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“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’sNightmare, which was still projected on the wall. “But I see you’ve gotJane Eyreon 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 beenpossessed. 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 passageways 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 Dougallisthe dark stranger. He has treated Violet brusquely because a curse on all mistresses of Lion’s Keep makes him reluctantto 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 inThe Dark Strangerwas 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 ofThe 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 thegrown-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.
