The black mirror
(19,572 words)

page 1
page 2
page 3

At times, she almost believed that she had been born to be someone else. These moments of self-delusion would tend to occur on the light, summer mornings when she would wake up seconds before the bell of her alarm-clock was due to ring, and levitate from the low double-bed, cast off night-clothes with a twist of her shoulder and slip like a tropical eel into the shower. Today was one of those mornings. Definitely. She could smell the perfection in the air, the running, fresh scent of that lull which fills a city in the hour before the stultifying rush begins. Beneath the warm water, she felt the creases slip away deliciously and sleep waft like muslin from her brain. She spat out the night in a mess of streaked peppermint and faced herself, in the blue electric tube clarity of the sink mirror. The summer morning had cleared away the stuffiness of the night, had eased out the stretch-marks, rendered suppleness to the heavy, dull sag of a forty-three year old skin.

Twenty years earlier, she had felt like this without effort, without thinking: Ruqa the guitarist, the billionaire, the soccer star, the cosmonaut, the princess. And then had come the bum string, the bad debt, the burst bladder, the fall. No prince. And in the real world, some fifteen years earlier, Ruqa Farrell had become an Estate Agent, a seller of domestic bliss, or at least, of four walls and a roof, a peddlar of beginnings or else, for the very aged, the place where they would breathe their last. And she’d been extremely successful. Her properties often sold before they’d even hit the local rag’s printing-press (well, all except one). Yet now, her delusions held a different quality. Perhaps they were not really delusions at all. Perhaps, at last, she had become that which deep down she had always felt herself to be. And surely this was better, this carrying of the ages, this exercised ability to possess, in a single being, the physical poise of a twenty-three year old and the experience of a mature woman. To face the world with the presage of shadows at your back. Lost lovers, dead mentors. Empty houses. When you have made all the mistakes, she thought, there can no longer be any embarrassment. You become naked and not blink an eyelid. You know the slope of yourself. You have total possession of your being. Almost.

The roughness of the wooden floorboards made the backs of her legs tingle, right up to the dimple of her sacrum and all the way up her spine, to the top of her head. She pirouetted like a classical dancer as she slipped on her navy business skirt and plain, white blouse and then she went into her cupboard and selected flat shoes to match. As she tied the laces, her own face rose through the black gloss, the nose bulbous, hallucinatory, the foetal lips barely formed and that thick forest of black hair which from a distance was all anyone ever saw of her. Even in her dreams, Ruqa felt the edge of her unreconstructable fringe brush irritatingly along her forehead. She’d read somewhere that most people dreamed in monochrome, but her dreams were all tactile.

I, Martinus Formicarius of Blackdowne, do hereby inscribe the doings and histories of His Majesty’s Ecclesiastical Court in the Rape of North Chichester in the Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Sixteen Hundred and Eighty-Seven.

Perhaps I am really a cat, she thought, a tawny-and-black loner, long spine creeping among willow grass and frazzles of brickwork. But then she dismissed the concept as idolatrous pomposity. And in her invoking of the image and its subsequent dismissal, Ruqa felt that she had grasped reality more deeply than usual and that today she would live in that rare state of heightened awareness in which not even the slip of shadow across lawn would escape her.

She gazed into her dressing-table mirror and fluffed up her hair, hopefully. The ridges of her cheekbones had always been a little too high, rendering to her face a broadness of aspect which she had never liked in other women. Anyway, as they always said, absolute black went with everything. Burned into her brain, the icon of her mother’s face at the moment of last exhalation. Not one for the snap album. As for the living visage, she could only just clunk up the image as magic lantern still. She smiled, ruefully. Half her family were decomposing corpses. The other half were scattered all over the world; a brother in Toronto, a niece in Scotland, immeasurable cousins in the Old Country (for decades, she had used that term when referring to Pakistan and then, one day, she had tumbled to the realisation that nobody else in the whole world ascribed this definition to the land of the pure). Her brother contacted her when he felt guilty, the cousins, only when they needed something. The niece was a butch lesbian who worked in a kebab take-away. She lived with an anorexic albino who, Ruqa suspected, was really of the vampiric tendency. She was nightmarishly pale and thin and was covered in freckles and she was in the habit of trotting, stark naked, around the house even when guests were in. She suffered that affliction of the need to shock and she whined constantly, but maybe that had been part of the attraction – for the butch niece, that was. Ruqa had sometimes visited them up there by the Clyde, but had never really enjoyed the visits. Her father… well, that was another story. Always had been. He was onto his third marriage, this time with a Sheffield shop-girl half his age. Recently, he’d moved in with the brand new wife. Fries, curlers, lino and a smouldering cigarette whose paper seemed constantly in danger of slipping from the lacquer of her cracked nails. Still, Ruqa could sense that there was a certain sluttish quality about the woman which might well attract most men, some of the time and certain men, all of the time. She wondered why he had bothered going through the motions of even a registry office wedding. As if anyone cared, these days. He was like an old film star; an orgy in every closet, but one well-buffed shoe always firmly planted on the floor.

She toyed, in the box, with the amber-and-jet necklace she had decided on and then slipped it over her head and settled the cold stones so that they rested just above her collar-bones. It must be hard that, she thought, constructing and then having to maintain an exoskeleton of respectability even when you knew that it was transparent. A generational thing, perhaps. But then, we all have our hang-ups, don’t we? Our subtle deficiencies. Obsessions. It’s just that we can never see our own. She sprinkled some yellow liquid onto her palm and then dabbed it as an archbishop would, May morning dew, over the slightly darker skin of her neck and then down over the rise of her chest. Her obsession - she supposed it must be an obsession - was the house. Not her modern flat; you’d have to be clinically insane to feel anything much for so functional a place; no, the space which Ruqa dreamed about, longed to dance in, couldn’t bear to leave, was an old building, set some ten miles out in the country. She let her hand slip passively into the top of the place where the cleft sank into the sweep of bone. Aradia Hall. Late Sixteenth Century. Unsold for eleven years, empty for longer. Through the web of her palm, she felt the steady movement of her heart. From behind the knuckled plate, she felt her heart slip like a metronome into her palm. She closed her fist and squeezed hard, rolling her knuckles over the bone. Squeezed, until she felt her nails pierce the skin. Over the eleven years, the house had become filled with her dreams. If I should die at this moment, she thought, I will be buried and ten thousand years will pass and then, one bright summer’s morning, my remains will be discovered and they will wonder why I was wearing this jewellery around my skeleton. Perhaps they will imagine that I was important (today, I am important; I have a client for the Hall). But that will only happen if I state in my will that I wish to be interred in a bog. And a peat-bog, at that. It preserves dead flesh for longer. She laughed aloud. What a morbid thought! Still, it was better to be alone. Better by far. Solitude, not loneliness. That was her mantra.

I have been uneasie, these nightes. Every since I did arrive at this place in the midst of oak and elm foreste, has my soule trembled with dreade of what, I do not knowe. ‘Tis beste, I fancie, that I know not, since it is the knowledge of that which is beyond the realm of men which leadeth to all things mischievous. I turn in this demi-sleep that doth o’ertake e’en the best of men. I feel the gorge riseth in mie throate, the sweet charr ffish ‘pon which we din’d laste nighte. I feel its red flow through mie tired limbes, its heavie opulence weakens mie resolve. I have done goode ‘n’ well in the pursuance of these duties of mine. This Hall which I have caused to be built, to the demescene of mine owne minde, is verilie the largest, moste splendid hall in the March, if not in the County! May the Lord forgive his moste humble servante for this mote of pride. From the morrow morn’, I shall consume nowt but oat clap bread; the iron ‘pon which the floure is baked shall steer away any evil from mie vittals.

 [top]

I seek the Queen of Witches, she who was Christen’d, Emm Demdike, but who is know’d in these marches as Mother Cattox, on account of the fact that every one of this acuursed breed doth don a devil-name, the verie same moment they shed the clothes of modestie which God, through the Bible moste holie, did decree right for human kind e’er since the daye of the Third Fall. I have heard a good manie evil things of this longe-dugg’d demon’s consort, not the leaste of which is that she fancies herself, not juste as the queen of the witches hereabouts, but also as a leader of women. Ha! I shall find her, and deep in the forest, I shall swinge her from oak branch, and her bodie be left nak’d and fish-gutted to rot and be consum’d by vulture cloudes in shape of wordes perilous that those may see, writ in the sky the fate of one who doth deem to deal dice betwixt God, the King and the Devil.

She went through to the kitchenette and treated herself to a mug of proper, ground coffee; today, there was time and she was sick of office-instant with that dreadful cold milk, or worse still, the powdered stuff which people still drank in this country. As though we are sheep, or cattle, she thought, to be fed this desiccated shit! She preferred her beverage, hot, milky, steaming and not-quite-boiling-over. That was another thing that was wholly dependent on the rhythm of the day. But then, most days lacked an essential, a natural rhythm. They just fell into her, or she into them, and the resulting disharmony between things and feelings would make it harder to make a connection with clients, to sell houses, to drink from the edge of a mug without spilling drops embarrassingly - and painfully - into her cleavage. She would stuff her face with fast-food or chocolate biscuits or those awful mints which everyone seemed to buy as gifts but which no-one she had ever met actually enjoyed eating. She would end up bloated, constipated, her waistline expanding like the belly of a waxing moon and at last she would sink into bed feeling halfway to the grave.

She thought of switching on the small digital radio which sat on the half-folded dining table and letting it play at low volume, but in the end, she decided against it. She didn’t need it. She could feel the music buzz from the earthenware of the mug to the skin of her lips and down into her stomach, her gut. Today was better. She was looking forward to the journey out-of-town, fifteen miles of fields and copses and hills undulating like the waves of a placid sea and then at last, beyond the far edge of the old forest, the Restoration house. It had become an office joke, Ruqa Farrell and Aradia Hall. Of course, no-one else would’ve wanted it; who would take on a property, A-listed, of course, which had not sold for over a decade and which showed no signs of selling? A house like that, people begin to get suspicious, they think something terrible must have happened there, or else that there’s been subsidence and that the whole structure is in imminent danger of being pulled down into the earth by an underground stream. Or maybe that there’s just plain old dry rot, wet rot, wood-worn slithering through the substance. It was a millstone. Even the owners were elusive; no names, just correspondence from some lawyer in the Far East. They weren’t too fussed; it was probably part of a complicated tax dodge of some sort. Actually, Ruqa didn’t know any more than anyone else, but she had pandered to the jests, shrugging them off as though the matter were of little importance, as though she, Ruqa Farrell, senior estate agent, were above such things. But Ruqa loved going out there. If her route happened to take her down her that way, she would take the opportunity to pop in and check everything was okay. It always was, of course. Sometimes, in her free time, she’d even gone there alone. In the evening, before she left the office, she’d slip the keys into her handbag and return them to the locked box in the safe the next day. No-one had guessed. And anyway, they would never have thought of checking in the locked box.

In her small flat, the bunch of keys seemed even larger than usual. She would remove them from the inner, zipped-up compartment of her handbag and would handle them as though they were a rare archaeological relic. Or a religious icon. She even loved the drive. She would roll down her car window and rapidly accelerate up the gears and when the wind hit eighty kilometres per hour she would close her eyes and feel her hair stream like waves around the bones of her face; she did this, not because she had a death-wish, but because she knew, in the arc of her skull, that there was absolutely no possibility of her crashing, that within the huge, unused mass of her grey matter some rodent radar system had flicked into electrical resonance with the hills and the streams, even the ones that long ago had been quarried flat or sucked dry. No-one else in the whole universe knew about these moments.

We have soughte out those with upraised handes, unnaturale dugges, more than the God-given number of teates, suspendor’d finger-bones, birthe-staines, demonic wartes, cicatrixes arising in the shape of the five-pointed star (may the Lord Jesus Christ protect us), fields ‘pon the skin of utter insanguinitie and other suchlike Deformities Luciferine. These beastes have we have captured and interrogated moste thoroughlie; the bathe women, the wearie and the inordinatelie melancholick; and have driven from their bodies and their soules, humoures both sucubic and incubic; and odoures moste foule and blacke. By our side we did porte the moste erudite and learn’d of volumes; the Malleus Maleficarum and that tome penned by the illustrious and moste learn’d Master Hopkins, The Discoverie of Witches. Our achievements moste wondrous being attained through the application of pincers, prickers, pilliwinckes, bridles, bootes, collars, cords, dry panns, binding globes, breaking mortars and other such wondrous mechanical devices which are testament to the ingeniousness of God’s workinges among the spirits of His faithful. Being founde guiltie, those servants of the Devil are taken to Beacon Hill and there hanged by the necke. On one Sabbath Day just before Easter, did we have thirtie such unrepentant wretches hanged. And repent or no, the soule muste needes leave the bodie, for either Satan or God will be standing at its elbow.

As her car bumped along the winding, private road which led up to the house, Ruqa noticed that the ivy which once had grown only across the western wall had now extended right along the eaves and down onto the front. Unlike most the buildings in this part of the county, Aradia Hall had been constructed of Hangman sandstone and the size of each block varied wildly from that of a pig’s torso to that of a human hand. It was as though whoever had hacked stone from quarry had been aware already of the space which each piece of rock would occupy in the finished house. The broken tarmac of the neglected road soon gave way to scraggy, yellow grasses. She rolled all the car windows, right down. It really was very warm for this early in the morning.

But then, she returned to her original line of thought, and reasoned that the quarrier would have been a different person from the builder. She wished that she could hold in her mind both of these concepts simultaneously, and that all that had happened here since the house had been built would become clear to her in a moment of total lucidity. Once or twice, she had thought of going to the county town and looking out the deeds, so that she might know the names of those who had breathed within the walls of this place. But she had never quite got round to it; something had always come up. Perhaps it was best that way. To have taken the names of those who had really lived would have been an appropriation, but worse than that, it would have restricted the field of possibility. No longer might the slicked-back, dark-brown hair of an incipient lover be turning and rising from the piano stool above the level of her collar-bones as she let her hands fall gently upon the shoulders of his dark lounge suit. Naturally, the piano would be a black concert grand. And then later, beneath a sky heavily cast over with the growling menace of Dorniers and Heinkel He 111s, her lover would be woollen sweater-clad and puffing on a saxophone-shaped, cherrywood pipe. The piano then would be upright, with short back-and-sides, on which, apart from a metronome, would sit a cylindrical tobacco box carved with images of far-off places. Her lover would be playing maniacally, pipe-smoke billowing as the bombs fell all around. Ruqa let out a sigh and then walked round by the French window and laughed quietly at herself and her fantasies.

It had been several weeks since she’d shown anyone round. Still, she thought, I wouldn’t have imagined that ivy could spread so quickly. She saw so many houses, she’d probably mixed up the ivy wall with another; there were so many in this part of England. But Aradia House was unique. Blocks, a shade of purplish-green, were set in clean, Puritan lines and the windows were small and fretted, their blistered frames like the wood of an abandoned spinet, holding the darkness taut behind them. Or perhaps she’d imagined it, in one of her strange, feline dreams, the plant clawing up the stone.

In her dream, Ruqa was a long, tawney-coloured cat and she was creeping among the leaves and stems of the ivy, along a ground-floor windowsill of the house. Her dream was totally sensate; as the sunlight trickled down through the ivy onto the ends of her fur, Ruqa-the-cat could feel the tiny ridges in the stone which had been made by three centuries and more of rain, from the belly of the forest, she could hear the elongated slither of grass snakes through the dew and she could smell the hide of any beast within the compass of a long league. As she reached the cross-beam of the window, she paused, right paw suspended in the air, and peered through the glass. The main room, the one with the great fireplace, was filled with blue light like the glow which emanated from the surface of the forest lake and in the centre of the room, on a faded red rug, a naked human figure stood before a pewter goblet, the size of a human skull. Above the mantelpiece was a huge circular mirror enclosed in brass, so that the room had its telescoped double. As she watched, transfixed, Ruqa-the-cat could see both the figure and its reflection dance around the wine-filled goblet. The smell of the liquor in the goblet was not unlike that of old blood. The figure was that of a woman with long, black hair which reached down below her waist and skin so white, that even in the filtered illumination of Ruqa’s dream, the woman’s body glowed like wax, like the surface of the moon. Ruqa could not make out the details of her face, however, she could see that it was unnaturally long and as the woman danced, her figure began to resemble a tall church candle, burning around a wick of black hair. In the dream, it struck her as odd that a cat might not be able to see the face properly, but then, she reminded herself, she was not really a cat and the reflections, the silhouettes cast by the mirror which circled around the walls, did not constitute ordinary murk. Yet there was someone else in the room, someone whose form Ruqa was unable to see. A hint of a shadow, perhaps, in the armchair with the broad shoulder-rests. Or something in the manner in which, even as she spun, the dancer fixed her gaze on the chair. Through the swirling dance of her reverie, woman and cat merged into one and this one merged with the stones and spaces of the house. And then, the house would fade and vanish, and the dream would slip away.

[top]

Sometimes, on sales visits, as she had run her hand over the smooth wood of those arm-rests, Ruqa had wondered whether this figure might not have been her father. But she could conceive of no quasi-Freudian reason, other than possibly his promiscuity, as to why her dad should appear in such a bizarre dream. Her mind flitted over all she had read, or heard, about Aradia Hall. Nothing terribly eventful. The usual clutch of sea-captains, colonial deputy commissioners and waistcoated, landowning gentlemen (at one time, all the lands for seven miles around had been their property). There was one thing, though. Aradia Hall had been built by one Master Blackdowne, a squire who had not been born into wealth, but had found favour with first, the authorities of Cromwell’s Commonwealth and later, following the Restoration of the Monarchy, with the sheriffs of the King. He had been rewarded for his adroit loyalty with the gift of this land and had commissioned the construction of the Hall. She had been unable to find any portraits of Squire Blackdowne, but then she’d reasoned that he had been a Puritan, so he may well have been against any kind of depiction of the human likeness. Ruqa wondered why she had not wanted to face whatever was in the dream  chair, watching.

Let it be know’d that by the ende of the monthe of July, in companie of two fellow-judges moste holie, I have effected moste certainlie the utter and moste near complete purgation of this wondrous and verdant lande from the awfulle ravages of the Devil and his legion. On the morn of the morrow, I muste face the greatest, Luciferine and moste evil of all the witches in West Sussex. They sayeth, in all the books, that a witch cannot cast a spell upon her judge, yet the Lord knoweth the ways of these necromancers and e’en the moste learned counsels of the faithfull host cannot possess all the knowledge which dwelleth betwixt heaven and earth, let alone that which festers in the bellie of the regions infernal. I sayeth ‘Luciferine’, for she is the moste beautiful witch I have ever set eyes ‘pon in this life. Indeede, it may be said that she is the moste beauteous woman I have ever seen. Her eyes are deepest velvet, her hair, sleek as fountain water and her waist fulle and carv’d akin to that moste perfecte geometer of which they write. When she speaketh, that which doth tripp from her tongue moste delicate seemeth indeed to float ‘pon a gallingale’s feather and her lips to drawe mine eye until I can think of little else. And yet, beneath all of this soft integument moste fayre, there lieth a blackamoor demon, a hoarie familiar, an incubus moste foule which doth threaten to pulle all of us down into the very pit of the fires eternal. This counterpoint is moste difficulte to measure or trammelle. With all my years of labour ‘pon this holie work of the Church and King, I cannot span its breach. I pray to God that I may comest through this ordeal of mine, as holie as I did enter into it. Yet these weekes, I am become moste melancholique. Alone, will I pursue my quarrie, since none of mie soldiers be lefte on mine owne holie side. The hag hath ta’en them all! One by one, by their poll’d members, hath she led each man to his doom. In dream, doth she play the spinet with the strings of their eternal soules.

She’d had had the same dream recurrently over the course of the eleven years. At first, it had been only once every few months, but more recently, it had begun to appear on almost a nightly basis. Certain aspect of the scene had come to obsess her. The way in which, at the base of her full belly, the dancer’s dark bush of pubic hair seemed to come alive, almost like a nest of Gorgon snakes, as her body turned and twisted in the chorea which had taken possession of her. The intense blueness of the room which could not be explained by the refraction of sunlight through the old glass of the windows, nor yet by its reflection from the ancient mirror above the fireplace, nor by the shade of the flowery wallpaper. And then there was the low sound of moaning which seemed to issue, not from the woman’s perpetually opened mouth, but from the very walls of the house. And recently, the mirror-image of the dancer had begun to move and act independently of the flesh-and-blood woman dancing before the fireplace in the room. The mirror woman had paused and come right to the edge of the glass, right to the invisible plane which divided one world from the other and had pressed her face up against the shimmering barrier, as though she was trying to push through, into the room. But dramatic as it was, this was not the most notable change in the dream. Over the past few nights, more and more clearly, she had been able to make out that through the window, through the mirror, the face at which Ruqa-the-cat squinted, was the face of Ruqa Farrell, city dweller, clothed woman and senior estate agent of twelve years’ standing. She would pause, fork suspended, in the middle of her solitary evening meal and stare into space for what seemed like fifteen minutes. Yet it was not fear; it was more a feeling of dissociation, as though she, her person, everything that she knew of as herself, had split into an infinite number of beings, each of which now possessed an existence, a spiritual house, of their own. She’d got used to eating cold food. It hadn’t seemed worth the effort of getting up and re-heating it, not for one person. It was just fuel, after all.

She turned off the engine and glanced at her watch. Nine-thirty-four. She was a little early. He would be here in around ten minutes. That had been the arrangement. She had ‘phoned him from home, late last night. Highly unusual, but at the last moment she had realised that she had forgotten to ring to confirm the time. She had felt a pang of disappointment when a woman had answered. Even this early, the sunlight was growing stronger. She got out of the car and began to walk towards the house. It was even warmer now than it had been when she’d begun her journey and as she reminded herself, the house was south-facing. She removed her jacket and slung it over her arm, but then she changed her mind and instead went back to the car, opened the passenger door, stretched over the head-rest and tossed the jacket onto the back seat. No thief would venture this far out of town.

The dew had already evaporated. It had hardly rained for months and the ground was like sand. She felt the give of the soil, and was glad, then, that she had worn low heels. As she glanced back in the direction from which she had come, a film of dust seemed to hover just above ground-level and through the quivering heat-haze, she made out the rows of poplars which cut through the fields, the winding road which surely, she thought, must’ve been laid down over an ancient bridal-path, the hawthorn hedge whose untrimmed tops sprouted wildly in all directions, the low, zinc roof of what looked like a cattle-trough. Behind everything, the forest seemed to sway, its dark mass permanently separating the Hall and the lands which for centuries had been of the Hall, from the rant and clatter of the outside world, from thieves and fools. On this, the far side of the pine and silver fir forest, one was as safe as it was possible to be, these days.

She swapped hands, from right to left; her shiny, bull-skin briefcase was fat with papers. Maybe she would be able to get through some of then before he arrived. She glanced up at the plaque: 1678. The sunlight had only just reached the copper square and had begun to tease the verdigris that speckled the base of the figure seven. Round the side of the house, beneath the gnarled branches of an unusually tall oak, was an old filled-in well and the almost petrified stumps of what once had been orange and lemon trees. Now, thick clumps of knee-high red and white heather thrived among the bilberry bushes and the tall weeds whose names she didn’t know. Beyond this area, lay the jagged remains of what once might have been a small steading. All that remained of these out-buildings were patches of beaten-down earth surrounded by stones which projected at odd angles from the ground. The keys were deep in her handbag. They were of the archaic pig-iron sort; dark, with rough-hewn edges and almost cartoon proportions. The one for the storm door felt smooth and warm and was the length of her palm, from knuckle to wrist. She felt the familiar frisson of excitement as she inserted the key into the lock to the point where she came up against the resistance of the mechanism. Behind her, a couple of wrens chirruped and played about in the branches of a birch. Of all the properties on her list, this was the one which Ruqa hoped would never sell.

She ought never to have taken the keys home; that constituted a definite breach of protocol; but it would have been so inconvenient to have had to drive in almost the opposite direction all the way across town to the office, just to pick up a bunch of keys. On the ‘phone, the woman’s voice had been deep and silky, and Ruqa had wondered whether perhaps she had already been in bed. She had pictured her instantly: blonde, sleek, tall, sultry, a modern Lili Marlene. In her mind, those women had always seemed to fuse into one, single woman, and that being was her nemesis, her alter ego. In her twenties, a decade when she had felt herself to be little more than a mirror to other people’s perceptions, Ruqa had tried desperately to shake off this feeling, had attempted even to befriend one or two of these others. These opposites. But it had never worked out. The relationships of acquaintance which she had tried to develop with these women had remained strained, artificial like those between the diplomats of enemy states and had tended to peter out into the run and tuck of the big city and Ruqa had been left, still cradling her demons. Was there a way of reversing a photograph, she wondered, of dissolving its image into nothing? Probably not. It was like time; once it had happened, there was no going back. Bitch.

page 1
page 2
page 3

[top]