Summary
A lone woman in a scarlet roadster limps out of a bruised Adirondack dusk, crumpled fenders dripping moonlit gasoline as though the night itself has tried to swallow her alive; the pines, gossiping like old parishioners, shepherd her toward a sprawling lakeside resort whose verandas sag with masculine ennui. There, under the pretense of convalescence, she becomes a slow-motion eclipse: every cigarette held between her ungloved fingers short-circuits the resort’s rituals of poker, bootleg gin, and boar-hunt braggadocio. She speaks in a voice that seems to arrive already echoing off bedroom walls, promising nothing yet binding each man to an erotic ledger whose interest compounds in sighs. The longer she lingers, the more the grand hotel reveals itself as a mausoleum of appetites: antlered heads on the walls drip spectral blood, lake water in the pitcher turns viscous at 3 a.m., and the concierge’s brass bell tolls like a slowed heartbeat. When the local coroner—once a Manhattan surgeon—unbuttons her blouse to inspect a bruise, he finds not broken ribs but an antique cameo portrait of himself as a boy, a talisman he lost decades prior. From that moment the hunt is on: husbands barter wives’ pearls for a single waltz, boys forsake Ivy League futures for the privilege of unlacing her boots, and the resort’s owner, a retired railway magnate, rewrites his will in fountain ink mixed with his own blood, bequeathing her the entire mountain should she stay until the first snowfall. Yet the woman, whose passport reads only “V. E.,” drives her roadster in widening gyres each midnight, returning with lake-weed twined through the spokes and a new story of engine trouble. On the eve of the equinox she hosts a masquerade in the emptied ballroom, candles guttering to reveal every guest wearing her face; the mirrors, black-veiled for the occasion, refuse to return any reflection but hers. By dawn the men wake on the dock, pockets full of river stones, while the roadster’s taillights recede like twin embers fading into folklore. The Adirondacks reclaim their silence, but the resort rots from the inside out: wallpaper peels in the shape of her silhouette, ballroom doors bleed rust shaped like lips, and the coroner, now the sole resident, records in his diary that the lake’s depth increases by exactly one fathom each year since her departure, as though the water itself rehearses her return.
Synopsis
A story of a female motorist that is brought to a resort in the Airondacks. Once brought in to heal from her wounds the male patrons find out that she has a rather bewitching way with men with total disregard of her ways.
