The Demon Lover (8 page)

“Me too. I am new, too!” She smiled. Her teeth had clearly not had the benefit of American dentistry, and the smile failed to brighten the pastiness of her skin. “I am … how do you say? Change student?”

“Exchange student,” I corrected her as gently as I could. She looked as if she might crumble under the slightest rough handling.

“Exchange student,” she repeated dutifully. Then she wrinkled her brow in confusion. “But that cannot be correct. Exchange means to trade one thing for another, no?”

I nodded in agreement.

“But I do not think Fairwick College will be sending an American student back where I am coming from.” She said this with such stolid gravity that I felt a little chill.

“Where exactly
do
you come from?” I asked.

She shook her head, making her lank hair whisk against her thin shoulders. I noticed the ends of her hair were split and damp—as if she’d been chewing them. “The borders change so often I hardly know anymore.”

When I’d walked into the room I had thought she looked younger than the average college student, but now, talking about her country, she suddenly looked much older. Where could she be from? I wondered. Bosnia? Chechnya? Serbia? But if she didn’t want to say which war-torn corner of Eastern Europe she came from, who was I to pry?

“What can I do to help?” I asked instead.

She gave me a snaggle-toothed smile and relaxed her shoulders. “I would like to take your class Vampires and the Gothic Imagination,” she said very carefully, as if she had rehearsed this bit. “But it is full.” She frowned, then smiled again (she was beginning to seem a little manic). “You are a very popular teacher! Everybody wants to take your class!”

“It’s my first semester here,” I reminded her. “So, it’s not because of me. The class is popular because vampires and the supernatural are popular right now. Is that why you want to take the class—because you liked the
Twilight
books?”

“I don’t know what this
Twilight
is,” she said. “I read the description of your class. It says that the heroine of the Gothic novel confronts evil—within and without—and survives it. That is what I would like to know, how one survives a confrontation with evil.”

The girl was leaning forward, her hands clasped in her lap, her pale tea-colored eyes wide and glassy. Her pupils were dilated, the black swimming over the light irises as if something dark were rising up inside her. For a moment, looking into them, I thought I caught a glimpse of the horrors they had seen. A wave of cold, like a current in the ocean, passed over me and I shivered.

“Of course you can take the class,” I said, wishing there was something more I could do for this girl. “Do you have something for me to sign?”

After I signed Mara Marinca’s add slip I decided I had to go home to take a nap. All the energy I’d woken up with had drained away. Moving boxes up all those steps had really worn me out. I felt as if I’d had that beer Frank Delmarco had offered—several, in fact.

On my way out of the building, I ran into a woman struggling on the stairs with two boxes. The boxes were uncovered and filled with newspapers and magazines that kept slipping out so that she had to stop every few steps and restack them. The boxes themselves looked as if they were coming apart at the seams.

“Here,” I said, taking pity on her predicament, “let me help you with those.”

“Omigod, you’re a lifesaver sent from heaven!” she declaimed dramatically, casting her big blue eyes upward. She was dressed for dramatic gestures—in a sweeping bell-sleeved kimono and a long flowing skirt—not for moving. Her wispy blond hair was pinned up in a clip that fell out twice before we made it up to her office with the collapsing boxes.

“Thank you so so much!” she said, spilling the contents of her box onto a pile of more newspapers and magazines spread out on her office floor. “I’ve been collecting all the journals and magazines that have reviewed my book this year and haven’t had a second to organize them all.”

“Wow,” I said, looking appreciatively at the pile.
The New Yorker
,
People
, and
Vanity Fair
were mixed in with literary journals like
The Hudson Review
and
Blueline
and writing magazines like
Poets & Writers
and
The Writer’s Chronicle
. I looked up from the pile to a stack of books on her desk: multiple copies of
Phoenix
—
Coming Up from the Ashes
.

“You’re Phoenix,” I said, feeling a little odd using the single name, but like Cher or Sting, that’s all she went by. “I’ve read about your memoir.” So had most of literate America. A harrowing tale of growing up with child abuse and incest in a dirt-poor Appalachian hollow,
Phoenix
had been featured on dozens of talk shows and gotten a rave review from a
New York Times
critic who was better known for excoriating her subjects.

“Oh, have you?” she asked, batting her eyelashes. I heard the Southern accent now and remembered she was from North Carolina. “Everybody’s been so sweet. It’s very gratifying, you know, when you write something as hard to write as my book was and then people are affected by it. Some of the messages I get on my website just make me bawl like a baby!”

“I guess your honesty about your own travails encourages your readers to open up about their own hardships,” I said, thinking that while
Sex Lives
had gotten me a fair amount of publicity it at least hadn’t gotten me a string of confessional emails.

“Exactly!” Phoenix nodded her head eagerly. “You must be a writer, too, to understand that.”

I admitted I was and introduced myself. She claimed to have heard of my book, but not to have had a chance to read it since she’d been so busy touring for her book this year. She demanded I get a copy of my book from my office so we could exchange signed copies (“The truth will set you free!” she wrote, drawing a little picture of a plumed bird on fire beside her signature.) and that we make a date to “get good and plastered” the coming weekend before classes started. She was teaching a writing seminar. “I just know once I get involved with my students I won’t have a minute for myself—that’s just the way I am!”

I left her introducing herself to Frank Delmarco (“A big strong man like you wouldn’t mind carrying up a few teeny-weeny boxes for me, would you?”) and made my escape. I was now really and truly exhausted. I was so tired that when I let myself into my house I couldn’t face one more flight of stairs. I collapsed on the couch in the library, not even bothering to draw the blinds against the late afternoon sun, and fell into a deep sleep.

I must have slept for several hours because when I woke up the room was nearly dark. The last of the sun bathed the couch in liquid amber and shadows stretched long across the library floor, almost, but not quite, reaching me.

Come here
, a voice from inside the shadows said.

I’m still asleep, I told myself. I’m still dreaming.

Come here!

The voice was harsher now. Gone was the gentle oceanic murmur of last night. But there was also something desperate in it. He couldn’t reach me in the light. He hadn’t grown that strong.

I will once I feed on you again
, the voice whispered.

I shivered, not from fear—but from desire at the memory of those shadow lips suckling me last night. I could feel myself going wet already just at the thought of him—

But it wasn’t a
him;
it was a thing waiting to feed on me and even if it was only a dream-thing I had to assert myself. Didn’t I?

I reached behind me for the lamp, remembering only as I touched it that I hadn’t plugged it in yet. The shadows stretched closer. The voice commanded me again.
Come here!
He was getting angry. I swung my legs around and planted my feet in the swath of sunlight. The wood felt warm. Solid. Was I really dreaming?

Yes, only dreaming
, the voice said, coaxing now.
But such a lovely dream. Come to me!

The dreams
were
lovely … well, last night’s dream had been. But still some shred of consciousness told me that there was a limit. That if I let this thing into the daylight I might never wake up from those dreams.

I stood up and followed the path of sunlight across the floor to the wall switch. I flicked it on.

When I turned back I half expected him to still be there—my moonlight lover—glowering at me with disapproval for my disobedience. I could feel his anger prickling the hairs at the back of my neck. I spun around but the room, awash with electric light, was empty.

SEVEN

I
slept with my light on that night. In the morning I called Brock Olsen to fix the window in my bedroom and he was at my door fifteen minutes later. He was short and broad and bearded. His face would have been handsome, but he must have had a bad case of acne when he was young that had left his skin rough and pitted. When I showed him the broken window he rocked back on his heels and stroked his beard as if he were contemplating the
Mona Lisa
.

“It happened two nights ago when there was all that wind,” I said. “This wind chime blew against it and broke it.” I retrieved the metal ornament from the desk drawer where I’d stowed it away, as if it proved my story. Brock gave me a long considering look, as if I was a shelf hung crooked.

“Is that how you cut your hand?” he asked, looking down at my hand.

The scratch had almost healed so I’d taken the bandage off, but it had started to itch. I nodded and he took my hand in his own broad and calloused one. He studied the cut for so long I began to feel uncomfortable, but then he ran the tips of his fingers over the scratch, which should have made me feel even more uncomfortable. It had the opposite effect. As he stroked my hand a wave of comfort and well-being spread throughout my body. I thought of stories I’d read about faith healers, people whose touch could cure suffering. Brock Olsen’s hands looked as if they’d suffered a lot themselves; they were nicked and scarred and riddled with burn marks that stood out white against his dark skin. He was missing the top of his left ring finger. Maybe having been through so much pain himself gave him the power to ease the pain in others. When he released my hand the itching was gone.

“Best be more careful next time,” he said, fixing me with his warm brown eyes. He waited until I promised I would and then went to get his tools from his truck.

I spent the morning sorting through Dahlia LaMotte’s papers while Brock Olsen worked in the house, replaning all my doors and windows. I found the background noise of his hammering and sanding oddly companionable. I made a pot of coffee for us and heated up a plate of cinnamon rolls Diana Hart had left on my doorstep with a note saying they were leftovers from last night’s guests. The smells of coffee and cinnamon mingled cozily with the piney scent of sawdust. It felt good to have someone else in the house. Maybe Frank Delmarco was right. This was too big a house for one person—although maybe not one person with this many books.

I decided that there were too many boxes of papers to keep in my little turret office, so I hauled them into one of the empty bedrooms. Brock helped me when he saw what I was doing. I unpacked them all and started stacking them in piles on the floor, sorting by category and using the iron mice doorstops as paperweights.

There were notebooks—ledgers from her father’s shipping business bound in marbled paper and ruled with narrow horizontal lines and red vertical columns—in which Dahlia had apparently written her rough drafts; piles of typescript; and letters. I arranged the letters chronologically, making piles for each decade of her life, and the writing notebooks and typescripts by book.

At some point in the afternoon Brock brought me a plate with cheese, bread, and apple slices and a fresh cup of coffee.

“Oh, Brock!” I cried. “I should have gotten
you
lunch.”

“I could see you were wrapped up in what you were doing,” he said, blood rising behind his ravaged skin. “Are these Dolly’s things?” he asked.

“Dolly?”

“That’s what we called her here in Fairwick. To the world she was Dahlia LaMotte.”

“There are people who remember her?” I asked, amazed that the town’s memory went back that far.

He smiled. “It’s a small town and the local families have been here a long time. My people have been here for over a hundred years.”

“Really? Did they come from somewhere in Scandinavia?”

“Sort of,” he replied. “We made some other stops along the way. Dolly’s people, they came later, and overland.”

“Overland?” I repeated, wondering what on earth he meant. Fairwick was a landlocked village in the Catskill Mountains. How else could anyone approach it? “You mean by train or carriage?”

A vivid red streak rose up on the right side of Brock’s face, highlighting a welt on his cheekbone. It looked like he’d been bitten by an insect there.

“Ya, they came by carriage, how else? I only meant some didn’t have fine carriages or train fare. My people came on foot, through the woods, through hardship and danger.” He rubbed at the welt on his face with the back of his scarred hand. He looked angry, but not at me, or even at the town. He looked angry at himself for not being able to express himself better. I wondered if the marks on his face were the vestiges of some childhood illness—chicken pox? measles?—that had scarred his brain as well as his skin.

“Your ancestors must have struggled hard to find a safe place to live and raise their children,” I said gently. “That’s something to be proud of.”

He nodded, the red streak subsiding. He pointed at the stacks of notebooks. “Dolly understood that. She helped us … my great-uncles, I mean, start the gardening shop when there weren’t no call for blacksmiths no more, and always had them come do what work needed doing in the house. She liked hearing the old stories.”

“Really?” I said, looking down at the ledgers. Had she used the stories she’d heard in her books? “That’s interesting. Perhaps you can help me by identifying where some of her stories came from.”

He smiled. It transformed his face from ugly to handsome. “Ya, I’ll be happy to. I am here to help you.”

I spent the rest of the afternoon making an inventory of Dahlia LaMotte’s notebooks and letters. The letters I found, to my disappointment, were all of a business nature, either to her publisher in New York or her lawyer in Boston. No clandestine love affairs or dark family secrets were likely to be lurking there, but the letters to her publisher could establish a timeline of her writing process. A glimpse of one showed that she reported progress on her novels dutifully.
I finished the handwritten draft of
Dark Destiny
today and will begin typing it tomorrow
, one letter read.

It was curious that she didn’t employ a typist. Was she such a hermit that she couldn’t stand the human interaction? But then, Brock had said that she enjoyed talking to the locals and hearing their stories. If I could find accounts of those conversations it would be fascinating to compare the references to boggarts and fairies, witches and demons that Dahlia sprinkled throughout her books to local folklore.

Only when I had a complete list of all the notebooks—numbered with dates and the titles of which novels she had been working on in each—and a list of typescripts, did I allow myself a peek at one of the notebooks. I chose
The Dark Stranger
, my favorite of her books and her best known novel. I read the familiar first lines with a frisson of excitement.

The moment I set foot across the threshold of Lion’s Keep I knew my fate was sealed. I had been here before, in desperate dreams and fevered fancies, and always I knew it to be the place where
he
would finally ensnare me
—
the man of my dreams
—
the incubus of my nightmares. The dark stranger, my demon lover …

I stopped reading. I didn’t recall the word
incubus
from the first paragraph of
The Dark Stranger
, or the phrase
demon lover
. Although Dahlia LaMotte flirted with the supernatural with her use of dreams, portents, creaking stairs, veiled figures, and telepathic voices, she never made overt use of it. At the end of each book the events were tidily explained. Her anti-heroes had all the elements of the rakish Byronic heroes of Gothic Romance, but they were flesh and blood, not incubi, demons, or vampires. Perhaps she was just playing with the imagery, but that imagery hadn’t made it into her final drafts. When, I wondered, had it been edited out?

I turned to the first page of the typescript of
The Dark Stranger
. On brittle, yellowed paper I read over the first paragraph. It was the same as in the notebook until the last line.

 
… 
the man of my dreams, the figure in my nightmares
.

Interesting.

Between handwritten draft and typescript Dahlia LaMotte had struck the words
incubus
and
demon lover
. How many other changes had she made? I flipped through one of the notebooks in which she’d written
The Dark Stranger
and happened upon a scene I remembered well. Violet Grey, timid governess, hears a cry in the night and rushes out onto the landing …

 
… 
so urgently that I didn’t stop to cover myself in my dressing gown. When I reached the landing I saw, to my horror, William Dougall standing there chiding the laundry maid for squealing at a mouse. I couldn’t bear for haughty William Dougall to think I was spying on him or to look upon me in my transparent nightgown. To my left was the door to the linen closet, which had been left partly ajar by the careless maid. It was the work of an instant to slip inside and wedge myself between the full shelf of folded linens and the door. I breathed an inaudible sigh of relief and settled myself against the still warm and fragrant cloth. Thankfully the room was not completely dark. A beam of moonlight came through a window at the back of the closet and flowed through the crack in the door, allowing me to watch for Dougall to leave the landing. He was still scolding her
.

“You should not be out and about at night. There are things here far worse than a mouse that will make you scream until you have no voice. Go back to your room. Lock your door and close your windows. Draw your drapes to shut out the moonlight. The moonlight plays tricks with one’s mind.”

Dougall glanced down at the spill of moonlight from the closet. For a moment his eyes seemed to meet mine and I felt a tremor move through me that reached into the pit of my stomach and made my legs go so weak I sank further into the warm sheets. Did he see me?

But then he turned abruptly and stalked away, leaving a very frightened-looking maid who soon scurried back to her room
.

As I should have done now. Only my legs were still weak. What had William Dougall meant by
the moonlight playing tricks
? The moonlight had certainly played tricks on me since I’d come to Lion’s Keep. At the memory of those strange dreams my heart raced. Did Dougall know about my moonlight lover who had insinuated himself into my bed
 
… 
and between my legs? At the thought I felt heat spark between my legs. I pressed my thighs together as if I could quench that flame, but instead the heat quickened. I squirmed against the sheets
 
… 
and felt them squirm against me!

I was not alone in the linen closet
.

Someone
—
or something
—
had stolen in behind me
 
… 
or had been hiding there when I came in
.

Slowly I took a step toward the door …

But strong arms wrapped around me and pulled me back
.

I started to call out and a hand clamped down over my mouth
.

Another hand dropped to my neck, caressed my throat, fondled my breast, lowered to my belly
 
… 
then slipped in between my legs. I struggled but my movements only succeeded in exciting him. I felt something stiff pressing against my back, pressing in between the cleft of my buttocks. The hand lifted my gown and spread my legs just as the hard probing shaft found its way between my legs and thrust into me
.

I bit the hand over my mouth and he
 
… it … 
returned the bite on my shoulder. He plunged deeper into me, withdrew, plunged again and again, stoking a flame that finally burst inside me. The moonlight seemed to splinter around me, dissolving into a shower of stars …

“Miss?”

I jumped at the sound of the voice, guiltily slamming shut the notebook on Violet Grey’s orgasm.

I looked up, hoping my cheeks weren’t as red as they felt. Brock was standing in the hallway, his coat on and his toolbox in his right hand. “They’ll be here when you get back,” he said.

“Who? Who’s coming back?” I asked.

“The books, I meant,” he said, giving me an odd look. “They’ll be here when you get back from the faculty reception.”

I looked down at my watch. It was a quarter to five; the reception started at six. I’d spent all afternoon in this room sorting through Dahlia’s papers, losing track of time, getting lost in an erotic haze.

Dahlia LaMotte had written erotica!
And then she had edited it out between manuscript and typescript. What a discovery! What an amazing book it would make! I wanted to go through every single notebook
right now
, but Brock was right. I had to go to the faculty reception.

“Thanks for reminding me.” I started to get up and found my legs were cramped from sitting in the same position for so long. Brock held out his hand to help me up. As soon as his broad, rough hand enfolded mine I felt an overwhelming sense of well-being. I looked down at the piles of paper, each watched over by its own cast iron mouse sentinel, and felt a swelling sense of excitement … followed by an almost equally potent sense of dread. Dahlia LaMotte had written of a lover made out of moonlight who ravished her heroines just as the creature in my dreams had ravished me. Either she had dreamed the same dreams as I had … or they weren’t dreams at all.