The Demon Lover (14 page)

THIRTEEN

I
walked home quickly, expecting every moment to be stopped by campus security demanding I return Professor Lilly’s property. I was relieved when I left the campus, but unhappy to see Diana Hart hailing me from her driveway. She was standing next to a bright yellow Toyota FJ Cruiser, which must belong to a guest. Even if Diana did drive I didn’t think she’d ever buy so flashy a vehicle.

“Callie, do you have a minute? I was just telling this young woman from the city about you.”

All I could see of the “young woman from the city” was a toned bottom sticking out of the hatchback.
Yoga bum
, Annie would have said appreciatively. The woman undoubtedly did do yoga; she was showing off its fruits in snug leggings emblazoned with the Sanskrit symbol for
namaste
. When she turned around I saw that every inch of her was toned and encased in skintight Lycra and fleece. Even her long black braid, which she flipped back over her shoulder, looked muscular. Just standing two feet from her made me miss six A.M. Jivamukti practice and soy chai lattes … made me miss the city. I’d only been up here for three months and already I had turned into a crazy Wiccan lady casting spells and wearing baggy sweats … Okay, I wasn’t actually wearing baggy sweats, but next to this woman’s tights—and after the weight I’d lost—my jeans did feel baggy.

“Cheers,” Miss Yoga Bum said in a gravelly Australian accent. “Diana told me you wrote that book on sexy vampires, which I thought was totally brilliant. I do some freelance for the
Times
style section and I thought maybe you could give me an interview. Jen Davies, by the way.” She held out a hand and I shook it, not at all surprised to encounter a grip as tight as a Moola Bandha lock. I was already beaming at her, though, as always turned to putty at the thought that a total stranger had read and liked my book.

“Sure,” I replied. “Are you up for the holiday visiting family?”

“Nah, my family’s all on the other side of the globe. Just thought I’d take some pics of the local flora and fauna.” She held up an expensive and complicated-looking camera.

“Jen’s planning on hiking in the woods behind your house,” Diana said in a strained chipper voice. I noticed now that something about this guest had gotten her wound up. I thought I knew what it was. Diana had counted on all her guests for the holiday having plans for Thanksgiving dinner. She must be worried about abandoning this one to come to my house tomorrow. Maybe I could help out there. While Diana nervously told Jen about how I’d fallen in the woods, I mentally counted out table places. If we scrunched up a bit …

“… and you can get lost in there. Tell her, Callie,” Diana concluded, her voice even more high-pitched than usual.

“The woods are overgrown,” I said mildly to Jen. She was wearing Timberland hiking boots and had a small compass attached to the zipper of her fleece vest; she looked like she could take care of herself. “And you can’t spend the whole day hiking. Why don’t you come have Thanksgiving with us? No family, just colleagues and new friends.”

Jen put her hands together in prayer position and bowed her head namaste-style. “That’s very kind of you,” she said with a dazzling toothy smile. “I’d love to.”

I hurried across the street hoping that news of the extra guest would throw Phoenix into enough of a panic that she’d be too busy to notice me disappearing upstairs. I needn’t have worried. Phoenix was passed out on the library couch snoring loudly. In the kitchen I found three punch bowls filled with three different types of punch. I dipped a mug into one and took a sip. It burned my throat going down but spread an agreeable warmth in my belly. I took some more and sat down at the kitchen table with the purloined book. If the spell required anything esoteric—eye of newt, for instance—I’d be out of luck. I almost hoped it would. I’d grabbed the book on impulse and had been too busy worrying I’d get caught to really think about what I was going to do with it until now. Was I really planning to
invoke a demon
? Because the chapter title I’d glimpsed in Soheila’s office suggested you had to invoke one before banishing one.

Skimming the chapter I found that the ingredients necessary for casting the spell were all readily available in the house. I gathered them all into one of the decorative baskets Phoenix had bought at Pier 1 and, adding an electric water kettle and an empty covered sugar bowl, went upstairs to my bedroom.

The demonology book said to summon the demon to a place “where it was wont to appear.” Well, it was
wont
to appear in my bedroom—in my bed, actually, but I didn’t want to do this in my bed. Aside from the risk of setting the sheets on fire, I thought it sent the wrong message. Just looking at the bed reminded me of the long nights of lovemaking … the way he kissed my breasts, the way he looked at me as he slid inside me …

No, I should definitely stay away from the bed
. I wasn’t invoking the demon lover to have sex, nor was I inviting him to stay. As I arranged a circle of candles on the floor I said aloud what it was I wanted to do.
Set your intention
, my yoga teacher always told us at the beginning of class. If there were ever a time to be clear about my intentions this was it.

“I’m calling him to tell him to go away and leave me alone,” I said, plugging the kettle into a wall socket. “Because I don’t want him,” I said, pouring a circle of salt outside the circle of candles. A pang of longing shot through me. The spiral brand on my breast tingled.

“Okay, maybe I want him, but don’t
want
to want him.”

I sprinkled cloves, cardamom, and cinnamon into the sugar bowl and set it by the kettle. I needed one more object to take with me into the circle. The demonology book said to have a “gift” for the demon—some object that meant something to the invoker of the spell. I went to my desk and began opening up the little drawers … I had put it in one of them.… When I found the object I was looking for I slipped it into my pocket along with a book of matches from Sapphire, Paul’s favorite restaurant in L.A.

Paul. I hadn’t forgotten he was coming. He was the main reason I had to do this now. I had a feeling that Paul might not be safe in the house with the demon lover still lurking about. Once I had banished the incubus, I’d be ready to be with Paul again fully. At least that’s what I was hoping.

I looked at my watch. It was 4:20, ten minutes to sunset according to timeanddate.com, 1:20 in California. Paul would still be at home. He was taking the red-eye to JFK after his last class tonight and then driving here tomorrow morning. I took out my cell phone and hit his number.

“Hey,” he said, “I was just packing. According to my weather app it’s in the fifties in Binghamton—that’s about the same weather as you, right?”

“Uh, actually we’re about ten degrees colder,” I told him. In truth, Fairwick was in an oddly cold pocket that was about twenty degrees colder than any of the surrounding upstate cities on any weather map, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that.

“Sheesh, sure you don’t want to come here? It’s eighty-three and sunny today.”

I knew he was only kidding, but for a moment I considered his question seriously. Was I sure that I’d be able to banish the demon lover once I summoned it? If I couldn’t, might it feel threatened by Paul? But the idea of the creature I’d encountered in my bed being threatened by Paul was more ridiculous than the notion that he existed in the first place.

“If it’s really cold we can just stay in bed the whole time,” I said, making my voice sultry.

“Sure,” Paul replied coolly, “while your dean is downstairs eating Thanksgiving dinner. Well, at least the weather forecast is clear. No storms in sight. I shouldn’t have any trouble flying.”

“No,” I said, looking out my bedroom window. “Not a cloud in the sky here.” The mountains to the east were sharply etched against a clear blue horizon. Not a breeze stirred the tips of the pines or the bare branches of the maples and the oaks. I suddenly found myself wishing for dark rain clouds and gusty winds, rain and sleet and snow—anything to keep Paul from coming. What if I got the invoking part of the spell right, but not the banishing part? Paul could be in danger here. I was about to warn him not to come, but he was saying he had to get to class.

“See you tomorrow morning. I lo—” The connection broke before we could exchange I-love-yous. The words might have become commonplaces lately, but I still missed them. I could only hope that after I banished the demon lover forever I’d be able to say them to Paul and mean them again.

The water had come to a roiling boil in the electric kettle. I poured it into the sugar bowl over the spices and then covered it. Then, with the demonology book tucked under my arm, holding the warm bowl in two hands, I stepped into the circle and sat down cross-legged in the center. I placed the sugar bowl in front of me and opened the demonology book to the chapter on invoking and banishing incubi, which I’d marked with the envelope that Soheila had given me. I hesitated for a moment, anxious to start the spell, but if Soheila’s “source” had anything useful to tell me about this creature I’d better find out now. I opened the envelope and took out the folded pages. They were the thin blue paper that people used to use for airmail letters in the days before faxes and emails. My mother had had a trove of letters on this stationery—“from the olden days,” she had told me when I’d found the ribbon-bound packet of letters. I’d been eleven at the time, an age when most girls gave up fairy tales for teen romances, but I, still bewitched by the fairy tales my parents told me every night, believed she meant from the days of the knights and dragons and fairy princesses, not just the 1970s when she and my father had corresponded the summer after they met at St. Andrew’s.

“He courted me by letter,” I still recalled my mother saying. “Just like in an old romantic novel.”

I sometimes wondered if my future love of romantic novels hadn’t come from that one chance comment.

The sound of the paper crackling as I opened it reminded me of her, but the contents of the letter soon had my undivided attention.

“My dearest Soheila,” it read in a slanting script that leaned toward the right margin of the page as if in a hurry to get to the end of each line.

I write to tell you one last story—you were always my best listener!—the story of the Ganconer. I came here to this country to find him—to track him down to his roots, so to speak, but I am afraid now that instead of me tracking him down, he has been pursuing me all along—since my childhood.When I was but a boy of twelve my sister Katy fell ill with a wasting disease that the village doctor could not name or stop. She, who had been a lively, beautiful girl, grew pale and then so weak that she could not leave her bedroom. The village doctor said it must be consumption, although she didn’t cough or have fever, and urged my family to take her away to the mountains for a change of air, but when the idea was broached to Katy she grew hysterical and shrieked that she would die if made to leave her bed. My mother said we should carry her out of the house kicking and screaming if need be, but my father, always tender of heart where Katy was concerned, couldn’t bear to do it. And so we stayed and Katy grew thinner and paler with each day.One night I heard her cry out and, thinking she needed something, I crept into her room. When I opened the door I thought I must still be asleep and dreaming. The room was flooded with moonlight, but the moonlight was in the shape of a white horse and on that horse rode a man cloaked in shadow. I stood speechless in the doorway—in shadow myself—as I watched Katy rise from her bed and go to the man. He reached down his hand, and that’s when I saw that he was made out of shadow himself. He was no more substantial than the shadow branches that fell across the floor, but I watched my sister take his hand and be pulled up onto the back of the moonlight horse. I watched my sister wrap her arms around the shadow man and rest her head upon his shadow back. Her face was glowing in the moonlight, a smile on her lips, but I saw, too, that she was falling into the shadow, being eaten alive by it. I tried to cry out then, but I couldn’t. It was like a hand had reached out—a shadow hand—and squeezed my throat. I felt cold all over and deathly afraid, but I knew that if I didn’t cry out I’d lose my sister forever. To this day I don’t know how I did it, but somehow I summoned the will to speak.“Leave her!” I cried.The shadow man turned to face me then, only he wasn’t a shadow man anymore, he was gaining flesh—pale white flesh as though the moonlight was pouring into a mold and making something whole. But his eyes … his terrible eyes! … were still wells of shadow, and when I looked into them an immense sadness came over me, a sadness that felled me to my knees and dragged me into the dark.I woke in the morning on the cold floor to the sound of my mother’s cries. She was holding the lifeless body of my sister, who lay on the floor beside me.“What happened?” she demanded when she saw that I was awake.I told her everything I had seen, never once thinking she might not believe me, and when I had finished I saw that she did believe me.“Who was he?” I asked.“That was the Ganconer, the Love Talker, a demon that robs women of their lives. They say that once he was as human as you or me, but he lost his way in the woods one day and fell asleep and the Fairy Queen came with her Riders and found him. He was so beautiful that she had to have him. She took him back with her to Faerie, where he dwells to this day, more fey than human now after all these centuries, a creature of shadow and moonlight. The little spark of human still left in him longs to be human again, but he can only become human if a human girl falls in love with him. And so he enchants girls, hoping to make one love him, but if he fails, the girl perishes.”“But our Katy loved him,” I said. “I saw him becoming human. He was turning into flesh—all but his eyes. And then he saw me …”“He would have killed you no doubt, if Katy hadn’t stopped him. There’s where her love of him left off. She must’ve broken free of him and run to save you.”“Then it’s because of me she’s dead,” I said.My mother—God bless her—looked as stricken then as when she’d been wailing over her dead daughter. She tried to tell me it wasn’t so, and in time I let her think she’d convinced me.But I have always known otherwise.That demon—I have long realized that the creatures we call fairies in my country are indistinguishable from the demons of yours—had killed her, but I had a hand in her death as well. And that is why I’ve made it my life’s mission to track him down and banish him to Hell—or Faerie or whatever dark pit he came from. (Yes, I know my mother’s tale says he was once human, but is that any reason to forgive him? On the contrary, I think it is all the more reason to condemn him.) All my studies—the degrees from the University of Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge, the honors, and papers and publications, even the founding of the Royal Order of Folklorists—were all in service to this goal. And now at last I believe I’ve found the spell to undo him.I know that if I had told you what I planned to do you would have tried to stop me, but I have no choice: I must confront him. From the moment when I looked into the blackness beyond his eyes a part of me has dwelled in that darkness. I have felt myself, in these last weeks, growing weaker. I believe he is somehow draining me of my life as he once drained Katy. Unless I confront him I will never be whole. And so, before I embark on this last journey I send you the manuscript of my last book for you to dispose of as you see fit. There is no one whom I trust more,
azizam
. Know always that I went into the darkness with your face before me and that if I don’t return it was not from want of loving you.         
Dooset daram
,
         Angus Fraser
         August 29, 1911 The signature and date caught me by surprise. The letter had been addressed to Soheila—and hadn’t she spoken of the writer as a dear friend?—but Angus Fraser had taught at Fairwick a hundred years ago. Perhaps the letter had been written to Soheila’s mother—or grandmother even. I opened the book in my lap to the title page and found his name under the title. Angus Fraser, DLitt Oxon; Ph.D. Folklore University of Edinburgh; Ph.D. Archaeology Cambridge, 1912.