blue eye scratched out, and a bird’s nest. Only one drawer was locked. I looked for a key in the other drawers, but didn’t find one.
I left all the objects where they were and added my own collection of stones and shells, as well as pens and pencils, tape, stapler, a dagger-shaped letter opener I’d gotten as a souvenir at a Scottish castle, file cards, and notebooks. I unpacked the reference books I liked to have near me while I was writing—the abridged Oxford English Dictionary (a gift from my grandmother when I graduated college), the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols , Roget’s Thesaurus , The Golden Bough , From the Beast to the Blonde , Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic , and half a dozen other books on fairy tales and folklore. On one shelf I put my favorite novels, from The Mysteries of Udolpho and Jane Eyre through Rebecca and Dahlia La-Motte’s The Dark Stranger . When I’d placed my pens in my Oxford University mug (a souvenir from my junior year abroad) and emptied a handful of paperclips into a chipped Sèvres teacup, which was the last remnant (according to my grandmother) of my great-great-grandmother’s wedding china, I finally felt at home.
I sat back and looked up, meeting my own eyes in my reflection in the darkened windowpane. I’d tied my hair up in a loose knot for my bath, but tendrils had escaped and curled around my face; my auburn hair looked black against my white skin. My nightshirt, I noticed, was rather transparent. For a moment I imagined what I’d look like to someone looking in from outside—a maiden trapped in a tower like on the cover of one of Dahlia LaMotte’s Gothic romances. I had started to laugh at the idea—before long I’d be running in my diaphanous nightgown toward a cliff with a castle looming in the background—when a flicker of white out in the back garden caught my attention. Just because my bedroom faced the woods didn’t mean no one could be out there. Although classes didn’t start until next week freshmen had started arriving for orientation and it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that the woods were a good place to get high and drink.
I pulled a Columbia sweatshirt over my nightshirt and leaned forward. There was something on the lawn just at the edge of the woods, a white shape that swayed in the breeze. For a moment I was sure it was a man in a white shirt and dark pants standing on the edge of the woods, looking up at my window. I could make out a pale face and dark eyes … and then the eyes widened and spread, devouring the rest of his face—I had the impression of eyes widening so far to see that they dissolved the rest of him—and then I saw that it was an illusion. The white shape was a plume of mist rising from the ground and dispersing on the breeze.
Great , now I was becoming like one of the heroines of the books I wrote about, jumping at noises and imagining faces in the mist. Violet Grey in the The Dark Stranger imagining phantom lovers in the moonlight—like the one I’d dreamt about last night. Only the dream I’d had last night hadn’t been of a romantic shadow lover. The flood of moonlight that had rushed into me had been an elemental force—urgent and impatient.
Because of how long you’ve waited for him , a voice inside my head whispered. Because of how long you’ve made him wait .
“That’s ridiculous,” I said aloud as I closed and locked the window. It was just being in a strange house, that’s all. And the house was already ceasing to feel strange.
Still, it took me a long time to fall asleep that night. I lay awake listening to the creaks and taps the old house made settling on its foundations and watching the moonlight cast jagged shadows as it shone through the broken glass in the window, unwilling to relax my guard against whatever might form out of the moonlight and shadow, afraid of a repeat of last night’s violent dream.
When I finally fell asleep, though, the dream that was waiting
I left all the objects where they were and added my own collection of stones and shells, as well as pens and pencils, tape, stapler, a dagger-shaped letter opener I’d gotten as a souvenir at a Scottish castle, file cards, and notebooks. I unpacked the reference books I liked to have near me while I was writing—the abridged Oxford English Dictionary (a gift from my grandmother when I graduated college), the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols , Roget’s Thesaurus , The Golden Bough , From the Beast to the Blonde , Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic , and half a dozen other books on fairy tales and folklore. On one shelf I put my favorite novels, from The Mysteries of Udolpho and Jane Eyre through Rebecca and Dahlia La-Motte’s The Dark Stranger . When I’d placed my pens in my Oxford University mug (a souvenir from my junior year abroad) and emptied a handful of paperclips into a chipped Sèvres teacup, which was the last remnant (according to my grandmother) of my great-great-grandmother’s wedding china, I finally felt at home.
I sat back and looked up, meeting my own eyes in my reflection in the darkened windowpane. I’d tied my hair up in a loose knot for my bath, but tendrils had escaped and curled around my face; my auburn hair looked black against my white skin. My nightshirt, I noticed, was rather transparent. For a moment I imagined what I’d look like to someone looking in from outside—a maiden trapped in a tower like on the cover of one of Dahlia LaMotte’s Gothic romances. I had started to laugh at the idea—before long I’d be running in my diaphanous nightgown toward a cliff with a castle looming in the background—when a flicker of white out in the back garden caught my attention. Just because my bedroom faced the woods didn’t mean no one could be out there. Although classes didn’t start until next week freshmen had started arriving for orientation and it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that the woods were a good place to get high and drink.
I pulled a Columbia sweatshirt over my nightshirt and leaned forward. There was something on the lawn just at the edge of the woods, a white shape that swayed in the breeze. For a moment I was sure it was a man in a white shirt and dark pants standing on the edge of the woods, looking up at my window. I could make out a pale face and dark eyes … and then the eyes widened and spread, devouring the rest of his face—I had the impression of eyes widening so far to see that they dissolved the rest of him—and then I saw that it was an illusion. The white shape was a plume of mist rising from the ground and dispersing on the breeze.
Great , now I was becoming like one of the heroines of the books I wrote about, jumping at noises and imagining faces in the mist. Violet Grey in the The Dark Stranger imagining phantom lovers in the moonlight—like the one I’d dreamt about last night. Only the dream I’d had last night hadn’t been of a romantic shadow lover. The flood of moonlight that had rushed into me had been an elemental force—urgent and impatient.
Because of how long you’ve waited for him , a voice inside my head whispered. Because of how long you’ve made him wait .
“That’s ridiculous,” I said aloud as I closed and locked the window. It was just being in a strange house, that’s all. And the house was already ceasing to feel strange.
Still, it took me a long time to fall asleep that night. I lay awake listening to the creaks and taps the old house made settling on its foundations and watching the moonlight cast jagged shadows as it shone through the broken glass in the window, unwilling to relax my guard against whatever might form out of the moonlight and shadow, afraid of a repeat of last night’s violent dream.
When I finally fell asleep, though, the dream that was waiting
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