Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction

  “Strangest thing,” the new guard says as he sips his morning coffee. “They found him dead this morning.”

  “Oh?”

  “They say he died in a very dishonorable manner.”

  “Come now, my friend. Satisfy my curiosity. You are about to torture me. Surely you might grant a man such a kind mercy as to distract me from my worries?”

  The guard laughed, a good man called into the service of a terrible employment.

  “Well, it’s said that he was pleasuring himself and decided to use a rope around his neck. And at the sensitive moment, he misjudged, and hanged himself in the throes of ecstasy.”

  “Did she?” the captive whispers. His gaze fades as though imagining the scene and stitching together the narrative with greater energy and his lips part.

  “He, you mean,” the guard corrects.

  The captive recollects himself and his gaze flicks to the guard.

  “Of course. I misspoke. Might I have a cigarette?” he asks.

  The guard puts down his coffee with a long-suffering sigh and offers the prisoner one: and when they are ensconced in cigarette smoke, the captive begins to speak.

  “You know how I got here, right?” he asks.

  The guard shakes his head.

  “Well, why don’t I tell you,” he suggests, “and if you know of Scheherazade, then you know what I am doing, what I am up to.”

  Cain

  Tanith Lee

  He was born seven minutes before me, and lived for two. By the time I had begun to breathe, he was dead. We were identical, so alike that if he’d lived, no one could have told us apart. Miranda revealed all this many years later, one night when she was unusually, spectacularly drunk. But by then, of course, I knew him well.

  One of my earliest memories is that I thought my name was Hill Town. Actually it’s Hilton, like the old hotels. I can remember asking my mother why I had this name, and had we lived on a hill? She laughed and dismissed me; I was still at the entertaining but relatively unobtrusive stage. The Girl—always there was a Girl to look after me—took me away, down to the edge of the blue creaming sea. “Look, fishes!” said the Girl. And we watched dolphins, which sometimes came in so near the shore, leaping like gray silk balloons from the water.

  The sea house was a large one, with white columns. In the garden were palms and enormous orange trees. But at other times we were in the city. I was taught at home by a succession of tutors. My remote father didn’t believe in my mixing in the rough-and-tumble of real life before I had to. I was, needless to say, a lonely child. The Girls were pretty, and mostly tried, I think, to be kind. But in a way they resented me, this dark cute little kid who was swathed in so much money, when they and theirs had had to struggle. Always a problem with servants, I suppose, however well-treated or well-paid. And frankly, I’d imagine the Girls weren’t that well-treated or paid. My father gave some of them special attention, and then they left. I recall my mother, white as marshmallow, shouting in a lofty room, “Since the baby, you don’t want me, do you?”

  “Oh, Miranda,” said my father, solid as granite to her sweet wobbling softness, “you’re so impossibly self-centered. Why does it have to be about you? Couldn’t I just fancy a change?”

  I remember too Miranda’s tall morning glasses of fruit juice and gin, which, as the day went on, altered to glasses of pure gin, with only an orange or lemon slice swimming there like a fish.

  As the years passed, her marshmallow softness became spread on her more lavishly. But she was a beautiful woman, even large, a fat, white, pampered seal, with yearning coal-dark eyes. Do you sense I loved her? I don’t know. I simply watched her. She was a glamorous being hung with jewels and glasses of alcohol, who normally inhabited the same buildings with me.

  As I grew older, she became more interested in me—once she saw I was a male, that is, not simply a boy child. She would rub me down with a towel when I came out of the sea or the pool. She would brush my hair, take my face between her hands, and stare into my eyes. She called me her “handsome hound.” “So streamlined and slender,” she would say. “And such lovely heartless eyes!” At first I think I didn’t dislike this. Then it embarrassed me. I can’t recollect quite when my self-consciousness began. Around puberty I would think. There was nothing sexual in her actions, though sensual perhaps. But fondling had for me an amorous quality from the very first.

  I said I was a lonely child, but that was in the day. I knew instinctively that my questions and conversations bored everyone. What to me was so new and odd was to them merely routine, beyond discussion. Yet also by day I was generally in the company of adults, my mother, sometimes my father, the tutors, the Girls. At night, bathed and combed and put to bed in silk pajamas, the mosquito net drawn like a film of mist about the bed, the window showing in its long frame the indigo star-daubed vista of sea and sky, or the light-hives of a city without other stars—at night, I was alone. More alone than most. My father frowned on any toys that were not instructional, in some way intellectual; I was taught chess at seven. And so no furry, floppy companion shared my bed from the age of five. I’d cried when they took my bear and rabbit away. My father explained that I was too old for them, and that in the children’s home to which they went, they were needed far more. He had always this habit, of abruptly seeing necessary benefits for others when he wanted to deprive his own family of something. (For example, the three Girls who were sent away would thereby lose their essential wages, bringing their kin to poverty—how was it my mother was oblivious to this? But she had obstinately continued oblivious.) However, my own horror was mitigated by the knowledge that my friends would be loved and housed.

  I think six months elapsed before I replaced them.

  How did it start? I had, when alone, talked to myself all that while, because I didn’t interrupt myself, or criticize—or very little, something had come off on me from the adult world—and because I found my own voice not repellent or annoying as, very evidently, now and then others did. Somewhere in the preslumbering dark, lit by the blue sea window or the honeycomb of city lights, my talk began to be not to myself, but to another.

  Children generally fall asleep quickly. Some nights I spoke for ten or fifteen minutes, on some for one or two. That sense that I was listened to was very definite. And presently, also the sense that this was a secret thing, which should be mentioned to no one else. But then, I wasn’t a confessing child, had never been encouraged to be. Tell mother. Your father wants to know. These were the phrases attendant on transgression, not invitations to confide.

  Even had I confided, of course, my nocturnal chats, though doubtlessly disapproved, would have been safely enough categorized. I had, like so many lonely infants, an Imaginary Friend.

  The Girl had slapped me during my bath. It was a hard slap, across my legs. I’d been splashing a lot. I don’t know why. I was never a very boisterous child. The point, which I didn’t then—I was eight—understand, was that she had on a gold lamé dress. She had fallen in love with my father and wanted to catch his eye, and to do this, pretending it was for some date she had after my bath, she had had to dress up first—he only came into my room for a few minutes before dinner. Inevitably, I’d splashed the dress. There was a wet patch on the inferior lamé, over her breast, which she’d wanted to sparkle. It looked like the map of Italy.

  The slap hurt quite badly, perhaps because I was wet. She looked at its reddening formation on my thighs in terror. She said she was sorry, so sorry, but her boyfriend was so particular. “If señor ask,” she said, “tell you slipped, yes?”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “You are a good little boy.”

  In fact, my father never noticed, either the red slap or the map of Italy, or her gaudy clothing.

  When they were all gone, I lay in bed, and rubbed my thighs where the sting had been. I told my Imaginary Friend what had happened. And it was then, then for the very first time, I felt him. Because he touched me. He touched the place whe
re I’d been slapped. He caressed it, as soothingly as a mother, over and over, stroking me until I tingled. In the end, consoled, curiously excited, yet calm, I fell asleep; and as I did, I felt his arms holding me.

  Why didn’t I marvel at this? Why wasn’t I alarmed? Everything is strange to a child. Very little makes any sense. Why is the sky blue? Why must I eat now when I’m not hungry, and not now, when I am? Why are you angry with me simply because I’m here. None of these inquiries, mostly unvoiced, gets a proper answer.

  And this—this was very nice. It was comforting, and I’d had no comfort at all. Even falling down in the sand on the beach, cutting my knee on a shell, a great fuss, painful antiseptic, a stitch put in by a scowling doctor—but no comfort. Be a brave boy.

  Yes, this was nice. And half waking once, the sense that he was still there. Not seen, but warmly touching, holding me, coiled about me, and I about him, the way I had seen cats asleep on sunny walls.

  Every night after that, he stroked me, and, leading my hands, led me to stroke him. He felt just like myself. Smooth and thin, almost snakelike, sleek. His hair was exactly the same longish length as mine, and smelled like mine, as his body did, of expensive soap and some child’s cologne, of shampoo and sea and salt. Of flesh, too, of the warmth of hidden valves, extrusions, and crevices, with their tang of meat and spice.

  I don’t remember when he kissed me first. It was a gentle brushing thing. I think I must have been ten or so. His closed mouth had a whisper-scent of toothpaste, just like my own.

  I’d call him by a name—I haven’t said, have I? I left off using it later—which was a makeshift of my own, a childish anagram, Holtni. (Hold me?) But even then I never used this name to him, only when I thought about him by day, which now I often did. I’ll tell Holtni about that big car I saw. I’ll tell Holtni Momma was sick and had to lie down. Or, Holtni will cuddle me, because I hadn’t done my mathematics very well, and my tutor shouted, saying I was a brainless little rich boy, as if rich were an obscenity—as, of course, it was.

  But I recall the next events, when everything changed, perfectly well.

  Puberty had commenced, but I didn’t know. No one had really warned me. There had been a book, which had diagrams, telling, it seemed—I was bored and didn’t try hard with it, there were so many dull books they made me read—only things I knew. That I had a penis, and two nipples, all three of which, like soldiers, might suddenly stand to attention. That was funny. I waited, but they didn’t. Probably all a mistake, just the same as the idea I would be good at sport, while, aside from swimming, I could do nothing sporting at all. One of the tutors had attempted to give me a sex lesson, but for his own ends, I would guess, judging from his overnight dismissal—something to do with the young gardener.

  I was twelve. I was in my mother’s room. Sometimes I went there when she was absent. I had liked to feel her dresses and sniff them, to pry into cupboards, drawers. I found curious things. A box like a shell with a rubber thing in it like something out of the sea—appropriate enough, given the box. And once a carton of things like large cigarettes, but these were, once extracted, too white and ultimately bendy, and I couldn’t see how you would light them. Luckily I never confided anything about these discoveries either. The notion of her preadolescent son routing among her diaphragm and tampons would have sent Miranda hysterical.

  Her jewels intrigued me too. As a child I loved to see her in them. She was, for a second, like something from the Arabian Nights (doubtless the expurgated version), leaning to kiss me good night, smelling of Les Yeux du Noir, her neck and ears lambent with cool, flashing emeralds, inflamed rubies, or the gold cross set with three diamonds between her breasts. The jewel boxes were sometimes locked, but she was forgetful. It was not until I was fifteen that I learned that these were all copies. The real gems were worn only once or twice a year.

  One can say that I had a sexual craving that stemmed from my mother, from her attributes—garments, ornament—more than her body, her self.

  This must be so, because that day in her room I was moved to strip, and look at myself in her pier glass, where I could see all of me.

  My theory then for doing it was that my own mirrors were either not full length, or in different places. My body seemed to me much larger and broader, and I wanted an overview.

  Whatever, my clothes came off and I stepped naked to her glass, standing there on the deep carpet in the shining sunlight of the sea house. And here I was, Hilton.

  I knew I was handsome. People remarked on it, and I had come to recognize what they pointed out. The large dark eyes and long lashes, the thin straight nose, the thick straight brows and thick straight hair. A long and narrow physique, long-legged, the shoulders widening. Clear skin mildly tanned from the days at the beach, the white band only about my loins, where, in a black thicket, the snake lay like a little velvet trunk. As I looked, I thought Holtni’s like me, so he too looks just like this. Even though I’ve never seen him. I’ll tell him how I’ve looked at me. I’ll ask him.

  As I said it, a blush went up my face, dark red. And my entire body quickened. I felt a wonderful, shameful, under-earth pressure. My blood was full of spangles and darts and up it rose, that velvet trunk, thickening and pushing, straight up, as the diagram in the awful book had foretold.

  I put my hand on it in astonishment, and a shudder of the darkest, most intense feeling went through me. I shut my eyes and played with myself, opened them and stopped. I could feel something building in me, from the base of my spine to the crown of my head, the soles of my feet. It scared me. It was like running along a corridor, and knowing at the end there must come an opening and a colossal leap—but into what?

  I turned my back on my image that was also the image of Holtni-Hold-Me. I put on my clothes, forcing my deflating erection inside like a naughty animal.

  Then I went for a long walk along the beach, drank a Coke at a café I was forbidden, watched other boys, the kind I’d never met, throwing a ball in the paint-blue water.

  Very carefully, I didn’t think one thought about bed, nighttime, anything like that.

  In any case, there was a dinner party that evening, and I was expected to be there for the first part of it. My father, utterly indifferent to me as a person, liked to show me off as a valuable possession. I was well-trained, polite, and, if not witty or skillful, at least graceful in my reticence. I said very little but listened attentively. Guests tended to exclaim that I was a model son.

  The evening passed. Miranda wore a green Lavinché gown, and, as ever, got enormously drunk, showing not too many signs of it, she and her body being so accustomed to the state of drunkenness. My father moved among his friends and business acquaintances. Two daughters of some politician, thirteen and fifteen, seemed both quite interested in me. Flattered and uneasy, I sat between them at dinner, eating decorously the iced soup and squab, the skulls of white meringues. One girl, the fifteen year old, told me quietly I was beautiful enough to kiss. If I could find an excuse to leave the party and come on to the balcony, where night-blooming jasmine made a canopy, she’d show me how.

  I didn’t want to go, and therefore felt I must. My father had always insisted I behave impeccably with his guests.

  Outside, the night was full of perfumes and murmurs, the sea, distant music from the little orchestra, laughter and talk.

  The girl drew me in under the jasmine. She was one inch taller than I, but this was no problem. She pressed her lipsticked mouth to mine, and slid her tongue among my teeth. Presently we clung together; I, because she clung to me.

  At last she drew back. “Not bad. You’re a wicked boy. You’ve been with a woman, I bet.”

  I said nothing. I had gathered, from literature alone, that to go with a woman was my destiny and function, a cause for congratulation, as with successful schoolwork.

  She reapplied her lipstick, pinched my bottom, and went back in to the party.

  Soon after, at about eleven, it was suggested to me surreptitiously
by the current Girl that I should go to bed.

  As I climbed the stairs, nothing about the politician’s daughter stayed with me. Although I knew the rising of my flesh was directly connected with what she had done and said, I had felt no connection as it occurred. I had not come erect, and, indeed, had known enough to ease back from her, as if to stop her feeling what in fact had not happened.

  Even so, I was now disturbed. For in my bed waited my intimate companion.

  By now, I’d decided that my own powers of the imagination had made him seem so real for me. Beginning to reason, having been made to do it by my various teachers, I’d awarded him at last the license of My Fantasy. That I was homosexual, oddly, did not occur to me. Until this particular night, I hadn’t once equated his caresses and my own with anything other than true companionship.

  In my bedroom, however, I began to know differently.

  No sooner was the door shut than my penis started to move independently. I’d already bathed before dinner. Now I went to shower and ran it chill. But this did nothing, save to tone me up, and so excite me more.

  I climbed into bed naked, in the dark, trembling with a terror old as life, already hot again, my lips parted.

  He met me at once, my Imaginary Friend, My Fantasy, Hold Me. He coiled his arms about me and dragged me down, fierce as a lion, his nails scraping and plowing my shoulders and my lower back. He rubbed himself against me, and I found we dueled, for he, invisible as night, tangible as flesh, was as erect as I. But he knew things I did not. He was tickling my balls, running a finger up and down my spine, kissing me not as the sticky lipstick girl did, but sucking my tongue and my breath right out of me. He exquisitely tortured my penis until I thought I’d choke and lose consciousness, but instead finally I came, exploding in his phantom hand, a shower of silver needles, a gush of syrup and wine.

  No sooner did it happen than I began to cry. Then, getting up, I ran to the bathroom and puked out all the exotic dinner.

  When I returned, I expected him to be there, to comfort me as in the past. But now, for the very first time, my friend was gone.