Mark could do nothing but stare at her. She came closer and closer, until he could have reached up and touched her. She had a high forehead, and her hair was braided in strange, elaborate loops. She had no eyebrows, which made her face expressionless. But her eyes were extraordinary. Her eyes were like looking at death.
She raised her right hand and lightly kissed her fingertips. He could feel her aura, both electrical and freezing cold, as if somebody had left a fridge door wide open. She whispered something, but it sounded more French than English - very soft and elided - and he could only understand a few words of it.
"My sweet love," she said. "Come to me, give me your very life."
There were dried runnels of blood on her breasts and down her slightly-bulging stomach, and down her thighs. Her feet were spattered in blood, too. Mark looked up at her, and he couldn't think what to say or what to do. He felt as if all of the energy had drained out of him, and he couldn't even speak.
We all have to die one day, he thought. But to die now, today, in this naked woman's arms... what an adventure that would be.
"Mark!" shouted Katie. "Grab her, Mark! Hold on to her!"
The woman twisted around and hissed at Katie, as furiously as a snake. Mark heaved himself out of his chair and tried to seize the woman's arm, but she was cold and slippery, like half-melted ice, and her wrist slithered out of his grasp.
"Now, Katie!" he yelled at her.
Katie threw herself at the curtains, and dragged them down, the curtain-hooks popping like firecrackers. The woman went for her, and she had almost reached the window when the last curtain-hook popped and the living-room was drowned with gray, drained daylight. She whipped around again and stared at Mark, and the expression on her face almost stopped his heart.
"Of all men," she whispered. "You have been the most faithless, and you will be punished."
Katie was on her knees, struggling to free herself from the curtains. The woman seized Katie's curls, lifted her up, and bit into her neck, with an audible crunch. Katie didn't even scream. She stared at Mark in mute desperation and fell sideways onto the carpet, with blood jetting out of her neck and spraying across the furniture.
The woman came slowly toward him, and Mark took one step back, and then another, shifting the armchair so that it stood between them. But she stopped. Her skin was already shining, as if it were melting, and she closed her eyes. Mark waited, holding his breath. Katie was convulsing, one foot jerking against the leg of the coffee table, so that the empty beer-cans rattled together.
The woman opened her eyes, and gave Mark one last unreadable look. Then she turned back toward the mirror. She took three paces, and it swallowed her, like an oil-streaked pool of water.
Mark waited, and waited, not moving. Outside the window, the rain began to clear, and he heard the whine of a milk float going past.
After a while, he sat down. He thought of calling the police, but what could he tell them? Then he thought of tying the bodies to the mirror, and dropping them into a rhyne, where they would never be found. But the police would come anyway, wouldn't they, asking questions?
The day slowly went by. Just after two o'clock the clouds cleared for a moment, and the naked cherry tree in the back garden sparkled with sunlight. At half-past three a loud clatter in the hallway made him jump, but it was only an old woman with a shopping trolley pushing a copy of the Wincanton Advertiser through the letterbox.
And so the darkness gradually gathered, and Mark sat in his armchair in front of the mirror, waiting.
At half-past five, when the room was completely filled with shadows, he thought he saw a faint pale stirring in the surface of the mirror, like a fish in the bottom of a murky pond. He gripped the arms of his chair, his heart beating so hard that it hurt his ribs.
Then he heard a bubbling groan from the couch; and the beer-cans started to rattle. The silvery-faced woman appeared in the mirror, and as she did so, Nigel and Katie sat up to greet her.
"I am half-sick of shadows, said
The Lady of Shalott."
