Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

Then, inevitably, all along the line the women began slitting the throats of the unsuspecting Walts, one after another, slash, slash, slash, slash, slash, with the same reactions, the same twist of the female features. The blood and gore rushed down toward him like a swiftly burning fuse. In that instant he knew he was going to die. When the line of murders reached the end, the nearest reflections, the woman beside him would wake and then slit his throat with her scissor-sharp claws.

Down the line came that sweep of slashing hands on the end of white arms, like a sea wave surging down a long curved bay.

“NO!” he screamed.

Instead, he reached under his own pillow and found the automatic pistol. In the next moment, before the line of arms reached his bed, he shot the woman beside him twice in the chest. She did not even open her eyes. There was the faintest of grunts and then she flopped over the edge of the bed, to strike the glass floor with the sound of a dead fish hitting a slab of marble.

Walt sat there trembling, the gun still gripped tightly in his fist. At any moment he expected the door to be flung open. There would be oriental men wielding meat cleavers tumbling into the room. They would see the dead body and set about him, hacking him to pieces, leaving him bleeding from a thousand cuts. In his mind he could feel the cold bite of the choppers and butcher’s knives now, biting into his vulnerable flesh. Bile rose to his mouth, as the terror of a horrible death washed through his stomach.

He had twenty-five rounds left in the automatic. He waited in abject misery, wondering how he had got into this mess, and how he would ever get out of it.

No one came.

He waited for at least ten minutes, before breaking down and sobbing, burying his face in one of the pillows.

Then he suddenly got angry. Red, misty rage swamped his brain. He sat up quickly. What the hell was all this? They had set him up, somehow. He was a patsy. They had used him to murder a woman whose name he did not know. What would he say to the police? The whole story was so fantastic the cops would laugh at him. Yet it was possible, with modern technology, to arrange something like this. The mirrors could be screens, displaying pictures they picked up through hidden cameras. Once the computers behind the screens had the images, they could do what they liked with them. All right, he had experienced unbelievable orgasms, but those could have been drug-induced, using that fragrance which pervaded the room at all times.

He stared again at the terrible mirrors and another thought came to him.

Maybe it was more devious still!

He remembered they could often hide prying eyes behind them. He finally saw through their whole filthy deviant scheme now. There was an audience behind those mirrors, paying to watch him make love to, then murder a young woman. Voyeurs of sex and death. The owners were using him to supply their jaded customers, those men who had seen and done everything, with a new excitement, a new experience. He imagined drooling customers watching open-mouthed as he and the woman frolicked on the bed, cried out in ecstasy, desire overflowing. Then the spectacle of the murder, the weapon blasting, the bullets striking flesh, the fear on the face of the murderer, the subsequent show of remorse. They probably loved every twisted minute of it: their voyeurism satiated with visions of fornication and blood.

Well, this was Walt Jones they were dealing with, not some namby-pamby from the suburbs of Suckerville. He was not going to lie down for this kind of deception. He was going to make them pay in more than money.

“You bastards!” he shrieked. “You bloody bastards!”

He began firing then, at random, the bullets shattering the mirrors all around him, above him. Walt imagined the terrified audience behind those mirrors, running for their lives as he pumped rounds into the walls and ceiling. He felt a barbarous achievement as the mirrors crashed all around him, the shards falling on his bed, slicing and piercing his naked body. It was raining glass and he did not care whether one of those dagger-sharp shards pierced his heart or not. He felt he really deserved to die with the woman. Those monsters had forced on him the role of executioner for their own anomalous cravings and he had failed to see how they were manipulating him.

Finally, he was out of ammunition, the mirrors all broken.

He shook his head. Fragments like diamonds fell from his hair. Bits of mirror lay all around him, reflecting parts of him: an eye, a tooth, a foot. Debris of his lust, his hunger for secret pockets of flesh. He wondered what made a man risk all to simply merge with woman for a few moments of high pleasure. How deep-seated was the desire to perform the futile act of procreation simply for itself.