I’d never heard of it. I considered looking it up in Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, but that was on the top shelf and I was warm and cozy on the couch. I snuggled down deeper into the cushions, pulled the afghan over my legs, and settled into the tale, delighted to be in the hands of an able storyteller.
The story begins with a young man named William Duffy, who goes to the enchanted Greenwood one Halloween night and falls in love with a fairy. They lie together in the Greenwood, and the fairy—who’s some kind of guardian of the door to Faerie—forgets to lead her people safely through the door.
I looked up from the paper, stunned by this detail. Last year, when the incubus had first appeared to me, I’d begun to have dreams in which I was leading a troop of fairies through a meadow, but I’d abandoned them to go into the woods with a handsome young man. Later, when I learned that I was descended from a line of fairy doorkeepers, I’d wondered if my dream was a vestigial memory of my ancestor. Now I wondered if the William Duffy story was about my ancestor. I read on.
Because the doorkeeper failed to bring her people to the door, many of her kind faded and perished. The Fairy Queen appeared and exacted a punishment for the two lovers. She banished the doorkeeper to the human world and took William Duffy to Faerie as her prisoner. The doorkeeper begged the Fairy Queen for a chance to save William, and the queen agreed. “In seven years, the host will ride out on All Hallows’ Eve with William. If you pull him down from his horse and hold on to him—even as he transforms into frightful shapes—he will be free. But if you fail to claim him, he will be sacrificed as the tithe we must pay to hell.”
The doorkeeper vows to save him. In token of her promise, she unpins a brooch from her dress. She breaks apart the brooch and hands half to William.
“Keep this as a token of my love,” she said. “My heart will be halved until we are together again.”
The Fairy Queen whisked William Duffy off to Faerie. Seven years later he rode out with the host, searching the Greenwood for his beloved to save him, but the woods were blasted as though by lightning and there was no sign of the doorkeeper.
“Ah,” the Fairy Queen told William, “she has forsaken you. Mayhap she has been destroyed by demons. When she broke her brooch in half, she halved her power. Foolish girl! I should give you as tithe to the demons of hell, but I am not heartless. Because of the love you bore one of our kind, I will let you dwell in Faerie instead. True, you will become a demon, but if ever you are loved again, you will become human.”
I put down Nicky’s paper on the coffee table, feeling tired and sad. My incubus had been made through the foolishness of my own ancestor! I didn’t have the heart to write comments and correct grammar anymore. I closed my eyes and pictured the Greenwood where the fairy doorkeeper and William Duffy lay together. I pictured a soft bed of emerald-green moss and wild heather, dappled with leaf shadow and sunlight filtered through ancient beech trees, and a young man who looked like Bill …
“You’ve come back for me,” he said, pulling me down beside him. In the dappled leaf shadow, his face was the face of the man in the stained-glass fanlight, then Liam’s, then Bill’s. Then he was some new combination of the three. My Greenwood lover, William Duffy.
“I never went away,” I told him, kneeling beside him on the heather bed but unwilling to let him pull me down beside him. “It’s you who went away. That monster killed you. I watched him slash your throat, and then you vanished. I thought you were dead.”
He lifted his hand to my face and brushed away a tear. “Not dead. Only trapped in Faerie, waiting for your return.”
“But the door is gone. I don’t know where there’s another.”
He shook his head and laughed—a musical sound that riffled the leaves in the beech trees and made my skin tingle. “How can you not know where the door is? The door is here.” I looked around us at the Greenwood and saw we were in a valley. Above us a castle loomed, its ruined walls guarded by gruesome stone gargoyles. A broken stone archway, also carved with gargoyles, stood on one side of the glade.
“But where—” I began to ask, but his arms were around me and he was pulling me down to the forest floor. His lips found mine and I forgot my questions. What mattered was that we were together and I could feel his warm hands touching me, peeling away my petticoat and long skirt, my tartan cloak—why was I wearing so many clothes?—and laying me down on the soft heather bed. He plucked a sprig of heather and brushed it along the line of my jaw, releasing its heady perfume into the air. He drew the flower lightly down my throat. I trembled at its touch … like velvet lips … and then I felt his lips on my skin, planting kisses on each breast, his teeth like the scratch of rough grass as he drew his tongue down to my navel and slipped his fingers between my legs. I cried out and arched my hips and reached for him, digging my heels into the velvet moss. I wrapped my hands into his hair and pulled his face to mine and kissed his mouth. He tasted like wild heather and peat smoke. His skin felt like furred moss and, where it was tenderest, flower petals. I drew him into me, feeling as though I were pulling it all inside me—the dappled sunlight, the mossy bed, the scent of heather. As it all burst, his green-gold eyes locked on mine and he said, “See, you knew where the hallow door was all along.”
I woke up on the couch in the darkened library, my fingers digging into the velvet cushions, my body pulsing with the force of the dream.
It was just a dream.
The reality of that crashed over me. I hadn’t found my way into Faerie, and the man in my dream hadn’t been Liam or Bill or my demon lover. He was William Duffy, the hero of Nicky’s ballad, summoned by a sex-deprived teacher falling asleep while grading papers.
Well, that was embarrassing.
I unwound myself from the tangled afghan—remembering the prickly wool of the tartan mantle I’d worn in the dream—and sat up, trying to shake off the fog of sleep. On the mantel above the fireplace, a clock chimed the hour. It was eleven o’clock. I’d slept the whole evening away, but at least I hadn’t overslept my meeting with Frank and Soheila. I got up, the afghan falling to the floor. Something else fluttered to the floor—a scrap of paper. I hoped I hadn’t been shredding my student papers in my sleep. That might be hard to explain. But when I bent down to pick up the scrap, I found it wasn’t paper at all. It was a sprig of heather.
CHAPTER FOUR
I tucked the heather sprig between the pages of Scott’s Scottish Minstrelsy, where I had searched in vain for a ballad called William Duffy or any mention of a hallow door. At last, afraid I’d be late, I went upstairs, took a shower to wake myself up, and dressed in black jeans, a black turtleneck, and sturdy black work boots. I combed my long red hair back and braided it and tucked it under a black beret. Frank had given me the beret. I felt a little silly wearing it, but it hid my hair—and perhaps made me look a bit like Simone Signoret in Army of Shadows.