The Demon Lover Read online

  “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.”

  “It was kind of odd,” I said, lowering my voice. I recounted the story of the painting and everyone’s reaction to it.

  “Huh,” Phoenix said, squinting up at the dark man on horseback. “If he came into my dreams I don’t think I’d ever want to wake up.”

  I nodded, turning away to hide my blush. There had to be an explanation for why he looked like the moonlight lover of my dreams. The painter of the triptych must have also designed the pediment over the door of Honeysuckle House … or used the same model … and that’s how I’d fashioned the face of the man in my dreams.

  “… and when Frank told me I thought it sounded just perfect. What do you say?”

  I realized that I’d been so intent on looking at the man in the painting and explaining his existence to myself that I’d lost the thread of Phoenix’s conversation. “I’m sorry, it’s so loud in here … what did you say?”

  “Your spare room. Frank says you’re looking for a lodger for it. I was going to stay in an apartment in one of the dorms, but between you, me, and the lamppost, I don’t think I’m the dorm mother type. I’m sure the two of us together would have much more fun!”

  NINE

  Trying to sway Phoenix from moving in with me turned out to be about as easy as persuading Hurricane Katrina to make landfall somewhere other than New Orleans. She was so smitten with the notion that she followed me home after the reception and swept through Honeysuckle House oohing and aahing over every detail. She thought the face in the carved pediment had “bedroom eyes” and the Greek gods on the mantel and on the dining room frieze “cute butts.” My library made her “want to curl up and read till doomsday.” I thought her ardor would cool when she saw Matilda’s spinster apartment, but she deemed it “darlin’ ” and said it reminded her of the room she had rented in a woman’s hotel in St. Louis when she was drying out and writing her memoir.

  “This house is the perfect place for me to write!” she said, crushing me to her ample bosom in an impetuous hug. “You see, I sometimes have a teeny problem staying on track. Men are the biggest distraction—don’t you think that Frank Delmarco is just hunky?—and then there’s …” She extended her pinky and thumb and tilted her hand in front of her mouth in the universal sign for drinking. “… the demon rum. But I know that here the two of us will be quiet as church mice and drink hot cocoa in the evenings and get so much work done!”

  I wondered what had happened to all the “fun” she’d promised me back at the reception. I was still trying to find a polite way of telling her I didn’t want a roommate, but if her moving in was inevitable—as it increasingly seemed to be—then I’d better at least make it clear that I needed lots of undisturbed quiet time in which to write.

  “I do have an idea for a new book,” I said cautiously as we walked upstairs, hoping I wouldn’t jinx the idea by talking about it. “And I’d be working on it most of the time.”

  “That’s perfect!” she cried. “Is this where you’re working?”

  We’d come to the spare bedroom where I’d laid out all Dahlia LaMotte’s papers.

  The door was propped open with one of the mice doorstops (“How adorable!” Phoenix squealed at the sight of it). I thought I’d closed it, but maybe Brock, who’d left after me, had left it open for some reason. He’d also hung something in the window—a little bundle of birch twigs and juniper sprigs tied with a red ribbon that I guessed must be some sort of Swedish good luck charm.

  I explained to her about Dahlia LaMotte’s papers and the unusual terms of her will but didn’t mention that I’d discovered a secret trove of nineteenth-century erotica.

  “What serendipity!” Phoenix clapped her hands and then held them out over the piles of paper as though blessing them. “I can feel the creative energy here. Oh, I just know I’d get so much work done in this house … which would be such a lifesaver. Did I mention that I’m six months overdue on delivery of my next manuscript to my publisher?”

  As we walked down the hall to my bedroom, Phoenix told me all the reasons she hadn’t been able to even start her second book. There were the time constraints of touring, doing interviews, and writing blurbs, plus the pressure of living up to the expectations of her dear readers whose lives she had touched. “But most especially,” she told me as I opened the door to my bedroom, “you have no idea how hard it is having to use parts of your own life to create. I feel like the bird in that story who plucks feathers out of her own breast to weave silk.”

  Perhaps it was the reference to one of my favorite folktales, “The Crane Wife,” that softened me, or perhaps it was the affinity I felt to Phoenix’s struggle to write her second book, but in the end I think it was because I was frightened. I’d begun thinking today that the shadow man in my dreams was real. Surely that was a sign that I was spending too much time on my own. And if anyone were capable of filling up this old house with life, it was Phoenix.

  Phoenix was so excited about getting to be roomies she insisted we have a drink to celebrate. We opened a bottle of Prosecco that had come as a welcome gift from In Vino Veritas Wines and Fine Liquors.r />
  “Better Prosecco than Prozac, that’s my motto!” Phoenix toasted, clinking her glass against mine.

  I must have nodded off on the library couch with the light on because the next thing I knew it was eight in the morning and Phoenix was back with a pickup truck (borrowed from Frank Delmarco, I later learned) full of her belongings. She was moved in by nine and by noon her room looked as if she had lived there for years. There were paisley shawls draped over the iron bed frame, framed photographs of her with various celebrities she had met on tour and old prints on the walls, colored glass bottles on the windowsills, and glimmering crystals hanging from the window frames. Even her collection of Franciscan Desert Rose chinaware had made its way into the kitchen cupboards.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked as she arranged the cream, pink, and green teacups on the empty shelves. “They look so pretty in these old-fashioned cupboards. I inherited the set from my mamo. You know it’s the china Jacqueline Kennedy chose for the White House.”

  When she took a breath for air I told her I didn’t mind at all. And it was true. As I told Paul that night on the phone, the house felt less empty with Phoenix and her things in it. He concurred that it was good for me not to be alone in a big house, unaccustomed as I was to living in the country, and since Phoenix’s writer-in-residence term was only for one year I wouldn’t be stuck with her forever if she turned out to be a horrible roommate.

  I went to bed as soon as I got off the phone with Paul, determined to get a good night’s sleep before the first day of classes. I turned out the light, confident that the dream wouldn’t come back now that I wasn’t alone in the house.

  But it did. The room was awash with moonlight, but I knew immediately that he was there in the shadows … that he was the shadow. I couldn’t move or breathe. He stood over me, watching me, but not touching me. Was he angry that I’d turned on the lights to banish him from the library? Or that I’d brought someone into the house?