Grim Tales by Norman Lock

fleeing from an impossible assignment into the freedom of the sunlit playground.

    He knew how to look at a person so that, even after a moment’s stare, the life was absorbed. That look – so terrible in its intensity and longing – was as if barbed. When the eyes left those of their victim, they drew with it some essential element without which life is impossible to sustain. It was not uncommon that those who had suffered this stare succumbed soon afterwards to a wasting disease – often mortal.

    You’re playing with fire, she warned. But he would not stop – no, not even when his hands started to smoke inside her blouse.

    She bared her throat to him but instead of kisses received a wound from which she bled to death more swiftly than any of the other guests thought possible.

    His practice of vampirism would not have been recognizable in previous centuries. He forsook the cape, for one thing and in general had banished black from his wardrobe in favor of other, gayer colors. He slept in a bed, although a sachet of Old World earth was sewn into the mattress, emitting a dank, not altogether unpleasant odor that might have been mistaken for that of potting soil had there been plants in the room. He had also managed by slow degrees to overcome his famous intolerance for Christian symbols and garlic to the point where he could enter Oude Kerk on the arm of a woman and, later, enjoy an Italian supper with her. His manners were not so suave as Ligosi’s, though certainly a world away from the uncouth Count Orlak (as played by Max Schreck in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu) . In two things, however, the family trait remained: his enjoyment of a beautiful woman’s neck and a mirror’s inability to possess his image. These two came together tragically one night in the bedroom of a lady. Looking in from the hallway, her husband happened to glance into the dressing-table mirror and – to his astonishment – saw her, sitting alone, with head thrown back in abandonment. Embarrassed by her shamelessness, he closed the door softly and went to his club. By morning she was “white as a ghost.”

    Mirrors interested him; how one becomes in them an image without history, without depth. So it was that he spent more and more time in front of the mirror until one day, turning from it at the sound of his wife’s coming into the room, his face remained in the mirror – inscrutably looking at her as she, seeing the sudden facelessness of the man in the room, began to scream.

    It was not vanity that drew him always to the mirror to see his face there but doubt – wearying and unassuageable – of his own existence.

    He conceived a mode of travel by which he might send his reflected image to destinations remote, exotic, or forbidden until one day, in Port au Prince, the mirror shattered; and, as if in sympathy, his own features recomposed themselves into something impossible to describe. He had to kill himself – surely you can see that?

    Every mirror in the city showed them making love in front of a mirror.

    Early that morning, which was to be his final morning, she took down the large, round mirror where she was often seen by her husband to sigh, for what cause he did not know (for the sake of her unhappiness, which was great, and, the man for whom she burned!) – took down the mirror and carried it out onto the lawn. Later, at the window, waiting for breakfast, her husband saw a pool of light, dazzling now that the sun had climbed the rooftops. He went outside as if drawn there and, looking into the mirror, fell into the sky. Quickly, she smashed the mirror.

    He had become a prisoner although there were no bars at the window or locked door to keep him in. Neither was there dog, snake, loathsome insect, or rat – there was not so much as a mouse to blockade the door against those who feared mice, which he did not. There was nothing at all to stand in the way of his