Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction

by Richard Bowes

  HANDSOME DEVIL

  STORIES OF SIN AND SEDUCTION

  STEVE BERMAN

  Copyright © 2013 by Steve Berman.

  Cover photographs by Valua Vitaly.

  Photo composite and cover design by Sherin Nicole.

  Cover design by Sherin Nicole.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  Cover title set in QumpellkaNo12 typeface by Gluk Fonts.

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-430-0 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-425-6 (trade paperback)

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  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

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  Contents

  Introduction — Steve Berman

  Lilac Season — Claire Humphrey

  A Spoonful of Salt — Nicole M. Taylor

  Man in Blue Overcoat — Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  This Is Not a Love Story — Nicole Kornher-Stace

  The White Prince — Orrin Grey

  Pira — Brad Strickland

  The Cure — Caren Gussoff

  Unveiled — J. Daniel Stone

  The Wedding Guest — Steve Chapman

  A Shot of Fireball — Carrie Laben

  Catherine and the Satyr — Theodora Goss

  The Queen and the Cambion — Richard Bowes

  Sleep of Reason — Halli Villegas

  The Love of the Emperor Is Divine — Tom Cardamone

  Please Do Me: An Oral History — Nick Mamatas

  The Queen of Them All — Ed Kurtz

  Her Sweet Solace — J. T. Glover

  Tears for Lilu — Martin Rose

  Cain — Tanith Lee

  Given to the Sea — E. L. Kemper

  The Oily Man — Alex Jeffers

  Dirty — Stephen Pope

  Winter — Michelle Sagara

  Prince of Flowers — Elizabeth Hand

  It Was the Heat — Pat Cadigan

  “Love is a devil. There is no evil but Love.”

  —William Shakespeare

  “Handsome is as handsome does”

  —J.R.R. Tolkien

  Introduction

  As you turn the pages of this volume past the table of contents, you invite into your imagination a grand collection of Lotharios who seek to seduce you. Seduction. From the Latin seducere, “to lead away or lead astray.” In English, the term was first used to describe the enticing of an individual away from the true faith (Roman Catholic or Anglican, depending on the era), but around the latter half of the eighteenth century “seduction” acquired the meaning we currently recognize: leading astray into sexual error.

  Only women could be “seduced,” of course—we’re more equal opportunity today, perhaps—beguiled off the path of virtue to wantonness. Ah, but did not Moll Flanders enjoy a more entertaining life before she renounced her “Fortunes and Misfortunes”? I promise she did, and so will you by the time you finish the last page of this book. The philanderers in these stories are the best at seduction because they are no normal men but rather supernatural entities best classified as incubi.

  Incubus. Also Latin, from a verb meaning “to lie upon.” Eventually the noun came to mean “nightmare”—when adopted into English, a very solid, if supernatural, bad dream.

  In Sands’s Demon Possession in Elizabethan England, the author reports a sixteenth-century belief that any cinema attendee of the twentieth and early twenty-first century has come to know as fact, at least within the genre of the horror film (and arguably fiction):

  Young women were thought to be more attractive to demons than old women, men, or children, implicating female sexuality as a condition for possession. The behavior of women possessed was frequently interpreted by onlookers as similar to the behavior of sexually aroused women … Phantom pregnancies were considered a symptom of possession or sexual activity with an incubus, a male demon who copulated with human females and pretended to impregnate them but who possessed no seed.1

  But long before Queen Elizabeth’s time medieval minds had devised elegant explanations for the problems of male nocturnal emission and pregnancy in virgins (the Church preferred not to permit later maidens to share Mary’s divine lover). For the first, the wily, wanton succubus (Latin, from a verb meaning “to lie under”—even in infernal dalliances patriarchy demands the missionary position); for the more serious second, the incubus.

  It should be pointed out that orthodoxy insisted demons were infertile. The lucky man visited by a succubus could not sire a half-infernal child on his demon lover because male bad behavior has few consequences. The sins of women must, however. To get around that conundrum, one line of thought suggests succubus and incubus were the same demon, a gender-bending fiend. In female guise she would visit blameless men, especially priests. Having succeeded in her goal of harvesting their seed, the cunning fiend underwent a foul inversion to masculine form and sowed that ill-gotten seed in the wombs of his unlucky victims. (Cloistered nuns especially preferred.) Apparently the interval within unholy flesh had a corrosive effect on human sperm, as the offspring of such complicated congress (sometimes referred to as cambions) possessed a wicked nature if not demonic powers.

  With the advent of the so-called Age of Reason in the eighteenth century and the twin marches of science and technology into the nineteenth, the traditional villains of Christian demonology were largely discredited. The incubus was relegated to the old-fashioned realm of folk tale. There remained a persistent demand for supernatural rakes, however (women being still prone to bad behavior), so from the fringes of literature arose a fearsome upstart: the vampire. The whole messy, unmentionable business of sexuality could be ignored—spilt blood might be spoken of in polite society, unlike spilt semen. Seduction by the vampire led not to pregnancy (a risky condition before modern medicine, to be sure) and wicked bastards but to a preternatural disease (which need not be explicitly labeled “venereal”) that spread from victim to victim.

  Yet, although the vampire’s popularity has only increased (and, lucky fiend, modern writers have been pleased to reveal the sensuality underlying his seductiveness), like all slumbering beasts the incubus was merely biding his time. The 1970s saw the release of Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin and the film The Omen, and the notion that the greatest of evils springs from the womb gained new currency. Copulation with demons or the Devil himself, willing and otherwise, returned to the zeitgeist. Scholars of pop literature and film have doubtless found ingenious methods of tying this trope to the invention of the Pill and the legalization of abortion. I am sure a solid case can be made for the rise of demonic rape in contemporary storytelling being among the patriarchy’s responses to contemporary women’s hard-won control of their own fertility.

  There are folk who assume all stories of incubi enchanting women (and men—yes, as a gay man, I can’t responsibly deny my fellows’ propensity to fall into the arms of scoundrels) are tales of rape and thus should neither be written nor read. All discussion of political correctness or “censorship” aside, and without denying the darkness in some of the fantastical tales that follow, I can assure you, gentle reader, that the seductions, the indulgences, are more often consensual and mutually enjoyed than the medieval mind could ever credit. The “sin” in this book’s subt
itle is a word to attract the casual eye rather than any judgment on sensuality or sexuality. “Handsome Devil” need not be a term of opprobrium.

  So settle someplace warm and comfortable. Perhaps have a glass of wine close at hand. Inhibitions should be suspended as much as disbelief, you see. Welcome these incubi into your imagination. Just be wary if they linger too long … handsome devils have been known to do so throughout the ages.

  Steve Berman

  Summer 2013

  1 Sands, Kathleen R., Demon Possession In Elizabethan England (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004) 19

  Lilac Season

  Claire Humphrey

  I wore my funeral dress to Crystal’s wedding. It was the only dress that felt right any more, even though the black cotton strained at the buttons across my chest and around my hips. Mom had draped her cream-and-blue scarf around my neck, but it was still the same dress everyone in Van Eyck had seen me wear at six visitations, six services, six interments.

  The church in Davisville was much bigger than ours, with a view right across the lake to the distant towers of Toronto. Mom parked in the middle of the lot and we walked past a whole fleet of the wedding party’s vehicles, all studded with pink tissue carnations.

  On the church steps, a half dozen groomsmen stood in a ragged line. One of them had already lost his corsage, his lapel adorned only with a scrap of greenery and a pearl-headed pin. “More for the bride’s side?” he said, extending an arm to me. “Beautiful day for a wedding, isn’t it?”

  Over his shoulder I saw Mom, winking madly and shooing her hands at me.

  “I guess,” I said to the groomsman, smiling as much as I ever did these days, but I watched his face go cool with disappointment.

  The groomsman led me up and handed me into a pew decked with white ribbon. Mom slid in beside me. I shut my eyes and listened. In the high-ceilinged sanctuary, I could hear the square heels of children’s shoes and the sharper heels of ladies’, and a buzz of excited whispering quite different from the hush preceding a funeral service.

  “Crystal lost people that day, too,” Mom whispered to me, “and look at her now.”

  I opened my eyes to look, and there she was: Crystal Romijn, soon to be Crystal Smits, glowing and poised at the bottom of the aisle, as the organist began the wedding march.

  Her father held her arm. Led her forward. Step and pause, step and pause, looking around the church like royalty.

  Crystal might have lost people that day, the day of the accident, but she hadn’t lost her father. She hadn’t lost her fiancé, who waited for her at the head of the aisle, with his open hands reaching out.

  I was happy for her. As happy as I could be, with my own father in the ground, and so many others.

  Dinner was served in the church hall. I sat with Mom at a ladies’ table, along with some other unmarried daughters. Every ten minutes someone began the relentless din of forks against glasses again, and Crystal had to get up and haul her train out from under her new husband’s feet and present her lips to him. She didn’t look as if she minded. By the time the main course was served—pork chops with almond green beans and roasted potatoes—the newlyweds were pink with wine and laughter, and the kisses began to lengthen.

  I was old enough for wine now, just, but the smell of it reminded me of the compost heap in Mom’s garden, or the grapes left crushed and rotting on the roads behind the harvest trucks in autumn. I drank water, and left a portion of my pork chop on my plate.

  Mom nodded her approval: she used to scold me for overeating, but these days she did not have to mention it. I could tell it tasted good, the sweet-savoury stickiness of the maple glaze, but it was as if the goodness was happening to someone else, someone in the next chair over. Mom and I placed our cutlery at the same neat angle on our plates, sat back, and pretended to turn our attention to the maid of honour’s toast.

  And finally the toasts ended, and everyone rose in a clatter of chairs and shoes, and the MC announced, “Ladies and gents, the bar is open!”

  I rose in as much of a hurry as everyone else, but I went the opposite way from the crowd, back into the church.

  The sanctuary smelled of lemon oil and old wood. I rounded the foremost pews where the two families had been seated; they were still decorated with bunches of white peonies. The white carpet rolled out in the aisle for Crystal’s promenade felt spongy under the heels of my shoes.

  I pushed through the double doors at the bottom of the aisle, to the vestibule. I sat on the small table where the programs were stacked on Sunday mornings, and I leaned down to unbuckle my ankle-straps and let my shoes slip off my feet. Then I unwound Mom’s scarf and dropped it, too, and unbuttoned the collar of my funeral dress.

  In the dim hush, between two sets of doors, I tilted my head back to keep the tears from welling.

  I did not want to weep again. I felt as if I’d done nothing else since the accident. But my father should have been there. We should have been seated at a table with another family, not at the widows’ table. My friends should have been there: Katie and Marieke and even Angela, who I’d bickered with all the time but now missed every bit as much as the others.

  Jason and Piet should have been there, too, swapping jokes and hockey stories. Maybe Piet would have asked Angela to marry him by now. Maybe Jason would have made up his mind to move to Toronto. Maybe Marieke would have been in Crystal’s wedding party, instead of one of the Davisville girls.

  One accident, two cars, six funerals. A hundred and fifty days of mourning, so far. And I could not begin to count all the ways things had changed.

  Just as I was about to put my shoes back on and go hunt down a Kleenex to blow my nose, the outer door swung open and one of the groomsmen slipped in.

  He held one of the paper candle-lanterns that had been hung in the lilac trees around the church grounds. It swung from a negligent hand as he turned and pulled the door shut behind him, almost soundless.

  My nose was going to run if I didn’t do something. I sniffled.

  He spun, brows high. He wasn’t one of the groom’s family, not with those dark eyes and hair. His coat was different from the others’, too, longer, and it fit him like it was his and not a rental. His corsage—tattered, petal-bruised—drooped from a collar of black silk.

  “You must be on the Davisville team,” I said. “Congratulations on the cup.”

  He chuckled. “Thank you. Though I can’t claim much of the glory. I’m new here.”

  “Still, you must be pretty good, or you guys wouldn’t have unseated the three-year reigning champs.”

  That was a bad thing for me to say, because it reminded me why we weren’t winning any more: Jason had been top scorer last year and Piet had been goalie, until they were taken from us.

  I looked up at the ceiling again. The groomsman’s shadow stretched crazily across it as he swung the lantern in his hand.

  I heard rustling, and felt something soft pressed into my hand. A handkerchief.

  I dried my cheeks with it. “I didn’t think people had these any more,” I said thickly.

  “I’m old-fashioned,” said the groomsman serenely, settling his weight against the table beside me. He twisted to set the lantern behind us, and faced forward again, his features in shadow.

  He did not ask me why I was weeping at a wedding. He said instead, “I knew the Riesling in these parts had an excellent reputation, but I had never tasted it until today.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t drink.”

  He half-turned toward me, that brow going up again. “No?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t like the taste.”

  “You will,” he said. “Find me later. When you’re ready.”

  He settled a warm palm on my shoulder.

  I flinched away, annoyed. “No, thanks.”

  He only looked amused, withdrew his hand slowly, and shifted to his feet. Took up the lantern and let himself into the sanctuary, leaving me alone in the dark.

  I gave myself
a few minutes to regain my composure. When I thought I was ready to return, I strapped my shoes on again, and picked up the scarf, and only then realized the groomsman must have seen me barefoot, with my dress opened to show my collarbone and the lacy top edge of my camisole and the full upper curves of my breasts.

  Blushing, I gave myself another few minutes.

  The first dance was past already; I saw Crystal seated and fanning herself, with her cousin offering her a glass of sparkling wine. I saw a cluster of black suits at the bar, and tried not to look that way.

  I nearly fled back to the vestibule, but Mom was at the coffee station, beckoning me over.

  “Mrs Van Houten, this is my daughter, Sofie,” she said. “Sofie, I’d like you to meet Mrs Van Houten. She’s one of Crystal’s new aunts.”

  I shook hands, and said enough of the right things to make Mom happy.

  “I have a young man who’d love to make your acquaintance,” Mrs Van Houten said. “He’s visiting. Friend of my nephew Wilfred’s.”

  With Mom right there, I couldn’t say anything other than yes.

  Mrs Van Houten looked over at the bar, and beckoned.

  The man who approached wasn’t one of the blue-eyed Smits boys, though. He was the groomsman who had given me his handkerchief.

  He smiled enchantingly at Mrs Van Houten, and then at me, raising his brow just slightly when I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “Željko, this is Sofie Lowsley,” Mrs Van Houten said, “from over in Van Eyck. Sofie, Željko Ilić.” She sounded out his name carefully, as if she’d just had a lesson.

  Željko shook my hand. He said, “You look ready for something to drink. Can I get you a glass of wine?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  Mom said, “Now, Sofie, be polite.”

  If she didn’t care, I guessed I didn’t have grounds to object. I didn’t resist when Željko led me away.

  We did not go to the bar, as I’d expected. Željko led me straight past it and out the side door of the church, into fresh evening, lilac-scented. A few fireflies floated along the hedge that separated the church from the manse garden. Mourning doves called in the dusk.

  We did not stay outside, though; we went back in through the front doors, and up the steps toward the choir-loft.