Festival of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  Jack said nothing. After a lengthy silence, Davis Culbut folded the sheet of paper and handed it to him. ‘I can only tell you that I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr Keller. I’m afraid there’s nothing else that I can do.’

  They sat by the window in Steiner’s Bar on First Street West and ordered two cold William Randolph Hearsts. Their waitress was a llama, with her hair braided and tied with red-and-white ribbons, and a brass bell around her neck.

  ‘You want to see a menu?’ she asked them, in a high, rasping voice that came right from the back of the throat. ‘The special today is saddle of saddle, with maraschinos.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘No, thank you. Just the beers.’

  The waitress stared at him with her slitted golden eyes. ‘You look kind of down, my friend, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘Mirror trouble,’ said Punipuni.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. My nephew had mirror trouble, too. He lost his two daughters.’

  Jack looked up at her. ‘Did he ever try to get them back?’

  The waitress shook her head so that her bell jangled. ‘What can you do? Once they’re gone, they’re gone.’

  ‘Did he ever think of going after them?’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘Did he ever think of going into the mirror himself, to see if he could rescue them?’

  The waitress shook her head again. ‘He has five other children, and a wife to take care of.’

  ‘So what did he do?’

  ‘He broke the mirror, in the end. He couldn’t bear to hear his little girls crying.’

  When she had gone, Jack and Punipuni sat and drank their beers in silence. At last, though, Punipuni wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, ‘You’re thinking of trying it, aren’t you?’

  ‘What else can I do, Pu? I love her. I can’t just leave her there.’

  ‘Even supposing you manage to get into the mirror, what’s going to happen if you can’t get back out?’

  ‘Then I’ll just have to make my life there, instead of here.’

  Punipuni took hold of Jack’s hands and gripped them tight. ‘If your loved one falls from a high tower, even the flamingos cannot save her, and they can fly.’

  That night, Jack sat on the end of the bed staring at himself in the cheval mirror, like a fortune teller confronted by his own mischance. Outside, the city glittered on the ocean’s edge, like Camelot.

  ‘Jacqueline?’ he said, as quietly as he could, as if he didn’t really want to disturb her.

  He thought of the day when he first met her. She was riding side-saddle on a white cow through a field of sunflowers, under a sky the color of polished brass. She was wearing a broken wedding cake on her head, and a white damask tablecloth, wound around and around her and trailing to the ground.

  He stopped and shaded his eyes. He had been visiting his friend Osmond at the Mumm’s Winery in Napa, and he had drunk two very cold bottles of Cuvée Napa méthode champenoise. He had taken the wrong turning while looking for the parking lot, and he had lost his way.

  ‘Excuse me!’ he shouted, even though she was less than ten feet away from him. ‘Can you direct me to Yountville?’

  The cow replied first. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sighed, with a distinctive French accent. ‘I’ve never been there.’ She slowly rolled her shining black eyes from side to side, taking in the sunflower field. ‘To tell you the truth, I’ve never been anywhere.’

  But Jacqueline laughed and said, ‘I can show you, don’t worry!’ She slithered down from the cow and walked up to him, so that she was disturbingly close. The tablecloth had slipped and he could see that, underneath it, her breasts were bare.

  ‘You’re not really interested in going to Yountville, are you?’ she asked him. She was wearing a very strong perfume, like a mixture of lilies and vertigo. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Have I drunk too much wine or is that a wedding cake on your head?’

  ‘Yes . . . I was supposed to get married today, but I decided against it.’

  Jack swayed, and blinked, and looked around the sunflower field. Sunflowers, as far as the eye could see, nodding like busybodies.

  ‘Hold this,’ Jacqueline had told him.

  Jacqueline had given him one end of the tablecloth, and then she had proceeded to turn around and around, both arms uplifted, unwinding herself. Soon she had been completely naked, except for the wedding cake on her head and tiny, white stiletto-heeled boots, with white laces. Jack was sure that he must be hallucinating. Too much heat, too much méthode champenoise.

  Jacqueline had an extraordinary figure, almost distorted, like a fantasy. Wide shoulders, enormous breasts, the narrowest of waists, and narrow hips, too. Her skin had been tanned the color of melted caramel and it was shiny with lotion. The warm breeze that made the sunflowers nod had made her nipples knurl and stiffen, too.

  ‘I was supposed to consummate my marriage today,’ she told him. ‘But since I don’t have a groom any longer . . .’

  ‘Who were you supposed to be marrying?’

  ‘A Frenchman. But I decided against it.’

  Jack licked his lips. They were rough from sunburn and too much alcohol. Jacqueline rested one hand lightly on his shoulder and said, ‘You don’t mind doing the honors, though?’

  ‘The honors?’

  She turned around and bent over, reaching behind her with both hands and pulling apart the cheeks of her bottom. He found himself staring at her tightly-wrinkled anus and her bare, pouting vulva. Her labia were open so that he could see right inside her, pink and glistening and glutinous.

  ‘Well?’ she asked him, after a moment. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘I, ah—’

  The cow stopped munching sunflowers for a moment. ‘Si vous ne trouvez pas agréables, monsieur, vous trouverez de moins des choses nouvelles,’ she quoted, with yellow petals falling from her mottled lips. ‘If you do not find anything you like, sir, at least you will find something new.’

  Jack stripped off his shirt and unbuckled his belt, undressing as rapidly as he used to, when he was a boy, on the banks of his grandpa’s swimming hole. His penis was already hard, and when he tugged off his white boxer shorts it bobbed up eagerly.

  He approached Jacqueline from behind, his penis in his hand, and moistened his glans against her shining labia.

  ‘With this cock, you consummate our union,’ Jacqueline recited.

  He pushed himself into her, as slowly as he could. She was very wet inside, and hot, as if she were running a temperature. His penis disappeared into her vagina as far as it would go, and for a long, long moment he stood in the sunflower field, buried inside her, his eyes closed, feeling the sun and the wind on his naked body. He felt as if a moment as perfect as this was beyond sin, beyond morality, beyond all explanation.

  With his eyes still closed, he heard a light buzzing noise. He felt something settle on his shoulder, and when he opened his eyes he saw that it was a small honey-bee. He tried to flick it off, but it stayed where it was, crawling toward his neck. He twitched his shoulder, and then he blew on it, but the honey bee kept its footing.

  He heard another buzzing noise, and then another. Two more honey bees spiraled out of the breeze and settled on his back. Jacqueline groped between her legs until she found his scrotum, and she dug her fingernails into his tightly-wrinkled skin and pulled at it. ‘Harder!’ she demanded. ‘Harder! I want this union to be thoroughly consummated! Harder!’

  Jack withdrew his penis a little way and then pushed it into her deeper. She let out a high ululation of pleasure: tirra-lirra-lirra! He pushed his penis in again, and again, but each time he did so more and more honey bees settled on his shoulders. They seemed to come from all directions, pattering out of the wind like hailstones. Soon his whole back was covered in a black glittering cape of honey bees. They crawled into his hair, too, and on to his face. They even tried to crawl into his nostrils, and into his mouth.

  ‘Harder, sir knight!’ J
acqueline screamed at him. He gripped her hips in both hands and began to ram his penis into her so hard that he tugged her two or three inches into the air with every thrust. But now the honey bees were gathering between his legs, covering his balls and crawling up the crack of his buttocks. One of them stung him, and then another. He felt a burning sensation in his scrotum, and all around the base of his penis. His balls began to swell up until he was sure that they were twice their normal size.

  A honey bee crept into his anus, and stung him two or three inches inside his rectum. This explorer was followed by another, and another, and then by dozens more, until he felt as if a blazing thorn-bush had been forced deep into his bottom. Yet Jacqueline kept screaming at him, her breasts jiggling like two huge Jell-Os with every thrust, and in spite of the pain he felt a rising ecstasy that made him feel that his penis was a volcano, and that his sperm was molten lava, and that he was right on the brink of eruption.

  Jacqueline began to quake. ‘Oh con-sume-AAAAAAAAation!’ she cried out, as if she were singing the last verse in a tragic opera. She dropped on to her knees on the dry-baked earth, between the sunflower stalks, and as she did so, Jack, in his suit of living bees, spurted semen on to her lower back, and her anus, and her gaping cunt.

  He pitched sideways on to the earth beside her, stunned by his ejaculation, and as he did so, the bees rose up from him, almost as one, and buzzed away. Only a few remained, dazedly crawling out of his asshole, as if they were potholers who had survived a whole week underground. They preened their wings for a while, and then they flew away, too.

  ‘You’ve been stung,’ said Jacqueline, touching Jack’s swollen lips. His body was covered all over with red lumps and his eyes were so puffy he was almost blind. His penis was gigantic, even now that his erection had died away.

  Jack stroked the line of her finely plucked cheekbones. He had never seen a girl with eyes this color. They were so green that they shone like traffic signals on a wet August night in Savannah.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked her.

  ‘Jacqueline Fronsart. I live in Yountville. I can show you the way.’

  They lay amongst the sunflowers for almost a half hour, naked. Jacqueline stretched out the skin of Jack’s scrotum so that it glowed scarlet against the sunlight, like a medieval parchment, and then she licked it with her tongue to cool the swelling. In return he sucked her nipples against the roof of his mouth until she moaned at him in Mandarin to stop.

  Eventually the cow coughed and said, ‘They’ll be wondering where I am. And anyway, my udder’s beginning to feel full.’

  ‘You shouldn’t eat sunflowers,’ Jacqueline admonished her.

  ‘You shouldn’t eat forbidden fruit,’ the cow retorted.

  But now Jacqueline was gone and the mirror showed nothing but his own reversed image, and the bed, and the dying sunlight inching down the bedroom wall. Dim, jerky, far away, he heard a boat hooting in the Bay and it reminded him of the old dentist from Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Still waiting there, the last boat whistling in the last harbor.

  ‘What’s going to happen if you can’t get back out?’ Punipuni had asked him.

  He didn’t know. He couldn’t see much of the world in the mirror. Only the bedroom, and part of the hallway, and it all looked the same as this world, except that it was horizontally transversed. Medieval painters invented a device with three mirrors which enabled you to see your face the way it really was. Frightening, in a way. Your own face, staring at you, as if your head had been cut off.

  He stood up and pulled his dark blue cotton sweater over his head. He had never felt so alone. He unfastened his belt and stepped out of his stone-colored chinos. He folded his chinos and laid them on the bed. At last he took off his shorts and stood naked in front of the mirror.

  ‘Jacqueline?’ he called. Even if he couldn’t penetrate the mirror, he needed to see her, to know that she was still there. Who hath seen her wave her hand? Or at the casement seen her stand? The Lady of Shalott.

  ‘Jacqueline?’ he repeated. ‘Jacqueline, I’ll come join you. I don’t care what it’s like in the mirror world. I just can’t stand to live without you.’

  The phone rang, beside the bed. He ignored it, to begin with, but it rang on and on and in the end he had to pick it up.

  ‘Mr German-cellar? It is I Punipuni Puu-suke.’

  ‘What do you want, Pu?’

  ‘I have decided that it is in the interests of both of us for me to open the restaurant this evening. I will be serving boiled pens in their own ink.’

  Jack didn’t take his eyes off the mirror. He was sure that he had seen the mirror curtains stir, even though the windows were closed.

  ‘Pu . . . if that’s what you want to do.’

  ‘We cannot afford to be closed, Mr German-cellar. The fierceness of the competition does not allow us.’ He paused for a moment, and then he said, ‘What are you contemplating, Mr German-cellar?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

  ‘You are not reconsidering a plunge into the mirror, sir? You know that it is better to rub margarine on your head than to run after a wig in a hurricane.’

  ‘Pu—’

  ‘Mr German-cellar, I do not wish for throat-constricting goodbyes. I wish for you to remain on this side of the reflective divide.’

  ‘Pu, I’ll be fine. Just open the restaurant.’

  ‘You must promise me, Mr German-cellar, that you will not do anything maniacal.’

  Jack put the phone down. He couldn’t make any promises to anyone. You can only make a promise if you understand how the world works, and after Jacqueleine’s disappearance he had discovered that life is not arranged in any kind of pattern, but incomprehensible. Nothing follows. Nothing fits together.

  He returned to the mirror and stood facing it. As he did so, the door in the reflection slowly swung open and Jacqueline slowly walked in. Her face was very pale, and her hair was elaborately curled and braided. She was wearing a royal-blue military jacket, with gold epaulets and frogging, and black riding-boots which came right up over her knees, but nothing else. Her heels rapped on the bedroom floor as she approached him.

  Jack pressed the palms of his hands against the mirror. ‘Jacqueline . . . what’s going on? Why are you dressed like that?’

  She pressed her palms against his, although all he could feel was cold glass. Her eyes looked unfocused, as if she were very tired, or drugged.

  ‘It’s a parade,’ she told him, as if that explained everything.

  ‘Parade? What parade? You’re practically naked.’

  She gave him a blurred and regretful smile. ‘It’s all different here, Jack.’

  He felt a tear creeping down his left cheek. ‘I’ve decided to join you. I’ve thought about it . . . and there isn’t any other way.’

  ‘You can’t. Not unless the mirror wants you.’

  ‘Then tell me how.’

  ‘You can’t, Jack. It doesn’t work that way. It’s all to do with vanity.’

  ‘I don’t understand. I just want us to be together, it doesn’t matter where.’

  Jacqueline said, ‘I walked down to the Embarcadero yesterday afternoon. The band was playing. The bears were dancing. And there it was, waiting for me. A rowboat, with my name on it.’

  ‘What?’

  She looked at him dreamily. ‘Jack . . . there’s always a boat waiting for all of us. The last boat whistling in the last harbor. One day we all have to close the book and close the door behind us and walk down the hill.’

  ‘Tell me how I can get into the mirror!’

  ‘You can’t, Jack.’

  Jack took a step back. He was breathing so heavily that his heart was thumping and his head was swimming. Jacqueline was less than three feet away from him, with those salmon eyes and those enormous breasts and that vulva like a brimming peach. All of the days and nights they had spent together flickered through his head like pictures in a zoetrope.

  Jacqueline said, ‘Jack –
you have to understand. It’s not that everything changes. Don’t you get it? Everything was back to front to begin with.’

  He took another step back, and then another, and then another. When he reached the bed, he stepped to one side. Jacqueline stood with her hands pressed flat against the mirror, like a child staring into a toy-store window.

  ‘Jack, whatever you’re thinking, don’t.’

  He didn’t hesitate. He ran toward the mirror, and on his last step he stretched out both of his hands ahead of him like a diver and plunged straight into the glass. It burst apart, with a crack like lightning, and he hurtled through the mahogany frame and on to the floor, with Jacqueline lying underneath him.

  But this wasn’t the soft, warm Jacqueline who had wriggled next to him in bed. This was a brilliant, sharp, shining Jacqueline – a woman made out of thousands of shards of dazzling glass. Her face was made of broken facets in which he could see his own face reflected again and again. Her breasts were nothing more than crushed and crackling heaps of splinters, and her legs were like scimitars.

  But Jack was overwhelmed with grief and lust and he wanted her still, however broken she was. He pushed his stiffened penis into her shattered vagina, and he thrust, and thrust, and grunted, and thrust, even though the glass cut slices from his glans, and stripped his skin to bloody ribbons. With each thrust the glass sliced deeper and deeper, into the spongy blood-filled tissue of his penile shaft, into his veins, into his nerve endings. Yet he could no longer distinguish between agony and pleasure, between need and self-mutilation.

  He held Jacqueline as tightly as he could, and kissed her. The tip of his tongue was sliced off, and his face was criss-crossed with gaping cuts.

  ‘We’re together,’ he panted, with blood bubbling out of his mouth. ‘We’re together!’

  He squeezed her breasts with both hands and three of his fingers were cut down to the bone. His left index finger flapped loosely on a thread of skin, and nothing else. But he kept on pushing his hips against her, even though his penis was in tatters, and his scrotum was sliced open so that his bloodied testicles hung out on tubes.