David Sutton - The Satyr's Head - Tales of Terror

As he stepped inside and began to climb the bare staircase to the first floor landing, he gazed bleakly at the mildewed paper on the walls. A naked light bulb swayed on the end of a cord at the head of the stairs. He wondered what he had let himself in for at a place like this. Fortifying himself, however, with the thought that in going through with what was to follow he might end the dreams that had been tormenting him for the past three weeks, he pressed on the buzzer by the door facing him at the top. One fifteen, she had said on the phone when he rang her an hour before. It was just a minute off that time now. He ran his fingers nervously through his uncombed hair.

After a short pause the door opened before him.

‘Believe in punctuality, don’t you?’ Clara said with an offhand familiarity which made him feel more relaxed as she stepped back and looked at the slim gold watch on her wrist. She was dressed in a denim skirt, fluffy red slippers and a purple, turtle-necked sweater, which clung, about her ample breasts.

She smiled as she showed him in.

‘Make yourself at home,’ she said breezily.

‘Thank you,’ Lamson said as he hung his coat on a hook by the door and looked about the room. In the far corner, partially hidden behind a faded Japanese screen, was a bed. In front of the old gas fire stood a coffee table crammed with dirty plates. He wondered if she had been having a party or whether, as seemed dismayingly more likely, she merely washed them up when there were no more clean ones left. He hoped, fleetingly, that she was a little more conscientious about cleaning herself.

Clara ground the cigarette she’d been smoking into a saucer, then said:

‘It’ll be forty quid. Cash first, if you don’t mind. It’s not that I don’t trust you, but 1 can hardly take you to court if you refuse to pay afterwards.’

Lamson smiled to cover his embarrassment, and said that he understood.

‘You can’t be too careful, can you?’ he added, sorting out the notes from his wallet. ‘Forty pounds, you said?’ he went on, as he placed the money in her waiting hand.

‘Many thanks,’ she replied, taking it to a drawer and locking it inside.

She looked back at him coyly.

‘Well, I suppose we had better begin,’ she said, folding back the screen from the bed. With no further words, she kicked off her slippers and began to unbutton her skirt. Within a few minutes she was dressed only in her tights and bra. She looked up then as if only just remembering his presence, and told him to hurry. ‘I haven’t all day to wait for you getting undressed. Unless, of course, you prefer having it with your clothes still on.’ She shook her head, laughing almost like a young girl, though she was in her late thirties, unfastening her bra and letting it fall forward from her breasts. Lamson swallowed as he stared at the limpid mounds of pale white flesh that were uncovered, their puckered orbs matching the goose flesh that was starting to rise on her cozily rounded arms.

She shivered, complaining to him again at his slowness.

‘Do you want me to help you?’ she asked sarcastically.

Lamson shook his head as he loosened his trousers and let them fall, unaided, to the floor. Stepping out of them onto the lukewarm oilcloth he looked at her again.

‘Come on, luv,’ she said as she rolled back on the rumpled bed. ‘Off with the rest of them and we can begin.’

Although Lamson felt embarrassed at his nakedness as he slipped out of the last of his clothes, and could feel the blood burning through his cheeks, he was surprised — and not just a little alarmed — that there was no other reaction, that he seemed, in fact, to be incapable of carrying out what he had paid for. Seemingly unaware of this — or, if she was, taking no apparent notice of it — she smiled as he approached her. Lightly, questingly, her hands felt about his body as he pushed his face into her breasts. He smelt the faint aroma of sweat and eau-de-cologne, his mind whirling with haphazard and conflicting sensations. She pressed his mouth against her hardening nipples as he moved further up her body. Yet, still, he could not find the desire to possess her.

‘Come on, come on, dearie,’ he heard her whisper between gasps. He raised himself onto his elbows and looked down into her face. In the same instant her hands grasped hold of him between his legs. He gasped as her fingers lengthened and tightened gently about his penis, guiding him towards her. It was as if his loins were being instilled with a surcharge of life.

He looked down at her eyes — Joan’s face seemed to merge with hers, hiding the cheapness and vulgarity that had been there a moment before. It was almost angelic. Never before had he looked upon a face such as this, upon which all his pent up emotions of warmth, affection and even love could be gladly poured. His eyes passed lingeringly about her warm, soft cheeks where the blood made a pleasant suffusion of pink. She smiled encouragingly, and yet with an apparent innocence which drove him into an almost unbearable desire to possess her. He felt her thighs rise on either side of his legs, pressing him to her. He could feel himself grow stiff, entering her slowly, cautiously passing into the warmth within her summoning body. He could have cried out at the exquisite pangs that were racing through him, obliterating conscious thought.

Even through the pleasure that was overwhelming his mind, though, Lamson became suddenly aware that the room was darkening. Something sharp and dry scraped painfully across his back. He cried out in alarm as it stuck, like a vicious hook, ruthlessly dragging him away from her.

The pain crescendoed suddenly as he was tugged from the bed and flung onto the floor. Contorted in agony, he looked up. He glimpsed something dark stride over him. There was a scream. It seemed to cut deep into his ears like slivers of glass, and he tried desperately to crawl back onto his knees. Then the screaming stopped, as suddenly as it began. Instead there was a ripping sound, like something being torn apart.

‘No! God, no!’ he sobbed, dizzy with nausea, his sight blurring as he seemed to start falling in a faint. Whatever stood over him still moved, its weight shifting from one leg to the other in sickening, horrifying rhythm to the rips and tears from the bed.

Feebly Lamson tried to reach out across the sheets to stop whatever was going on there, when something soft and warm touched his fingers.

Something wet.

It clung to him as he automatically recoiled away from it, screaming hysterically as darkness closed in all about him.

It could have been hours, or even just minutes afterwards, when he opened his eyes once more. However long he’d been unconscious, the tawdry bedchamber had gone, as if he had never been there. Instead he was stretched out on the floor of his flat, facing the window. A blowfly buzzed aggressively, though without result, against the windowpane. Besides this there was silence.

As he slowly climbed to his feet, his first reaction was one of intense relief. He could have laughed out loud in that one brief instant in joy at the fact that it had never happened, that it was all just a horrible dream, that he had never even left his flat!

Then he noticed the spots of blood on his shirt. There were scabs of it clotted about his hands and fingers. His stomach heaved with revulsion as he stared down at the ugly stains covering him like the deadly marks of a plague.

‘Oh, my God!’ he muttered, rushing convulsively to the sink to wash them from him. His hands still dripping, he grabbed hold of his shirt and tugged it from him, grinding his teeth against the pain in his back as the scabs swathed across it were torn open. His shirt had been glued to him by them. When the pain subsided enough for him to touch them, he gingerly felt across his back, his fingers cautiously trembling along the blood-clogged grooves gouged into him. Crestfallen with horror, he stared at his haggard face in the mirror above the sink. Did it happen? Was it not just a dream but some vile distortion of reality?