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
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
