Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction

by Richard Bowes

  He returned. I’m sure you worked that out. He was there the next night, and the next. Initially, I tried to find excuses not to go to bed. I’d sit reading in the rocker by the window. Or I’d watch my TV. Sometimes, seeing the light on, or hearing the television at one o’clock, the Girl would knock and come in, dressed in her skimpy kimono. “Bad boy—you go to sleep now. What will señor say if I tell?”

  So in the end I had to sit there in the dark. And once, when she knocked and opened the door, had to pretend I’d been visiting the bathroom.

  I took to locking my door. When she knocked then, and rattled, which once or twice she did, I didn’t answer. In the morning, she chided me, and I said, “Yes, you woke me up. Father isn’t going to like that, is he?”

  In any case, whatever I did, unless I slept all night in the chair, I must eventually go to bed. And then, after a few moments, or even immediately, My Fantasy would catch hold of me. He was only sometimes insidious. Usually he overwhelmed me at once, his arms round me, his hands on me, his tongue at my lips. But I was ready anyway. I’d sat in the chair for two hours, nursing my engorgement. Sometimes within a minute of his irresistible strokes, I erupted, whimpering into his unseen yet smothering body. Two or three times, he surprised me, was not there. Then I would thrash about, my face a furnace, the bursting sausage of desire twitching in my own unpracticed grip. And then he would steal over me, shivering fingers along my buttocks, under my ear. He would draw me against his body, massaging my belly, licking my neck, his other hand riding me forward over the edge into the scarlet abyss of orgasm.

  I stopped resisting. I simply got into bed without delay and put out the light, and gave myself up, gasping with uncontrollable eagerness.

  Once he had had me, I slept. He let me, holding me close. I never ran away again and he never again deserted me. Now and then, generally between three and four in the morning, the window lightening like a pearl, he would wake me … That is, I thought, I would wake myself, stiff again, and sometimes then he would take me in his mouth. The bliss of this caused me the first time to scream. Nobody arrived to investigate. I would have said it was a nightmare. I knew, switching on a lamp, they would see no one but me, my nudity safe under the wet sheet and through the mist of net.

  Not until I was almost fifteen did he ease me on to my stomach, and with glorious, melting intrusions, culminating in cannon thrusts, bugger me. I thought I would die of that. I bit my pillow, my saliva mingling with tears and sweat. The orgasm was like death, and, in the morning, I expected to be crippled, disfigured, but everything was apparently the same, save for one tiny drop of blood, my virginity, that I blamed on a bite.

  You would probably ask me if I truly still thought by now that I did all this myself, merely through an overactive imagination, and some unlikely contortions of my own body? What can I say? I’d given up. Reason had never been much use in my life. The rules of my daytime world were set, irksome, and unimportant. I longed for and expected nothing. And, by then, I had read of the incubus, the male demon that fastens on hapless sleepers, drawing out their life. I had the attentions of an incubus, then. The fashionable pious religion my parents had once tried to introduce left me unmoved, and I doubted all the messages of the Church. Anyway, they were wrong. I felt no weakness. And he was my friend of long standing. He asked nothing, only my random caresses, my blind pleasure. And the pleasure—it was so incredible, it was now my drug. As easy to wean Miranda from her tumblers of gin.

  In fact, Miranda was easier. A few days after my fifteenth birthday, following a particularly brilliant public fiasco in an opulent shop of the city, Miranda collapsed. Soon she was in a detoxification clinic, the alcohol all sucked out of her, having to face reality head-on and alone.

  She looked, no pun intended, like a mummy, when I saw her a month later. She’d lost too much weight too quickly. Without drink she had no appetite, as she told me, and in detail, constant stomach cramps, flatulence, sensations of asphyxia, headaches, joint pains, nausea, and spots in her vision. The doctors insisted all this was doing her good; but, she petulantly and pathetically mumbled, weeping strengthless tears, she felt so ill.

  What could I do? My father looked at her grim-faced, told her she was paying the price for her foolishness, then took me away. A month after that, she was returned to us, walking with a stick on shaking white pumps, in an awful bright cheerful mauve dress that made her look ninety.

  She began after this to take an interest in charity work. Someone, perhaps a priest, had told her to have more care of others than herself, and that this would help her. Possibly it did. She ate little, but constantly drank juices, sodas, bottled water. Sometimes she would binge on chocolate, but this brought on agonizing migraines. She’d never smoked, but now talked about taking it up. My father warned her that he detested nicotine on the hands and breath of women. Which must have been a lie, because his latest mistress, the daughter of a tobacco magnate, smoked thirty to fifty cigarettes a day.

  Miranda kept away from strong drink for five years. I don’t know how she managed this feat. Every day she seemed thinner and more brittle. She had developed, despite the thinness, a large stomach, a light cough, and some strange type of eczema, always hidden in bandages that now and then showed under her sleeves. None of these ailments every responded to any treatment. She did more and more charity work, then less and less. Sometimes she’d say, “Thank God I gave up drinking. I’m so much better now.” The doctors seemed to have taught her to repeat this, like a magical mantra. But it didn’t work.

  Meanwhile, I was brought steadily into my father’s world—dinners, concerts, receptions. He seemed to want me to make up my mind what I wished to do. But I wished to do nothing in particular. In a curious rush, I can’t describe it any other way, and can’t linger over it, all at once I was twenty. He made a decision for me. I was to go into a junior partnership in the firm of some friend. It had to do with travel and imports—I couldn’t have cared less. But as always, my façade of polite attention, my good looks, my apparently superior education—this last a complete myth, for I’d learned practically nothing, and had no application or ambition—saw me well-received in the spurious job. It was all right, in its way. The pretty secretaries ogled me, and a couple of men. But I was suitably aloof. There was nothing unprepossessing in the work, which consisted actually of nothing. And, I had my nights to look forward to, as I’d greedily looked forward to them now for years.

  Soon I was sent on a series of missions to wine and dine eminent clients. This, evidently, I was excellent at.

  Returning from one of these jaunts, rather drunk, ironically, I found the city house in turmoil. Miranda had been taken seriously ill and rushed to hospital.

  She was in a large white room, surrounded by banks of flowers and bulbous, undersea-looking tubs of oxygen. She sat bolt upright on her pillows, and she was smiling as I hadn’t seen her smile for five years. The cause was obvious. On the bedside table stood two magnum bottles of the most expensive and cloudy gin. She’d bribed one of the nurses, and, the times being what they were, the nurse had obliged.

  No one else was there.

  “Hallo, handsome,” she said to me. “Pull up a chair. Have a drink.”

  “I’ve been drinking all evening. Should you—”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “I’m going to die in a couple of weeks.”

  I was, despite everything, despite my own utter self-centered callousness, shocked. At fifteen, when she was in the clinic, I can’t recall being very concerned. I thought her collapse was a plea for my father’s notice. But to die to get it would be, even for Miranda, a bit extreme.

  “Surely that’s not so.”

  “It is so. Have this.” She passed me another toothglass of the gin. It was sweet and poisonous. I almost gagged, but got some down. “You’re pale, Hilton. Does that mean you care?”

  “Of course I care.”

  “I’m your mother,” she said. “Well. There we are. I’ve got som
ething else in there now. As big as a melon, he said. Did he? Was it a peach? Something appetizing. Absolutely no symptoms, except all the other foul things I’ve had for years. I just thought it was that. One more pain to put up with. Do you know, he said my liver was quite good. My kidneys too. It’s this that’s going to do it. So. Here’s to Life!”

  I wanted, being me, to run away at once. But how could I? My father was untraceably with one of his women. And no one else had bothered to come, or she hadn’t wanted them. The flowers were all they could manage, a call to a top-class florist. They’d do the same for her funeral.

  She was very, very drunk. The alcohol, after the space of abstinence, had hit her like a tidal wave. Maybe she’d also been given morphine. She looked happy, almost radiant, her thin face flushed and her eyes limpid with the gin. She didn’t seem afraid.

  “I want to tell you something, Hilton,” she said. “Your father’d never speak about it. I had no one to tell!—oh, except I had a counselor, but he kept insisting to me what I felt: Now, señora, you feel this, don’t you? Or, you must experience the hurt, it mustn’t go in but come out. And I said, But I don’t feel hurt. I feel dirty. There’s been a murder inside me. Dirty? he said, Murder? As if I’d confused him. And when I tried to explain, I couldn’t get to it, and he corrected me, No, no, it was hurt I felt. And then later I thought, So what? I’ve got a child. I managed that.”

  “Mother, I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

  That was when she told me.

  She did so in vast, almost technical detail. How the labor pains began when she was in the bath, and she had to be lifted out. And then the private plane, the flight to the hospital, and how she’d given birth, and then given birth again.

  “They hadn’t known, Hilton. It wasn’t the way it is now. And—this is a primitive place, Hilton. Two babies. Two little sons. You—and him.”

  I was the second of a pair of twins. Younger by seven minutes. Even as she was screaming and ejecting me, they were slapping him and trying to keep him alive.

  “But they couldn’t, Hilton. He just folded up like a gray flower and died. There was no proper reason. They said I should just never have had two babies. One had overcome the other. One was too weak, the other too strong.” She drank more gin. She said, “You were so like each other to look at. Identical. No one could have told you apart, except you were alive. And if he’d lived … I used to think you would have played jokes on all of us. You know, the way it is in Shakespeare—” (she pronounced it, drunk, Shazpure. For some reason, I remember that very well. Shazpure) “—he’d pretend to be you, and you’d play terrible games with girls. And you’d be inseparable.”

  We are, Mother, I thought. I drank all the gin in the glass, retched uncontrollably, got a grip. I said, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “What was the point? I mean. What was the point?”

  She leaned back, and her face drooped. “I think I’ll have a little sleep, Hilton. Be a good boy and run along. Your father’ll be here in half an hour. The nurse said.”

  Her glass fell from her hand, but it didn’t matter, it was empty. She snored softly, and I thought of the cancer in her womb, where we had been, he and I, and I’d crushed the life out of him.

  When I stood up, the room spun, and I went into her bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. The nurse, I could tell, seeing me come out, thought that the drops were tears.

  That night, I didn’t go to bed. I went to a nightclub and drank and smoked dope. In the morning, I was so sick I didn’t notice, and fell asleep on the bathroom floor.

  It was always in a bed he had me. Always there. Why? Did he only remember the labor-ward bed, or was the coffin, the little tiny white coffin he must have had, like a bed? And nighttime. Darkness.

  I kept out of bed, all beds, even a hammock. Slept in chairs, mostly at the hospital, surrounded by harsh lights and muttering people. She went quicker than they said, as if she ran away. She died after three days.

  In the mêlée of the next two weeks, the calls, the letters, the servants running to and fro, the ghastly arrangements for a death, it was simple to evade. Even to stop thinking.

  The funeral was a classy affair. My father wore his blackest suit and threw a rose into her grave. He abstained from his mistress for a week. God knows why. She certainly didn’t, and called him twice, pretending to the servant she was a “friend of the señora’s.”

  In the end, I went and lay on my bed. It was afternoon, and I felt safe. I’d wake again before the darkness came. But I didn’t wake, not until the city window of my adult bedroom was patched by black sky and bee-gold lights, and then he was there, beside me.

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “You know I didn’t know.” Talking to him, as I always had when a child. I’d talked to him far less in recent years, only gasps and demands, begging him to go on, do more. “Do you hate me? This isn’t hate, is it?”

  He put his long formed finger inside me, and moved there. My back arched at once, well taught. His weight on me, and he tongued my nipples while the other hand cupped my genitals and I swelled. His breath burned my chest, my face. He probed my mouth hungrily. I couldn’t speak. The mounting sensation, the unavoidable, was rushing up my spine. On my side, his hand rubbing me even as he edged, twitched, became enormous inside my body.

  “Wait—was it my fault—wait—”

  But he wouldn’t wait. Now he clove me in long pounding drumbeats and his fingers skidded on the engine of my seed. The world was going to blow up and I couldn’t stop. I gripped the bed and spasmed, my bowels, my belly, my penis, my lungs. I heard my howl, half disembodied. I thought the rollers of it would never stop.

  He’s killing me, I thought, even as I bucked and grunted in ecstasy. Killing me, as I killed him.

  I felt empty when it was over. I lay half off the bed. His weight, his body, were gone.

  “Don’t go. Listen to me. Can you hear me? Do you hear? What are you? What? Are you—the one she said—”

  But there was nothing in the dark.

  He woke me between three and four, tickling the entrance to my body. I had lain awake petrified for three hours, slept for one. Now I tried to fight him off. He paid no attention. He took me in his mouth and all my fear and rage slipped from me as constellations shot through that tiny orifice that knows so much.

  And then he was gone once more. He wouldn’t stay—to listen. Probably he had never hear me, was deaf and dumb. He was dead, after all. He only wanted to do this.

  Did it matter? Christ, I’d come to like it so, to rely on it. In all my idiotic life, this was all that was of any real use. It asked nothing but my delight. A lovely present for me at the end of every oh-so-trying day.

  And it hadn’t hurt me. My last medical showed me fit and strong, as they always did.

  What then? Was it revenge? What was it? A demon, a ghost? Should I attempt an exorcism?

  I slept, exhausted. I think I felt him in the dark, holding me. Maybe I only dreamed it.

  Months followed. I did nothing but work. I slept rather a lot in chairs. I wondered if a hotel room would free me. In the past, he’d come to me in the houses of my—our—father. What was his name? They must have had him posthumously christened or blessed—

  I began to feel I might be going mad, and my couth, controlled exterior only proved this all the more to me. No one could get inside me (but for my sodomous ghost-lover). I was a dummy from a shop window. Hollow within.

  (Now and then I went into my bed. There he always found me. I dreaded it, wanted it. I had, after all, nothing else of any interest in my life.)

  I had more sense than to confront my father on the matter of my dead twin. But I went finally to the priest who had, haphazardly, received Miranda.

  He tried at first to be kind to me, but I, logically, was suspicious. Did he see me as reconverting back into the faith?

  I said, “My mother told me, just before her death, that when I was born—”

  “
Yes?” he said. His face was bland.

  “That there was another child, who died, after only two minutes.”

  “She told you this?”

  “Yes. I think she felt guilty, for some reason.”

  “She’d used contraception in the past,” said the priest. “It weighs heavily on some women, to break the commandments of the church.”

  I growled at him, but not outwardly. I said, “Was he named?”

  “My dear son, I don’t know. You seem troubled.” How could he see what no other could? “Why not tell me the real root of your problem?”

  I intended to get up and walk out. The slums of the city seethed with diseased and ruined girls who did not break the Church’s commandments, and filled the world with unwanted, ill-treated brats.

  But I heard myself blurt, “I dream about it. About him. He won’t leave me alone. Since I was a child—”

  What on earth was wrong with me? I hadn’t minded, had I, until just now? Until she let me know, twenty years too late, that I was preyed upon by an undead brother?

  Then I saw my panic, clear as a picture rising up in developing fluid. I saw how everything had changed.

  The priest rose as I, belatedly did. He put a restraining hand on my arm.

  “Hilton, my son. I have something to say. God made us, and we have duties to God. To ignore them is unwise.”

  “What—”

  “Please listen a moment. You’re of an age, my son, when I’d expect you either to have sought the priesthood—or a woman.”

  I stood there and gaped at him. I was cold with horror at what I’d suddenly seen to be my existence. That nothing mattered save my nights in the arms of death. To be sucked off and wanked and buggered by death. Disgust, despair—both, doubtless, sins.

  Then, out of sync, I heard what he’d said.

  “You mean I should be involved with a woman?”

  “With your father’s consent, of course. And with the idea of a true union, a marriage. At your age, what could be more natural? Let me assure you, Hilton, it will get rid of any such nightmares as you’ve described.”