The Demon Lover (9 page)

EIGHT

I
walked briskly across the campus, trying to dispel the ridiculous notion that my dreams were something more than the work of an overheated imagination—mine or Dahlia’s. There was a simple explanation. I’d grown up listening to fairy tales and had invented my own fairytale prince out of them. And I’d been reading Dahlia LaMotte’s books for years. Even in the edited and published versions there was a latent eroticism and plenty of references to moonlight and shadows. Moving to Dahlia’s house had simply brought that latent sexuality to life—and into my dreams. That Dahlia had written more graphically in her original manuscripts was an exciting scholarly discovery, I told myself as I entered Briggs Hall, but that was all. It didn’t mean my dreams were anything but dreams.

Like Fraser, Briggs was in the Tudor style, only considerably grander. Entering the main parlor I felt as if I might be entering William Dougall’s ancestral castle. One whole wall was covered with heavy tapestry drapes. The beamed ceiling must have been at least twelve feet high. Looking up I saw that each beam was decorated in gilt lettering and Celtic designs, which were echoed in painted inserts in the dark oak paneling. Above the stone fireplace at the end of the room hung a huge painting of monumental figures in flowing medieval robes. The room was so impressive that I stood in the doorway for several minutes admiring it—and catching my breath from my hurried walk across campus—before I became aware that I was being watched. Elizabeth Book, in a brocade dress and pearls that somehow managed to make her look fashionably chic and Old World elegant at the same time, was pointing me out to a striking, tall woman dressed all in green. The dean caught my eye and waved for me to come forward. I obeyed, feeling as if I’d been summoned by a queen.

As regal as Elizabeth Book was, though, the woman who stood beside her dwarfed her. She must have been at least six feet tall, in a green jersey calf-length dress that clung to her willowy frame. Her loose, waist-length hair was platinum blond. From across the room I had thought she was young, but as I got closer I saw that her face was creased by fine lines and that her hair was actually silver. Her green eyes were clear and sharp as emeralds and watched me with unnerving focus. I felt as if my progress across the long room were being tracked by a mountain lion.

“Ah, there you are, Callie,” Elizabeth Book said, holding out both her hands to me. “You look lovely!”

“Thank you.” I had worn my favorite cocktail dress—a vintage peacock blue Dolce & Gabbana that clung just enough to my curves, made my hair glow copper, and brought out the green in my eyes. In the shadow of the regal woman in green, though, I felt suddenly like a scullery maid.

“Cailleach McFay, I’d like you to meet Fiona Eldritch, our Elizabethan scholar.”

Fiona Eldritch tilted her sharp chin down in my direction, her green cat eyes narrowing. “Liz has been telling me all about you, Cailleach … may I call you Cailleach? I love the old Celtic names. They’re so romantic.”

“Of course,” I said, wondering what the dean had been saying about me. “It’s not a particularly romantic one, I’m afraid. It means ‘old hag.’ ”

Fiona shook her head and I heard little bells ringing. The sound must have come from her earrings, which were tiny silver balls suspended from silver chains. I suddenly felt a little tipsy even though I hadn’t had anything to drink yet. “That’s a corruption of the name,” she insisted. “The Cailleachs were revered goddesses among the ancient Celts. Liz tells me you had an interesting encounter in the woods.”

“It wasn’t anything,” I said, surprised that this, and not my academic qualifications, was what they had been discussing. “Just a bird caught in the thicket that I let out. It was nothing.”

“I’m sure it was far from nothing,” Fiona Eldritch said, shaking her head. “But what it was … only time will tell.”

As I had no idea how to respond to this enigmatic statement an awkward silence followed, which I finally broke by asking Fiona what Elizabethan authors she was particularly interested in.

“Edmund Spenser, of course,” she replied as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. Then she excused herself to get a glass of champagne.

“Don’t mind Fiona,” Dean Book said, grabbing a champagne flute off a passing tray for me. “If she comes off as haughty it’s because of how she was raised. Here, let me introduce you to Casper van der Aart, head of the earth sciences department. I think you’ll enjoy him.”

I wasn’t sure what I would have in common with an earth sciences professor, but after five minutes with the jovial, short, white-haired man I saw it didn’t matter. He complimented my dress, told me I reminded him of a “Scottish lass” he’d pined for when he spent a semester teaching at the University of Edinburgh, and told me funny stories about his colleagues.

“There’s Alice Hubbard from psychology,” he said, pointing to a dowdy woman with a poorly cut pageboy hairdo wearing misshapen tweeds. “Last year at a conference in Montreal someone mistook her for Betty Friedan and she gave them a two hour interview without once letting on who she really was. And the tall Viking next to her is her best friend, Joan Ryan from chemistry.” The two women had identical haircuts. I wondered if there was only one salon in Fairwick and decided I’d better go back to the city to get my hair cut. “Joan blew up the chem lab two years ago and lost her eyebrows. They’ve never grown back.”

Casper van der Aart wiggled his own bushy eyebrows Groucho Marx–fashion and I laughed so hard I got champagne up my nose.

“Who are those people?” I asked, tilting my glass subtly toward a group of new arrivals—two men, one tall and blond, the other short and bald, and a petite brown-haired woman, all in nearly identical dark suits with the same pallor of academics who live in the underground stacks of the library.

“They’re from the Eastern European and Russian Institute,” Casper said curtly. “They tend to keep to themselves … but ah, here’s one of my favorite people, Soheila Lilly.”

The woman he introduced me to had olive skin and a petite but curvy figure. Her dark hair was beautifully cut (I made a mental note to ask where she had it done). She wore clinging cashmere layers in earth tones that seemed too warm for the mild weather but looked beautiful on her.

“I am always cold,” she said when I complimented her on her outfit. “And I feel the damp most severely.”

“Soheila is from the Middle East,” Casper told me.

“Yes,” she said, “I came overland from Iran when the shah was deposed.”

There was that term Brock had used before about Dahlia LaMotte’s family—
overland
.

“I went to college with a girl from Great Neck whose family came over then, too … but why do you say
overland
?”

She shrugged and crossed her arms over her chest; the diamonds on her fingers glittered as she chafed her hands against her upper arms. She and Casper exchanged a look. “It is just an expression we exiles use,” she said.

“Here at Fairwick,” Casper said, “there is a long tradition of giving asylum to refugees. That’s what the painting on the outer doors of the triptych represents. It’s called
The Fairies’ Farewell.
” He nodded toward the large painting at the end of the room. From afar I hadn’t noticed that it was a triptych, but when I got closer I saw a seam running down the middle and two small gilt handles, presumably to open the painting to reveal the three interior scenes. I thought it was unusual to display a triptych closed, but then the painting on the outer doors was certainly worth looking at. It depicted a procession of winged fairies and fox-faced elves led by a man and woman on horseback, traveling from left to right across a meadow, heading toward an arched opening in a thick wood. The man was on a white horse. He wore a black cloak, his face in shadow. The woman, on a black horse, wore a long green medieval dress, cinched at the waist with a gold belt decorated with Celtic designs similar to the ones on the painted beams and panels in this room. Her long white hair was entwined with flowers and leaves and, I realized with a start, she looked a lot like Fiona Eldritch. I turned around to glance at Fiona, who was chatting with the dark-garbed Russian studies professors.

“You’ve noticed the resemblance,” Casper said, sounding, I thought, a little nervous for the first time since I’d met him. “Fiona is the grandchild of one of the donors of the painting, who modeled for the Fairy Queen.”

“I see,” I said, although I thought there was something Casper wasn’t telling me. “So she’s the Fairy Queen, who’s …?” I was going to ask who the man at her side was, but as I stepped nearer and looked more closely at the shadowed face the words died in my throat. It was he. The man in my dreams.

“Ah, you recognize him,” Soheila said.

I tore my eyes away from the painted face and stared at Soheila, aghast.

“What do you mean? Why would I recognize him?”

“Because you’ve made a study of him,” Soheila replied calmly, but giving me a quizzical look. “That is the Ganconer, as he’s called in Celtic myth. His name means ‘love talker.’ In Sumerian myth he was called Lilu. He’s the incubus who rides his horse, the night mare, into the dreams of women whom he seduces. The women he comes to in their sleep fall under his spell and begin to waste away. He sucks them dry like a vampire. He’s what you write about in your book—the demon lover.” Soheila wrapped her sweater more tightly around her chest and tucked her hands into her long sleeves. She looked like she was freezing. “In my country we have a long history of dealing with demons,” she whispered. For a moment I thought I saw her breath condensing into a little puff of smoke, but I must have imagined it; it was warm in the room. “But he is the most dangerous of demons because he is the most beautiful. The others …” She tilted her chin to the far right side of the painting—the woods that were the destination of the procession. The dense thicket was inhabited by shadowy figures. While the creatures in the procession were beautiful winged fairies and elves, the creatures lurking amid the vines were stunted goblins and lizard-skinned dwarves, forked-tongued devils and bat-faced imps. “These creatures are easily recognizable as demons, but the Ganconer assumes the shape of your heart’s desire.”

“Why is he at the head of this procession?” I asked. “Is he with … 
her
?” I pointed toward the Fairy Queen, feeling an odd pang of jealousy.

Soheila gave me a long, level stare before replying. “Some say the queen stole him as a young man from the mortals and enchanted him, and that when he seduces a human woman he is trying to make himself human again by drinking her spirit, but always before he can become human he drains his lover dry.”

“Oh,” I said, “that’s … sad.” And then, trying to assume an air of scholarly detachment: “I’ve heard stories about young men kidnapped by the fairies, of course …” I faltered, reminding myself that this was the kind of story my fairytale prince had told me. “But never a version in which the young man becomes a demon lover.” I turned back to the painting. “Where are they going?”

“Back to Faerie,” Soheila said. “Legend has it that once all the fairies and demons lived with mortals, coming and going between the world of mortals and the world of Faerie freely. But then the mortal world grew more crowded and mortals lost belief in the old gods. The doors between the worlds began to close. The fairies and demons had to choose between worlds. Most went back to Faerie, but some who had fallen in love with humanity remained. The doors closed and then even the doors themselves began to disappear. Only one door remained, and it was carefully hidden and most dangerous to pass through. Deep thickets grew up over the last door,” Soheila continued, “barring the way between the worlds. They grow thicker every year. Few try to pass anymore, and those who do are often lost between the worlds … caught in a bodiless limbo of pain. That is why the doors of the triptych are closed. We open it only four times a year, on the solstices and equinoxes, which are the times that tradition tells us the doors between the worlds may open …”

As she faltered to a stop I heard the pain in Soheila’s voice. Startled, I turned away from the painting to look at her. Tears shone in her almond-shaped eyes—and not just in hers. Her story had drawn a small circle. Alice Hubbard and Joan Ryan stood with their arms around each other, dabbing their eyes with cloth hankies. Fiona Eldritch, her face rigid with pain, stood beside Elizabeth Book, who was patting the hand of a tiny Asian woman. The three Russian studies professors hovered at the edge of the group looking uncomfortable but riveted to the painting. I wondered why this fairy story spoke so strongly to them. Were they all, like Mara Marinca and Soheila Lilly, exiles from war-torn countries?

The somber mood was broken by a familiar voice.

“What are y’all looking at?”

It was Phoenix, in an attention-getting slinky red dress and four-inch-high stilettos. She was hanging on the arm of Frank Delmarco, who looked as if he wasn’t quite sure how he had acquired this particular piece of arm candy. The circle quickly dispersed, the Russian studies professors, especially, seeming to melt into the far shadows of the room, although I saw one of them glancing back over his shoulder at Phoenix.

“Soheila was telling me the story of this painting,” I answered. Frank struck up a conversation with Casper about baseball, using it as an excuse to detach himself from Phoenix. Soheila, who looked exhausted and chilled from her recounting of the fairy story, excused herself to go look for a cup of hot tea.

“I thought y’all were having some kind of séance when I came in, the mood was so gloomy. I’m very empathic, you know.”