He made several telephone calls, inviting a variety of people to cocktails in the afternoon. He then phoned a modish caterer, to order liquor and exotic hors-d’œuvres.
Next, he carried the mirror out of the study and into the living room, where he hung it in a conspicuous place.
Alan’s idea was simple, if not brilliant. The mirror would be made useful to him, after all. Not as directly as he had hoped, but indirectly. It would become a conversation piece. It would fascinate all sorts of people. Among his invited guests were a nationally syndicated gossip columnist, several show people of all sexes, tattletales of all ages, beauteous if vacuous ladies of the beau monde, a nice sampling of that worthless world Alan despised and admired.
These creatures would be impressed and awed by his mirror. They would squeal and gibber and ask how the trick was done. They would question him about the mirror’s origins; he would be deliciously cryptic, hinting at other dark, nameless forces at his beck and call. Word would spread, by mouth and print, about the mysterious Cagliostro in their midst. He would be lionized, fêted, adulated. His lightest statement would carry weight. He would be a frequent guest on television talk shows, entering the homes of millions of people. He would be written up in magazines of huge circulation. His photo would appear everywhere. Publishers would offer him gigantic sums for his ghost-written autobiography. He would be in great demand on the lecture circuit, at stunning fees. He would be considered a sage, and his advice on all matters would urgently be sought. He would be deemed delightfully dangerous, and women would fall at his presumably cloven feet, yearning to learn the arcane amatory techniques of which surely he was a master. He would become a legend in his own time, for in our epoch, Alan well knew, it is not necessary to be gifted or accomplished in order to attain legendary status. And perhaps, some distant day, when he was very old, he might sell the mirror for a vast amount of money.
It would not be a bad life, he told himself, as he showered and prepared for the cocktail party.
His guests began to arrive at about six, and everything went as he’d wished. The mirror was a great success, and so was he. He saw the hot glitter in their eyes, heard their voices coarsen with a kind of lust, filled his grateful lungs with the acrid perfume of glamor (didn’t ‘glamor’ have a dazzling original meaning?—he’d have to look it up in the Unabridged in the morning).
All but a few of his guests were remarkably ugly, but it was a fashionable ugliness that passed for beauty in certain strata of society, and most of them were no longer young, although they strove to present the appearance of youth, aided by dyes, diets, corsets, injections, surgery, dentistry. One person of indeterminate age—Alan was fairly sure it was a woman—had hair bleached white as the well-known sepulcher and skin the texture of cold gravy. Several of the men wore hair not their own. Costly gems, throbbing with inner fire, pulsated on many a turkey neck and talon.
They cavorted before the glass like performing apes. They grinned, frowned, rolled their eyes, stuck out their tongues. Some made obscene gestures.
When the guests reluctantly left, one of them was persuaded to stay a little longer. She was beautiful, haughty, confident; her face was on the cover of every fashion magazine; she had starred in a chic movie—and yet Alan possessed her mere minutes after the last of the others had departed. It happened on the soft carpet in front of his marvelous, his glamorous mirror (an interesting experience, that: he told himself he might try placing the glass on the ceiling over his bed some time, just as an experiment).
He dismissed her somewhat later, after a cozy tête-à-tête supper, and only after solemnly promising he would call her the next day.
Alone, Alan stood in front of the mirror, intensely pleased with himself. His reflection appeared to be pleased too. Why not? The Alan of five seconds from now would be just as content as the Alan of now. He had won. In stories, the Devil always wins by cleverly wording the contract and then sticking literally and precisely to that wording—observing the letter of it, but violating the spirit, for the Devil has a brilliant legal mind, and is The Father of Lawyers. By such a device he had triumphed over Alan—temporarily. But Alan had turned the tables on him by making those five useless seconds useful. He had traded on human curiosity, cashed in on human gullibility, much in the manner of the Devil himself. He had beaten the Devil at his own game. He had bested him. Alan’s image smiled broadly and, five seconds later, Alan did likewise.
A few moments after that, however, there were two figures in the mirror. The Devil’s image appeared behind Alan’s, and tapped Alan’s reflection on the shoulder.
The real Alan, though he’d felt nothing, quickly whirled around—but it was all right, there was no One behind him, he was alone.
He immediately turned back to the mirror. The images of both the Devil and Alan had vanished from the glass. It reflected an empty room.
Icy sweat covered him in an instant as he recalled a condition of the contract: the mirror was “for his private use.” But Alan had put it on display, shown it to many others. He had violated the contract. The Devil was therefore entitled to . . . foreclose.
Alan smelled a goat-stink. He felt somebody tap him on the shoulder.
THE HOUSE OF CTHULHU
by Brian Lumley
Brian Lumley is a sergeant in the British Royal Military Police and a fine writer as well. His “Born of the Winds” received a nomination for a 1976 World Fantasy Award and was one of only a handful of stories in recent years that have been successful additions to the Lovecraft-Derleth Cthulhu Mythos. This is another one and led off the first issue of Whispers. It was selected for two Best-of-Year anthologies and is, I believe, the first heroic-fantasy addition to the Mythos to appear professionally.
Now it happened aforetime that Zar-thule the Conqueror who is called Reaver of Reavers, Seeker of Treasures and Sacker of Cities, swam out of the East with his dragonships; aye, even beneath the snapping sails of his dragonships. The wind was but lately turned favorable, and now the weary rowers nodded over their shipped oars while sleepy steersmen held the course. And there Zar-thule descried him in the sea the island Arlyeh, whereon loomed tall and twisted towers builded of black stones whose tortuous twinings were of contorted angles all unknown and utterly beyond the ken of men. Aye, and this island was redly litten by the sun sinking down over its awesome black crags and burning behind the asymmetrical aeries and spires carved therefrom by other than human hands.
And though Zar-thule felt a great hunger and stood sore weary of the great sea’s expanse behind the lolling dragon’s tail of his ship Redfire, and even though he gazed with red and rapacious eyes upon the black island, still he held off his reavers, biding them that they ride at anchor well out to sea until the sun was deeply down and gone into the Realm of Cthon; aye, even unto Cthon, who sits in silence to snare the sun in his net beyond the Edge of the World. Indeed, such were Zar-thule’s raiders as their deeds were best done by night, for then Gleeth the blind Moon God saw them not nor heard in his celestial deafness the horrible which ever attended unto such deeds.