“Silver’s very conductive,” said Nigel, as if that explained everything. “Sir John Raseburne wore a silver helmet at Agin-court, 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 Win-canton 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 carsponges, 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 blood-sucker 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 learned to the red heart’s core.’ She was a blood-sucking 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 1:00 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 07:26.
“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 towelling 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 grey 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 woollen 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 centre 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.