“Please,” Jonathan Carver said wearily. “Don’t waste my time with nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense,” Davis rushed on desperately. “You see, I’ve got a pawn ticket myself.”
Jonathan Carver paused to stare at the young man.
Davis nodded. “My wife, Beth. You’ve never met her, but she’s beautiful. When I first met her, she didn’t love me. I remember I was walking along the street thinking I’d sell my soul if I could only have her for my wife. Suddenly I looked up to see this pawnshop where none had been before. On impulse I went in. The man said he’d loan me one thousand dollars to buy roses for the girl I loved. He said an eloquent gesture like that would make her love me. I thought he was mad, but he counted out the money and said if it didn’t work, I owed him nothing. If it did—”
“Your soul,” the old man said.
“Right. I didn’t see what I had to lose, and I was crazy enough myself to try it. And of course it worked. Beth was so impressed with the nut who loved her enough to fill half her house with red roses on a whim, she started taking a new interest in me. We were married a month later.” James Davis paused. “So you see, I’m working to pay off my own debt, just like you. I’ve got a lifetime of bad deeds ahead of me. If you kill me now, you’ll be doing the world a favor—but not yourself.”
Jonathan Carver stared thoughtfully at the man. “I don’t believe you,” he said finally.
“The pawn ticket is in my wallet,” the young man said. “See for yourself.”
Cautiously the old man extricated Davis’s wallet from a rear pocket and fumbled through the cards until he came to a familiar one that held a thumbprint, the name James Davis, and the number $997.46.
“You’ve got a long way to go,” Carver grunted.
“I just started,” Davis said, almost apologetically. “You’d be surprised at some of the things I had to do to get the loan down that far. Anyway, as you can see, we’re both working for the same employer.”
The old man sighed. “All right.” He shuffled forward to release the man from his manacles. “Perhaps,” he added hopefully, “we can even work together—for our mutual benefit.”
James Davis rubbed circulation into his unbound ankles and wrists. “I’m afraid not.” He smiled and said pleasantly, “One of the things I’ve been doing during my two-year employment as your bookkeeper is embezzling funds from you.”
Jonathan Carver’s face turned livid. “What?”
“That’s right.” The young man’s strong hands leaped out to grasp the old man by the throat. “And here’s where I earn a fifty-dollar credit for myself.”
Carver’s puny hands scrabbled at the fingers tightening into his windpipe. He gasped and wheezed, and his face changed color.
“But you mustn’t kill me,” he muttered hoarsely. “You said killing an evil person is not a bad deed.”
“I lied,” James Davis said simply. “Lying is worth a few points too, you know. Besides, you don’t really think the devil is going to let you redeem your soul, do you?”
Suddenly the old man laughed. “Nor yours,” he said.
James Davis’s fingers cut off the old man’s words forever, but years later the young man growing old remembered them and knew the beginnings of fear.
LE MIROIR
by Robert Aickman
Robert Aickman is an English author whose stories of eerie and supernatural occurrences are strange mixtures of allegory, poetry, and style. They create exceptional moods and often conclude in a less-than-explicit manner, something his detractors frequently point out; however, his stories are written exactly as he wants them to be. His subtle hints tease from you feelings and fears you would rather not know existed, and you are free to let your mind determine just what has happened and to accept or reject a supernatural explanation. Aickman’s “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” was the recipient of the first World Fantasy Award for short fiction and his recent collection, Cold Hand in Mine, collects that gem with seven other “strange stories.” Here is an original from the pages of Whispers that shows us that minds and mirrors can play very bizarre games, very bizarre . . .
Celia’s father was old enough to be her grandfather, perhaps her great-grandfather. Notoriously, it is one of the advantages that men have over women.
He had beautiful, silvery hair, and a voice like a distant bell of indeterminate note; but, unfortunately, he could move only very slowly, and, even then, aided by a shiny black staff, with a most handsomely jeweled knob. Celia had never known her mother, and that lady’s portrait was always turned to the wall, from which position, in accordance with her father’s adjuration, she had never cared to drag it, or to set about dragging it, for it looked very heavy.
The old house was crumbling now, and something beautiful was lost to it with every year that ended: even the drawing of an unknown, smiling woman by Raphael; even the tiny box found in the Prince of the Moskowa’s fob, and soaked in his blood. In the end, one would have thought that there remained only the mirrors; the looking glasses, if you insist. The mirrors or looking glasses, and the bare utilities for the bare living which has to substitute for life.
All the looking glasses were, of course, mercury-silvered, so that, as well as reflecting, they embellished and discriminated. In each of the state rooms were three or four of the objects; on the walls, on floor stands, on bureaux and escritoires. In the state bedrooms the looking glasses were even more subtly placed and more ingeniously set, in that long ago they had been offered more curious topics to touch upon. It is unnecessary to select from the lists of past guests, because the lists included everyone.
Day by day, Celia’s father would toil round the rooms, struggling up the grand staircases, crawling perilously down them; in every room, on every landing, at every dark corner, gazing in the looking glasses, outstaring time. Sometimes, at a respectful distance, he was followed for much of the way by his old Nurse, though more commonly Nurse was confined by neuritis and weakheadedness to her bed in the little apartment under the flaking tiles that she had occupied since first she came. How old Nurse could be was a subject sedulously eschewed.
Right from the cradle (and Celia’s cradle had aforetime cradled both the shapely John Dryden and the unproportioned Alexander Pope), Celia had vouchsafed her frail, dreamlike drawings; in pencil, even in chalk; and, later, with water color finely touched in. She had studied every urn in the park, and every ancient tree, by every condition of light: the Elizabethan oaks, the Capability Brown beeches, the single exotics planted with ceremony by Mr. Palgrave, by Bishop Wilberforce, by the Prince Imperial. The tenant farmer’s herds served well as artistic auxiliaries; and, sometimes at dusk, the Mad Hunt, which all at these times could hear but only those with the Sight could behold. It was natural that when at length Celia had arrived at her sixteenth birthday, she should wish to go to Paris in order to increase her power and widen her range.
Still in a dream, she found herself enrolled at a long-established and old-fashioned private atelier: Étien’s it had been familiarly named by many generations of students, some of them always British. One felt that Watteau and Greuze must have been among the more recent pupils; Claude, among the earlier professors. But now, as is often found with aging institutions, seven eighths of the attendants were excessively youthful; too young to be taken quite seriously as yet by anyone. The remaining one eighth was composed of shaky eccentrics and inadequates who had been attending (and, of course, contributing) since the year Dot. The professors were wayward, though one or two were geniuses, and merely at cross purposes with the times in which they found themselves. Genius, however, comes normally in inverse measure with capacity to impart. The two things are strongly opposed. One of the pupils, a very old, very tough American woman brought a sackful of cakes and pastries for consumption by all during the two breaks each day.