“Not if I have to wear a kilt! I went in drag last year and froze my ass off. I don’t know how girls wear dresses in the winter.”
“Leggings,” Nicky and Ruby said simultaneously.
“And Uggs,” Flonia added.
“You could wear woolen socks,” I suggested to Scott, “but I don’t think real Scotsmen wear anything underneath their kilts.”
“No way! They went commando? I’m totally up for it!”
The girls dissolved into giggles at that and I went to heat up some more apple cider, leaving them to flirt and plan their costumes. I liked having the house full of laughing young people. Maybe I should rent out rooms to students—or have monthly dinners. Suddenly I saw myself as a female Mr. Chips, growing old in the youthful company of my students. If I never found my demon lover, would I feel, as Mr. Chips had at the end, that I’d led a fulfilling life?
I found myself thinking such melancholic thoughts more as the autumn nights lengthened and filled with the sound of migrating geese and cold winds from the north. I huddled under warm quilts, longing for the warmth of William Duffy’s body in my dreams. He was there waiting for me every night now. As soon as I walked through the ruined door into the sun-dappled Greenwood, he would reach for me and pull me down to the mossy bed. His hands and lips moved over me as if memorizing my face, my body.
“Aye, lass,” he growled into my neck, “it’s you. I’d know you if I were blind and a hundred years went by. Dinna go this time; it’s so verra cold when you’re gone. Cold as the grave.”
It was cold when I woke up alone in bed. I’d try to go back to sleep, clinging to the dream, its warmth fading as fast as heat left a dying body. Even the sprigs of heather that I still found scattered in my sheets were now dried out. It was as if it had turned to winter where William was, and everything was dying there. I began to feel as hollow and dry as the dead cornstalks in the fields. I suppose it was natural to feel this way at this time of year, when the leaves on the trees changed and the grasses in the fields died and the sun itself seemed to be waning. That’s why primitive man had built bonfires and made offerings to their dead, to assert that the world wasn’t really dying.
But with the nephilim increasing in power around us, I wondered if such tokens meant anything. On campus, fluorescent-green flyers filled the bulletin boards and plastered walls with new regulations and warnings. BAN HALLOWEEN signs were springing up among the jack-o’-lanterns, black cats, and scary witches in town.
By the Friday before Halloween, I had decided that no matter how much I might need the observance of Halloween to open the hallow door, I couldn’t endanger my students. I decided to compel all of them to go home for the weekend. Looking through Wheelock the night before, I’d found half a dozen homesickness spells to do the trick. One awakened an unbearable craving for your mother’s cooking, and another increased your dirty laundry and made your clean socks disappear. Standing in front of my class, I saw that it would be easy. Although my students affected an attitude of independence and worldly cool, I knew that just below the surface they were still half children. All I’d have to do was remind them of that.
“I thought that today I would read you a story,” I said, taking out an illustrated children’s book.
There were a few snickers and rolled eyes, but when I perched on the edge of my desk and opened the book, holding it out so they could see the pictures, the students scooted their chairs closer into a circle and leaned forward.
I had stayed up all night, looking for the right narrative strategy to send them home. Finally, toward dawn, I realized it didn’t really matter what story I read. As long as I read a story my parents had read to me as a child, they would each hear the story their parents had read to them and they would want to go home. So I read the tattered copy of Tam Lin, with its beautiful watercolors of misty Scottish glens and the deep mysterious Greenwood, of beautiful Jennet Carter in her plaid cloak and the handsome prince she saves from the fox-faced Fairy Queen. At the end, I invested the lines with the compulsion of magic.
“And so Jennet and Tam Lin were married. Together they restored and renamed Carter Hall and they—and their children’s children’s children—lived there, in the home they made together, happily ever after.”
When I closed the book and looked up, I could see in each student’s eyes a fire burning—a home fire, a burning desire to be home.
“The last bus leaves at five,” I said, casually glancing down at my wristwatch. “Travel safely.”
They gathered their books and left in a rush. I saw Ruby talking to Flonia and guessed that Ruby was inviting Flonia to go home with her. Nicky was with them, and I hoped that she would go home with Ruby, too, far away from Fairwick. I doubted that even a homesickness spell would send Nicky running back to the moldering pile her mother and grandmother lived in. She would be safer in New Jersey with Ruby.
I closed my book and rushed upstairs to my office, where I swiveled my desk chair around to face the window that looked over the quad. I raised the sash and leaned my elbows on the sill to watch my students, their brightly hued jackets and sweaters like so many autumn leaves blown by the wind across the darkening campus.
Go home. I willed the spell to spread from student to student. Go home.
My words were picked up by a gust across the quad, spinning fallen leaves into red and gold cyclones to carry a few hundred Dorothys back home to Kansas. The wind I summoned smelled like hot cocoa and fresh-baked apple pie, like fires burning in hearths and the sweater your mother wore on cold mornings to fetch the newspaper. It soughed through the trees with the creak of your front door opening and the whisper of slippered feet coming to greet you. It chased the dark clouds out of the west, releasing a crack of sunlight on the horizon that lit up the tops of crimson trees and the brick walls of west-facing buildings with the golden glow of your mother’s face when she saw you.
What a surprise! She would say. I didn’t know you were coming home this weekend.
I was out of socks, you would say.
Or, The cafeteria food sucks.
Or, Everybody else was going home.
Everybody was going home. I could feel the spell spreading across campus, infecting everyone, even the instructors, with the desire to go home. And, like all magic, it rebounded on me thricefold, so that I, too, wanted to go home.
But where was home?
The empty house on Elm Street? My friend Annie’s house in Brooklyn, where I knew she and her partner, Maxine, would welcome me to their annual Halloween party? Or Faerie, where my demon lover maybe was or wasn’t waiting for me?
I sat at the window until the last light faded from the western sky and the air turned cold.
“Good move,” a voice said from behind me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I swiveled my chair around. I hadn’t turned on any lights in my office, so the figure in the doorway was silhouetted against the bright hall lights. It was a figure of a man, but the shadow it cast against the wall was of an enormous beast whose wings bristled with a thousand razor-edged barbs. As he stepped though the door, I heard their sharp edges scraping against the wood.
“You can’t stop them from going,” I said, steeling my voice to hide my fear.