Red Grow the Roses

Gracefully, almost idly, she circles my reflection and, as I watch, begins to dance. It’s strange to see her brushing up against me, draping her arms about my neck, rubbing her rear into my crotch – all without me being able to feel a thing. The tease is entirely visual. Each flick of her hips makes the blood surge in my veins. Each jiggle of her breasts makes my need grow. But I feel oddly discomfited in the midst of my fascination, as if I’m jealous of my own reflection. I move my hands, trying to interact with her dance, and she laughs silently as my mirrored self moves too, clumsily encircling her undulating hips. Turning in my arms she grasps the front of my shirt and tears it open.

My real shirt, the one on my material body, remains unscathed. The one in the reflection is shredded and my chest revealed. The look of confusion on my face is comic. She’s mocking me, I suspect – mocking my desire to rationalise, at any rate. She rakes her nails across my bare skin and my reflection bleeds, yet I feel nothing. She shreds my trousers – effortlessly; her nails must be sharp as knives – and squirms her pert little rump against me.

‘Come here,’ I say hoarsely. ‘Come on out.’

Her eyes lift and meet mine, looking straight out from the glass, her lips forming a smile so wanton that it makes my cock stiffen all on its own. Then she abandons my reflected self and walks out from the mirrored room into the material one. Her feet make no sound on the carpet, of course, but I feel the caress of the cold air that surrounds her. I take a deep breath as she closes on me, lays a slender hand on my breastbone, and then pushes me backwards on to the table and climbs on top.

This time I hear the fabric of my shirt tear.

* * *

She tastes like that Chinese tea: lapsang souchong, that’s the one. Slightly smoky, slightly tannic. Cold.

Eat me, I beg. Eat me up. Take me down to that dark place and let me never come back.

* * *

When the elevator door opens I’m lying supine on the polished conference table, speckled with love-bites, and she’s kneeling over me. She’s framing my head with her straddled thighs and grinding her pubic mound down over my face, but I’m not exactly applying myself to the job. Traumatic pleasure has got me pinned, capable of nothing more than groans. She’s got her teeth buried deep in my balls and she’s sucking hard, and that’s about all my mind is capable of grasping right now.

Until Penny steps out of the lift.

I look up from between the mirror-girl’s white thighs as my world cracks like a dropped glass. ‘It’s not what it looks like’ – isn’t that what I’m supposed to say, caught in flagrante like that? That’s the cliché. Try and talk your way out of this: Mr Dick is standing at full mast, angled as a gnomon over my belly. ‘It’s not what it looks like, darling: I’m not really fucking her.’

The mirror-girl makes the point far better than I ever could, lifting her face from my punctured balls and stiff cock to snarl at Penny, showing a red mask that’s all savage teeth.

‘Richard?’ Pen takes an unsteady pace forward, dropping her handbag.

Light as a cat, the mirror-girl springs off me and the two women stare.

‘That’s … That’s my husband.’ Penny sounds aghast.

The mirror-girl doesn’t reply. I’ve never heard her speak. She snatches my wrist and pulls me up from the table, heading for the window. She’s strong, but I’m so weak I can’t keep my legs under me. I’ve lost too much blood, I think, as the floor shoots up to meet me and my shoulder is wrenched at an unnatural angle. Blue-black explosions of colour flare behind my eyes. My knees burn on the carpet as she tows me. I see her bound through the pane of glass and my arm follows, tight in her grasp.

It’s like jelly; gelid but yielding. My hand sinks into the pane and it doesn’t appear on the outside of the glass where the walkway is, waving over the city landscape, but only in the reflected room. With a jerk she drags me through up to my shoulder. For the first time I try to resist, though not wholeheartedly.

A warm hand grabs my other wrist, drawing it out behind me. Penny. It’s Penny, holding me back.

The mirror-girl pulls again, much stronger, and my head is wrenched through to the other side. For a moment, strung between both worlds, I see what the reflection looks like from within. I see what she looks like in her own world.

I scream, but I know Penny can’t hear me any more. The warm hand is nearly pulling my left arm off: the cold one is wrenching at my right. I shut my eyes and haul backwards as hard as I can, twisting my wrist in the mirror-ghost’s grasp. Her fingers feel as thin and hard as bone.

Then she lets go. It’s so abrupt it has to be deliberate: I pitch over backwards and the glass shatters to tiny cubes, letting in a ferocious blast of night air. Every light on the observation floor goes out as I tumble into Penny’s arms. It’s freezing cold. She gasps my name over and over, and we crawl together over the crunching safety glass toward the lift. We end up crouched together by the wall, and she takes my head in her hands and presses her cheek against mine, trembling.

‘Pen. Oh, thank God.’

‘I came … I came to see if you were OK.’ Her skin feels hot and even though I’m dizzy and shaking I wrap my arms around her, craving that warmth. The tears running down my face – hers or mine – burn my cheeks.

For a moment the memory of what lies beyond the mirror fills my head, and then I push it away, burying my face in my wife’s warm scent.

This is terrible. I’ve still, despite everything, got an erection that could stand for Parliament. My balls seethe, swollen and tight with the urge to erupt and shed – well, I can’t even guess: the mirror-ghost has drained me dry and I ought to be shrivelled and flaccid but I’m not, I’m burning with arousal. Pulling Penny further up on to my lap I kiss her fervently and push her skirt up her thighs. She makes an incoherent noise that might be protest, but she kisses me back and clings to my neck. My fingers find the edge of her panties, and I pull at them, sharply, my hands clumsy and quivering. Her gusset is thick with the sanitary pad that I wrench aside. Then I pull her up and over my stiffy, impaling her slippery depths.

‘Richard!’

‘Please,’ I groan, my dry lips mumbling her in the half-dark, my breath coming hard and bitter. ‘Please, Pen.’ I have to: I have to slake this torturing tumescence. All my cum’s been drained already but I need to go again. Right now.

‘Oh, God.’

‘Please. Yes. Oh, yes.’

Grunting, sweating, clumsy – we slither together, frantic now. Penny’s thighs rise and fall and I grip her hips with desperate strength. She’s gasping. I’m nearly weeping with the need for release, because I can’t possibly come again, not now.

But somehow I do. Riding a long white streak of pain I flood her, pulse after pulse.

* * *

And now Penny is pregnant. When she couldn’t have been fertile. When I had nothing left to give her, from testes inflamed with poison.

Now I’m really scared.

(Roisin)

And this is Roisin, the mirror-ghost. She is the oldest of the vampires in the City: so very old that she hardly remembers her first life, so old that only her name remains to her. Her history has dissolved in the murk of years, her ambitions and personality washed away by the tide of time. She has forgotten almost everything. Her body too has surrendered its identity, even its reality. It has become as tenuous and fragmented as her mind.

Matter is no longer material. The material is no matter. She is on her way to becoming a ghost, or a god.

She remembers only how to love. The thirst for love still drives her. She doesn’t feed casually, not like Ben or Naylor, Reynauld or Estelle. She doesn’t choose a different lover every night then abandon them disbelieving and distraught before morning. When Roisin feeds, it is with passion. She falls for her lovers with the swift, heart-clutching imperative of romantic fervour. She becomes obsessed and will woo a new flame for weeks, lavishing her kisses upon them alone. She shadows and protects them, keeping them close, shutting the world with all its dangers and horrors away, spinning a cocoon of love to cradle them.

And she will be gentle as she eats you. Tender as her lips wrap about your warm flesh and seek the throbbing pulse. She will mourn you with exquisite sorrow when you leave her bereft.

Fear her love.

Roisin will come to you out of a silvered glass. Be not too vain, or the white lady may spy you and want you for her own. Under the moonlight, she will stoop to kiss your flesh with her pale lips and fill you with her cold fire. In silent places she approaches, her presence marked only by the faintest whisper, a stir of chill air not strong enough to break the cobwebs spun on an autumn night. Her skin is whiter than porcelain, her lips full, her breasts small and soft, her eyes an empty void aching to be filled with the sight of you. She needs. She is the embodiment of need.

She is beautiful, and she will break your heart.

It’s hard to say what it is that attracts her in the first place: a look in someone’s eye, perhaps; a particular indefinable scent of skin or the sound of a racing pulse. It’s the indescribable chemistry of passion: a mystery. Perhaps she sees or tastes in them a faint echo of her first love. And yet every time she is betrayed; that is her tragedy. Her lovers grow wizened and ungrateful, dull as clods of earth where once they were brimming with life, and unresponsive to either pain or pleasure. Just as swiftly as she falls for them she inevitably finds herself one night, without warning, perplexed and frustrated and indifferent, and she turns away in search of new succour for her empty and aching heart.

And she forgets.

Once outside of the fierce focused light of her love, the living are too ephemeral to make any impression on her memory. Roisin has lived so many years, seen so many faces, that mortals are like transient patterns formed by mud swirled in water. She finds comfort in places she knows, but even places change. Meadows are suddenly covered in swathes of housing, trees grow to giants and then vanish in the blink of an eye, skylines rise and fall like a tide. She clings to those people whose immortality – if not their permanence – makes them more than passing shadows, to Reynauld and Naylor in particular. They are the anchors of her disintegrating life. They are beacons in the fog.

The present washes over her, too ephemeral to grasp. The past decays. She recalls … What? Fragments only.

The smell of the wild briar roses after which she was named.

A lead-weighted spindle hanging from her fingers, twisting flax to thread.

The seep of bog water into leather shoes stuffed with fleece to cushion her numb toes. Hands heavy on her arms, marching her too fast through the puddles, the mud splashing up under her woollen skirt all over her bare legs.