The Demon Lover (21 page)

I was going to tell her to stay in, but then I realized that wouldn’t be necessary. She hadn’t left the house in days. Honeysuckle House had its second writer recluse.

I called Dean Book on my cell as soon as I was out of earshot of the house. She answered on the first ring.

“I just read the story,” she said without preamble. “How’s Phoenix?”

“Stricken. She must have realized that minx Jen Davies was on to her because she’s been sulking all weekend.”

Dean Book called the Australian reporter something rather stronger than
minx
.

“Are you going to fire Phoenix?” I asked.

“I have to talk to the board, but I’d like to hear Phoenix’s story first. Is she at your house?”

I’d reached the entrance to campus. I turned around before entering the gates and looked back at Honeysuckle House, visible now since Ike had trimmed the hedges back. I thought I saw a shadow move near the back of the house, but it was only a shrub swaying in the wind. “Yes, she’s there. I don’t think she’s going anywhere.”

“Good. I’ll come by in half an hour to see her. May I use the key under the gnome if she doesn’t let me in?”

I told Dean Book she could without bothering to ask how she knew about the hidden key and was about to hang up when she asked me one more question. “There hasn’t been any further sign of … 
him
, has there?”

“No,” I answered, making my voice upbeat. “Not a trace. Nada. Zip. Elvis has left the building.”

Dean Book took so long to reply I thought AT&T had dropped another call. I half hoped it had and she’d missed my lame attempt at levity. But after a beat she replied. “Good. One less thing to worry about. Have a good class, Callie.”

I did have a good class. I’d asked them to read a Victoria Holt novel over the break, suspecting that a pocket-sized romance novel might be a better travel companion than one of the heavy eighteenth-century novels we’d been reading.

“It was great,” Jeanine Marfalla, a pretty sophomore from the suburbs of Boston, enthused. “I read the whole thing on the train ride home and bought two more of her books at a used bookstore.”

Nicky said that her favorite part was when the heroine hears the hero murmuring German endearments at her locked door.

“It gave me chills,” she said. Nicky looked better for the break, rested and well fed. Mara, however, wasn’t in the class at all. When I asked Nicky after class where Mara was, she blushed and told me that she wasn’t sure because she hadn’t been back to her dorm room yet. She’d spent the break in town with Ben. I suppressed a jealous pang that she had gotten to spend time with her boyfriend and I hadn’t.

I checked my phone and found a text message from Liz Book asking me if I wouldn’t mind taking Phoenix’s workshop for her. I texted back that I’d be happy to and asked how Phoenix was doing.

Not great
, the dean texted back.
Come back right after you’re done with her class
.

When I walked into the writing workshop the first person I noticed was Mara. She looked embarrassed to see me. “I am so sorry to miss your class, Professor McFay. I got used to sleeping late on the vacation and overslept this morning.” She looked awful—exhausted and bone thin—and yet I’d recalled her eating quite heartily at Thanksgiving. I wondered if she was bulimic.

“That’s okay, Mara. You can make it up to me by telling me what Phoenix assigned over the break.”

“Oh, she never assigns anything,” Mara answered. “She just tells us to keep going with our memoirs. To dig down to the bitter roots, as she always says.”

“The roots of truth,” another student, a boy in leather and piercings, added in a mocking tone.

“Where the real dirt lies,” another volunteered.

Clearly Phoenix’s students had memorized her adages. Unfortunately they all revolved around the theme of telling the truth. What would these students think when they found out that her entire memoir was fake?

I asked if anyone would be willing to read aloud what they’d written over the break. A few students raised their hands, but when Mara raised hers they put theirs down. Wow, I thought, it’s like they’ve been trained. I called on Nicky.

“Um … I actually wrote about why I don’t like memoirs,” Nicky said sheepishly.

“Well, then,” I said, exasperated. “Read that.”

So Nicky got up and read something she called “Household Ghosts,” a vivid evocation of her house and the people who lived in it.

“Sometimes I think it would be better to forget the past and focus on the future,” she concluded. “I suppose that’s why I don’t really feel comfortable with writing about my life. I grew up surrounded by the ghosts of the past, ghosts shaped like the silk cotillion dresses rotting inside dusty armoires and like the dead wrapped in burlap sacks beside the railroad tracks. Wouldn’t it be better to let those ghosts rest in peace?”

I walked home haunted by the last image in Nicky’s piece—the bodies wrapped in burlap sacks—that she must have gotten from the photographs of the ’93 train crash, a crash possibly caused by her great-great-grandfather’s negligence. What must it feel like to grow up in a town with that family history? You wouldn’t have to be under a curse to feel like you were.

My musings were cut short by an ear-splitting shriek. It sounded like someone was being torn limb from limb, and it came from my house. I broke into a run and nearly fell on the still-slick street. I forced myself into a brisk walk, keeping my eyes on the street for patches of ice. When I reached my house I halted on the front path, as frozen by the tableau on my front porch as the ice doves and angels hanging in the trees. Phoenix—or Betsy Ross Middlefield, as I supposed I should think of her—was standing on the porch in her purple chenille bathrobe, hair wild and loose in the breeze, both arms wrapped around a column.

“I can’t go!” Phoenix wailed. “The demon will find me if I go outside. We chased it out of the house, but I saw it before looking in through the kitchen window! It’s just waiting for me to leave the house before pouncing on me!”

A sixtyish woman with impeccably cut and styled ash blond hair, wearing a slim camel hair coat, stood beside Phoenix, her lips pressed together, one gloved hand resting on Phoenix’s back.

“There, there, Betsy,” I heard her saying. “There are no demons at McLean. You remember Dr. Cavett, don’t you?”

I saw the man she referred to standing in the shadows of the porch with Dean Book. He was a short balding man in a checked blazer and rust-colored turtleneck. He looked frightened of all the females on the porch, perhaps most of all by Dean Book, bristling in her heavy fur coat. She came forward when she saw me and the sunlight rippled across the deep brown fur. For a moment the pelt seemed to move on its own, as if a large furry creature held the dean in its grip. I blinked and the illusion faded … if it
had
been an illusion.

“Oh, Callie, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been explaining to Dr. Cavett that some of Phoenix’s notions about demons and incubi might have come out of your research.”

“Her name is Betsy, not Phoenix,” the woman in the camel hair coat insisted. “She was named after her grandmother who was a descendant of Betsy Ross and it’s a perfectly good name.”

“I hate it, Mother,” Phoenix cried—no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t think of her as
Betsy
. “I’ve told you that a million times. And I hate being named after my crazy grandmother and I hate McLean. I’m a writer—an artist!—and I have an idea for a new book about what I’ve experienced here at Fairwick, but I need to stay here at Honeysuckle House to write it.”

“Where there’s a
demon
waiting outside the house to pounce on you?” her mother asked, her voice icily mocking.

Phoenix’s bloodshot eyes skittered from her mother to me. If she asked me to corroborate her story, what would I say? I didn’t want it on my conscience that Phoenix was dragged off to a mental hospital … but neither did I want to be dragged off to one myself. But Phoenix didn’t ask me to testify that the house had lately been occupied by a demon.

“Oh Callie, you took over my class, didn’t you? Did you see Mara? Did she ask for me? Did she give you any more of her memoir for me to read?” Then, turning back to her mother, she said, “You see, I can’t possibly leave. Mara Marinca is depending on me.”

Dean Book glanced nervously at me. I imagined she was thinking the same thing I was—that Phoenix’s obsession with Mara was no healthier than her fixation on the demon.

“All your students asked for you,” I fibbed. “Nicky Ballard read something …”

Phoenix waved away my mention of Nicky. “It’s Mara who matters!” she shrieked. “Mara who must learn to tell the truth. She mustn’t think I lied. I have to explain.”

Dean Book sighed. “Perhaps it’s better if you explain everything to your students
after
you’ve had a nice rest.” Then, turning to Phoenix’s mother and doctor, she added, “I can’t have her upsetting her students in this state.” She turned once again to Phoenix. “But once you’re more yourself, we can consider having you come back.”

It was an unfortunate choice of words. “I
am
myself! Who else would I be?” Phoenix screamed, and flung herself at the dean. She only meant, I think, to throw herself on the dean’s mercy, but she came at Liz with such force that she knocked her back several feet. Liz tottered for a moment, her arms flailing to keep her balance. I stepped forward to help her while the doctor and Mrs. Middlefield tried to restrain Phoenix. They were between Liz and Phoenix, their backs to Liz, so they didn’t see what happened next. They didn’t see the shadow thrown by Liz rear up on the wall—a huge bearlike creature with claws and an enormous mouth stretched wide in a toothy snarl. But I saw it, and so did Phoenix. She screamed one more time, a scream that sounded so insane that I couldn’t blame Dr. Cavett for sticking her with a tranquilizer needle. As Phoenix’s screams subsided into soft whimpers, I had half a mind to ask for some of that tranquilizer myself.

TWENTY

W
ith Phoenix gone, Honeysuckle House felt truly empty. I had driven out the incubus—and the incubus had, in turn, driven out my roommate.

Liz Book, after explaining to me that the bear-shaped shadow I’d seen on the wall was her familiar, Ursuline (and promising to tell me more about
that
later), said I shouldn’t look at it that way. Phoenix had been clearly troubled to begin with and the real tipping point for her had been the exposure of her fraudulent memoir. But I felt sure it had been the exorcism and its aftermath that had driven Phoenix over the edge. Why else would she have gone on about demons the way she had?

“Besides, we don’t know that
he
didn’t bring Jen Davies here to expose Phoenix,” I pointed out. “After all, he downed a plane two hundred miles to the west and created a ring of ice around a town so my boyfriend couldn’t spend Thanksgiving with me.”

I knew I sounded paranoid, but I thought I could be excused a little anxiety after what I’d been through. Having failed to gain my love, the incubus had decided that I’d have to be all by myself.

Well, I’d show him. I didn’t mind living alone and I wasn’t going to flip out like Phoenix. I was determined to buckle down for what remained of the semester. I had plenty of work because I’d offered to take Phoenix’s class until Dean Book could find a replacement, which probably wouldn’t be until after the winter break. The first thing I found out from the class was that Phoenix hadn’t returned anyone’s work since the beginning of the semester. I promised I would rectify that situation right away—and sat myself down to spend the weekend reading the life stories of twenty-four college-age students.

You wouldn’t have thought they’d have that much life to write about—but you would have been wrong. I read the story of a girl from central Africa who’d fled her native country to avoid genital mutilation. I read a brief, but poignant, account by Flonia Rugova of how she and her mother had fled Albania. Not all the students came from exotic backgrounds. Richie Esposito from the Bronx had handed in a graphic novel in which rival gangs of rats, roaches, and pigeons fought for control of the city after a nuclear apocalypse.

I read Nicky Ballard’s work with particular attention, searching for clues to the Ballard curse, but Nicky hadn’t written much.

I reread the piece Nicky called “Household Ghosts” that she had read in class. She had written below the last line, “I’d really like to work on poetry this semester.”

At the bottom of the page Phoenix had scrawled,
YOU MUST CONFRONT YOUR GHOSTS!!!
But I understood where Nicky was coming from. My grandmother Adelaide had made a fetish of our family’s origins, which went back to the
Mayflower
. She was always going off to some DAR event or to her club—a fusty place called the Grove where all the faded gentry of New York society gathered to compare their family trees. The place had given me the creeps; I was always afraid I was going to use the wrong fork or break the eggshell-thin teacups.

I crossed out Phoenix’s comment and wrote:
I love the images in your writing. Why don’t you try some poems?

Then I took out the Xeroxed copy I’d made of the list of the people who had died in the Ulster & Clare Great Crash of ’93. I’d start researching each of the names this week. It was one thing to tell Nicky to move on from her ghosts, but until I found the “ghost” who had cursed her she was going to be trapped in that moldering house.

The one student whose work I didn’t get to read was Mara Marinca. The purple folder containing her memoir in progress was missing. I spoke to Liz about it and she called Phoenix’s mother to see if Phoenix had the folder when she checked into McLean, but Mrs. Middlefield insisted that she didn’t. “She kept asking us to send for that girl’s writing, but of course we told her we couldn’t.”

I searched the whole house for the folder—or any stray scrap of Mara’s writing. I recalled seeing the folder in the library before I went to class the day Phoenix was taken away. Perhaps if she had thought that someone—the
demon
, she’d said—was trying to break in to steal the papers she might have hidden them. But as hard as I looked the only things I found of Phoenix’s were half-empty liquor bottles stashed in a dozen clever hiding places.

I saved Mara’s conference for last on Monday, dreading the moment when I’d have to tell her that everything she’d written that semester was missing.

“Phoenix spoke very highly of your writing ability,” I told her. “If you print out another copy I’ll be happy to read it.”

“Print out?” Mara asked, her pale, tea-colored eyes staring at me dumbly.

I suppressed a twinge of impatience. Her command of English certainly seemed to come and go randomly.

“Yes, from your computer. If you don’t have a printer I believe you can send a file to the campus printing center. Or you could just send me a copy by email.”

“But I don’t make my writing on the computer. I make it with pen. On paper.”

“Oh,” I said, my heart sinking. “I don’t suppose you made copies.”

Mara shook her head. “I never thought that was necessary. These things I wrote … they were just …” Mara pinched her fingers together and made a series of loops in the air. For a moment I imagined I saw writing in the air—strange runic symbols that hovered like fireflies—but then I blinked and the images faded. “How do you say? Scribbles?”

“Phoenix didn’t think they were scribbles,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “She was quite taken with what you wrote.”

Mara smiled sadly. “I am afraid so taken she was taken away. Maybe it is not so good for me to write about the terrible things I have seen. Perhaps putting them into words makes them more real and does no one good.”

“But it won’t do you any good to keep those things inside. Perhaps you should talk to someone. Dr. Lilly, for instance.”

Mara sniffed. “I have spoken to her, but she doesn’t understand.”

It seemed to me that Soheila Lilly was exactly the person who would understand the anguish of exile, but like many young people Mara didn’t think an older person could understand her experiences. “How about Flonia Rugova?” I asked. “She’s from Albania, which is close to your country.”

Mara cast her eyes down as she often did when her homeland was alluded to, but when she glanced up her eyes were narrowed with interest. “Hm … perhaps you are right. Flonia and I might have much in common and it would be nice to have someone to talk to. Nicolette is very busy now with her boyfriend, Benjamin. She doesn’t even come back to our room at night … oh!” Mara clapped her hand to her mouth. “Perhaps I should not have said that. I do not want to get Nicolette in trouble.”

“It’s okay, Mara. I don’t think Fairwick has a curfew. But I can see how that might be lonely for you. Maybe you should try to make some new friends … get to know some of the other students better.”

Mara gave me the biggest smile I’d ever seen on her—or on anyone else, for that matter. Her mouth was unusually wide … and full of really bad teeth. “Yes, that is what I’ll do. Starting with Flonia Rugova. And as for the writing class … would it be okay if I didn’t hand anything in for a while? Just until I decide what I want to write?”

“I suppose that will be all right until Phoenix’s replacement arrives,” I said uneasily. I didn’t like the idea of letting a student off the hook so readily. But then, she had done more than her share already and it would give the other students a chance to get their work read. And besides, I guiltily admitted to myself, at least now I’d be spared reading about the horrors that she’d lived through.

I didn’t feel so easy about my conference with Mara afterward. I spent that night restlessly prowling through my empty house, haunted by the feeling that something was really wrong with the girl and determined to find her folder if it was still in the house. The fact that I didn’t really want to read it just made me look all the harder to assuage my conscience. I looked everywhere that Phoenix might think to hide papers—through the kitchen cabinets and the china hutches, behind the books in the library, between the stacks of Dahlia LaMotte’s manuscripts, in my own desk (checking again that the one locked drawer was still locked even though it was much too small to hold Mara’s folder) and closets, and, finally, in the attic.

I left the attic until last because I didn’t like going up there alone. I had a feeling that if the incubus were lurking anywhere in the house that’s where he’d be—beneath the steeply pitched roof, among the tea chests and forlorn broken furniture. When I switched on the light and the overhead bulb popped I had to resist the urge to give up, but I made myself go downstairs for one of the battery-operated lanterns Dory Browne had given me in case of any more power outages. I came back holding the lantern over my head, sweeping its light across the dusty floor and into every nook and cranny. I’d covered most of the area when the light swept into the far west eave … and a scrap of shadow skittered across the floor.

I nearly dropped the lantern. Instead I swung it in the direction the shadow had sped, sending the shadow-thing scurrying into an open tea chest. My heart hammering, I pounced on the tea chest and slammed the lid. Whatever was inside flung itself up against the lid, making a sickening thump that reverberated inside my own chest.

Shit, what now? Should I lock the chest and bring it to Liz Book?

But then I remembered that the tea chests, built to keep precious tea leaves dry on long ocean voyages, were airtight. If I’d caught something alive in there it would be dead by the time I brought it to Liz’s house.

Which shouldn’t be a problem. If it was the incubus then he couldn’t suffocate … right? And if it was an animal that had taken up residence in my attic then I was best rid of it … right?

Another thump rattled the box. Whatever was inside, it was mad. Or afraid.

Shit
.

I balanced the lantern on top of a nearby broken chair so that its light shone onto the lid of the tea chest. Then, crouching on my toes so that I could move fast, I put a hand on either side of the box and lifted the lid.

Two beady black eyes set in a tiny furry face stared up at me. If the creature had moved a centimeter I would have screamed and run, but the mouse sat perfectly still on its haunches holding its tiny pink paws up in front of the white ruff on its chest as if it were praying for leniency—a posture that struck me as familiar. I peered over at the mouse’s tail and saw a short stump instead.

“It’s you!” I said. “The tailless doormouse. You didn’t explode!”

The mouse cocked its head and twitched its small pink ears. It was, I had to admit, kind of cute.

“I’m glad you survived,” I said, feeling a little stupid addressing a mouse, but hey, I’d done stranger things lately. “I’m sorry your little friends didn’t.”

The mouse squeaked and rubbed a tiny paw across its face, as if washing itself … or brushing away a tear.

“Aw, are you crying?” I put my hand into the tea chest, palm up. “Come here, little guy. I won’t hurt you.”

The mouse looked at my hand for a few long seconds, then stretched its neck toward it and sniffed at my fingertips, which were still blistered from when I’d grabbed him during the exorcism. What if it bit me? Could magical-iron-doormice-come-to-life carry rabies? But the mouse didn’t bite me. Instead he licked my blistered fingertips and crawled into my hand. Then he turned around twice and curled up into a ball, tucked the stub of his tail beneath his haunches, rested his pink nose on top of his paws, and looked up at me.

I laughed. “Okay, you’re pretty darn cute. Let’s go get you something to eat.”

I named him Ralph after the mouse in Beverly Cleary’s
The Mouse and the Motorcycle
, one of my favorite books when I was growing up. Ralph the Doormouse—it had a nice ring to it. After I fed him some cheese, lettuce, and carrots, I took him back upstairs in a basket lined with a dishtowel. I put him on my desk while I made my nightly call to Paul. He curled up and listened with one eye open as I told Paul about my conference with Mara.

“It sounds like she’s trying to get out of doing any more work for the semester. You can’t be so easy on your students, Cal. They’ll walk all over you.”

We’d had this argument before. Paul had only been teaching for a couple of years, but already he seemed burned out by the emotional demands his students made on him. I had to agree that in this era of email and texting, the self-esteem generation could be demanding and annoying to deal with (I’d actually had students at Columbia who wanted to know why I didn’t buy an iPhone or BlackBerry so I could answer their emails immediately), but it was really only a handful of students who acted as if they were entitled to their professor’s undivided attention. Paul treated every student as a potential threat to his time and tenure opportunities. Sometimes I wondered if he’d be happier in a line of work that didn’t involve teaching.

When I said good night to Paul, I saw that Ralph had fallen asleep. I left his basket on the desk and went to bed. I suppose it was an indicator of how lonely I’d felt since Phoenix left that having a mouse sleeping in my room made me feel better.

I reached for a student paper to read before going to sleep but picked up instead one of Dahlia LaMotte’s notebooks. I wasn’t sure that reading erotica was what I needed right now, but I just couldn’t bear to read another student paper—and I was pretty hooked on
The Viking Raider
. It was the only manuscript I’d read so far in which the sex with a human character was as exciting as the sex with the incubus. I had just gotten to the part where the Viking raider realizes that his captive Irish lass is being visited nightly by a
night-mare
.