The Demon Lover Page 5

  Diana glared at the dean but got up obediently.

  “I really don’t need …” I began, but Diana had already gone inside, letting the screen door slam behind her. Dory Browne looked after her but stayed on the porch. I sank down into a wicker rocking chair, suddenly tired out by all the drama of the morning. Elizabeth Book didn’t waste any time getting down to business.

  “On behalf of the committee, I’d like to offer you the position of assistant professor of English and Folklore,” she said. “Of course, I know you may be considering other offers, so if you’d like time …”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I replied, suddenly sure of what I wanted—had—to do. “I’d like the job and …” I glanced across the street. I couldn’t see the house but I could smell it—honeysuckle and salt air as if it stood on a cliff above the sea instead of on a street in a remote mountain town. It was the smell of my dreams. It was the scent that always accompanied my fairytale prince. Not that that was the reason I had to do it.

  I turned back to Dory Browne. “I’m going to buy Honeysuckle House.”

  FIVE

  When I called Paul from Manhattan that night he took the news that I’d accepted the job at Fairwick surprisingly well.

  “I’ve been asking around and the school has a pretty good reputation. They have an honors program with very generous financial aid that draws some top students from around the country and the world,” he told me. I could hear his fingers tapping on his laptop keyboard in the background. He must have been Googling the college and town for hours. “And according to MapQuest it’s only three hours from the city. When I can get a job there next year it’ll be an easy commute. In the meantime it looks like the closest airport is Newark …”

  He was less than thrilled when I told him I’d bought a five-bedroom Victorian house.

  “I thought we were going to use that money to buy a bigger apartment in the city when I moved there,” he said, his voice sounding young and wounded. “You could have at least discussed it with me.”

  I argued that we’d always agreed we should each take the job—or graduate school offer—that was best without worrying about what the other one thought.

  “Yes, but a house,” he said. “That’s so … permanent.”

  “Tenure’s permanent,” I countered. “A house is …” I wanted to say that a house could be bought and sold, but I knew already that it wasn’t ever going to be easy to sell Honeysuckle House. The very thought of letting the house go already gave me a strange pang. “… it’s a vacation house. You’ll come up on weekends. We’ll spend our summers there. You’ll see, once you’re in the city full time you’ll be dying to get out of it like all good New Yorkers.”

  “You should have at least talked to me first,” he said with uncharacteristic hurt. Paul was generally the most easygoing of guys; we hardly ever fought. And we didn’t now. Paul got off the phone saying he had papers to grade.

  Looking for some girlfriendly support I took the subway to Brooklyn to my friend Annie’s bakery to tell her what I’d done. She’d been my best friend since high school and even though she didn’t date men herself (she had come out when we were in tenth grade) she always had good advice about them. And she’d been after me for years to ditch the long-distance relationship with Paul and go out with someone in the city.

  “Sorry, Cal, I’m with Paul here,” she told me while squirting yellow icing on a row of sunflower-themed cupcakes. “You acted like a man—all high-handed. And I don’t buy all this crap about doing what’s best for each of you, damn the relationship. That just sounds like neither of you care enough about the relationship to make a sacrifice to make it work.”

  I’d forgotten that since Annie had moved in with her girlfriend, Maxine, she’d gotten a bit sanctimonious about commitment.

  “You think I should sacrifice my career and move out to L.A.?” I asked, nabbing one of the half-finished cupcakes. I had a sudden urge for sugar, which I blamed on all the sweets I’d consumed at the Hart Brake Inn.

  “I didn’t say that. But if you both really wanted to be together you would have found a way by now, and buying a house for yourself doesn’t sound like the kind of thing a person does when she’s in love.”

  Unless she’s in love with a man who appears in a dream, I thought but didn’t say.

  Strangely, it was the same view that my grandmother Adelaide took when I called her up in Santa Fe (where she had retired when I graduated high school) to tell her my news. “Fairwick’s a second-tier college with a second-rate staff,” she drawled in her starchy New England voice. It was the same voice she had once used when she spoke of my mother’s decision to go to college in Scotland (“The women in our family have always gone to Radcliffe or Barnard”), my mother’s marriage to my father, my decision to go to NYU, and my choice of scholarly concentration (“Fairy tales are for children!). When she’d finished belittling my new employer, she asked if this meant I’d broken up with “that boy in California.” When I told her no, she said it was only a matter of time; if we were serious about each other we would have managed to live on the same side of the country by now.

  Adelaide’s and Annie’s verdicts haunted me on the way to visit Paul in California. Oddly it was the dream I’d had at the Hart Brake Inn that made me feel like they might have a point, as if I’d been unfaithful to Paul and bought Honeysuckle House so I could be with that moonlight lover. The fact that my knees turned to water every time I remembered the dream seemed to corroborate that theory, as did the fact that the moonlight lover reminded me of the fairytale prince of my adolescent fantasies. I felt like I’d betrayed Paul with my ex-boyfriend. It made me wonder if a part of me hadn’t always been waiting for the return of my fairytale prince—the same part of me that was okay with living three thousand miles away from my boyfriend.

  When I got to L.A., though, I explained to Paul about the boxes of Dahlia LaMotte’s papers in the attic and he began to relent.

  “You mean you can write about them—even reproduce them—as long as the originals stay in the house?”

  I showed him the codicil to the deed that said so.

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” he asked, rewarding me with the wry crooked smile that had first warmed me to him in our sophomore English class. “That’s brilliant, Cal. We’ll have enough to buy a place in Manhattan when you publish your next book!”

  As much as I was relieved that he’d forgiven me, I still had the uneasy feeling that my rashness (and the spectral infidelity he didn’t know about) had been forgiven because it had been judged profitable. So I spent the two weeks in L.A. feeling a little like a high-priced hooker, trying to convince myself that having erotic fantasies about an imaginary lover was not the same as cheating. So what if I recalled the way the moonlight had carved sinuous muscles out of shadow when I looked at Paul? Or that I remembered the touch of those pearly lips when Paul kissed me? It was only a dream—and one I hadn’t had again since that night at the Hart Brake Inn. And if I cut my trip a day short so I’d have time to settle into the new house before term began, it didn’t mean I was longing to be back at Honeysuckle House to see if the dream would come back there.

  Did it?

  If I’d believed in the pathetic fallacy—that the weather in a novel reflected the emotions of the heroine—I’d have had to suspect that my purchase of Honeysuckle House had indeed been dictated by a malevolent force. I drove up to Fairwick in a torrential rainstorm that threatened to blow my new green Honda FIT off the highway. When I got to Fairwick all the houses on my street were dark. The power must be out, I thought, wondering how often that happened. I considered going first to the Hart Brake Inn and asking Diana for a room—or at least a flashlight and candles—but when I drove up in front of Honeysuckle House I knew I couldn’t wait any longer to claim it as my own. Even the wind seemed to be pushing me up the front steps (there was that pathetic fallacy again!), urging me to the front door. I glanced
up at the fanlight, but the face was dark and somehow brooding, with no light shining through the stained glass. Like the lover in my dreams before the moonlight awakened him. I had a feeling that he was somewhere in the shadowy house, waiting for the sound of my key to awaken him. I now held the big old-fashioned key that Dory had sent me in the mail wrapped in brown paper and twine, poised centimeters from the lock. It felt heavy in my hand, weighted with all the questionable decisions I’d made over the last month.

  I’d passed up a possible career in Manhattan—the center of my known universe—for a job in a second-tier college in a podunk town where I knew no one. I’d bought a hundred-year-old house which, despite its sterling inspection report, was likely to require maintenance that I, a lifetime apartment dweller, couldn’t even begin to imagine. Although I’d planned to keep the Inwood apartment I’d sublet it at the last minute when my TA admitted she didn’t have anywhere to live, so now if I decided to go back to the city I’d have no place to stay. Worst of all, I’d put stress on an eight-year relationship with a decent man whom I believed I was in love with. And all because of a dream that reminded me of the fairytale prince of my teenaged dreams.

  I should turn around right now, get in my car, drive back to New York City, tell Dory Browne to put the house on the market, and take adjunct teaching jobs until I could reapply for next year at a college within commuting distance of Manhattan. Yes, that’s what I should do, only …

  Something clicked. Something metal.

  I looked down at my hand and saw that the key was now in the lock. How had that happened? I pulled the key out and held it half an inch in front of the lock. It quivered in the air. Was my hand shaking? Or … I touched the key to the keyhole, which I noticed now was surrounded by an iron plate shaped like a rooster. I felt a tug at my hand as the key leapt forward and slid smoothly into the lock.

  Damn! I stared at it for a full minute until the idea clicked in my head with the same resolute sound the key had made when it slid into the lock. The lock must be magnetic. It seemed like pretty sophisticated technology for a nineteenth-century house, but then I remembered what Dory Browne had said about Silas LaMotte: he liked everything shipshape, he’d built this house to last, and, according to the inspector I’d hired, it was in pristine condition. “A little paint and some caulking and you’re good to go,” he’d told me, recommending his cousin Brock Olsen for the repairs. Dory had let Brock in last week and offered to oversee the work. I had nothing to worry about. It hadn’t been crazy to buy the house, but it would be crazy to walk away from it now.

  I turned the key. The tumblers turned smoothly in the lock and the door opened silently on well-oiled hinges, not at all like the creaking doors of Gothic romance. Nor was I greeted with cobwebs and dank miasmas. The house smelled like fresh paint and varnish. A clean, practical smell that vanquished the ridiculous notion that I’d bought the house because of a dream.

  It was, after all, a beautiful house. As I stood on the threshold a bit of moonlight struggled through the clouds and skidded across the newly varnished floors like a stone skipping across a pond. I stepped inside with the wind coming in on my heels, ruffling the lace curtains in the parlor and trembling the glass in the windows. The house creaked like a ship in a storm—maybe that’s how Silas LaMotte had built it. I even thought I could smell a whiff of sea air beneath the paint and varnish, but when I closed the door the house seemed to settle. The storm was clearing, letting in enough moonlight to make the new white paint glow like polished marble and casting a distorted reflection of the fanlight onto the foyer floor—the face of the pagan god elongated and distorted so that he seemed to be smirking.

  I shivered at the thought … but also because I was damp and tired from the long drive. I needed a hot bath (assuming the hot water heater worked without electrity) and bed (assuming the bed I’d ordered had come and been set up). The movers were coming early in the morning. Once I’d had a good night’s sleep and filled the house with my books and furniture it wouldn’t feel so strange … or echo so hollowly.

  I climbed the stairs, my footsteps sounding loud as firecrackers in the empty house. I recalled what I’d said to Dory Browne about not having to worry about burglars and her reply: “No, you wouldn’t have to worry about anyone breaking in.” Why had she emphasized in as if there were something dangerous already lurking in the house?

  I was afraid that the upstairs hallway would be completely dark, but the moonlight had found its way here, too, through the windows of the smaller bedrooms, the doors of which had been propped open. Only the door at the end of the hallway to the master bedroom was closed.

  I made my way down the hallway feeling peculiarly watched. Looking down I spied the shadow of a mouse at my feet. I screamed and jumped a good two feet before realizing the shadow belonged to a cast-iron doorstop shaped like a mouse holding its little paws out.

  Cursing Diana Hart’s love of animal tchotchkes (I suspected she was responsible for the mice doorstops), I turned the knob of my bedroom door, but it wouldn’t budge. It must have swung shut when the paint was still wet and had dried stuck. I leaned my shoulder against the door, cursing softly under my breath. Open up, damn it, I’m tired … The door swung open so suddenly I stumbled into the room. An angry gust of wind snapped the curtains at the window and ruffled the linens of the bed.

  The bed.

  I’d asked Dory Browne to accept delivery on the bed I’d ordered from Anthropologie and I’d hoped that the workman had assembled it, but I half expected to be sleeping on a bare mattress on the floor. But not only had someone assembled the pine four-poster frame, but someone had also made it up with crisp white sheets, plump pillows, and a lofty feather-filled duvet. All of it white in the moonlight. It looked like it was meant for a bride—not for sweaty me in my scruffy shorts and T-shirt.

  I should take a bath, I thought, but I was suddenly too exhausted. I walked toward the bed … and stubbed my toe on something hard. Cursing, I groped on the floor and picked up something heavy and cold. Holding it up in the moonlight, I saw it was one of the cast-iron mice. It must have fallen there when the wind slammed the door shut before I arrived. It had a splash of white paint on its chest—probably from when Brock painted the room—and it was missing the tip of its tail. Another glance on the floor revealed the missing appendage. I picked that up lest I impale my foot on it later and held it up in front of the mouse’s little whiskered face.

  “Wounded in the line of duty, eh?” I said. “It’s all right, soldier. I’m giving you the night off.” I put the mouse doorstop outside in the hall with the rest of its companions and closed the door. Then I peeled off my sweaty clothes and crawled into the white virginal bed, sinking into its deep, pillowy embrace and into an even deeper sleep.

  But not for long.

  Someone was tapping at the window. I got up and walked across the dark room toward the lighted window. Moonlight was banked up against the glass like water pressing against a dam, but it wasn’t coming in. I was standing in the dark, on the threshold between shadow and moonlight, where he always waited for me. And someone was knocking. I walked closer to the window and saw that there was something metal hanging from the window frame, a round medallion with spokes like a wheel and three dangling keys. Although it was made of some kind of dark metal, it reminded me of a dream catcher. It was tapping against the glass, propelled by the wind whistling through a crack in the window frame. If I didn’t take it down it would break the glass. I grabbed it and pulled, snapping the ribbon that held it. Instantly a crack appeared in one of the windowpanes, splintering the glass into a million jagged shards. They fell to the floor at my feet and the moonlight rushed in with the wind—a wind that smelled like honeysuckle and salt—and circled around me like an angry riptide. It slammed me up against the window, my back hitting the glass and shattering the rest of the panes. The moonlight was so bright I was blinded. I closed my eyes against it, but it was still there beneath my eyelids, still there
pressing me up against the windowpane, a cold, hard surge that pushed my hips up onto the window ledge and spread my legs and poured into me … I grasped the window frame for balance and cut my hand on broken glass. I gasped and my mouth filled up with saltwater. I tried to push back but that only made the surge come again … and again, sucking me down into the riptide.

  I’d heard somewhere that if you’re drowning you should relax and let the current take you. I did that now and the current turned warm and carried me down into the darkness, like a lover carrying me to bed, down into the darkness where he lived.

  SIX

  The sound of the moving truck in the driveway woke me up the next morning. I lay for a moment, sprawled in a tangle of sheets, trying to remember where I was. Hadn’t I drowned? But that was only a dream. As I scrambled into my discarded clothes from last night, though, I noticed the broken glass on the floor and a long jagged cut on my hand. I gingerly approached the window and saw that there among the broken glass was the metal wind chime. I stared at it for a moment, recalling the violence of my dream, but then a knock on the front door startled me out of my reverie. The sound of the wind chime hitting the window must have woken me up and I’d gone to the window to close it. That’s when I must have cut my hand. The wind and the broken glass must have mixed in with my dream and created the rest out of all my pent-up longing for the return of my shadow lover. That was the only explanation, I told myself hurrying down the stairs, the only one that made sense.

  It didn’t take long for the two men and two women from Green Move (the eco-friendly moving company run by Annie’s partner, Maxine) to unpack the contents of my Inwood apartment and the boxes from my storage unit. When they finished, the house still looked empty. I invited them to share the basket of sandwiches that had arrived courtesy of Deena’s Deli (“We’re Deli-ghted you’re our new neighbor!!!”). We sat on the front porch enjoying the cool breeze that came out of the woods.