Light, she thought, as she cleaned the palette and brushes. Light. But all she could remember was the plumage of the bird, blacker than black under the silver moon.
She slept.
Later in the day, she walked down to the shore, earlier than usual. This time she carried binoculars, hurriedly purchased in town, and she scanned the seaward sky from north to south, searching for a familiar silhouette. Gulls she saw, gulls in plenty, soaring, swooping for food, perching on rocks. Fat gulls, grey on top and white beneath. But no hawks, no eagles. She turned the binoculars westward, toward the rooftops of the town, just visible beyond the intervening trees. She saw flecks that might be pigeons, crows, even sparrows, near and far. Ordinary birds. Nowhere did she see the short head, broad tail, and flared wings that marked her quarry.
She ate a quick dinner and returned to the painting by the waning, rosy glow of dusk. One could not evoke the depths of night, she thought, under a bright sun. She lightened her palette, reworked the moon and sea and even the dark air between them, trying to capture the radiance against which the bird had seemed so intense a shadow. Past midnight, she realized that there was a contradiction in her mind, a double image of that instant, in which the sky was bright and dark at the same time. She could feel it, but the painting was only a poor reflection of that feeling, two dimensional, and – by now – muddy. She cleaned the palette and brushes and set the canvas aside against the wall. Stifling a yawn, she mounted a fresh, blank canvas on the easel.
The bird this time, nothing else. She sketched quickly, placing tail and flared pinions, adding details that she felt rather than remembered. The light was moonlight of course, but there was no sky, no ocean, only the dark wingspan and the merest suggestion of curved beak and piercing eye. And when she reached the limits of both her recollection and her invention, she went downstairs to the study and looked eagles up in the encyclopedia. She knew now that it had been an eagle; she wouldn’t allow it to be anything else. The encyclopedia illustrations gave her some inspiration and corrected a few of her assumptions, and she hurried back upstairs to make adjustments.
By dawnlight again, she viewed her new effort with a critical eye. She had never painted birds before; at most, they had been pieces of background in her few landscapes, a brushstroke or two in the sky. The black eagle showed her lack of familiarity with his kind; he was naive and awkward, though bold. If she squinted, she could see a family resemblance to the bird on the back of a dollar bill.
At twilight, she walked by the shore, searching the darkening sky for him, staying on till the moon was high, that night and many after. Night upon night, as the moon waned and the stars brightened by contrast. Night upon night, in fair weather and foul, when the waves were slick as glass, when the waves were wild things clutching for the sky. She waited for another glimpse, straining at clouds or a late gull or a speck of flotsam on the water. She waited late, late, and past midnight she returned home and worked on one or the other of the paintings, striving to recreate the bird.
She had never gone to town much, less since the deaths of her parents. Now she had no use for the place at all; she had her groceries delivered and paid her bills by mail. Every scrap of her spare time was spoken for, by paint or binoculars, or the sleep that she grudgingly allowed herself. Only the postman saw her, dropping off a few bills, catalogues, advertisements a couple of times a week. And the people who walked by the sea. But the weather was beginning to grow chilly for both tourists and lovers; soon the moon waxed full again, and only Lydia stood on the shore to watch it touch the waves with silver.
She heard the bird now, sometimes – she was sure of that, though she never saw his broad, dark wings. She heard him beat the air once, twice, high above her head, and then there was silence as he soared and she stared upward, trying to pierce the blackness with her human eyes. She thought he could probably see her well enough, eagles’ eyes being so much sharper than humans’, and she tried to imagine how she must appear to him – her face a pale speck amid the darkness of rocks and scrubby grass. A small thing, earthbound, of no significance to a creature who sailed the dark ocean of air. What would it be like, she wondered, to have wings and look down upon the creatures who could only walk?
The paintings had proliferated by this time. They lined the studio, view after view of the subject she had seen only once. Yet there was a clear image of him in her mind’s eye, as if she could reconstruct his whole form from the sound of his wings. His eye, she knew, was golden, like a great amber bead set above the corner of his beak. The beak was dark as his plumage, like polished jet. And to display their true span, the great black pinions would require a canvas larger than any Lydia had ever worked. She contemplated ordering the proper size from Boston, stretching it and preparing it herself. She measured the door of the studio, to be sure the finished product could be carried out of the room, and then she made the phone call.
Autumn was waning by the time the painting was well-begun. The sea breeze that washed her studio was chill by day now, and gusty, though she still opened the windows to it, and painted wearing an old sweater. When she walked by the shore, she could see scarlet leaves floating among the restless waves. The color of the ocean was changing, too, and the color of the sky; the daytime world was beginning to grey out for winter. Only at night were the changes invisible. At night the buoy still clanged far out on the water, and the moon still splashed its shimmering highway to Europe almost at Lydia’s feet. At night, ebony wings beat the air, and Lydia strained for a glimpse, just a single brief glimpse, of the bird that glided somewhere, somewhere, in the vast, unchanging darkness.
The days grew shorter, as the chilling wind ruffled the waves to a restive froth, and the nights were long – long for walking by the choppy water, long for painting by lamplight. Lydia slept the whole short day through now, seeing the sun only at dawn and dusk. The bird preferred the night hours, and Lydia had begun to understand that preference. Day was jarring, stark, revealing too much of reality. Night was kind and soothing, hiding the world’s flaws in velvet. At night, Lydia could look into her dimly lit mirror and see the girl she had once been, the girl whose skin bore no sign of wrinkling, whose hair was yet untouched by grey, whose life still lay ahead of her. That girl could walk on the shore and dream dreams; she could look upon the moonlit highway to Europe and imagine herself traveling it, light as a feather, eastward, over the horizon.
She finished the painting half a dozen times. At dawn she would step back from it, cock her head to one side, and nod to herself. She would clean the brushes and palette carefully, then, and go to bed satisfied. But when she woke a dusk, the light of the setting sun showed her flaws, approximations, incompleteness, and she would eat a quick breakfast and go out to the shore again, in search of her model, and inspiration. Inspiration she would find, in the clang of the buoy or the whisper of the wind, or the faint rustle of wingbeats high, high. But the model would not show himself, not even his shadow, and she would return home and work determinedly through the dark hours until she laid the brushes aside again, come dawn.
Half a dozen times, she finished, and slept, and then one blustery sunset found her with nothing left to do.
Not that the painting was perfect. She eyed it critically from every angle, brushes poised in her fingers, palette in the crook of her arm. She approached it several times, as if to lay another stroke upon the canvas, then drew back. The paint was very thick in some places. But she knew another layer would not make it better. The painting was beyond her ability to improve. She set her brushes aside and went out to walk.
Lydia understood the limits of her skill. She did not expect the canvas to be a photographic reproduction of the image in her mind’s eye. She knew she would have to be satisfied with the faintest hint of the beauty and grace and power of the original. And down by the shore, in the pale light of the full moon, she had to weep for her own limitations. She wept, and she shivered a little because the night was very chill, and her coat was not quite h
eavy enough.
High above her head, she heard his wings.
She knew the sound instantly and looked up, straining to pierce the darkness, her tears a chilly patch upon each eye, blurring her vision for a moment. As a blur, she saw him silhouetted against the moon, and then she blinked and brought him into sharp focus. He was poised above the shimmering path that the moon laid down on the surface of the sea, his great wings motionless as he glided lower, lower, almost touching the white-topped waves. An eagle – yes, she had been right all the time, right in every detail, even to the amber eye that glittered with moonlight, glittered as it regarded her.
He swooped toward her, his great dark wings blotting out the moon, the sky, the world. She gazed at him in wonder, in adoration; the painting had not matched his true size, not remotely. He was the grandfather of eagles, she thought – the god of eagles. She felt a great gust of air as he hovered over her a moment. And then, as delicately as she might cradle a kitten, his great talons locked about her waist and hips. Her hair blew wild as his pinions cupped air to rise again, and then her feet floated free of the earth. Upward they soared – upward, and the rushing wind was a tonic to Lydia’s soul. She felt light, young, and beautiful as the bird himself. Looking down, she could see the silver moonpath flowing far below.
Eastward they flew. Eastward toward Europe.
As the first rays of sunlight spread out over the ocean, Lydia saw the island. The only land visible from horizon, to horizon, it was dominated by a huge mountain, and as they drew closer, she realized that the summit of that mountain was their destination. This did not surprise her; where else, she reasoned, would an eagle rest?
Closer still, and she saw the nest, big as her parents’ house, built of bushes and driftwood and spars from sailing ships, some with ropes and tattered canvas still clinging to them. And then, at the last moment, just before her feet touched the soft, shadowed interior of the nest, just before they brushed the lining of feathers torn from the bird’s own downy breast, and his mate’s, she struggled. Poor dried-up spinster, she struggled – weakly – as she fell toward those small, dark, gaping beaks.
GRAHAM MASTERTON RETURNED TO Britain in 2002, after living in Cork, Ireland, for four years, where “the silver rain and the golden silence were highly conducive to writing”. While there, he was honoured for his fund-raising for the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
His latest novels include Swimmer, the Edgar Award-shortlisted Trauma, The Hidden World (which began life as a story he told to Irish Traveller children in his local library), A Terrible Beauty (set in County Cork), The Doorkeepers, The Devil in Grey and Unspeakable. The author’s 1998 thriller Genius (originally published under the pseudonym “Alan Blackwood”) was reissued in hardcover, and Telos Publishing also issued a special 25th anniversary edition of his debut horror novel, The Manitou. He is currently working on a sequel, which the author describes as “Native American terror with knobs on.”
An abridged version of the following story originally appeared on the BBC’s horror website with illustrations by veteran artist Frazer Irving. It was also broadcast on BBC7 digital radio, read by Jamie Bamber. This marks the story’s first appearance in print.
“I have been fascinated by mirrors ever since my mother read me Alice Through the Looking-Glass when I was very young,” recalls Masterton. “Lewis Carroll’s idea that something different was happening in a mirror-world, if only you could see it, both alarmed and excited me, and I used to spend hours with my cheek pressed against the mirror in my grandparents’s house, trying to see the strange and different garden which I was convinced existed just beyond the reflected back door.
“My novel Mirror told the story of ayoung boy whose murder was witnessed by a mirror, but I returned to the subject of reflected evil after reading a poignant story called ‘The Lady of Shalott’, about a small crippled girl in New York who (like Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott) could only see the outside world by means of her mirror.
“I wrote three different stories on the same theme, including this one.”
IT WAS RAINING SO hard that Mark stayed in the Range Rover, drinking cold espresso straight from the flask and listening to a play on the radio about a widow who compulsively knitted cardigans for her recently-dead husband.
“It took me ages to find this shade of grey. Shale, they call it. It matches his eyes.”
“He’s dead, Maureen. He’s never going to wear it.”
“Don’t be silly. Nobody dies, so long as you remember what they looked like.”
He was thinking about calling it a day when he saw Katie trudging across the field toward him, in her bright red raincoat, with the pointy hood. As she approached he let down the window, tipping out the last of his coffee. The rain spattered icy-cold against his cheek.
“You look drowned!” he called out. “Why don’t you pack it in?”
“We’ve found something really exciting, that’s why.”
She came up to the Range Rover and pulled back her hood. Her curly blonde hair was stuck to her forehead and there was a drip on the end of her nose. She had always put him in mind of a poor bedraggled fairy, even when she was dry, and today she looked as if she had fallen out of her traveler’sjoy bush and into a puddle.
“Where’s Nigel?” he asked her.
“He’s still there, digging.”
“I told him to survey the ditches. What the hell’s he digging for?”
“Mark, we think we might have found Shalott.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
Katie wiped the rain from her face with the back of her hand. “Those ditches aren’t ditches, they used to be a stream, and there’s an island in the middle. And those lumps we thought were Iron Age sheep-pens, they’re stones, all cut and dressed, like the stones for building a wall.”
“Oh, I see,” said Mark. “And you and Nigel, being you and Nigel, you immediately thought, ‘shalott!’”
“Why not? It’s in the right location, isn’t it, upstream from Cadbury?”
Mark shook his head. “Come on, Katie, I know that you and Nigel think that Camelot was all true. If you dug up an old tomato-ketchup bottle you’d probably persuade yourselves that it came from the Round Table.”
“It’s not just the stones, Mark. We’ve found some kind of metal frame. It’s mostly buried, but Nigel’s trying to get it out.”
“A frame?”
Katie stretched her arms as wide as she could. “It’s big, and it’s very tarnished. Nigel thinks it could be a mirror.”
“I get it . . . island, Camelot, mirror. Must be Shalott!”
“Come and have a look anyway. I mean, it might just be scrap, but you never know.”
Mark checked his watch. “Let’s leave it till tomorrow. We can’t do anything sensible in this weather.”
“I don’t think we can just leave it there. Supposing somebody else comes along and decides to finish digging it up? It could be valuable. If we have found Shalott, and if it is a mirror –”
“Katie, read my lips, Shalott is a myth. Whatever it is you’ve dug up, can’t you just cover it up again and leave it till tomorrow? It’s going to be pitch dark in half an hour.”
Katie put on one of those faces that meant she was going to go on nagging about this until she got her own way. They weren’t having any kind of relationship, but ever since Katie had joined the company, six weeks ago, they had been mildly flirting with each other, and Mark wouldn’t have minded if it went a little further. He let his head drop down in surrender, and said, “Okay. . . if I must.”
The widow in the radio-play was still fretting about her latest sweater. “He’s not so very keen on raglan sleeves . . . he thinks they make him look round-shouldered.”
“He’s dead, Maureen. He probably doesn’t have any shoulders.”
Katie turned around and started back up the hill. Mark climbed down from the Range Rover, slammed the door, and trudged through the long grass behind her. The
skies were hung with filthy grey curtains, and the wind was blowing directly from the north-east, so that his wet raincoat collar kept petulantly slapping his face. He wouldn’t have come out here at all, not today, but the weather had put him eleven days behind schedule, and the county council were starting to grow impatient.
“We’re going to be bloody popular!” he shouted. “If this is bloody Shalott!”
Katie spun around as she walked, her hands thrust deep in her duffel-coat pockets. “But it could be! A castle, on an island, right in the heart of King Arthur country!”
Mark caught up with her. “Forget it, Katie. It’s all stories – especially the Lady of Shalott. Burne Jones, Tennyson, the Victorians loved that kind of thing. A cursed woman in a castle, dying of unrequited love. Sounds like my ex, come to think of it.”
They topped the ridge. Through the misty swathes of rain, they could just about make out the thickly-wooded hills that half-encircled the valley on the eastern side. Below them lay a wide, boggy meadow. A straggling line of knobbly-topped willows crossed the meadow diagonally from south-east to north-west, like a procession of medieval monks, marking the course of an ancient ditch. They could see Nigel about a quarter of a mile away, in his fluorescent yellow jacket and his white plastic helmet, digging.
Mark clasped his hands together and raised his eyes toward the overbearing clouds. “Dear Lord, if You’re up there, please let Nigel be digging up a bit of old bedstead.”
“But if this is Shalott—” Katie persisted.
“It isn’t Shalott, Katie. There is no Shalott, and there never was. Even if it is – which it isn’t – it’s situated slap bang in the middle of the proposed route for the Woolston relief road, which is already three-and-a-half years late and six-point-nine million pounds over budget. Which means that the county council will have to rethink their entire highways-building plan, and we won’t get paid until the whole mess has gone through a full-scale public enquiry, which probably means in fifteen years’ time.”
The Mammoth Book of Terror Page 15
