The Demon Lover by Juliet Dark Page B

insect there.
    “Ya, they came by carriage, how else? I only meant some didn’t have fine carriages or train fare. My people came on foot, through the woods, through hardship and danger.” He rubbed at the welt on his face with the back of his scarred hand. He looked angry, but not at me, or even at the town. He looked angry at himself for not being able to express himself better. I wondered if the marks on his face were the vestiges of some childhood illness—chicken pox? measles?—that had scarred his brain as well as his skin.
    “Your ancestors must have struggled hard to find a safe place to live and raise their children,” I said gently. “That’s something to be proud of.”
    He nodded, the red streak subsiding. He pointed at the stacks of notebooks. “Dolly understood that. She helped us … my great-uncles, I mean, start the gardening shop when there weren’t no call for blacksmiths no more, and always had them come do what work needed doing in the house. She liked hearing the old stories.”
    “Really?” I said, looking down at the ledgers. Had she used the stories she’d heard in her books? “That’s interesting. Perhaps you can help me by identifying where some of her stories came from.”
    He smiled. It transformed his face from ugly to handsome. “Ya, I’ll be happy to. I am here to help you.”
    I spent the rest of the afternoon making an inventory of Dahlia LaMotte’s notebooks and letters. The letters I found, to my disappointment, were all of a business nature, either to her publisher in New York or her lawyer in Boston. No clandestine love affairs or dark family secrets were likely to be lurking there, but the letters to her publisher could establish a timeline of her writing process. A glimpse of one showed that she reported progress on her novels dutifully. I finished the handwritten draft of Dark Destiny today and will begin typing it tomorrow , one letter read.
    It was curious that she didn’t employ a typist. Was she such a hermit that she couldn’t stand the human interaction? But then, Brock had said that she enjoyed talking to the locals and hearing their stories. If I could find accounts of those conversations it would be fascinating to compare the references to boggarts and fairies, witches and demons that Dahlia sprinkled throughout her books to local folklore.
    Only when I had a complete list of all the notebooks—numbered with dates and the titles of which novels she had been working on in each—and a list of typescripts, did I allow myself a peek at one of the notebooks. I chose The Dark Stranger , my favorite of her books and her best known novel. I read the familiar first lines with a frisson of excitement.
    The moment I set foot across the threshold of Lion’s Keep I knew my fate was sealed. I had been here before, in desperate dreams and fevered fancies, and always I knew it to be the place where he would finally ensnare me — the man of my dreams — the incubus of my nightmares. The dark stranger, my demon lover …
    I stopped reading. I didn’t recall the word incubus from the first paragraph of The Dark Stranger , or the phrase demon lover . Although Dahlia LaMotte flirted with the supernatural with her use of dreams, portents, creaking stairs, veiled figures, and telepathic voices, she never made overt use of it. At the end of each book the events were tidily explained. Her anti-heroes had all the elements of the rakish Byronic heroes of Gothic Romance, but they were flesh and blood, not incubi, demons, or vampires. Perhaps she was just playing with the imagery, but that imagery hadn’t made it into her final drafts. When, I wondered, had it been edited out?
    I turned to the first page of the typescript of The Dark Stranger . On brittle, yellowed paper I read over the first paragraph. It was the same as in the notebook until the last line.
      …  the man of my dreams, the figure in my nightmares .
    Interesting.
    Between handwritten draft and typescript