Festival of Fear (24 page)

‘There,' she said. ‘I reckon we can have it all cleaned up by tomorrow.'

‘I'll give my friend a call,' said Mark. ‘Maybe he can send somebody down to look at it.'

‘It's amazing, isn't it, to think that the last person to look into this mirror could have been the Lady of Shalott?'

‘You blithering idiot,' said Nigel.

‘I beg your pardon?'

Nigel waved his can of lager at the television screen. ‘Not you. Him. He thinks that single mothers should get two votes.'

They didn't go to bed until well past one a.m. Mark had the main bedroom because he was the boss, even though it wasn't exactly luxurious. The double bed was lumpy and the white Regency-style wardrobe was crowded with wire hangers. Katie had the smaller bedroom at the back, with teddy-bear wallpaper, while Nigel had to sleep on the sofa in the living room.

Mark slept badly that night. He dreamed that he was walking at the rear of a long funeral procession, with a horse-drawn hearse, and black-dyed ostrich plumes nodding in the wind. A woman's voice was calling him from very far away, and he stopped, while the funeral procession carried on. For some reason he felt infinitely sad and lonely, the same way that he had felt when he was five, when his mother died.

‘Mark!' she kept calling him. ‘
Mark
!'

He woke up with a harsh intake of breath. It was still dark, although his travel clock said seven twenty-six a.m.

‘Mark!' she repeated, and it wasn't his mother, but Katie, and she was calling him from downstairs.

He climbed out of bed, still stunned from sleeping. He dragged his toweling bathrobe from the hook on the back of the door and stumbled down the narrow staircase. In the living room the curtains were drawn back, although the gray November day was still dismal and dark, and it was raining. Katie was standing in the middle of the room in a pink cotton nightshirt, her hair all messed up, her forearms raised like the figure in
The Scream
.

‘Katie! What the hell's going on?'

‘It's Nigel. Look at him, Mark, he's dead.'

‘What?' Mark switched the ceiling light on. Nigel was lying on his back on the chintz-upholstered couch, wearing nothing but green woolen socks and a brown plaid shirt, which was pulled right up to his chin. His bony white chest had a crucifix of dark hair across it. His penis looked like a dead fledgling.

But it was the expression on his face that horrified Mark the most. He was staring up at the ceiling, wide-eyed, his mouth stretched wide open, as if he were shouting at somebody. There was no doubt that he was dead. His throat had been torn open, in a stringy red mess of tendons and cartilage, and the cushion beneath his head was soaked black with blood.

‘Jesus,' said Mark. He took three or four very deep breaths. ‘Jesus.'

Katie was almost as white as Nigel. ‘What could have
done
that? It looks like he was bitten by a
dog
.'

Mark went through to the kitchen and rattled the back door handle. ‘Locked,' he said, coming back into the living room. ‘There's no dog anywhere.'

‘Then what—?' Katie promptly sat down, and lowered her head. ‘Oh God, I think I'm going to faint.'

‘I'll have to call the police,' said Mark. He couldn't stop staring at Nigel's face. Nigel didn't look terrified. In fact, he looked almost exultant, as if having his throat ripped out had been the most thrilling experience of his whole life.

‘But what did it?' asked Katie. ‘
We
didn't do it, and Nigel couldn't have done it himself.'

Mark frowned down at the yellow swirly carpet. He could make out a blotchy trail of footprints leading from the side of the couch to the center of the room. He thought at first that they must be Nigel's, but on closer examination they seemed to be far too small, and there was no blood on Nigel's socks. Close to the coffee table the footprints formed a pattern like a huge, petal-shedding rose, and then, much fainter, they made their toward the mirror. Where they stopped.

‘Look,' he said. ‘What do you make of that?'

Katie approached the mirror and peered into the shiny circle that she had cleaned yesterday evening. ‘It's almost as if . . . no.'

‘It's almost as if
what
?'

‘It's almost as if somebody killed Nigel and then walked straight into the mirror.'

‘That's insane. People can't walk into mirrors.'

‘But these footprints . . . they don't go anywhere else.'

‘It's impossible. Whoever it was, they must have done it to trick us.'

They both looked up at the face of Lamia. She looked back at them, secret and serene. Her smile seemed to say
wouldn't you like to know
?

‘They built a tower, didn't they?' said Katie. She was trembling with shock. ‘They built a tower for the express purpose of keeping the Lady of Shalott locked up. If she was Lamia, then they locked her up because she seduced men and drank their blood.'

‘Katie, for Christ's sake. That was seven hundred years ago. That's if it really happened at all.'

Katie pointed to Nigel's body on the couch. ‘Nigel's dead, Mark!
That
really happened! But
nobody
could have entered this room last night, could they? Not without breaking the door down and waking us up.
Nobody
could have entered this room unless they stepped right out of this mirror!'

‘So what do you suggest? We call the police?'

‘We
have
to!'

‘Oh, yes? And what do we tell them? “Well, officer, it was like this. We took a thirteenth-century mirror that didn't belong to us and The Lady of Shalott came out of it in the middle of the night and tore Nigel's throat out?” They'll send us to Broadmoor, Katie! They'll put us in the funny farm for life!'

‘Mark, listen, this is real.'

‘It's only a story, Katie. It's only a legend.'

‘But think of the poem,
The Lady of Shalott
. Think of what it says. “
Moving thro' a mirror clear, that hangs before her all the year, shadows of the world appear
.” Don't you get it? Tennyson specifically wrote
through
a mirror, not
in
it. The Lady of Shalott wasn't looking
at
her mirror, she was
inside
it, looking out!'

‘This gets better.'

‘But it all fits together. She was Lamia. A bloodsucker, a vampire! Like all vampires, she could only come out at night. But she didn't hide inside a coffin all day . . . she hid inside a mirror! Daylight can't penetrate a mirror, any more than it can penetrate a closed coffin!'

‘I don't know much about vampires, Katie, but I do know that you can't see them in mirrors.'

‘Of course not. And this is the reason why! Lamia and her reflection are one and the same. When she steps out of the mirror, she's no longer inside it, so she doesn't appear to have a reflection. And the curse on her must be that she can only come out of the mirror at night, like
all
vampires.'

‘Katie, for Christ's sake . . . you're getting completely carried away.'

‘But it's the only answer that makes any sense! Why did they lock up The Lady of Shalott on an island, in a stream? Because vampires can't cross running water. Why did they carve a crucifix and a skull on the stones outside? The words said,
God save us from the pestilence within these walls
. They didn't mean the Black Death . . . they meant
her
! The Lady of Shalott, Lamia,
she
was the pestilence!'

Mark sat down. He looked at Nigel and then he looked away again. He had never seen a dead body before, but the dead were so totally dead that you could quickly lose interest in them, after a while. They didn't talk. They didn't even breathe. He could understand why morticians were so blasé.

‘So?' he asked Katie, at last. ‘What do you think we ought to do?'

‘Let's draw the curtains,' she said. ‘Let's shut out all the daylight. If you sit here, perhaps she'll be tempted to come out again. After all, she's been seven hundred years without fresh blood, hasn't she? She must be thirsty.'

Mark stared at her. ‘You're having a laugh, aren't you? You want me to sit here in the dark, hoping that some mythical woman is going to step out of a dirty old mirror and try to suck all the blood out of me?'

He was trying to show Katie that he wasn't afraid, and that her vampire idea was nonsense, but all the time Nigel was lying on the couch, silently shouting at the ceiling. And there was so much blood, and so many footprints. What else could have happened in this room last night?

Katie said, ‘It's up to you. If you think I'm being ridiculous, let's forget it. Let's call the police and tell them exactly what happened. I'm sure that forensics will prove that we didn't kill him.'

‘I wouldn't count on it, myself.'

Mark stood up again and went over to the mirror. He peered into the polished circle, but all he could see was his own face, dimly haloed.

‘All right, then,' he said. ‘Let's give it a try, just to put your mind at rest.
Then
we call the police.'

Katie drew the brown velvet curtains and tucked them in at the bottom to keep out the tiniest chink of daylight. It was well past eight o'clock now, but it was still pouring with rain outside and the morning was so gloomy that she need hardly have bothered. Mark pulled one of the armchairs up in front of the mirror and sat facing it.

‘I feel like one of those goats they tie up, to catch tigers.'

‘Well, I wouldn't worry. I'm probably wrong.'

Mark took out a crumpled Kleenex and blew his nose, and then sniffed. ‘
Phwoaff
    !' he protested. ‘Nigel's smelling already. Rotten chicken, or what?'

‘That's the blood,' said Katie. Adding, after a moment, ‘My uncle used to be a butcher. He always said that bad blood is the worst smell in the world.'

They sat in silence for a while. The smell of blood seemed to be growing thicker, and riper, and it was all Mark could do not to gag. His throat was dry, too, and he wished he had drunk some orange juice before starting this vigil.

‘You couldn't fetch me a drink, could you?' he asked Katie.

‘Shh,' said Katie. ‘I think I can see something.'

‘What? Where?'

‘Look at the mirror, in the middle. Like a very faint light.'

Mark stared toward the mirror in the darkness. At first he couldn't see anything but overwhelming blackness. But then he saw a flicker, like somebody waving a white scarf, and then another.

Very gradually, a
face
began to appear in the polished circle. Mark felt a slow crawling sensation down his back, and his lower jaw began to judder so much that he had to clench his teeth to stop it. The face was pale and bland but strangely beautiful, and it was staring straight at him, unblinking, and smiling. It looked more like the face of a marble statue than a human being. Mark tried to look away, but he couldn't. Every time he turned his head toward Katie he was compelled to turn back again.

The darkened living room seemed to grow even more airless and suffocating, and when he said, ‘
Katie . . . can you see what I see
?' his voice sounded muffled, as if he had a pillow over his face.

Soundlessly, the pale woman took one step out of the surface of the mirror. She was naked, and her skin was the color of the moon. The black tarnish clung to her for a moment, like oily cobwebs, but as she took another step forward they slid away from her, leaving her luminous and pristine.

Mark could do nothing but stare at her. She came closer and closer, until he could have reached up and touched her. She had a high forehead, and her hair was braided in strange, elaborate loops. She had no eyebrows, which made her face expressionless. But her eyes were extraordinary. Her eyes were like looking at death.

She raised her right hand and lightly kissed her fingertips. He could feel her aura, both electrical and freezing cold, as if somebody had left a fridge door wide open. She whispered something, but it sounded more French than English – very soft and elided – and he could only understand a few words of it.

‘
My sweet love
,' she said. ‘
Come to me, give me your very life
.'

There were dried runnels of blood on her breasts and down her slightly bulging stomach, and down her thighs. Her feet were spattered in blood, too. Mark looked up at her, and he couldn't think what to say or what to do. He felt as if all of the energy had drained out of him, and he couldn't even speak.

We all have to die one day
, he thought.
But to die now, today, in this naked woman's arms
 . . .
what an adventure that would be
.

‘Mark!' shouted Katie. ‘Grab her, Mark! Hold on to her!'

The woman twisted around and hissed at Katie, as furiously as a snake. Mark heaved himself out of his chair and tried to seize the woman's arm, but she was cold and slippery, like half-melted ice, and her wrist slithered out of his grasp.

‘
Now
, Katie!' he yelled at her.

Katie threw herself at the curtains, and dragged them down, the curtain hooks popping like firecrackers. The woman went for her, and she had almost reached the window when the last curtain-hook popped and the living room was drowned with gray, drained daylight. She whipped around again and stared at Mark, and the expression on her face almost stopped his heart.

‘
Of all men
,' she whispered. ‘
You have been the most faithless, and you will be punished
.'

Katie was on her knees, struggling to free herself from the curtains. The woman seized Katie's curls, lifted her up, and bit into her neck, with an audible crunch. Katie didn't even scream. She stared at Mark in mute desperation and fell sideways on to the carpet, with blood jetting out of her neck and spraying across the furniture.