by Juliet Dark
The shadow hovered over me and I saw his face—not angry, but sad … and aged somehow. Stark lines were etched around his mouth and deep shadows were carved beneath his eyes. He’d grown weaker in the few nights I’d denied him. Perhaps I could still keep him at bay. As he stretched himself over me, hovering millimeters from my skin, I could feel the static electricity between us. Every hair on my body stood erect; my skin tingled with his nearness. Only his lips touched mine, pressing hard, trying to force my mouth open to inhale my breath.
He sucks them dry like a vampire, Soheila had said.
But what harm could he do me if he was just a dream? Why not enjoy the dream?
I parted my lips. For a moment he hesitated, and then his tongue slid along my upper lip, teasing me, punishing me for my delay. His teeth tugged at my lower lip. I opened my mouth wider and he forced his tongue inside, suddenly hard and urgent as he sucked the breath from me. When he blew his breath into my lungs I could move, but only at his bidding and only to his rhythm.
Which was fine by me.
Tonight he was neither as violent as he’d been the first night nor as gentle as the second. Instead he seemed to have learned the particular rhythm that opened all the locked rooms inside of me. He made love to me as though he knew my body as well as his own … as if he were inside my body and mind, anticipating my every desire before I even knew what they were. Looking into the face that hovered above mine, his eyes dark shadows, his lips parted over mine, was like looking into my own face … only just when I was about to see it fully, just when the moonlight was about to illuminate all of him, the shadows swept across his brow, like clouds passing over the moon, and I felt myself sucked into a deep, endless darkness in which there was nothing but the two of us, making love all night long.
I knew that time was deceptive in dreams and that dreams of a minute might feel as though they lasted all night, but that’s what if felt like—as if we made love all night. When I awoke I was covered in sweat and my muscles were sore. When I touched myself between my legs I was wet and the insides of my thighs were tender.
I had to drink half a pot of coffee to get myself ready for my first class. I was afraid I wouldn’t be up for it, but once I was standing in front of the class I was fine. More than fine. Ignoring my notes, with a reproduction of Fuseli’s Nightmare projected on the Smartboard behind me, I talked about the demon lover in literature for thirty minutes. As I spoke I found myself often looking toward Mara Marinca, who sat at the back of the class and maintained a steady, interested gaze. I’d discovered on my book tour that certain people had better “listening faces.” It might have little or nothing to do with what they were actually thinking—people who’d scowled throughout a reading had come up to me afterward to say how much they had enjoyed it—but it was unnerving to focus on someone who looked bored or skeptical. Better to focus on someone whose face expressed polite interest (not the girl next to Mara, whose bland moon-shaped face expressed little but the desire to nap) and Mara had the perfect listening face. She looked as if she was drinking in my every word.
My students burst into excited discussion as soon as I opened the floor for questions. Half a dozen came up afterward with more questions—or begging to be let into the class even though it was closed.
Since I’d let in Mara Marinca, I didn’t feel like I could turn them down.
Mara herself came up once the crowd had dispersed, with the bored moon-faced girl in tow.
“You see,” she was saying to the girl, “I told you Dr. McFay was a wonderful teacher. Now you want to take the class, no? Dr. McFay, this is my roommate, Nicolette Ballard. She wants to take your class but it is closed.”
I looked at Nicolette Ballard. The roundness of her face was accentuated by her unfortunate haircut—the same choppy pageboy that I’d seen on Alice Hubbard and Joan Ryan. There must be some sadistic barber in town. “Are you interested in Gothic literature?” I asked.
Nicolette yawned. “I don’t really like all that romance stuff,” she said, looking at the floor, the ceiling, and then scowling at Fuseli’s Nightmare, which was still projected on the wall. “But I see you’ve got Jane Eyre on your syllabus and it’s my favorite book.”
“Nicolette is helping me most kindly with my English,” Mara said. “It would be so very helpful to me if she were in the class so we could study together.” I looked down at my class list. I was already six over the maximum enrollment. I looked back up, into Mara’s wide tea-colored eyes, which were glowing gold in the light from the projected image.
“Sure,” I said, signing my name to Nicolette Ballard’s add slip. “What’s one more?”
I sailed home on a rosy cloud of satisfaction and contentment. I should have been exhausted but the talk had given me an idea for the Dahlia LaMotte book. I wrote for four hours until the smell of dinner cooking drew me downstairs. I groggily recalled that sometime last night I’d agreed to exchange part of Phoenix’s rent for cooking.
I ate two servings of crawfish étoufée with cornbread and sweet potato pie and then stayed up late, drinking wine with Phoenix and talking about the students we had in common. (“Did you have that waiflike child from Bosnia?” Phoenix had asked. “You wouldn’t believe the things she wrote in her first assignment. I read it aloud and there wasn’t a dry eye in the classroom!”) I went to bed so exhausted that I was sure I wouldn’t have the dream again.
But I did. I had it that night and every night for the next three weeks. Each night I woke—or thought I awoke—to a moonlit room. The shadows reached for me and swelled into the dark lover. I’d feel his weight on my chest and then, just when I thought I’d suffocate, he’d press his lips to mine and blow his breath into my lungs and we’d make love—long, deep, utterly spine-rocking, toe-curling sex that went until the first light of day.
The vivid erotic dreams must come, I decided, from reading Dahlia LaMotte’s uncensored manuscripts. Tired as I was each morning, I came home in the afternoon to the empty house (Phoenix’s classes were in the afternoon) and immediately started reading the manuscripts, stopping only to eat the elaborate dinner that Phoenix would cook. Then I’d write late into the night until I’d fall asleep … and have the dream again. It was as if I’d found a loop of creativity, a closed circuit that could endlessly feed on itself.
It was the same loop that Dahlia LaMotte had found.
Anyone glancing at a bibliography of Dahlia LaMotte could tell she had been prolific, but only by reading her handwritten drafts could you tell she had been possessed. She dated each entry so I could tell how much she had written in a day. On average she wrote about forty pages—in a miniscule hand on thin ruled lines—but some days she wrote sixty or more. Sometimes when she came to the end of a notebook she had continued writing in the margins and even between the lines of the filled pages. On the days she wrote the most her usually neat handwriting became nearly indecipherable, as if her pen were skipping across the page like a stone skimming the surface of a pond, barely touching the water.
The content on those days when she wrote the most was different from her other writing. The Dark Stranger, the published version, was full of sexuality seething just below the surface. A young woman—penniless, orphaned, friendless Violet Grey—comes to Lion’s Keep, a secluded estate on the Cornish coast, to work as a governess to the young sister of William Dougall, a brooding man whose behavior becomes increasingly strange and threatening. Accidents befall Violet, from which she is saved by a mysterious figure in a black cloak—the dark stranger of the title. She becomes convinced that Dougall is trying to kill her, although the reasons, involving inheritance, mistaken identities, and mislaid letters, are never exactly clear and are the biggest pitfall of the plot. Violet comes to believe that the dark stranger who saves her is the ghost of Dougall’s long-lost brother—the good brother who should have inherited Lion’s Keep. She begins to dream about him at night and to imagine that he visits her in her room (the castle is full of secret pass
ageways and hidden doors). There’s a persistent eroticism in these passages that’s heightened by the stranger’s ambiguous identity. Sometimes he is masked, sometimes he assumes the face of William Dougall. At the end it is revealed that William Dougall is the dark stranger. He has treated Violet brusquely because a curse on all mistresses of Lion’s Keep makes him reluctant to fall in love. He has appeared in her room to protect her from the illegitimate son of Dougall’s dead brother, who stands to inherit the estate if Dougall dies childless. Of course it is Dougall whom Violet has loved all along—he is the dark stranger, still potent in his sexual mystery, but reformed enough to make a proper bridegroom by the last page of the book. He is the Beast with the witch’s curse lifted, Mr. Rochester redeemed by his attempt to save his mad wife’s life from the fire.
The sexual tension in The Dark Stranger was powerful, but it was always below the surface. Dougall appears in Violet’s room but never touches her.
Not so in Dahlia’s handwritten drafts. The scene I’d already read, in which Violet is ravaged by an invisible stranger in the linen closet was one of several in which a “dark stranger” makes love to her. In the manuscript, the dark stranger schtupps Violet Grey in every corner of Lion’s Keep, from the linen closet to the butler’s pantry, “his thrusts rattling the Wedgwood teacups,” to the gamekeeper’s cottage where he “laid me down on the rough wooden boards and cleaved me with his gleaming shaft.” To the modern reader it’s clear that the visitations of the dark stranger reflect Violet’s sublimated sexual longing for William Dougall, whom she cannot allow herself to love as long as she believes he is evil. But Violet believes that the dark stranger is an incubus. The housekeeper, Mrs. Eaves, reinforces this theory by telling her a local folktale about a youth turned into a demon by the Fairy Queen. Only when William Dougall declares his love for her at the end of the book is Violet able to renounce the incubus—her dark stranger—in order to marry her mortal lover.
The night I finished reading the handwritten draft of The Dark Stranger, I lay awake for a long time thinking about Violet’s dark stranger and my demon lover, reluctant to give in to sleep. I had tried to tell myself that my dreams had come from reading Dahlia LaMotte’s sex scenes combined with the atmosphere of this old house; that the moonlight lover was the grown-up, X-rated version of my childhood fairytale prince. But the dreams had begun before I started reading Dahlia’s rough drafts and my fairytale prince had never frightened me the way this creature did. I kept going around in circles looking for the answer, but try as I might, I couldn’t find a rational explanation for how I’d shared the same erotic dream as a fictional character created a hundred years ago. The effort wore me out. I slipped into sleep at last.
When he arrived I was waiting for him. The shadow branches reached and swelled, the moonlight crested above me, brilliant in its whiteness, but I kept my eyes open against the painfully bright light. I watched him take shape above me. For the first time I realized that he took shape because I watched him, he took his first breath only after he blew into my mouth and drew breath from me … Would he move if I didn’t move first? I kept myself still even though every cell in my body was pulled to every cell of the dark matter he was made of. His eyes met mine … and widened with surprise.
“Who are you?” I asked, shocked that I had the power to speak.
But not as shocked as he was.
I saw the look of amazement spread across his face … a face that had never looked so complete or so beautiful before … and then he was gone. The moonlight drew back into the shadows with a hoarse rasp like a wave dragging over rough shingle, and then the shadows themselves shriveled and shrank and vanished like smoke. I was left gasping like a fish flung onto the shore by an angry retreating tide.
TEN
I woke up the next morning cranky and bad-tempered. I had a headache and felt like I was coming down with the flu. I thought a hot shower would make me feel better but when I turned it on I found that there was nothing but ice cold water; the hot water heater, which the house inspector had certified as sound, must have been broken. Making a mental note to call Brock, I made a pot of coffee, only to discover that the milk had gone sour. When I tried to toast some leftover scones the toaster oven short-circuited, caught fire, and burned them to a crisp before I could put the fire out.
I decided to walk to campus hoping the air and exercise would heal my bad mood, but the minute I got outside I realized that the balmy Indian Summer weather had come to an abrupt end. It must have been under forty. I persevered, determined not to be a wuss about the cold, but ten minutes from the house it started to rain … or sleet, actually. The frozen rain needled my face and the back of my neck. I was soaked and frozen by the time I made it to the college center, where I stopped to buy a bagel and coffee. I was late for class and spent the first ten minutes complaining to a confused group of students about the inferiority of bagels outside the New York metropolitan area and the absurdity of sleet in October.
I’d planned to show Rebecca in class but when I slid the DVD into the disk drive, my computer made a grinding noise and then spit the DVD out with a hiss. I swore—and heard a few students giggle at my use of the Anglo-Saxon invective—and pushed the DVD back in. A blue spark flew out of the disk drive and jolted me. My laptop moaned like a sick cat. I felt my eyes pricking with tears at the injustice of the world turning against me. I’m not sure what I would have done next if Nicky Ballard hadn’t appeared at my side and gently taken over.
“Here, let me. I’ve worked at campus tech support for a couple of years and can usually figure this stuff out.” Nicky tapped in a few commands on my laptop and within minutes my Mac was purring and playing the movie.
I thanked Nicky and she gave me a rare smile. It was then that I noticed that she had lost weight. Her round face had thinned out, revealing sculpted cheekbones. Her bangs were brushed to the side, showing off a high forehead and wide turquoise eyes. She looked pretty—but I felt a pang of concern. Although it was typical for freshmen to gain weight, I’d also seen some turn anorexic under the academic and social stresses of college. I made a note to talk to her after class and settled in to watch the movie.
The minute of thinking of someone other than myself had put my bad mood in perspective, but as I watched the movie I felt annoyance growing again. I liked to show Rebecca because the novel was a classic reworking of Gothic themes and the Hitchcock film was beautiful and moody. But the truth was that the second Mrs. de Winter (the poor woman didn’t even rate a first name) was a ninny. It was painful to watch her quailing under the imperious Mrs. Danvers and hiding broken china away like a guilty child.
I dismissed the class after half the movie and told them they should finish reading the book before the next class. “Which ends differently than the movie so don’t think you can get away with not reading it.” Then, on a sudden impulse, I added: “Ask yourself this: What would you have done in the second Mrs. de Winter’s shoes—or in the shoes of any of the heroines we’ve seen so far this year? Do these women have to be so helpless?”
I caught Mara’s eyes on me as I gave this assignment. Instead of her usual reverent gaze she looked puzzled and I realized that I’d asked the question angrily. Shit, I really must be losing it.
I had decided to put off talking to Nicky Ballard until another day, but as she walked by me she stopped and said:
“I’d fire Mrs. Danvers.”
“What?”
“If I was the second Mrs. de Winter. That’s the first thing I’d do. Then I’d give all Rebecca’s things to the Salvation Army—or whatever the British equivalent was—and redecorate. Then I’d tell Max that if he wanted to make our marriage work he’d better get over his dead wife and start paying attention to me.”
“Good girl,” I said.
“But what would you do when you found out how Rebecca died?” A voice came from the door. It was Mara, who’d been waiting in the doorway for her roommate.
“I’d
say good riddance and make sure no one ever found that boat.” There was a sudden hardness in Nicky’s eyes that took me by surprise.
“Nicky, could you stay for a moment and show me how you fixed my computer?” I asked with a disingenuous smile, and then, turning to Mara: “You’d better go on to class. I don’t want to make you late.”
“But Nicky’s in the same class …”
“You can tell Phoenix she’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Mara left reluctantly, giving Nicky a worried glance over her shoulder. I wondered if she’d noticed the change in Nicky as well. While Nicky went though the steps she’d taken to fix my computer, I studied her more closely. I could see that in addition to the lost weight her eyes were feverish and her skin was pale.
“Thanks, Nicky. You were a real lifesaver. Can I call you if I have problems at home with it?”
“Sure. Like I said, I’ve worked in tech support for years …”
“But aren’t you a freshman?”
“Yeah, but I live here in town and I got the job the summer after my sophomore year in high school. One of my teachers recommended me because I was always fixing the high school’s computers. I got to know Dean Book …” Nicky smiled and lowered her voice. “For a smart lady she didn’t know the first thing about computers. She suggested I apply to college here. I’d been planning to go to the SUNY over in Oneonta, but Dean Book told me about the scholarship program and, well … here I am.”
“And you’re liking it so far?”
“Well, it’s a little strange. All my life I’ve watched the college teachers in town and they all seemed like they came from another world. Like that English teacher, Miss Eldritch. Have you ever watched how she walks? She kinda floats. And those creepy Russian professors … Do you know that they all live together in a scary old Victorian mansion on top of the hill? It’s all shuttered up during the day and you never see any of them except at night. Even their classes are at night. Kids in town say they’re part of some kinky sex triangle …” Nicky blushed. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be disrespectful. It’s just weird to have spent all my life on one side and now I’m on the other—like Alice through the looking glass, you know?”
