Of Devils & Deviants: An Anthology of Erotic Horror Read online

  They reached the upstairs landing. Jack went across to his front door and took out his key. His heart was thumping like an Irish drum and he wasn’t at all sure that he was going to be able to do this. But there was a brass ankh on the door, where Jaqueline had nailed it, and he could see her kissing her fingertips and pressing it against the ankh, and saying, “This is the symbol of life everlasting that will never die.”

  She had been naked at the time, except for a deerstalker hat like Sherlock Holmes. She loved Sherlock Holmes, and she often called Jack “Watson”. Without warning she would take out her violin and play a few scraping notes of Cajun music on it and proclaim, “‘The game is afoot!’”

  He opened the door and pushed it wide. The apartment was silent, except for the noise of the traffic outside. There was a narrow hallway, with a coat-stand that was clustered with twenty or thirty hats – skimmers and derbies and shapeless old fedoras – and the floor was heaped with smelly, discarded shoes – brown Oxfords and gilded ballet-pumps and $350 Guevara trainers.

  Jack climbed over the shoes into the living-room. It was furnished with heavy red-leather chairs and couches, and glass-fronted bookcases crammed with leather-bound books. Over the cast-iron fireplace hung a large colored lithograph. It depicted a voluptuous naked woman riding a bicycle over a hurrying carpet of living mice, crushing them under her tires. Only on very close examination could it be seen that instead of a saddle the bicycle was fitted with a thick purple dildo, complete with bulging testicles. The caption read “The Second Most Pleasurable Way to Exterminate Rodents – Pestifex Powder.”

  The bedroom door was ajar but he hardly dared to go inside. At last Punipuni nudged him and said, “Go on, Jack. You have to. You cannot mend a broken ginger-jar by refusing to look at it.”

  “Yes, you’re right.” Jack crossed the living-room and pushed open the bedroom door. The pine four-poster bed was still unmade, with its durry dragged across it diagonally, and its pillows still scattered. On the opposite side of the room, between the two open windows, stood Jacqueline’s dressing-table, with all of her Debussy perfumes and her Seurat face-powders, and dozens of paintbrushes in a white ceramic jar.

  In the corner stood the cheval-mirror, oval, and almost six feet high on its swiveling base. It was made out of dark highly-polished mahogany, with grapevines carved all around it, and the face of a mocking cherub at the crest of the frame. Jack walked around the bed and confronted it. All he could see was himself, and the quilt, and Punipuni standing in the doorway behind him.

  He looked terrible. His hair was still disheveled from taking off his apron, and he was wearing a crumpled blue shirt with paint-spots on it and a pair of baggy Levis with ripped-out knees. There were plum-colored circles under his eyes.

  He reached out and touched the dusty surface of the mirror with his fingertips. “Jacqueline,” he said. “Jacqueline – are you there?”

  “Maybe there was mix-up,” said Punipuni, trying to sound optimistic. “Maybe she just went out to buy lipstick.”

  But Jack knew that there had been no mistake. In the mirror, Jacqueline’s white silken robe was lying on the floor at the end of the bed. But when he looked around, it wasn’t there, not in the real world.

  He leaned close to the mirror. “Jacqueline!” he called out, hoarsely. “Jacqueline, sweetheart, it’s Jack!”

  “Maybe she hides,” Punipuni suggested. “Maybe she doesn’t want you to see her suffer.”

  But at that moment, Jacqueline appeared in the mirror, and came walking slowly across the room toward him, like a woman in a dream. She was naked apart from very high black stiletto shoes with black silk chrysanthemums on them, and a huge black funeral hat, bobbing with ostrich plumes. She was wearing upswept dark glasses and dangly jet earrings, and her lips were painted glossy black.

  Jack gripped the frame of the mirror in anguish. “Jacqueline! Oh God, Jacqueline!”

  Her mirror-image came up to his mirror-image and wrapped her arms around it. He could see her clearly in the mirror, but he could neither see nor feel her here, in the bedroom.

  “Jack…” she whispered, and even though he couldn’t see her eyes behind her dark glasses, her voice was quaking with panic. “You have to get me out of here. Please.”

  “I don’t know how, sweetheart. Nobody knows how.”

  “All I was doing…I was plucking my eyebrows. I leaned forward toward the mirror…the next thing I knew I lost my balance. It was like falling through ice. Jack, I hate it here. I’m so frightened. You have to get me out.”

  Jack didn’t know what to say. He could see Jacqueline kissing him and stroking his hair and pressing her breasts against his chest, but it was all an illusion.

  Punipuni gave an uncomfortable cough. “Maybe I leave now, Mr German-cellar. You know my number. You call if you want my help. A real friend waits like a rook on the gatepost.”

  Jack said, “Thanks, Pu. I’ll catch you later.” He didn’t turn around. He didn’t want Punipuni to see the welter of tears in his eyes.

  * * *

  After Punipuni had left, Jack knelt in front of the mirror and Jacqueline knelt down inside it, facing him, although he could see himself kneeling behind her.

  “You have to find a way to get me out,” said Jacqueline. “It’s so unfriendly here…the people won’t speak to me. I ask them how to get back through the mirror but all they do is smile. And it’s so silent. No traffic. All you can hear is the wind.”

  “Listen,” Jack told her. “I’ll go back to Sonoma, where we bought the mirror. Maybe the guy in the antiques store can help us.”

  Jacqueline lowered her head so that all he could see was the feathery brim of her funeral hat. “I miss you so much, Jack. I just want to be back in bed with you.”

  Jack didn’t know what to say. But Jacqueline lifted her head again, and said, “Take off your clothes.”

  “What?”

  “Please, take off your clothes.”

  Slowly, like a man with aching knees and elbows, he unbuttoned his shirt and his jeans, and pulled them off. He took off his red-and-white striped boxer shorts, too, and stood naked in front of the mirror, his penis half-erect. The early-afternoon sun shone in his pubic hairs so that they looked like electric filaments.

  “Come to the mirror,” said Jacqueline. She approached its surface from the inside, so that her hands were pressed flat against the glass. Her breasts were squashed against the glass, too, so that her nipples looked like large dried fruits.

  Jack took his penis in his hand and held the swollen purple glans against the mirror. Jacqueline stuck out her tongue and licked the other side of the glass, again and again. Jack couldn’t feel anything, but the sight of her tongue against his glans gave him an extraordinary sensation of frustration and arousal. He began to rub his penis up and down, gripping it tighter and tighter, while Jacqueline licked even faster.

  She reached down between her thighs and parted her vulva with her fingers. With her long middle finger she began to flick her clitoris, and the reflected sunlight from the wooden floor showed Jack that she was glistening with juice.

  He rubbed himself harder and harder until he knew that he couldn’t stop himself from climaxing.

  “Oh, God,” he said, and sperm shot in loops all over the mirror, all over Jacqueline’s reflected tongue, and on her reflected nose, and even in her reflected hair. She licked at it greedily, even though she could neither touch it nor taste it. Watching her, Jack pressed his forehead against the mirror in utter despair.

  He stayed there, feeling drained, while she lay back on the floor, opened her legs wide, and slowly massaged herself, playing with her clitoris and sliding her long black-polished fingernails into her slippery pink hole. After a while, she closed her legs tightly, and shivered. He wasn’t sure if she was having an orgasm or not, but she lay on the floor motionless for over a minute, the plumes of her hat stirring in the breeze from the wide-open window.

  Mr Santorini, in the downstairs apartm
ent, was playing Carry Me To Heaven With Candy-Colored Ribbons on his wind-up gramophone. Jack could hear the scratchy tenor voice like a message from long ago and far away.

  * * *

  San Francisco folk wisdom says that for every ten miles you drive away from the city, it grows ten degrees Fahrenheit hotter. It was so hot by the time that Jack reached Sonoma that afternoon that the air was like liquid honey. He turned left off East Spain Street and there was Loculus Antiques, a single-story conservatory shaded by eucalyptus trees. He parked his Peacock and climbed out, but Punipuni stayed where he was, listening to Cambodian jazz on the radio. That Old Fish Hook Fandango, by Samlor Chapheck and the South East Asian Swingers.

  Jack opened the door of Loculus Antiques and a bell jangled. Inside, the conservatory was stacked with antique sofas and dining-chairs and plaster busts of Aristotle, and it smelled of dried-out horsehair and failed attempts to make money. There was a strange light in there, too, like a mortuary, because the glass roof had been painted over green. A man appeared from the back of the store wearing what looked like white linen pajamas. He looked about 55, with a skull-like head and fraying white hair and thick-rimmed spectacles. His top front teeth stuck out like a horse.

  “May I show you something?” he drawled. His accent wasn’t Northern California. More like Marblehead, Massachusetts.

  “You probably don’t remember me, but you sold me a mirror about six months ago. Jack Keller.”

  “A mirraw, hmm? Well, I sell an awful lot of mirraws. All guaranteed safe, of course.”

  “This one wasn’t. I lost my partner this morning. I was just starting work when the police came around and told me she’d been mirrorized.”

  The man slowly took off his spectacles and stared at Jack with bulging pale blue eyes. “You’re absolutely sure it was one of mine? I don’t see how it could have been. I’m very careful, you know. I lost my own pet Pomeranian that way. It was only a little hand-mirraw, too. One second she was chasing her squeaky bone. The next…gone!

  He put his spectacles back on. “I had to—” and he made a smacking gesture with his hands, to indicate that he had broken the mirror to put his dog down. “That endless pathetic barking…I couldn’t bear it.”

  “The same thing’s happened to my partner,” said Jack, trying to control his anger. “And it was one of your mirrors, I still have the receipt. A cheval-mirror, with a mahogany frame, with grapevines carved all around it.”

  The man’s face drained of color. “That mirraw. Oh, dear.”

  “Oh, dear? Is that all you can say? I’ve lost the only woman I’ve ever loved. A beautiful, vibrant young woman with all of her life still in front of her.”

  “I am sorry. My Pom was a pedigree, you know…but this is much worse, isn’t it?”

  Jack went right up to him. “I want to know how to get her out. And if I can’t get her out, I’m going to come back here and I’m going to tear your head off with my bare hands.”

  “Well! There’s no need to be so aggressive.”

  “Believe me, pal, you don’t even know the meaning of the word aggressive. But you will do, if you don’t tell me how to get my partner out of that goddamned mirror.”

  “Please,” said the man, lifting both hands as if he were admitting liability. “I only sold it to you because I thought that it had to be a fake.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I bought it cheap from a dealer in Sacramento. He wouldn’t say why he was selling it at such a knock-down price. It has a story attached to it, but if the story’s true…well, even if it’s only half-true…”

  “What story?” Jack demanded.

  “Believe me, I wouldn’t have sold it to you if I thought there was any risk attached, especially after that last outbreak of silver plunge. I’m always so careful with mirraws.”

  He went over to his desk, which was cluttered with papers and books and a framed photograph of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, with the handwritten message, To Timmy, What A Night!

  He pulled open his desk-drawers, one after the other. “I put it down to vanity, you know. If people stare into the mirraw long enough, it’s bound to set off some reaction. I mean, it happens with people, doesn’t it? If you stare at somebody long enough, they’re bound to say ‘who do you think you’re looking at?’, aren’t they?”

  He couldn’t find what he was looking for in his drawers, so he pulled down a steady shower of pamphlets and invoices and pieces of paper from the shelves behind his desk. At last he said, “Here we are! We’re in luck!”

  He unfolded a worn-out sheet of typing paper and smoothed it with the edge of his hand. “The Camelot Looking-Glass. Made circa 1842, as a gift from an admiring nation to Alfred Lord Tennyson on publication of the revised version of his great poem The Lady of Shalott.’”

  “What does that mean?” said Jack, impatiently. “I don’t understand.”

  “The mirraw was specially commissioned by The Arthurian Society in England as a token of esteem for The Lady of Shalott. You do know about The Lady of Shalott?”

  Jack shook his head. “What does this have to do with my getting Jacqueline back?”

  “It could have everything to do with it. Or, on the other hand, nothing at all, if the mirraw’s a fake.”

  “Go on.”

  The man pulled up a bentwood chair and sat down. “Some literary experts think that The Lady of Shalott was a poetic description of silver plunge.”

  “I think I’m losing my patience here,” said Jack.

  “No! No! Listen! The Lady of Shalott is about a beautiful woman who is condemned to spend all of her days in a tower, weaving tapestries of whatever she sees through her window. She weaves tapestries of all the passing seasons. She weaves courtships, weddings, funerals. The catch is, though, that she is under a spell. She is only allowed to look at the world by means of her mirraw. Otherwise, she will die.

  “Let’s see if I can remember some of it.

  “There she weaves by night and day

  A magic web with colors gay.

  She has heard a whisper say,

  A curse is on her if she stay

  To look down to Camelot…

  “And moving thro’ a mirraw clear

  That hangs before her all the year,

  Shadows of the world appear.

  There she sees the highway near

  Winding down to Camelot…”

  “Yes, great, very poetic,” Jack interrupted. “But I still don’t see how this can help Jacqueline.”

  “Please – just let me finish. One day, Sir Lancelot comes riding past the tower. He looks magnificent. He has a shining saddle and jingling bridle-bells and his helmet-feather burns like a flame. The Lady of Shalott sees him in her mirraw, and she can’t resist turning around to look at him directly.

  “She left the web, she left the loom

  She made three paces thro’ the room

  She saw the water-lily bloom,

  She saw the helmet and the plume

  She look’d down to Camelot.

  Out flew the web and floated wide;

  The mirraw crack’d from side to side;

  “The curse is come upon me,” cried

  The Lady of Shalott.”

  “She knows that she is doomed. She leaves the tower. She finds a boat in the river and paints her name on it, The Lady of Shalott. Then she lies down in it and floats to Camelot, singing her last sad song. The reapers in the fields beside the river can hear this lament, as her blood slowly freezes and her eyes grow dark. By the time her boat reaches the jetty at Camelot, she’s dead.

  “Sir Lancelot comes down to the wharf with the rest of the crowds. He sees her lying in the boat and thinks how beautiful she is, and he asks God to give her grace. That’s what Tennyson wrote in the poem, anyhow. But listen to what it says on this piece of paper.

  “‘Several other stories suggest that Sir Lancelot visited the Lady of Shalott in her tower many times and become so entranced by her beauty that
he became her lover, even though she could not look at him directly when they made love because of the curse that was on her. One day however he gave her ecstasy so intense that she turned to look at him. She vanished into her mirraw and was never seen again.

  “‘The mirraw presented to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is reputed to be the original mirraw in which The Lady of Shalott disappeared, with a new decorative frame paid for by public subscription. When Lord Tennyson died in 1892, the mirraw was taken from his house at Aldworth, near Haslemere, in southern England, and sold to a New York company of auctioneers.”

  Jack snatched the paper out of his hand and read it for himself. “You knew that this mirror had swallowed this Shalott woman and yet you sold it to us without any warning?”

  “Because the Lady of Shalott is only a poem, and Sir Lancelot is only a myth, and Camelot never existed! I never thought that it could happen for real! Even Lord Tennyson thought that the mirraw was a phony, and that some poor idiot from The Arthurian Society had been bamboozled into paying a fortune for an ordinary looking-glass!”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Jack shouted at him. “Even ordinary mirrors can be dangerous, you know that! Look what happened to your dog!”

  The man ran his hand through his straggling white hair. “The dealer in Sacramento said that it had never given anybody any trouble, not in thirty years. I inspected for silver plunge, but of course it’s not always easy to tell if a mirraw’s been infected or not.”

  Jack took two or three deep breaths to calm himself down. At that moment, Punipuni appeared in the doorway of the antiques store, and the bell jangled.

  “Everything is okay, Mr German-cellar?”

  “No, Pu, it isn’t.”

  The man jerked his head toward Punipuni and said, “Who’s this?”

  “A friend. His name is Punipuni Puusuke.”

  The man held out his hand. “Pleased to know you. My name’s Davis Culbut.”

  “Pleased to know you, too, Mr French-somersault.”