by Giles Ekins
‘It is upon the legend of the Comtesse de Blacam,’ Tchort continued, again ignoring Charlie’s crass comments, ‘that this…illusion is based. If you care to come a little closer, I shall demonstrate.’
‘No, no, no, not on me you don’t, thank you very much, I ‘m not going to be putting my head in there, I can tell you.’
‘Oh Charlie, Charlie, so much hostility and suspicion,’ and Charlie starts in shock at another unexpected voice at his shoulder, his heart suddenly pounding fiercely again as a wave of breathlessness swept over him. He turns and beside and behind him stand two stunningly beautiful women, how the Hell could they get so close behind me without sensing or hearing them? Or smelling them? And where the Hell did they come from in the first place? the furious questions surging through his brain.
One of the women is young and very pretty, more than that, stunning, a beautiful girl just out of her teenage years with the loom of youth. She wore a simple loose knee-length sleeveless white dress, white shoes with 3’ high heels, was of above medium height, slim but with pleasing curves in all the right places, with straight yellow-gold blonde hair hanging down almost to her breasts. She had pale, almost translucent skin, etiolated, as if she rarely saw daylight. She wore minimal make-up apart from a light blusher and pale pink lipstick and her eyes were large and grey, eyes that seem to cloak a world of hidden secrets behind a mask of innocence.
The other woman was older, but ageless. Tall and raven haired, hair that flowed in an avalanche to frame a face that shimmered with an aura of utter depravity, she was Vampira come to life. She was heavily made up, with deep purple eye shadow, liner and mascara, glossy foundation and purple-black lipstick. Her eyes are wide set and almost violet in colour, coordinating it seems with the colour of her eye shadow and lip-stick. She wore a long red dress that clung to her breasts and thighs like second skin, emphasising every curve of her voluptuous body and although the dress was buttoned to the throat, a long open slit down the front led almost to the point of her bust to display a very deep cleavage, drawing his eyes to the fullness of her breasts. On her face there was no mask of innocence, no façade to hide behind; lust and decadence seem to exude from her very pores, as though there was no depravity or dissoluteness that she had not tasted or would not gladly taste again.
‘Now look,’ he shouts angrily, his anger fueled by disquiet and shock, ‘ this is all getting a bit out of hand, don’t you think, people popping up out through the floorboards like fucking pantomime demons all the time.’
‘Charlie, relax, relax, you are among friends now,’ Tchort soothes him, his voice emollient and mellifluent, almost hypnotic, ‘Friends. Now, please, allow me to introduce my associates, they are here to help you, together we can achieve your wildest dreams.’ nodding towards the women, now are standing to either side of Charlie, smiling beguilingly at him. ‘Lilith van Dante,’ he says, waving a hand towards the red clad Vampira, ‘one of my dearest good friends, my accomplice for more years that I care to think.’
Lilith slides up close to Charlie, he can now smell a perfume on her, a ripe heavy scent, a heady attar, wondering in passing why he could not smell it before as she offers him a languid red-nailed hand, held high, for him to kiss. She stands very close to him, her wide open eyes bore into him and he is intensely aware of her physical presence, as if she had her body actually pressed against him, intensely sentient to the sexual aura that surrounds her.
‘Hello Charlie,’ she purrs, her voice husky and slightly accented, a bit like Marlene Dietrich, he thinks. ‘I am sure that we are going to be good friends, you and I, Such very good friends.’
‘Yeah and…er nice to meet you too,’ Charlie answers, feeling uncomfortable, disconcerted by her powerful sexual presence. ‘Lilith? Lovely name that, there’s a song by Genesis, ‘bout someone called Lilith. ‘Lilywhite Lilith?’ it’s on the ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ album, the last album Peter Gabriel made with them before he went solo…’ His voice tails off, feeling foolish, ‘what a plonker’ he thinks, babbling on like that. ‘Yeah, Genesis, that was it’ Shut up you fool, only making a bigger idiot of yourself. You need this place, don’t fuck it up by being such a wally.’ ‘Aye, right’ he repeats, feeling like a complete and utter twonk.
‘Ah, yes, Genesis, I remember it well,’ Tchort said smoothly, seeming not to notice Charlie’s embarrassing gaucherie. ’And here we have the lovely Selene,’ indicating the blonde girl who stood at the other side of Charlie from Lilith. She gave Charlie a warm and smile and then looked down demurely, her hands clasped in front of her, looking for all the world as though she had just come from church, girlishly shy and innocent. ‘Selene is to be your Comtesse Marie-Josephine de Blacam, as it were. Charlie, I am sure that you and she will make a wonderful team together.’
‘Now let’s just hang on a minute. I haven’t said I’ll even take this trick yet. And if I do, I choose my own assistants, thank you very much.’
‘Charlie, I guarantee that you will take this trick, this illusion. It is unlike anything you have ever seen before in your life. But only Selene can work the…magic. Remember that. She is as much a part of this illusion as the guillotine itself.’
‘We’ll have to see about that, won’t we?’ retorted Charlie rather ungraciously, a sharp edge of asperity to his voice, feeling that he is being swept along by events beyond his control. ‘If she’s part of the illusion as you say, well, we’d best be the seeing off it, hadn’t we? And then we can be giving a yea or a nay.’
‘Of course, the production, the presentation of the illusion, that will be entirely up to you.’
‘That’s nice to know,’ Charlie retorted sourly, ’I was just about to change the name of the act to ‘The Great Mo Tchort.’
‘Bitterness is a shallow emotion Charlie, and does not become you. You are among friends now, believe me, we really do only have your best interests at heart.’ He beckons to Selene, ‘Come my dear, let us lay to dust the qualms in Charlie’s breast, let us slay the dragon of suspicion and doubt and bring to him, our new friend, the opportunity for salvation and success.’ He takes Selene’s arm and ushers her to the guillotine. ‘Come, let us re-live, or rather re-create the execution of the Comtesse Marie-Josephine de Blacam.’
Selene gives Charlie an encouraging smile as she sits down onto the bascule, ties up her hair on top of her head with an elastic hairband and then swings her legs up, lies down, and rolls over so that her head is positioned beneath the awesome, glittering blade. Tchort lowers the upper segment of the lunette and locks it in place about Selene’s slender neck. Lilith is standing ever closer to Charlie and suddenly, fleetingly, feels her breasts press against his arm and feels a sudden frisson of heat surging into his groin. With a smile Tchort, gestures to Charlie, ‘My friend?’ holding out the release rope to him, ‘Would you like the honour?’
‘No, No,’ Charlie shakes his head, not really sure that he wants part of this any longer. He knows how guillotine illusions work and this is not an illusion. ‘This is getting all too fucking weird, I mean, this is the real bastard thing, an actual working, head lopping guillotine. He feels his heart pounding furiously and he can scarcely breathe, the sensation that the workshop has no oxygen coursing through him in a sickening torrent. Tchort releases the blade. The weighted triangular blade slices down in a searing glimpse of steel, so quickly that Charlie barely has time to blink, time to realise that the blade has dropped and then the crash as the blade hits the base of the guillotine echoes around the workshop. A flying, spurting drench of blood and Selene’s severed head, blonde hair sleeked with gore drops into the basket.
Charlie reels back in total shock, his heart seized in an icy unrelenting grasp as his lungs fight to drag in some air. ‘MY GOD, OH MY GOD, MY GOD. YOU’VE KILLED HER. KILLED HER. YOU’VE CUT OFF HER HEAD AND FUCKING KILLED HER’ he screams and staggers over towards the guillotine, retching and heaving. He grasps the upright support, feeling his legs beginning to shake and then unwittingly looks down in to the basket
. Selene’s head lies there on one side, thin rivers of blood tricking from the severed neck. Slowly the head turns face upwards, open-eyed and staring, suddenly one eye winks at him and her mouth opens. ‘Give us a kiss, Charlie,’ she says, the room spins faster, ever faster and Charlie falls to the floor in a dead faint.
FOURTEEN
Michael O’Daly’s Magic Lantern, a minute or two or maybe an eternity later
‘But you did listen Charlie’ Tchort responded in a reasoning, soothing voice, ‘you listened to the yearnings of your innermost heart.’
CHARLIE HAS THE SENSATION THAT HE IS WALKING, but as though in a dream. The edges of his vision are blurred, as if seen though glass smeared with Vaseline, colours are distorted, sounds are muffled and indistinct but footsteps sound loudly in his ear.
Is he drugged? He does not know.
Is he alive? He does not know.
Is he dead? He does not care.
The scene coalesces, he sees himself between a row of timber shelves, shelves that are stacked with books, hundreds, thousands of books of all shapes and sizes and subjects. Is he in a library, a public library perhaps? Yes, yes, a public library, a library that is both strange to him but very familiar, unrecognisable but tangible, like reaching for an elusive memory, searching for that unseen object that is just beyond the reach of his fingers. It is more than a vision, less than a reality. He walks further, scanning the books, running his fingers along the wood of the shelves. He walks down more aisles, searching, seeking, the shelves become a blur as he passes book after book, shelf after shelf, row after row, section after section; Art and Design, Biography, Business, Computing and IT, Education, Food and Drink, , a kaleidoscope of multi-coloured book covers, Gender Studies, Health and Wellbeing, History and Politics, faster and faster , and then he is on a carousel, swirling him round and round and up and down on the brightly painted wooden horse; Home and Garden, Law, Medical, Mind Body and Spirit, Philosophy, , then he is on a sliding library ladder, Psychology and Social Sciences Religion and Beliefs, Science, Sport, Leisure, Transport, slowly the ladder comes to a halt. He strains to read the section heading; the sign blurs before his eyes, swirls and then clears to read ‘Occult Studies’
He reaches out as the shelf tilts away, elusive, he stretches, pulls out one book, flips through it and tosses it aside, then another, flips through and tosses it aside, a third , then a fourth, a fifth and sixth. Then a seventh. A paperback with a yellow and black cover entitled ‘The Treasury of Witchcraft and the Occult,’ somehow familiar. He opens the book, scanning the chapter heads, the black and white engravings of devils and demons, sorcerers and necromancers, Black Sabbaths, black cats and broomstick flying witches.
He stops at page 98, at a paragraph that is headed, SATANIC NOMENTCLATURE. It reads as thus:
Satan has his own individual national nomenclature, as follows:
Russian: Tchort
Persian: Dev
Syriac: Beherit
Biblical: Asmodeus, Belial, Apollyon
Arabic: Shaitan
Egyptian: Set
Japanese: O Yama
Two words stand out, as if in bold print, ASMODEUS and TCHORT, and he seems to hear Tchort’s words in his ear, my name is an ancient one, very ancient indeed. This particular derivation is Russian, I believe.
SATANIC NOMENTCLATURE, ASMODEUS, TCHORT, SATANIC NOMENTCLATURE, TCHORT, ASMODEUS, TCHORT, SATANIC, SATANIC, SATANIC. The words ring through his head in swirls, he is spinning, spinning in a spiral, from dark to light, from Hell to…?
Charlie wakes, disorientated, confused, his head awhirl.
Gradually he comes to but the sensation of disorientation and confusion remain. Was it a dream, or rather a nightmare that he had just seen, the library, the carousel, that book, ‘A Treasury of Witchcraft and the Occult’ and the Satanic connection with Asmodeus Tchort?
And did he really see Selene beheaded by the guillotine or was that another nightmare?
He is lying down on Michaelmas’s maroon Chesterfield, vague shadows and figures hover indistinctly around him. Slowly they coalesce into his vision; Tchort, Lilith and Selene are bent over him, concerned faces that swim in and out of his vision.
‘Welcome back, Charlie,’ Selene says in a low soft, almost comforting voice, a dedicated nurse greeting a patient awakening from an operation. Then it dawns on him, it was no dream, no nightmare, that at some time in the past, when seeking ideas to put into his act he had read, or read in part, ‘The Treasury of Witchcraft and the Occult’ and that Tchort, Asmodeus Tchort was Satan.
Asmodeus Tchort was Satan, Lucifer, the Devil, Beelzebub, The Evil One, Old Nick and a thousand other names.
The impact hits with a sledgehammer blow, he screams and struggles to rise from the sofa, but he is leaden , slow moving as if encapsulated in gelatin, his limbs move in slow motion, heavy, his arms and legs disconnected from his brain. He sees Tchort reach out, as if to assist him, ‘Nooooo.,’ he screams, flailing his arms about wildly. ‘Get the fuck away from me. Get away!’ He points a wavering finger at Tchort. ‘You! You! You’re the Devil. Satan!’ and holds up his hands, fists closed apart from his forefingers which he crosses to form a crucifix, but even in the moment of his greatest terror the inane thought crosses (no pun intended) his mind, ‘where the fuck are those toothbrushes when I need them?’ ‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ he shouts, thrusting his l crucifix up at Tchort.
‘A fallen angel is all I am. That’s all, a fallen angel,’ and Tchort gently closes his hand over the forefinger crucifix and pulls it apart, disappointingly failing to burst into righteous flames as he does so.
‘Oh yeah, and I’m Florence fucking Nightingale’ he shouts, stabbing his fingers at Tchort again. ‘You are the Devil, Satan, Asmodeus call me Mo Tchort, Old Nick, Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, whatever else the fuck you call yourself. Lucifer.’
‘Tchort shrugs elegantly. ‘Names, names, names. As I say, a fallen angel is all that I am,’ and somewhat archaically goes on to say ‘and yes, which I do answer to the name of Lucifer. Lucifer the Morning Star, to be precise.
‘Bugger that Fallen Angel and Morning Star bollocks; you are Lucifer, Satan and the source of all that is vile and evil in this world.’
Tchort smiles condescendingly, as if scoring a debating point at the Oxford Union, ‘That is not what you told Doreen, sorry Doreen, this morning, now is it? What was it you said, ah, yes, ‘All that crap about the Devil and Satan, it’s medieval mumbo jumbo dreamed up by priests to keep the peasants down and give them an excuse to burn a few old hags when it got cold in the winter.’
‘How the fuck…? Charlie holds his head in his hands, near to breaking point… How the hell did I ever get myself into this fucking mess?’ ‘Look, don’t give me any more of this shit, I can’t take any more, I really can’t. I’ve had it up to here in fucking spades.’ He looks up suddenly as the realisation that Selene has her head back in place hits him with a jolting shock as ice cold fingers seize his heart and the dread-chills shudder his body.
‘No, no, no, no, no.no. Oh fuck, Oh fuck no. I saw your head come off. I saw the knife come down and take off your head. It was there. In the basket. I saw it. It was real. There.’ Another surge of ice cold dread cuts through him, his heart seems to freeze as the icy fingers tighten, he cannot breath and acid bile rises to his gorge, he hyperventilates, gasping for air. Afraid, Charlie is very, very afraid. ‘Oh fuck, shit. This is witchcraft, isn’t it? Real magic, BLACK magic! Devil’s sorcery, not the kiddie crap illusion stuff I do on stage.’
‘Perhaps the real question, Charlie,’ he hears Selene say through the mists of his torment, ‘is what is reality? And what is illusion? Perhaps what you perceive as reality has been an illusion all along.’
‘Don’t give me all that metaphysical shit, darling, thank you very much, I don’t need it.’ He looks up at Tchort, ‘or perhaps I should say don’t give me all that Mephistophelesical shit.’
‘Oh very good, Charlie, very good
indeed,’ Tchort softly claps his hands approvingly, ‘Mephistopheles, I had forgotten that one. Mephistophelesical shit, very clever and very quick-witted I must say considering your somewhat agitated state of mind.’
‘Is it any fucking wonder I’m agitated?’ He looked up at Selene smiling shyly at him, so far as he could tell there did not seem to any cut marks around her neck, no great stitches or staples holding her head in place like some Frankenstein’s monster. ‘All I do know is that I saw your head come off and fall into the basket. That head turned around in the basket and winked at me and that head, the chopped off head, asked me for a kiss. And I do know that somehow I am mixed up with the fucking Devil. Apart from that it has been a perfectly normal day and it’s been lovely meeting you all.’
The enormity of the situation strikes him again and he slumps back onto the Chesterfield, bent over double, holding his head in his hands, shaking it from side to side in anguish and distress. ‘Oh shite, shite, shite. However did I get into this fucking nightmare? Jesus wept, I can’t take any more. I should never have done it, said it five fucking times, I should’ve listened to Doreen. I should have listened.’
‘But you did listen Charlie’ Tchort responded in a reasoning, soothing voice, ‘you listened to the yearnings of your innermost heart. You want fame and fortune. You want to be known as the most… legendary magician that ever trod the stage. I can give you that. You know I can give you that. All you have to do is place your trust in me.’
‘Hah, trust the Devil? You must take me for some kind of cunt to believe that. I’m getting out of here,’ and made to get up from the red Chesterfield but Lilith van Dante lays a restraining hand on his shoulder.
‘Oh no, Charlie,’ she exclaims, ‘we’ve hardly had time to get to know you and here you are, so anxious to get away from us.’ She pouts, ‘Is it something we have said? We mean you no harm. Truly. Please, wait just a little while, and get to know us a little better, why don’t you.’ She glides closer to him, her violet eyes wide open, a wide smile across her face as takes his head in her hands and leans over to kiss him on the mouth. For a moment or two, Charlie struggles to resist her, but her alluring erotic perfume, her intense sexual aura, her soft lips and probing tongue overwhelm his resistance and he relaxes, falling back so that he is once again lying down on the sofa with Lilith above him, still entwined in the kiss. He can feel her breasts against him, her thighs, the lush body enslaving him and as she writhes against him, his erection soars, hard and demanding, pressing into the junction of her thighs. Then Lilith slithers down his body, swiftly unfastens his belt. He tries to resist again, but Selene gently restrains him, bending down to kiss him as Lilith slides down his zip and releases his straining cock from his underpants and then takes him in her mouth, fellating him with a skill beyond anything he has ever experienced before. He groans, the pleasure almost too much to bear, then Lilith stands, lifts her long dress up over her thighs; she is naked underneath and her long legs flash in the half light as she straddles Charlie and then mounts him.
