The Demon Lover (6 page)

She showed me four small bedrooms—one complete with built-in bed and cabinets exactly like a ship’s cabin, which Dory told me had been Silas’s bedroom—a linen closet, a bathroom with an enormous claw-foot tub, and then, finally, she opened the last door at the end of the hallway. “The master bedroom,” she announced.

The corner room faced the east side of the house. Two large windows overlooked an overgrown garden and the mountains in the distance. The bed would go up against the west wall so you could lie in bed and look out at the mountains. At night you’d see the moon rise. The southeast corner of the room opened into an octagonal turret. A desk had been built across three sides of the turret; on the other three sides were built-in bookshelves below the windows. A straight-backed wooden chair with a needlepoint cushion stood facing the desk. I sat down at it. The desk had been fitted out with dozens of tiny drawers and shelves. I opened one of the drawers and found, to my utter delight, a blue robin’s egg.

“I suppose Dahlia LaMotte’s papers were given to the library with her books,” I said, trying another drawer that turned out to be locked.

“Actually, I believe Matilda moved all her aunt’s papers up to the attic.”

“The attic?” I asked.

Dory Browne sighed. “I suppose you’ll want to see that, too.”

Having spent most of my life living in apartments I had very little experience with attics. I was picturing a dusty, cobweb-filled space at the top of a rickety ladder, but the room, which we reached by a narrow flight of stairs, was clean and smelled pleasantly of tea. It smelled of tea because Dahlia LaMotte’s papers had all been stored in tea crates, each one marked with the insignia of the LaMotte Tea Company and the type of tea inside—Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Lapsang souchong, and other exotic varieties.

“They were left over from her father’s warehouses,” Dory told me.

There were twelve of them. I opened one gingerly, half-afraid after my experience in the woods that a mouse would jump out at me, but the only thing that came out of the box was the scent of bergamot. Three notebooks, each one bound in the same marbled paper, lay across the top of the chest. I picked up one and saw there was another identical notebook beneath it. I turned to the first page and found Dahlia LaMotte’s signature and the dates
August 15, 1901–September 26, 1901
in a florid but readable hand. She’d filled up the book quickly.

“Why aren’t these in a library?” I asked, thumbing through a few pages.
Started
The Wild Moon
today
, I read on one page;
I had the dream again last night
, I read on another.

“Dahlia’s will specified that her papers remain in the house.”

“That’s odd.”

Dory sat down on a tea crate—this one labeled Ceylon—and shrugged. “Dahlia
was
odd. Years of living alone immersed in your own fantasies will do that to a person.”

“Does her will stipulate what use can be made of the papers?” I asked.

“Whoever owns the house, owns the papers. As long as they physically remain in the house you can read them, write about them, copy them, and even publish them—although a half-share of the royalties of any published work must go to the estate, which pays for the upkeep of the house.”

“I’ve never heard of anything so strange,” I said, running my hands across the worn paper binding of one of the notebooks.

Dory smiled a trifle condescendingly. “You’ve led a very unstrange life then,” she said. Then she sighed again. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in looking at that Craftsman bungalow now?”

I helped Dory close up the house. It was quite a job. The shutters flapped in the wind, rattled their hinges, and slammed shut on our fingertips when we least expected it. The four-over-four, double-sashed windows groaned on their way down like children forced to leave a birthday party before cake was served. While Dory was closing the front door—and telling me that the asking price, which sounded ridiculously low to me, was really too high—she got her thumb stuck in the doorjamb.

“It’s like it doesn’t want us to leave,” I said, looking back at the house from the front lawn. Shuttered, it looked sad and glowering.

“That may well be,” Dory snapped, sucking her thumb, “but we can’t all have everything we want.”

I didn’t ask what she meant by that—or why she was so set on
not
making this sale. Instead I added up figures as we walked back to the inn. Aside from the small trust fund left by my parents, I had gotten a nice advance for
Sex Lives
. Paul and I had talked about using it to buy a larger apartment if he got a job in New York City, but with the same money I could buy this house and keep my rent-stabilized Inwood apartment for our pied-a-terre. It could be our country house, even if I didn’t get the Fairwick job …

I was so immersed in my thoughts that I didn’t notice until I came up the inn’s steps that Dean Book was waiting for me on the front porch. Diana Hart was there, too, sitting in the wicker glider with her arms crossed over her chest and her lips thin with seeming anger. Had the women been arguing? I wondered. But Elizabeth Book, dressed today in an ivory linen shift with a matching cotton sweater draped over her shoulders, looked radiantly pleased.

“Dr. McFay,” she said, “please come join me. Diana was just going to bring out another pitcher of iced tea.”

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

W
hen 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.