The Demon Lover (7 page)

“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

T
he 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.

“The summers are great up here,” one of the women told me. “My partner and I have a place in Margaretville about forty minutes east. But the winters …”

The woman, whose name was Yvonne, proceeded to tell me about a couple who’d moved up here year-round and gone a little stir crazy, but then, she assured me, they’d always had “issues.” I laughed off the idea that I was worried about going stir crazy in the country and they all agreed that it was different because I was teaching at the college. When they left the house felt quiet and even emptier than before they had come with my meager belongings.

Before I could wonder if the first sign of going stir crazy was having strange erotic dreams, I threw myself into unpacking, figuring that the surest way to ward off melancholy was to make the house feel like my home. I hung framed prints and photographs in the library and parlor and unpacked my mismatched collection of mugs and dishes into the built-in china cabinets. It would be fun, I told myself, to find odds and ends in antiques stores to fill the house up.

After dinner—a pizza delivered courtesy of Mama Esta’s Pizzeria and a bottle of Shiraz from a local vineyard—I took a long-overdue soak in the claw-foot tub, pouring in the rose-scented bath oil that had come in a welcome basket from a store called Res Botanica (“May your new home be sweet!”). Then I put on a loose nightshirt and started unpacking my files and office supplies into the desk in the tower office while sipping a glass of wine. It was fun opening up all the little desk drawers. In addition to the robin’s egg I had found the first day I saw the house, I found a glossy black seedpod shaped like a horned goat’s head, a china doll’s head with one blue eye scratched out, and a bird’s nest. Only one drawer was locked. I looked for a key in the other drawers, but didn’t find one.

I left all the objects where they were and added my own collection of stones and shells, as well as pens and pencils, tape, stapler, a dagger-shaped letter opener I’d gotten as a souvenir at a Scottish castle, file cards, and notebooks. I unpacked the reference books I liked to have near me while I was writing—the abridged
Oxford English Dictionary
(a gift from my grandmother when I graduated college), the
Penguin Dictionary of Symbols
,
Roget’s Thesaurus
,
The Golden Bough
,
From the Beast to the Blonde
, Gilbert and Gubar’s
The Madwoman in the Attic
, and half a dozen other books on fairy tales and folklore. On one shelf I put my favorite novels, from
The Mysteries of Udolpho
and
Jane Eyre
through
Rebecca
and Dahlia La-Motte’s
The Dark Stranger
. When I’d placed my pens in my Oxford University mug (a souvenir from my junior year abroad) and emptied a handful of paperclips into a chipped Sèvres teacup, which was the last remnant (according to my grandmother) of my great-great-grandmother’s wedding china, I finally felt at home.

I sat back and looked up, meeting my own eyes in my reflection in the darkened windowpane. I’d tied my hair up in a loose knot for my bath, but tendrils had escaped and curled around my face; my auburn hair looked black against my white skin. My nightshirt, I noticed, was rather transparent. For a moment I imagined what I’d look like to someone looking in from outside—a maiden trapped in a tower like on the cover of one of Dahlia LaMotte’s Gothic romances. I had started to laugh at the idea—before long I’d be running in my diaphanous nightgown toward a cliff with a castle looming in the background—when a flicker of white out in the back garden caught my attention. Just because my bedroom faced the woods didn’t mean no one could be out there. Although classes didn’t start until next week freshmen had started arriving for orientation and it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that the woods were a good place to get high and drink.

I pulled a Columbia sweatshirt over my nightshirt and leaned forward. There
was
something on the lawn just at the edge of the woods, a white shape that swayed in the breeze. For a moment I was sure it was a man in a white shirt and dark pants standing on the edge of the woods, looking up at my window. I could make out a pale face and dark eyes … and then the eyes widened and spread, devouring the rest of his face—I had the impression of eyes widening so far to see that they dissolved the rest of him—and then I saw that it was an illusion. The white shape was a plume of mist rising from the ground and dispersing on the breeze.

Great
, now I was becoming like one of the heroines of the books I wrote about, jumping at noises and imagining faces in the mist. Violet Grey in the
The Dark Stranger
imagining phantom lovers in the moonlight—like the one I’d dreamt about last night. Only the dream I’d had last night hadn’t been of a romantic shadow lover. The flood of moonlight that had rushed into me had been an elemental force—urgent and impatient.

Because of how long you’ve waited for him
, a voice inside my head whispered.
Because of how long you’ve made him wait
.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said aloud as I closed and locked the window. It was just being in a strange house, that’s all. And the house was already ceasing to feel strange.

Still, it took me a long time to fall asleep that night. I lay awake listening to the creaks and taps the old house made settling on its foundations and watching the moonlight cast jagged shadows as it shone through the broken glass in the window, unwilling to relax my guard against whatever might form out of the moonlight and shadow, afraid of a repeat of last night’s violent dream.

When I finally fell asleep, though, the dream that was waiting for me was completely different. Shadows stole softly across the floor, skirting the sharp blades of moonlight as if they were actually made of glass. The shadows slipped into my bed and wrapped themselves around me, murmuring words that I couldn’t understand but which sounded like the drone of the surf inside a seashell. The sound poured into my ears like warm oil and spread a feeling of contentment throughout my body. It was like being massaged all over at once. The shadows were everywhere, like a warm bath with fingers and lips, sucking on my mouth, my nipples, and between my legs. As if they were feeding on me and growing stronger with every orgasm they gave me.

I woke up the next morning feeling strangely refreshed, not sore at all from the heavy lifting I’d done the day before. I unpacked a dozen boxes before breakfast and then decided I might as well use all this energy to move into my campus office. The campus as I drove through it was relatively quiet except for the freshmen here for orientation. They were instantly recognizable from the way they walked in tight-knit clumps of four and six, as if the bucolic ivy-covered campus were a dangerous wilderness that could only be broached by group expedition. I remembered how in my first week at NYU all the kids from out of town travelled together in packs. A city kid, I’d been disdainful of their timidity and dependence, and stayed mostly to myself or socialized with city friends from high school. As a result, I hadn’t made a lot of new friends at college; then I met Paul and I spent most of my time with him or in the library. I supposed it had paid off when I got into Columbia (where the easy camaraderie of college had given way to the competition of grad school), but now watching these kids laughing and jostling up against one another under the stately autumn-colored trees I felt like I might have missed something.

I parked in front of Fraser Hall, a four-storied half-timbered faux-Tudor building which held the folklore department offices. It was named for Angus Fraser, a famous folklorist who had founded the Royal Order of Folklorists at the turn of the last century, written dozens of books on Celtic folklore, and taught at Fairwick a hundred years ago. My office was on the top floor and, I soon discovered, there was no elevator. On my second trip hauling boxes up the steep, winding stairs a pair of brawny arms relieved me of my burden.

“You sound like you’re going to expire of consumption at any moment.” I recognized Frank Delmarco, the American history professor who had sneered at the inclusion of vampire books in my curriculum during my interview. Now he was apparently critiquing my stair-climbing capacity.

“I’m … fine …” I huffed. “I’ve been … doing … a … lot of un … packing.”

“Yeah, I heard you bought the old LaMotte house. Isn’t that a little big for just one person alone?”

For a split second I almost told him I
wasn’t
alone in the house. I felt my face go red recalling what company I’d found in my dreams. Luckily, Comrade Delmarco (today he was wearing a red T-shirt with pictures of Marx and Lenin wearing party hats that read JOIN THE COMMUNIST PARTY) would just think I was embarrassed to be hogging a big house to myself.

“I may rent out one of the rooms,” I said, although I had no plans to and I instantly didn’t like the idea of anyone else in the house.

“Really? That’s a good idea—” he began, but I cut him off.

“You know, it’s funny that someone who disapproves of ‘catering to the common denominator’ would be a socialist.”

“A socialist? I’m not a socialist,” he sputtered, dumping one of my boxes on the floor of my new office. “Do you have more boxes?”

“Yes, but please don’t put yourself to any trouble on my account.” I turned and headed down the stairs. He followed.

“No problem. We socialists like to help out our comrades. Geez, even if I were a socialist, I don’t see what despising commercial vampire dreck has to do with anything—”

“Dreck? What a snob! Have you ever read Anne Rice?”

“No.”

“Stephenie Meyer?”

“God, no!”

“Charlaine Harris?”

“Who?”

We continued arguing as he helped me bring up all my books and files. It took three trips, at the end of which we were both breathing hard and drenched with sweat.

“Sheesh, it’s hot,” he said, wiping the sweat off his brow with a red bandana. “Would you like a beer?”

“At ten in the morning?” I asked.

“Now who’s the snob?” he asked, throwing his hands up and walking out of my office.

I unpacked my books and files in a snit of annoyance that turned gradually into an insatiable urge for a beer and then into regret for not having thanked Frank Delmarco for helping me carry up all those boxes. I went out into the hall to find his office. I followed the sound of laughter around the corner and saw, through an open doorway, the profile of a young, pretty girl sitting in an office chair next to a large desk. All I could see of the man behind the desk was a pair of Timberland hiking boots propped up on a stack of books, but I recognized Frank Delmarco from his booming laugh. The girl joined in his laughter, tossing her waist-length shiny hair over her shoulder and crossing her very long, very bare legs. I suddenly felt like I’d had enough socializing with my new colleagues for the day and decided to go home.

When I stopped back in my office to lock up, though, I found I had a visitor. A student—or maybe a student’s kid sister, she looked that young—was perched on the edge of the straight-backed chair next to my desk, her shoulders hunched over, her medium-length hair—which was the color of weak, milky tea—obscuring her face. When I walked into the room she flinched and looked up. Her eyes were huge and the same milky tea color as her hair.

“Oh, excuse me, Professor McFay, I hope you don’t mind me coming in … The door was open and it was drafty in the hallway.”

It was eighty degrees in the hallway but this girl looked as if she could be blown away by a summer breeze. The reason her eyes looked so big, I saw now, was that her face was so thin.

“No problem,” I said, not sounding as if I meant it. I was tired and wanted to go home. “Office hours haven’t really begun yet …”

“Oh, I am so sorry!” She jumped up from her chair. She was wearing a soft blue peasant blouse that flapped around her rail-thin chest. This girl wasn’t just thin, she was undernourished. Anorexia? I wondered. “It’s just I come late to school and have not made the registration.”

I noticed her accent now. Eastern European, I thought. “It’s okay, please, sit down. I just wasn’t expecting any students today, but I’m new here and I don’t know the routine yet.”