fear of the consequences, either to himself or to them. He could even visit Mother Isobel in her sleep, take her baseball bat away from her and hit her over the head with it, then tell her to forget all about it. Though the information would still be there in her mind, buried on some unconscious level, and would just result in more trouble later. What he really should do was sneak into her dreams and convince her he was the most wonderful man who’d ever lived, a veritable saint who deserved a raise, then let the idea percolate up through her conscious thoughts until she took it for her own.

He drank four more cups of coffee before he left for school, but even so he was dead tired, irritable, and almost unable to function all day, though he kept stopping off in the faculty lounge and knocking down Dixie cup after pink Dixie cup of the horribly bitter coffee they kept simmering there. When lunch came he didn’t go to the cafeteria, just curled up on the couch in the lounge and went to sleep. Dreaming, he relived his last hour of waking time—the correspondence between waking and dream time seemed exact—but was unable to in any way influence or change the backward flow of events. He was the only one asleep, all the others were awake and conscious: there was no way he could alter or escape from the collective reality they were maintaining.

But it was hard having to endure the gritty exhaustion of last hour’s class all over again. Hard to endure his frustrated lust and fantasies yet another time without being able to do anything about them. Hard, finally, to have to watch himself doing such a ridiculous, insensitive, and insanely boring job of teaching books that, when he’d first started teaching, had fascinated and excited him. He was in the same position as his students now, a spectator rather than a participant, and the combination of boredom, frustration, and acute self-criticism was intolerable. He’d have to do something about it, use at least part of the time he spent reliving class periods in reverse to not only think about his subject, but to study the girls’ reactions, think about what they needed, why they always learned so little, because if he couldn’t speed things up and turn in a performance he felt better about as spectator/critic, he was going to be unhappier than he was making any of his students.

It was ironic in a way: the very transformation that was going to allow him to satisfy all his forbidden desires would at the same time force him to become a better teacher.

He slept through the period bell, was awakened a moment later by Jim Seabury, the new psychology teacher.

“You’re going to be late if you don’t hurry.”

“Thanks, Jim. I didn’t get much sleep last night and—” He realized what he was saying, broke off suddenly, then added with what he hoped was the appropriate sheepish grin, “But if you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention anything about it to anybody. Even Veronica.”

“Sure. Hey, did you hear Mother Isobel refused to renew my contract? Said I was atheistic.”

“I heard. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. I’ll be glad to get out of here. But anyway, you should watch out, make sure you get enough sleep. Most people don’t realize how dangerous not getting enough is. You can end up on the funny farm that way.”

St. Jacques stared at Seabury, trying to decide if the other had meant anything personal, then remembered belatedly that the psychology teacher had served as a subject in some sort of sleep-deprivation experiments once.

“How come?”

“REM sleep. Dreaming. You’ve got to get a certain amount of dreaming in every night. Missing a few days won’t really do you any harm, but after a while it creeps up on you.”

“I haven’t quite reached that point. Not yet, anyway. But I’ve got to get to class. See you later.”

“Sure. Bye.”

He spent the rest of the afternoon avoiding Mother Isobel while compiling for himself a new set of images and fantasies for the night to come, not sure whether or not his morning memories would be available, since he’d already slept on them once.

Marcia was back in class. She seemed to have reverted to her normal behavior—which is to say, she ignored him as completely as possible—though she was quieter than usual. He, in turn, neither called on her nor paid any overt attention when he saw her whispering and passing notes, but he watched her out of the corner of his eye.

Once, when he was staring unguardedly at June, he realized both she and Terri were staring quietly and intensely back at him. After he jerked his gaze away, though, he realized they had just been pretending to pay attention and that their thoughts had been totally elsewhere.

As he was leaving the school after his next class he glanced over at the swimming pool, saw the girls on the swim team all lined up watching Veronica demonstrate a back flip off the high board. They had a meet that evening; Veronica wouldn’t be back till long after he was asleep.

He finished his work early and went to bed around seven. He didn’t bother to switch pillows: the spices were once again stimulating his imagination and sharpening his senses—if anything, their effect was more aphrodisiac than tranquilizing—but he knew he was too tired to be kept awake by them.

As soon as he’d finished his plummeting dive through the back of his head he looked at the bedside clock: 7:15. If he let himself return to the beginning of his French I class he’d have five hours and fifteen minutes before his dream progression brought him back to the moment he’d fallen asleep. That would be about 5:45, and he had no idea what would happen then.

He let the backward flow carry him along, his exhaustion decreasing with every hour subtracted from the day. On his way back to school he realized he would never be able to return to a point where he felt refreshed if he took control at 2:00, and that anyway he was staying conscious through the whole sleep period, not really giving way to his dreams despite the fact that he was immersing himself in the collective unconscious and sharing the dreams of others. What if he needed that relaxation of conscious control and the release it brought to stay sane?

But perhaps it was just the contact, the shared wish-fulfillment, that was needed, and the abdication of control was merely a means toward that end. He tried to remember what Jung—who, after all, had been the one who’d concentrated on the collective unconscious—had said about dreams. All he could come up with was an anecdote he’d read somewhere.

Freud and Jung had been at a psychiatric conference where Freud had been lecturing about phallic symbols. He’d claimed that nothing in a dream was what it seemed, that every apparent meaning cloaked a hidden, latent meaning. He’d stated that things in dreams—such as trains going into tunnels, pencils, swords, umbrellas, or whatever—had no meaning or importance in themselves, but were there to simultaneously mask and reveal what they really stood for, which was in every case a phallus.

When question time arrived, however, Jung had demanded what the latent meaning of a phallus was when the phallus itself appeared in the dream, and Freud had been unable to answer him.

Which was all very well, and if St. Jacques’s unconscious had presented him with the information it had to mean something, but he couldn’t see what. Unless a phallus really did stand for itself alone, so that distortion was only a means of getting certain things into awareness. Which would mean that what was important was the fact of getting them there, not the subterfuges one normally used to do so.

Watching Veronica come soaring back up out of the pool onto the diving board, he found himself appreciating her grace and control. She and the rest of the swim team would still be awake, so the scene had to be rigidly exact and immutable, but when he looked at her from this distance she seemed almost as young and graceful as her dream-self of the night before. Perhaps it was because she didn’t have to worry about the impression she was making on people, but poised on the diving board in her blue tank suit, completely lost in what she was doing, she seemed paradoxically less aggressively healthy, less solidly muscular, than she did away from her sports.

St. Jacques continued backing away from the swimming pool, lost it around the corner. Inside the main building he backed past the faculty lounge up the stairs to his last class. He was surprised and pleased to find the resolution he’d made during his lunchtime nap had already had some effect, though he’d made no conscious alteration in his teaching methods: he was obviously paying closer attention to his students and their needs, trying harder to get things across to them, being a little more sympathetic when they didn’t understand him. What’s more, some of the students seemed to have sensed the change and were reacting favorably.

Between classes he dashed backward down to the empty faculty lounge, spat two cups of coffee back into their pink Dixie cups and let the percolator suck them up its spout, then backed out of the lounge to his French I class, feeling more tired than ever. He endured the class in reverse until the moment came when he’d first entered the room and put his books on his desk, then took control of the dream and felt the time-flow flipflop back to normal around him.

None of you will notice anything’s different unless I tell you to, he commanded silently. You will all see me here at my desk, giving the same lecture and asking the same questions you remember from before. Nothing will be any different from the way you remember it. Except, he decided to add, the class seems much more interesting, and when you wake up in the morning the only thing you’ll remember is that it was a good class and you feel like you’ve really learned something.

He got up, walked to the door, then paused a moment before going out, watching them. They were all staring intently at the front of the room, more alert and interested-seeming than he could remember ever having seen them. Glancing at the front, he realized he could see himself sitting at his desk, shuffling notes. The product of their collective imagination.

The St. Jacques behind the desk looked up at the class, began talking animatedly. What he was saying was not only more interesting than anything St. Jacques remembered reexperiencing himself saying, it was also clearer and better organized. He was fascinated, almost tempted to stay and watch his improved self teach, but finally tore himself away, went down to the faculty lounge, and made sure it was as empty as he remembered. In the lounge bathroom he first became his younger self, then took on Russell Thomas’s appearance, practiced moving around until he was sure he had everything down perfect, then went back upstairs.

No one noticed him enter. He had a hard time tearing himself free of the fascination his double exercised over him, but finally walked over to June and Terri and asked them to come to the faculty lounge with him. He hesitated, then asked Marcia as well.

The fantasy he’d worked out—that had elaborated itself in his head over the last two days—called for Marcia to know what was happening, and to have helped plan it with him (the him in question being, of course, Russell Thomas: the poet’s identity an additional safeguard in case something went wrong, as well as a physical self it felt good to wear, and which was undoubtedly more pleasing than his own), then persuaded her two somewhat hesitant but interested friends to participate with her. So Marcia was the one who locked the door to the faculty lounge behind them and turned out the lights, plunging the room into a semiobscurity lit only by the faint reddish glow filtering in through the curtains. And it was Marcia also who took the lead and encouraged her friends, undressing both herself and the bogus poet, making quiet ecstatic love with him on the carpet and couch until the time came when June and Terri too shed their clothes and all three were rolling around in a passionate, sweating tangle of bodies, breasts, thighs, genitalia, and multiple orgasms, in ever more complicated and abandoned linkages, pairings, and daisy chains. St. Jacques was indefatigable, trying things he’d never before even allowed himself to imagine, no longer really sure when something had originated in his own fantasies and when it came from one or more of the girls…. He found his physical form changing, so that for a while he was a boy of fourteen, at other times various older men he knew instinctively were the girls’ fathers, at yet another time a man who could only be his own father, then, briefly, he was two men, one of them Russell Thomas while the other was his own adolescent self. Meanwhile the girls had been shifting and flowing between various identities, Marcia becoming first Liz and then St. Jacques’s mother, while Terri and June had become his two younger sisters, then both of them were Veronica as she’d been when St. Jacques first met her. One of them even became Mother Isobel, and for an instant she stared fiercely and furiously around her, but their combined desires overcame the innate censoring mechanism that had called the nun into their midst, and she grew younger, became the Sister Isobel she’d been when St. Jacques first met her, then younger still, a shy adolescent girl, before she melted back into Veronica and the two Veronicas again began to flicker through the identities of various other girls in his classes before regaining their true forms as Terri and June…. All of them, every identity, spasming and melting through orgasm after orgasm, each the ultimate possible release from the tensions of the one before until even that ultimate possible release showed itself in turn to be merely a state of intolerable tension by contrast with the release that followed it.

Finally—perhaps gradually, perhaps abruptly, St. Jacques wasn’t sure—they’d disentangled themselves, were showering and soaping one another clean in the shower stall that had made a sudden appearance in the bathroom, then were toweling one another off and getting out. St. Jacques was himself again, no longer Russell Thomas, but a younger self, seventeen or eighteen years old, with the confidence and grace that Russell Thomas had pretended to and he himself had always lacked.

St. Jacques glanced at his watch as he was putting it back on: 7:15. His dream-time had caught up with the waking-time it was recapitulating. St. Jacques reminded all three girls that they’d have to forget everything as soon as they awakened. Marcia said she would make sure she did, then had to excuse herself and leave, as they’d all known she would.

St. Jacques felt an irresistible urge to return home, taking Terri and June with him. He finished dressing then waited for June and Terri to put their heavy pullovers on over their jeans—all three were dressed casually, for the street now—then put his arms around them and walked them to his car. He felt singingly happy, with a quiet excitement growing in him that he was content just to feel. The girls squeezed into the front seat with him and he drove them back to the house, all three waving to the gate guard as they left.

At the house St. Jacques opened a bottle of champagne—St. Jacques had always liked champagne and both girls had a weakness for it—then sat around the living room sipping it in silence and watching the fire that had sprung to life in the fireplace. When they finished the bottle, they went into the bedroom to make love some more.

They start slowly, romantically, this time, as though the three of them are fitting together, following something innate and inborn rather than dictating their private needs and wants to one another. The spicy smell from the pillow fills the room, fills them all with a floating lightness as it blends into the walls and furniture and turns everything into sunlit forest, soft and cool and green. Then a luminous mist with hints of green and gold in its depths is swirling languidly around them as they make love in the long green grass with the tiny red and yellow wildflowers all around… as they rise up together in the glowing air on their long, golden-tipped, ivory-feathered wings, beating their way gently and without haste ever higher, until at last the world is lost entirely beneath them and they swoop and turn with ever greater rapidity and grace, falling and floating, all three intertwined now, through infinite golden clouds, St. Jacques’s double phallus jade and ruby, twin coiling serpents of light, there deep in both girls simultaneously as they all three cling to one another, not moving, not needing to move anymore, spinning and turning through the cool foggy luminescence of infinite space, the skies beyond the sky, and St. Jacques knows that this is what the phallus in his dreams had always masked and revealed, this ultimate unmoving union, this joyous fusion of flesh and sky.

“I told you that it was just a venal sin, and he’d come to his senses soon,” he hears Terri say to June in a voice that is as much his wife Veronica’s as it is Terri’s, as much Terri’s as it is Veronica’s.

“Angels always do. I owe both of you an apology,” he hears June say in a voice choked with laughter, a voice as much Mother Isobel’s as it is June’s, as much June’s as it is Mother Isobel’s.

“On the contrary,” St. Jacques says, “I’m the one who has to apologize. I’m delighted that Veronica brought you along and gave me the opportunity to make amends.” They all burst out laughing and fall intertwined into the sky.

St. Jacques realizes suddenly that on awakening he will remember only the phallus, the multiple penetrations and spasming releases, that the unity and love and the way they’re all five melting through one another into the infinite sky will be as beyond his own conscious mind’s ability to accept as his earlier, purely sexual fantasies had been beyond Mother Isobel’s comprehension.

The alarm clock goes off and he just has enough time to remind them all—June and Terri and Veronica and Mother Isobel and himself—to forget what’s happened as soon as they awaken. They agree, and then all of them fall laughing out of the sky into their separate selves.

Veronica and St. Jacques wake up beside each other. They stare at each other, wide awake, more refreshed than either can remember having been in years. Neither remembers any of what passed between them in the early morning, when Veronica’s symbiote had finally reached the critical point in its interaction with her nervous system and begun affecting her dreams in the same way her husband’s had been affecting his—a change that had been delayed several days in her case, because she’d eaten so much less of the moldy toast than her husband had that the mold which had taken up residence in her had needed that much longer to multiply to a point where it could affect her.

They smile at each other, feeling a rare mutual sympathy and tenderness and rather surprised by it, unaware that anything has really changed. They then separate to live their separate days, St. Jacques to worry about improving his teaching methods and fantasize endless daisy chains and orgasms, though perhaps a little less obsessively than before; Veronica to work with her geology students and swim team while she daydreams about astral projection and the wonders of heaven.

It took them almost a year to realize and accept what they’d come to mean to each other, decades more to begin to fully integrate their sleeping and waking lives. Sometime during that first year they began making love to each other in the flesh again, and eventually two children were born to their union. And in those two children and their many, many descendants, the blue-green mold lived happily ever after.