Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

Demon Lover by Suzanne Jones

Colorado resident Suzanne Jones began writing mystery fiction in 1985. Her short tales of suspense often find the protagonists pitted not only against others, but against themselves...

Dana had forgotten the matches. She rocked back on her heels and the familiar feelings swept over her: the irritation, anxiety, self-loathing. She stared at the gas stove. How could she have forgotten the matches? How stupid of her. In her mind, she followed that twisting road down the mountain the six miles into town. She sighed and stood up from the last of the boxes she had been unpacking. There was a price for solitude. There was a price for everything. Her fingers closed on the vial of pills in her pocket, and she measured her feelings against the need for their relief. Not yet.

She thought she remembered a cabin within walking distance. She had seen a car turning into a driveway as she drove herself carefully along that steep road, looking for the place that would be her home during the summer session. She couldn’t face repeating the ordeal of that drive so soon. She would walk. It was late afternoon, but there were still too many hours between her and sleep. Besides, “Exercise is one antidote for depression.” That was her doctor, Goldman, speaking. A calm, quiet, confident voice that verged on smugness. All right. She would walk.

The air was a little cold and thin this high above the town. So clean. It pleased her to walk along the dirt road that ran along the top of a steep cliff and then between the small pines and scraggly brush, the ground beneath them still streaked with the last snow of spring. There were, besides the steady crunch of her own footsteps, the cries of birds and an occasional rustle in the brush. Not snakes, like in Texas, it was too high for them. Just some small creature, startled by her approach, as startled as she.

She saw the mailbox now with “Keller” lettered inexpertly in bold strokes on its side. Dr. Keller, she thought. She had been told the chairman of the English Department had a cabin on the mountain, a place he went to in the summers, from which he would emerge only a couple of times a week to do seminars, a place where he would work on his publications for the Modern Language Association. It wouldn’t hurt her to meet him. In fact, it was desirable. She had been accepted into the doctoral program in English, but except for her stepsister Jane, she knew no one in the department. She had been accepted largely because of James’s recommendation. James, with his clever hands and very Catholic wife and two children.

Thunderheads were starting to build over the mountain and patching the road with light and shade. There was a freshening in the air. Rain was on the way, and soon large heavy drops began to dimple the dust in the road. She hurried, reaching the front door of the cabin as it began to rain with a violence that promised to spend itself shortly. A man appeared at the door.

“Dr. Keller? I’m Dana Greystoke—”

The rain drove her against the door.

He unlatched it and pushed it open for her. He was tall and thin, late forties or early fifties, with just the appropriate amount of gray to look distinguished in his close-cut dark hair. His eyes were large and brown, and now looked at her with what she took to be irritation at her intrusion.

She glanced about the room. The fireplace was larger than the one in her cabin, and the floors were stone instead of carpeted plywood. There was a large bookcase on the wall next to the fireplace and a carton of books on the large, heavy table near the window.

She stammered through her explanation and her request for the matches. The rain hurled itself against the window.

The man dug in his jacket pocket for the matches. He was formally dressed for the mountains, she thought, even to the tastefully striped tie.

“You’re the girl from Texas, aren’t you, the one James Rollins sent us? Medieval’s your field, isn’t it?”

She nodded. She wanted to leave almost as much as he seemed to want her to, but the violent rainstorm made it almost impossible to do so. Foolish to leave and awkward to stay.

“I don’t suppose the storm will last long,” she said uncomfortably.

“No, it should blow itself out soon,” he agreed. He seemed to resign himself to having to deal with his uninvited guest. “Here, have some sherry. It’ll warm you.”

She had noticed the bottle and two glasses. “A colleague dropped this off earlier,” he said. “Let me get you a clean glass.”

He disappeared into the kitchen. She heard the sound of running water. She stuffed her hands in her pockets, curling her fingers around that vial, comforting herself. The rain pounded furiously against the window and hammered the roof. She drifted to the box of books to see what it was that he took with him to the mountains, half hoping it was something nonscholarly. She took up a slender volume, worn, old. Letters in faded gold winked up from wrinkled leather and across centuries.

“Be careful with that,” he said sharply.

Startled, she almost dropped it.

“It’s rather fragile. I suppose I shouldn’t cart them about, but they’re rather valuable, you know. I don’t like leaving them. That’s the most valuable of the lot.”

“It’s lovely,” she said, conscious of the inadequacy of the statement. She was holding in her hands a piece of time, an eighteenth-century edition of The Canterbury Tales. She had heard of Keller’s rare-book collection. James had said with a sneer that it was the most distinguished thing about him. But that was probably James’s envy and jealousy of someone more highly regarded than himself in the field.

He handed her the sherry. It was smooth and had the slightly sweet taste of nuts. She was appropriately intimidated, she thought. His rare old books, his fine wine, his disturbing masculinity.

“To curly-haired girl graduate students,” he said and raised his glass.

He seemed to relax a little with the sherry. He listed some professors at Texas whom she knew and some others whom she knew only by reputation. She wondered how much he knew about her involvement with James. That he knew something she was sure. Her little affair had certainly been noised about. Discretion was not one of James’s virtues. Nonetheless, her credentials were sound. She had done very well in the master’s program — despite James, not because of him, she knew. Sleeping with department heads was anathema to graduate careers. She had mostly escaped the consequences, largely because she had published a monograph on Chretien de Troyes, an accomplishment which was sufficiently rare among master’s candidates to distinguish her from the field, and also because her late father was a past president of the MLA. The man tactfully did not mention her father.

The rain continued. One glass of sherry became two.

The rain continued, and he built a fire.

His hands, when, finally, they were on her, came as a relief. She didn’t have to talk to him anymore, to deal with his suspected sarcasm, to have the things she said measured and judged and found shallow and wanting. Now there was only the fierce communication of flesh, which released her from the obligations and obsequious regard of their respective stations and intellects.

What terror she had first felt in James’s presence she had once confessed to him in bed, and he had laughed. “No more than age when confronted with the endless procession of youth, of bright, eager minds like cannibals come to consume the graying flesh of our intellect.”

When she came to herself, there was a stinging in her throat, then at her eyes. She was almost fully dressed, lying on the bed. And she was alone. The smoke was coming up from the bottom of the door, leaking through the sides of the door and crawling lightly up the wall.

She coughed and called his name, but there was no response. It was becoming harder to breathe, but some innate caution made her lay her hand flat against the door rather than try to open it. It was warm, and she drew back as if already burned.

More smoke came rapidly now, surging under the door. There were two windows set high and narrow in the wall at the back of the room. They were painted shut. The armchair in the room was too heavy for her to lift. Moving quickly, she tore apart the bed and seized one of the slats. She smashed one of the windows, but that seemed to pull more smoke into the room.

She climbed onto the chair and pulled herself over the bits of broken glass in the window frame and fell headfirst to the muddy ground.

At first she lay stunned, unable to move, but the fire at last had possessed the room, and the heat made her get to her knees and scuttle crablike away from the burning house into the wet trees.

She felt the impact and saw the ball of flame roil upward as though it were a solid mass before the explosion almost deafened her. She lay quietly for a time in the wet grass, an injured animal, and then became aware of the cuts stinging her arms and hands and of the long tear in her side. She got to her feet and began to walk as quickly as she could to the road.

The rain had stopped. Behind her, far down the mountain and over the ringing in her ears, she heard the faint sounds of sirens slowly building in intensity as the vehicles worked their way up the switchbacks.

She lowered herself into the deep, old-fashioned tub despite the pain and let the hot water wash the blood away. She carefully did not think now, but treated her wounds tenderly, with a consideration she seldom gave her own body. The familiar red welts on her wrists were themselves nicked, but not reopened. She was not badly hurt. The long tear in her side was shallow, little more than a scratch, and had stopped bleeding.

When she no longer could keep the memory of what had happened from her, she took one of Dr. Goldman’s pills and lay down.

Before she fell asleep she made herself think over and over again: “I did not start the fire. That was not my fault.” She carefully clung to that thought until she lost consciousness.

When she awoke, she had a panicky moment of dislocation. The unfamiliar, water-spotted ceiling, the strange room, the rough blanket she had pulled over herself against the cold night air.

Then she remembered. The memory beat at her like one of her stepsister’s insistent children, demanding her attention. She remembered.

She felt little curiosity about what had happened to the man. He was dead, or he was not. She realized that she was angry with him. He had not tried to rescue her. She had been awakened by the smoke, not by any human cry. He had either died in the fire or left her there to die. All in all, she thought it would be better if he were dead; otherwise, she would have to see him again and deal with her anger and her embarrassment. She would not go to the authorities, for what could she tell them that would be of any use? Did she know how the fire started? No. The rest was nobody’s business but her own and Keller’s.

It was still a shock to read the headline in the local paper: English Department Chairman Dies in Fire. She felt less anger toward him dead. She felt she should be generous to his memory. Perhaps he had tried to save her. Perhaps she had been mistaken, and his dying cries instead of the smoke had awakened her.

She told no one, not even her stepsister. She still could see no purpose to it. She read the report in the paper several times, and found it to be substantially correct, if a little muddled as to sequence. The article made it sound as though there had been a propane leak that had caused the explosion and fire. The fire she knew had preceded the explosion, otherwise she herself could not have survived. How the fire had actually begun was a matter of indifference to her. An accident was an accident, and dead was dead. She saw no need to set the reporter right.

She did not attend the funeral. Her stepsister Jane did and reported that it was as well attended as might be expected at the beginning of the summer term. Jane said that Keller’s sister had been there but had not seemed to grieve overmuch.

Dana herself did not grieve at all but found Keller would not disappear easily, even so. He came to the edges of her dreams, his lean, tanned face by turns mocking her and berating her for her lack of feeling. On waking in her sweaty bed, she realized that she felt as abandoned by him as she had by James. Death was the ultimate abandonment. “Seduced and abandoned.” She was embarrassed to find herself holding such an old-fashioned view of an act between consenting adults. She knew she was more troubled by these feelings than by his death. She had scarcely known him. A few hours. Some pleasure. Much pain.

She and Jane were walking with Jane’s three small children in the open-air mall the day after the funeral. It was the afternoon of a lovely, soft, cloudless day. The mall was crowded as usual with musicians, acrobats, magicians, students, tourists, and townspeople. She let herself drift mindlessly, without conscious thought, over the smooth brick pavement, absorbing the sights, and the smell of hot dogs, fried foods, and incense, and the sounds: the music of the individual street players merging in mild disharmony, the throbbing of the drums of the Hare Krishnas who had taken one street corner joyously for their own.

She thought she heard someone call her name, and she looked back into the sun, shading her eyes, and thought she saw him: a shape, a momentary interruption of the light, sensed rather than seen.

“Are you all right?” Her stepsister was looking closely at her.

She could no longer see him. He was gone. But then he could hardly have been there at all.

“A new delusion,” Dana said uneasily. “I thought I saw Dr. Keller just now.” Her fingers curved about the vial of pills, yet she made no move to extract one. She felt none of the usual symptoms: the pounding heart, the constriction of her throat, the unfocused anxiety. She did feel shaken, because she thought she had seen him, her lover. Her dead lover whose mouth had the sweet taste of sherry on it.

And he had appeared so unexpectedly. That was what puzzled her. If she alone had been responsible for his creation, this phantom, he should have arisen from the miasma of her own fears and guilt. Not on a day on which she felt so calm, a day of lazy sunshine and sensuous comfort.

“Perhaps someone you saw reminded you of Jerry Keller. You know, the way he moved. The way he carried his head,” Jane suggested.

“I hadn’t known him that well or that long,” she said. “I’d scarcely met him.”

“Well, Jerry it wasn’t. It couldn’t be,” Jane assured her. “Dead he very much is. Dental records don’t lie.” Her stepsister patted her arm and reached with the other to corral one of her brood.

Dana realized she knew almost nothing about Jerry Keller: what kind of teacher he was, what kind of music he liked, where he lived.

So she found the house where he had lived. It was a medium-sized house on a lovely tree-shaded street in the west of town near the foot of the mountain that reared itself there in a series of short sandstone cliffs. The house was painted white and had two large expanses of glass, one on each of its two stories, to look out, she supposed, on the mountain.

Impulsively she climbed the short flight of stairs to the upper entrance and knocked. She knew Keller had little family, only the one sister, but Jane said there was some student who also lived in the house.

Dana had had the student pointed out to her during a class change as he walked through the hall in the building that housed the English Department. Now he opened the door of Keller’s house.

“Yes?”

She could see the marks of grief on his face, the shadows beneath his eyes. She judged him to be about her own age, maybe a year or two younger. He was as fair as she was dark, with bright, coppery hair, clear skin, gray eyes, and a beautifully shaped mouth.

She hadn’t thought of what to say.

“I was a friend of Professor Keller’s,” she tried. “May I come in?” Her own boldness embarrassed her, and she was afraid he would refuse.

He stepped back automatically, but a little hesitantly, as if he were trying to think of some reason she should not come in.

She looked around a living room of white walls and pale carpet. The walls, she saw, were hung with modem paintings, and there were, of course, the books. Bookshelves ran from floor to ceiling, the length of one wall, flanking the fireplace of stone, which had also been painted white. There were boxes stacked in the center of the room and flowers withering on the hearth. From the funeral, she thought.

“I’m just starting to help his sister crate up his things. You just missed her, by the way. She’s gone out to get more boxes.”

She nodded. “You’re Geoffrey White. I’m Dana Greystoke. Like Tarzan,” she added, repeating the tired line.

“You’re the girl from Texas. Dr. Keller would have been your advisor.”

She decided not to offer her condolences. She didn’t know if it would be appropriate to do so.

“It must be quite a job.” She indicated the bookcase with a nod.

“I don’t mind. It’s the least I could do for her.” He frowned. “I don’t know who’ll be your advisor now. I suppose Bennett will appoint someone. He must have recovered from his fit of ecstasy over Jerry’s death by now and be flapping his way back here as fast as he can. He had just left for Italy, you know, for the summer.”

“You don’t like him?”

“Mason Bennett? He’s a complete jerk. It almost killed him when Jerry — Dr. Keller — was appointed chairman this spring, when old Haliburton retired. They tossed him the bone of Director of Graduate Studies, but it was the chair Bennett wanted. Everybody knew that. I suppose now he’ll get it. They’ve already made him acting chairman. They did that even before they tracked him down in Venice.”

She was looking at the books as he spoke and now felt a coolness touch the hairs on the back of her neck. “That’s the Chaucer.”

“Don’t touch it. It’s very old.”

There were one or two others she thought she also remembered. But there was no mistaking that particular edition of The Canterbury Tales.

“That’s impossible,” she whispered. “They should have been destroyed in the fire.”

“He hadn’t brought his books up to the cabin yet,” the boy explained. “I found them here, boxed and ready to be taken up. I guess he hadn’t gotten around to it.” He looked at her. “How do you know about his collection?”

“I’ve seen it before,” she said. “At the cabin. I was there that afternoon, the afternoon of the fire. He was unpacking these same books.”

The boy jammed his hands into his pants pockets. “You were there? Nobody told me that.”

She shrugged a little guiltily. “I didn’t tell anybody. It didn’t seem important at the time. But I know I saw these books there. I held The Canterbury Tales in my hands.”

“That’s hardly possible, as you can see for yourself,” the boy said crossly. “He always took at least these eight with him up there every summer. But they were here the day he died. I put them out on the shelves again so his sister could see them.”

She could look at them no longer. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She stumbled from the house. When she got to her car, she looked back. The boy was watching her.

She sat on her stepsister’s inexpensive couch. Books and papers littered the coffee table. Her stepsister, divorced, had a fellowship and was teaching a writing class in the evening to help support herself and her children.

One of the children approached Dana shyly with a riddle. “How can you tell if a glass is half full or half empty?”

She shook her head.

“It depends,” he said importantly, “on if you’re filling or emptying the glass. If you’re filling it, it’s half full. If you’re emptying it, it’s half empty—”

“The optimist,” his mother pointed out, eager to impart a precept, “would say it was half full, the pessimist, half empty.”

The child, suddenly bored, darted away.

“He was almost hostile,” Dana said, resuming the conversation the child had interrupted.

“Geoffrey, you mean?” Jane lit a cigarette and waved the smoke away. “Well, the rumor had him head over heels in love with Keller, and more than a little jealous. That probably explains it.”

For a moment she wondered if Keller had reciprocated the boy’s feelings, shared the attachment. She supposed he had. The boy did live with him.

“I met Keller the day of the fire up at the cabin, and I’m certain I saw those books there. Why weren’t they burned in the fire?”

“Immortal works, right?” Her stepsister chuckled. “Okay, obviously they were taken from the cabin after you saw them but before the fire started. He must have taken them back to the house after you had gone, although that really doesn’t make much sense. Whenever Keller moved, he always took the gems of the collection with him. Everybody knew that.”

There wasn’t time for him to take them back to town and then come back to die, Dana thought, but did not say so to Jane.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she agreed.

Later that day, at the university, again without warning — she was sure she had not been thinking of him — Dana thought she saw Keller in the parking lot. She only caught a glimpse of a tall thin man, but she had the breathless certainty that it was he. By the time she could make herself follow him, he had vanished in the jumble of cars. The incident left her perplexed and uneasy. She was afraid that her grasp on reality, ever tenuous, was weakening.

She drove with her usual care up the steep mountain road, but in her eagerness to put the blackened ruin of Keller’s cabin behind her, she took the curve beyond it too quickly. When she tried to slow down, the brake pedal went all the way to the floor without any effect. As the car started to skid across the road, she panicked and turned the steering wheel hard away from the steep drop. The rear end broke free, spinning the car around, and slamming it into the side of the mountain.

She was unhurt. She had not been going very fast. She sat with her forehead against the steering wheel and tried to catch her breath and slow the beating of her heart. She got shakily out of the car to survey the damage. The left rear fender had been badly dented by the impact. The familiar self-loathing seized her. Now she had wrecked the car.

She left the car facing the wrong way, crumpled against the road-cut, and walked the distance remaining to her cabin, where she found that the telephone book was five years old, and partly as a consequence, she had to make four calls before she got someone to agree to tow the car to town. She then went back to the car to wait for the tow truck. While she waited, she wondered what would have happened if the brakes had quit on her way down the mountain.

After a long forty minutes, the man from the garage arrived with a tow truck, crawled under her car, said her brake line was damaged as well as the rear fender, and he didn’t know what else. He said he would have their mechanic call her with an estimate in the morning.

As she watched the car being towed away from her down the mountain and the shadows deepening along the road, she felt herself begin that mindless slide into the anxiety she wanted so to control. The mundane activities of contacting the garage and dealing with the tow truck operator had preoccupied her, but now she was alone again and unable to stop the conviction that was growing within her: He had tried to kill her.

Jane would now be teaching her evening class, but she had to tell someone. It occurred to her that she knew almost no one in the town. She needed to talk to someone who had known Keller. Either the dental records were wrong and he was still alive, or there was some thing that was stalking her.

“I think I saw Keller today,” she said into the telephone.

There was a silence at the other end.

“Why are you doing this?” Geoffrey asked.

She could hear the anger in the student’s voice.

“I think he must still be alive. There must have been some mistake in identifying his body. I think I have seen him twice, and he’s trying to kill me. He tampered with the brakes of my car.”

Her voice sounded high pitched and unconvincing even to her.

“There couldn’t have been any mistake. Jerry’s dead,” the boy said. “You think you’ve seen him?”

“I’ve seen someone — something — that looks like Keller. I’m not making this up. Someone did try to kill me — just now.”

She knew she was losing his willingness to believe in what she was telling him — however much he might want Keller to be alive. And what if he wasn’t alive?

“Can you come up here?” she pleaded. “I’m in the cabin just up from his, the one with the green roof. I’m afraid he’s coming after me.” She was unable to keep from adding, “What if he thinks I should have died with him in the fire?”

“Do you know how crazy that sounds?”

“Please,” she said. She did not want to be alone after dark. “I’m frightened of him — of whatever it is. You were his friend—”

“I have a cousin in the sheriff’s office. He can stop you from harassing me—”

The police. She knew with a chilling certitude that they would think her mad. But she had hoped the boy, because he loved Keller, might listen to her. And perhaps he could stop whatever it was from killing her.

“Please,” she repeated. “Please come up here. See him for yourself—”

The line was dead in her hand, but he had not hung up. Something was wrong with the telephone. She stared at it in frustration. She had to make the boy understand. He had to understand. There wasn’t anybody else.

She went to the window, turning off the light so that she could better see out into the night to where the road ran beneath the pale moon. There was no wind, and it was very still. She could hear none of the sounds that had become so familiar to her during her sleepless nights. She thought the quiet unnatural as she watched the shadows mass along the road.

She made herself concentrate. Now she was afraid of those pills in her pocket. She had to think clearly. The compromises she was making between her perceptions and those of others were breaking down. The gulf between what was real to her and what was real to others seemed to her to be widening.

Still, real things, measurable events, were occurring and would continue to occur outside her mind, regardless of her perception of them. The brakes had been damaged. That was fact: objective, verifiable reality. She had run over nothing in the car that she could remember, no curb or stone. She could think of no way the brakes could have been damaged by accident.

Had she really seen Keller? She thought she had, but that was not a fact. Suppose she hadn’t seen Keller but had seen someone who looked very much like him. But why would this someone try to kill her?

She tried to calm herself to stop the awful pounding of her heart. She really did not believe in phantoms except those of her own making, her own imagination. What she had told the boy she knew was nonsense born of her desperation. She had seen no perturbed spirit. This was a creature capable of physical acts. A man then. A man who must have a very practical reason for wanting her dead.

She thought of the riddle. When is a box half empty or half full?

Then she knew. He had not been unpacking those books as she had assumed. He had been packing them.

There was a sound at the back of the house as the glass in the door gave way.

She could identify him. And she was bound to see him again. And again.

“I read somewhere that killing a person was far easier than killing a duck. I have not found it so.”

He switched on the lamp at the desk. It lit his face from below, distorting the fine cheekbones and throwing his eyes into shadow. “You’re hard to kill. Not like Keller. He was easy.”

She was almost relieved to see him, proving to herself that he was real and not some spectre of her mind. “You couldn’t bear to burn the books, could you? Dr. Bennett, isn’t it?”

“I’m not a thief or a vandal,” he said mildly. “Those books are irreplaceable. After I set the fire, I used Keller’s keys to let myself into his house in town and left them there on my way to the airport.” He stepped closer. In the light from the lamp she could see the old-fashioned straight razor in his hand.

“I thought you’d died in the fire, my dear. You should have, but when I returned from Italy, I discovered they had found only Keller’s body in the ashes. You were the only one who knew I was there that afternoon. Fortunately, you naturally assumed I was Keller. His body was in the other bedroom. Poor timing, my dear.” He smiled sadly, she thought. “You wouldn’t think you’d be so hard to kill...”

She felt a perverse pride in that, and it was that pride that impelled her past him.

He seized her before she could reach the door. He caught her about the waist and swung her toward the bathroom.

“No, don’t!” he said. “Let me ease you into that Good Night.” His mouth was close to her ear. “You wanted it once — I have seen your wrists—”

“No!” she cried. She hadn’t meant it. They all told her she hadn’t meant it. They told her that the serious ones cut the tendons. The really serious ones make their slashes lengthwise and to the bone.

She felt the blade, the cold, the sting, and the bite of it as he drew it across her wrist.

He forced her to her knees with the weight of his body, over the edge of the old-fashioned tub.

His hands were slippery with her blood as he grappled with her. He was too strong for her, but she fought on stubbornly, unwilling to make it easy for him. She felt the blade slide across her other wrist, and she groaned, and then screamed at him.

She heard the door splinter open, and she had a chance to glimpse Geoffrey’s pale face, and then there were others, and hands upon her, lifting her and binding her wounds.

After a time she lay again in a white, orderly place. The nurses came and went on rubber soles, but clattered dishes and trays and dropped enough things to assure her that they at least thought that she would remain among the living.

In the night, when they moved like aquarium fish through green light, she allowed herself to think of her demon lover. She felt only a little anger now, and something akin to pity for the waste of so much knowledge lacking in wisdom. Then she found herself thinking of James, but not with so much pain. It was as though she were merely bruised now and even that was healing. The intense feelings of shame and loss were lessening, fading. In their place was a little sadness, which, as she thought on it, seemed more like peace.