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THREE
Iawoke the next morning with the bone-melting contentment that follows a night of really good sex—quickly followed by a rush of shame at the realization that the sex had all been inside my own head. I had been sometimes embarrassed by the dreams I’d had as a teenager, but they’d never gone this far. The fairytale prince had always stayed on the threshold between dark and light. The first time he spoke had been after my parents died. I’d been crying in my new bedroom in my grandmother’s apartment, trying to stifle my sobs so she wouldn’t hear, when suddenly the room was full of the scent of honeysuckle and ocean and I’d known he was there.
“Let me tell you a story,” he had said, and he’d told me a fairy tale about a brave Scottish girl named Jennet who saved a prince named Tam Lin who had been kidnapped by the fairy queen. It was one of the stories my parents had told me. I’d fallen asleep listening to its comforting rhythms, determined to be as brave as Jennet. From then on whenever I cried I’d hear his voice telling that same story. When I was older I realized that I’d turned the prince from the story into my storyteller to take the place of my dead parents. It was a harmless fantasy. He’d never come forward…orcomeinside me the way this creature had. I’d never felt sore between my legs…
I got up quickly, eager to clear the fuzz from my head and bloodstream. I didn’t have time to languish in erotic daydreams. Dean Book would be calling later this morning and I had to decide what to say to her if she offered me the job. Plus, I wantedto get inside Honeysuckle House before I left. I hadn’t spent the whole night wallowing in X-rated fantasies. Sometime in the night I’d had an idea for an essay on Dahlia LaMotte’s work, maybe even something longer…I’d even scribbled something in my notebook, which I always kept beside my bed. I looked at it now.
The threshold, I’d scrawled in great loopy script across a blank page,between shadow and moonlight. Now if I could only remember what that meant.
I decided to take a jog to clear my head. One part of my dream that I hadn’t imagined was the clearing weather. Crisp, dry sunlit air poured through the open window where moonlight had spilled last night. When I pulled open the curtains I was greeted with a fresh-washed blue sky. The hedge across the street sparkled in the sun. There were bright flashes of pink and red amid the branches, long tubular blooms that looked like an exotic strain of honeysuckle. Oddly, though, I noticed that there were no tree branches near my window, nothing that could have cast the shadows I’d seen last night. Even that part had been a dream.
I shrugged off the memory of those ghostly branches and pulled on sweatpants, T-shirt, and sneakers. I padded downstairs as quietly as I could on the creaking wooden steps, even though I was the only guest staying at the inn. I wondered if Diana was up making breakfast, but I didn’t hear any noise from the kitchen. I checked my watch: 6:15. Breakfast at the Hart Brake Inn was served at 8:30. I had plenty of time for a long run and a shower.
While I stretched out my leg muscles on the porch I thought about possible routes to take. The campus would be a logical choice but somehow I didn’t want to run into Dean Book in my jogging clothes. I could head down toward town, but then I’d have to stop for stop signs and traffic. In the city I jogged in Van Cortlandt Park where there were dirt cross-country trails that were kinder on my knee joints.
Therewasa dirt path here, I remembered, that went into the woods behind Honeysuckle House. I didn’t know how far it went, but since the woods went on for miles surely the trail would, too. I could find out if the woods were as inspiring as Dean Book thought they were.
I crossed the street at an easy lope, slowing at the entrance to the path to adjust my eyes to the woods’ diminished light. Even after I’d become accustomed to the light, I kept the pace slow so I could keep an eye on the unfamiliar terrain to avoid tripping on roots or branches. The surface of the path was fairly smooth and pleasantly springy—as if it had once been a bog. It curved slightly to the north. From the map I’d glanced at yesterday I imagined that the trail circled around the boundary of campus. I decided to run for twenty minutes—about two miles at my current pace—turn back, run another ten minutes, and then walk the last mile back to cool down.
For the first mile I rehearsed various polite ways of asking for time to consider a job offer should I receive one from Dean Book. Then my mind went pleasantly blank and I noticed how good the clean mountain air felt moving in and out of my lungs. The ground beneath my feet was so springy my knees hadn’t twinged once. I picked up the pace, feeling that little endorphin kick that made getting up at the crack of dawn to run worth it. What a great place to run! If I lived in Honeysuckle House this trail would be right outside my door. I could run here every morning.
But I wasn’t going to live in Honeysuckle House. Where had that idea come from? Even if I took the Fairwick job, what would I need with a big old house?
Though it would be nice to finally have room enough for all my booksandshoes. Every year I had to choose which to put in storage.
I laughed out loud at the idea that I might take a job for adequate storage space. The woods echoed back the sound. The trees were lower here on this part of the path. They weren’teven trees anymore, really, more like very tall overgrown shrubs that sprang over the path and intertwined to form an arched colonnade, some eight or nine feet above the ground, decorated with great looping swags of vines and sprigged with white and yellow flowers which smelled—
I pulled what felt like a gallon of air into my lungs.
—delicious!
The honeysuckle shrubs and vines that Silas LaMotte had planted around his house had spread over a mile into the woods! The whole house must smell of them. At night the breeze from the woods would blow through the open windows and fill the rooms with their scent.
At the thought of a bedroom filled with moonlight and honeysuckle, images from last night’s dream came flooding back to me: shadow branches borne across the floor on a shaft of moonlight, the light carving a man out of those shadows, the shadow man making love to me like a wave…
Of course. The man in my dream was a demon lover. The demon lover always came in dreams. One of its names wasmare, from which we derived the wordnightmare. (Although what I’d experienced last night hadn’t felt anything like a nightmare.)
I had been writing about the demon lover in literature for years. In truth, I’d started writing about him because of my made-up fairytale prince. But the prince had gone away as I catalogued and studied the species of incubus and demon lover, vampire and phantom. Why had he come back now?
It was the house. Honeysuckle House. An abandoned Queen Anne Victorian, overgrown with shrubs and vines, a beautiful man’s face carved above its door. It was my glimpse of the house that had conjured the mirage I’d seen in the rain, and it was that image that had come to me in my dream. I remembered, too, that in the dream I’d had the sense that the moonlight was coming from across the street. The house had haunted me. And why not? In Gothic novels the house was always amajor character in its own right—the Castle of Otranto, Thornfield Hall, Manderley—and often it was the moment of crossing the threshold of the house that began the heroine’s adventure.
A line from Joseph Campbell’sThe Hero with a Thousand Facesoccurred to me: “…it is only by advancing beyond those bounds…that the individual passes, either alive or in death, into a new zone of experience.”
That’s why I had scrawled that note about thresholds last night. The doorway of the house was the threshold of adventure for the heroine of a Gothic novel, especially for women like Emily Dickinson or Dahlia LaMotte, who had totally confined themselves to their houses. It would be interesting to write about the influence living in Honeysuckle House had had on Dahlia LaMotte’s work. I ran faster as I spooled out the idea, my feet barely touching the ground. I’d call it “The Threshold Between Moonlight and…”
One moment I was midstride, soaring free of the earth; the next I was flat on the ground, face in the dirt, the wind knocked out of me. I gulped for air, but the ground was pressing too hard on my chest. I had the confused notion that the ground itself had risen up to slam into my chest. It was pressing against my chest, my mouth, my nose…dragging me down into the darkness. Dimly I felt my fingers clawing at the soft, warm earth. I was sinking…
He was rising to meet me, emerging out of the darkness as if rising out of dark water. The face of the man who’d come to me in the moonlight last night. His features were clearer this time, but not because there was more light to see him by (it was very, very dark where he was) but because there was more of him to see. He wasgrowing, becoming more solid. As if to reward me for this insight he smiled. His beautiful lips parted and came closer until they touched my lips and pushed them open. His tongue flicked into my mouth—hot and wet. I felt myself go hot and wet between my legs where I was still sorefrom last night, so overcome with desire I felt myself sinking into that blackness…then he breathed into my mouth.
The air seared my lungs, but I gulped greedy mouthfuls of it. With the oxygen came consciousness. I opened my eyes. I was lying on my back, looking up at a tangled canopy of honeysuckle vines. They formed a vaulted green chapel starred with white and yellow flowers. Like a wedding chapel, I found myself thinking dazedly, still panting from the erotic force of that kiss. Or a funeral chapel if I hadn’t caught my breath.
I ran my hands over my chest, feeling for broken ribs, but everything seemed to be intact. Then I slowly pushed myself up into a sitting position and wiggled my toes. My right ankle felt a little tender, but otherwise I seemed remarkably unscathed. How had I fallen, anyway? I looked around the path behind me for a root or branch that could have tripped me, but the ground was clear. Apparently I’d stumbled over my own two feet.
Abashed at my own clumsiness—and by the direction my imagination seemed to be taking me since last night’s dream—I got slowly to my feet, slapping dirt from my sweatpants. I gingerly stretched my arms over my head and then bent down to touch my toes. I was going to be sore from the fallandfrom stopping so abruptly without a cooldown, but I seemed to be okay. I wasn’t going to be running any more today, though. I’d have to walk back.
I looked at my watch. It was 7:10. I’d run for almost a whole hour and at a pretty fast pace. Damn, I could be four miles from the inn! I’d better start walking. I turned to go…and turned again. I turned in a circle twice before admitting that I couldn’t tell which way I’d come. I examined the dirt path for my own footprints, but somewhere along the way it had gone from soft loam to dirt packed so hard that it didn’t show footprints. Surely when I fell though…I squatted on the ground and stared at the dirt for an impression of my body. Nothing.
I stood up again—too fast. My head spun. Maybe I’d hit it in the fall and I had a concussion. That would explain the confusionand the hallucination of the face. I couldn’t really be lost in the woods, could I?
