Festival of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  ‘What? That could cause irreparable damage!’

  ‘Nigel – everything that happens in this world causes irreparable damage. That’s the whole definition of history.’

  The rain had stopped completely now and Katie pushed back her hood. ‘I hate to say it, Mark, but I think you’re right. We found this tower, we found this mirror. If we report it, we’ll get nothing at all. No money, no credit. Not even a mention in the papers.’

  Nigel stood over the metal frame for a long time, his hand thoughtfully covering the lower part of his face.

  ‘Well?’ Mark asked him, at last. It was already growing dark, and a chilly mist was rising between the knobbly topped willow-trees.

  ‘All right, then, bugger it,’ said Nigel. ‘Let’s pull the bugger out.’

  Mark drove the Range Rover down the hill and jostled along the banks of the ditch until he reached the island of Shalott. He switched on all the floodlights, front and rear, and then he and Nigel fastened towing chains to the metal frame, wrapping them in torn T-shirts to protect the mouldings as much as they could. Mark slowly revved the Range Rover forward, its tires spinning in the fibrous brown mud. Nigel screamed, ‘Steady! Steady!’

  At first the metal frame wouldn’t move, but Mark tried pulling it, and then easing off the throttle, and then pulling it again. Gradually, it began to emerge from the peaty soil which covered it, and even before it was halfway out, he could see that Nigel was right, and that it was a mirror – or a large sheet of metal, anyway. He pulled it completely free, and Nigel screamed, ‘Stop!’

  They hunkered down beside it and shone their flashlights on it. The decorative vine-tendrils had been badly bent by the towing chains, but there was no other obvious damage. The surface of the mirror was black and mottled, like a serious bruise, but otherwise it seemed to have survived its seven hundred years with very little corrosion. It was over an inch thick and it was so heavy that they could barely lift it.

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Katie.

  ‘We take it back to the house, we clean it up, and we try to check out its provenance – where it was made, who made it, and what its history was. We have it assayed. Then we talk to one or two dealers who are interested in this kind of thing, and see how much we can get for it.’

  ‘And what about Shalott?’ asked Nigel. In the upward beam of his flashlight, his face had become a theatrical mask.

  ‘You can finish off your survey, Nigel. I think you ought to. But give me two versions. One for the county council, and one for posterity. As soon as you’re done, I’ll arrange for somebody to take all the stones away, and store them. Don’t worry. You’ll be able to publish your story in five or ten years’ time, and you’ll probably make a fortune out of it.’

  ‘But the island – it’s all going to be lost.’

  ‘That’s the story of Britain, Nigel. Nothing you can do can change it.’

  They heaved the mirror into the back of the Range Rover and drove back into Wincanton. Mark had rented a small end-of-terrace house on the outskirts, because it was much cheaper than staying in a hotel for seven weeks. The house was plain, flat fronted, with a scrubby front garden and a dilapidated wooden garage. In the back garden stood a single naked cherry tree. Inside, the ground-level rooms had been knocked together to make a living room with a dining area at one end. The carpet was yellow with green Paisley swirls on it, and the furniture was reproduction, all chintz and dark varnish.

  Between them, grunting, they maneuvered the mirror into the living room and propped it against the wall. Katie folded up two bath towels and they wedged it underneath the frame to stop it from marking the carpet.

  ‘I feel like a criminal,’ said Nigel.

  Mark lit the gas fire and briskly chafed his hands. ‘You shouldn’t. You should feel like an Englishman, protecting his heritage.’

  Katie said, ‘I still don’t know if we’ve done the right thing. I mean, there’s still time to declare it as a treasure trove.’

  ‘Well, go ahead, if you want Historical Site Assessment to go out of business and you don’t want a third share of whatever we can sell it for.’

  Katie went up to the mirror, licked the tip of her finger and cleaned some of the mud off it. As she did so, she suddenly recoiled, as if she had been stung. ‘Ow,’ she said, and stared at her fingertip. ‘It gave me a shock.’

  ‘A shock? What kind of a shock?’

  ‘Like static, you know, when you get out of a car.’

  Mark approached the mirror and touched it with all five fingers of his left hand. ‘I can’t feel anything.’ He licked his fingers and tried again, and this time he lifted his hand away and said, ‘Ouch! You’re right! It’s like it’s charged.’

  ‘Silver’s very conductive,’ said Nigel, as if that explained everything. ‘Sir John Raseburne wore a silver helmet at Agincourt, and he was struck by lightning. He was thrown so far into the air that the French thought he could fly.’

  He touched the mirror himself. After a while, he said, ‘No, nothing. You must have earthed it, you two.’

  Mark looked at the black, diseased surface of the mirror and said nothing.

  That evening, Mark ordered a takeaway curry from the Wincanton Tandoori in the High Street, and they ate chicken Madras and mushroom bhaji while they took it in turns to clean away seven centuries of tarnish.

  Neil played The Best of Matt Monro on his CD player. ‘I’m sorry . . . I didn’t bring any of my madrigals.’

  ‘Don’t apologize. This is almost medieval.’

  First of all, they washed down the mirror with warm, soapy water and cellulose car sponges, until all of the peaty soil was sluiced off it. Katie stood on a kitchen chair and cleaned all of the decorative detail at the top of the frame with a toothbrush and Q-tips. As she worried the mud out of the human head in the center of the mirror, it gradually emerged as a woman, with high cheekbones and slanted eyes and her hair looped up in elaborate braids. Underneath her chin there was a scroll with the single word Lamia.

  ‘Lamia?’ said Mark. ‘Is that Latin, or what?’

  ‘No, no, Greek,’ said Nigel. ‘It’s the Greek name for Lilith, who was Adam’s first companion, before Eve. She insisted on having the same rights as Adam and so God threw her out of Eden. She married a demon and became the queen of demons.

  He stepped closer to the mirror and touched the woman’s faintly smiling lips. ‘Lamia was supposed to be the most incredibly beautiful woman you could imagine. She had white skin and black eyes and breasts that no man could resist fondling. Just one night with Lamia and pfff! – you would never look at a human woman again.’

  ‘What was the catch?’

  ‘She sucked all of the blood out of you, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re talking about my ex again.’

  Katie said, ‘I seem to remember that John Keats wrote a poem called Lamia, didn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Nigel. A chap called Lycius met Lamia and fell madly in love with her. The trouble is, he didn’t realize that she was a bloodsucker and that she was cursed by God.’

  ‘Cursed?’ said Katie.

  ‘Yes, God had condemned her for her disobedience for ever. “Some penanced lady-elf . . . some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self.”’

  ‘Like the Lady of Shalott.’

  ‘Well, I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘Perhaps they were one and the same person . . . Lamia, and the Lady of Shalott.’

  They all looked at the woman’s face on top of the mirror. There was no question that she was beautiful; and even though the casting had a simplified, medieval style, the sculptor had managed to convey a sense of slyness, and of secrecy.

  ‘She was a bit of a mystery, really,’ said Nigel. ‘She was supposed to be a virgin, d’you see, “yet in the lore of love deep learnèd to the red heart’s core.” She was a bloodsucking enchantress, but at the same time she was capable of deep and genuine love. Men couldn’t resist her. Lycius said she gave him “a hundred
thirsts”.’

  ‘Just like this bloody Madras chicken,’ said Mark. ‘Is there any more beer in the fridge?’

  Katie carried on cleaning the mirror long after Mark and Nigel had grown tired of it. They sat in two reproduction armchairs drinking Stella Artois and eating cheese and onion crisps and heckling Question Time, while Katie applied 3M’s Tarni-Shield with a soft blue cloth and gradually exposed a circle of shining silver, large enough to see her own face.

  ‘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.’