Incubus by Carol Goodman

Author:Carol Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446489413
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I SPENT THE next week (the last week of classes before finals) trying to avoid Liam Doyle, so embarrassed was I to have been caught talking about him behind his back. Making fun of his poetry, no less! I didn’t know what had come over me. Why had I taken such a dislike to the man just because he wore foppish shirts and had gone to Oxford?

Nearly everyone else certainly liked him. Soheila Lilly served me Irish Breakfast tea the next time I was in her office – “a present from that nice Irish writer!” – and confided to me that he reminded her of Angus Fraser. I saw him eating lunch with Elizabeth Book in the student union twice and heard the dean laughing like a schoolgirl. Even Frank Delmarco grudgingly admitted to me that the new hire wasn’t all bad – and then he showed me the Jets tickets Doyle had gotten for him for the weekend after Christmas. His students raved about the workshop and told me how he took them on hikes through the woods and recited poetry to them.

Nicky Ballard, especially, had been galvanized by him to write. She was working on a series of poems developing the theme of the ice maiden. When she showed me a few of the poems, I immediately saw that Nicky was working out her fear of being trapped by the legacy of her family history through the poems. I thought it was a good emotional strategy but wondered if it would really help combat a century-old curse. Of course, Nicky didn’t know she was under a curse, so it fell to me do what I could to avert it.

I had started the painstaking work of looking up each casualty of the Ulster & Clare train crash, but it was going slowly. Even when I was able to find out something about a victim or their family I had no way of telling whether the person was a witch. There had to some better way of going about this. At the beginning of finals week I decided to go by Liz Book’s office to ask if she had any ideas on how to track down the perpetrator of the curse. As soon as I mentioned the curse a pall fell over Liz’s face, making her look older and tired. In fact, I noticed that she was looking distinctly untidy. Strands of graying hair had escaped her usually immaculate chignon and her knit St. John’s jacket was missing a brass button.

“The Ballard curse has been documented by my predecessors for generations. When I took this job ten years ago I made it one of my missions to avert the curse. First I thought that if we could find out the origins of the curse we could undo it, so I asked Anton Volkov to go through the very long list of people who had reason to hate Bertram Ballard.”

“Why Anton Volkov?” I asked. She looked confused by the question,

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