doormaker
Doormaker. The spirits you could interrogate and who dared answer told you a doormaker kept your prison cell key.
It’s taken until now to find a mention in one of your more opaque resources that even resembles such a concept. The diagram you meditate over is something like a church window, a peaked symmetric shape split in two by a solid line down the middle, and each panel filled with lines and characters mostly symmetric, but flipped.
What answers your call looks very familiar indeed. You have the uncanny experience of seeing yourself coalesce opposite yourself. Both of you startle at the same time.
“What is—”/“What is—” you both start identically, then cut off. You both frown.
You have a feeling that saying your name isn’t going to help, here. In fact perhaps it would be dangerous to put your name in this thing’s mouth.
You both regard one another coolly. You’re a little conflicted. On the one hand this thing has answered wearing your form, a violation for which you wish to make it pay. On the other, it’s not the worst thing in the world to have your attention fixed with laser intensity on an idol of your own body. You can’t help but admire how the cross-legged seating position causes her thighs to chub out, enhancing the graceful and generous curve of her backside where it squidges out to support her weight. Her belly sits in her lap like an offering, riding across the middle with a crease like an ink stroke from a lover’s pen. Her breasts ride high despite their heft, an open challenge to gravity which covets their ponderous weight, like the mass of the planet itself desires you. That’s to say nothing of her face: pale, each feature flawless and dark, set in an austere stare that brooks no defiance.
You stare into her eyes and she into yours. Those eyes hold no fear for you, lacking the dangerous, insidious undertow of the dancing crimson vortices that capture the unwary. You press your will into the gaze.
She glances away.
Good. And more. See how she breathes deeper than you? When your gaze roved over your reflected body you grew a little steamy. But whatever is pretending to be you was not prepared for the emotion.
Unprepared, too, for the sensation you focus on now. You have burned away much of what your fan base bled for you through the Invitation. You hunger. It’s strange to imagine the feel of your own calves between your teeth; consider what it might be like to suck down that shapely behind, or to surmount your hard-fought, silk-padded belly. Only your unassailable sense of self keeps you from giving any ground to the idea that your image might end up consuming you.
The thought of swallowing up the creature opposite you sets parts of you fizzing with hunger. What must your guest be feeling! Your image parts her lips, a desperate and feral need causing her flat eyes to smoulder.
Three times your reflection has faltered: the eyes, the lust, the hunger being too much for it. You press the advantage before you find yourself having to fend off a ravenous assault by your own image.
“Tell me your name.”
The image speaks too, but slower. You break the symmetry for good.
It says, “… Tell me your… Hah. Clever.”
Fuck, do you smile like that? That smoky, crooked, knowing smirk? You want to bite those lips and teach her a thing or two. You thought you knew why your meals seemed drawn to you, but gosh, being the object of that smile feels like a tug felt right at the heart.
Is it possible to like yourself too much?
You repeat your demand. “Tell me.”
“Lucifer,” says your reflection.
You frown. Surely it knows you’re not dumb enough to fall for such an obvious lie. That smirk is really beginning to get to you, too. So superior. Like it’s telling a joke no one else will get…
… ah. Of course.
“No. You don’t bring light. You just reflect it. Tell me your name, mirror spirit. This is the third and final time of asking.”
You watch your own face collapse into a black frown. The integrity of the image begins to warp, your features beginning to melt and elongate like heated wax.
“Speculuceps.”
You speak the creature’s name. Immediately the solidity if your reflection dissolves and vanishes. All that remains is a distortion in space, a roughly human-shaped discontinuity that warps your bookcase, your desk.
With a voice like cut glass singing, it speaks. “What do you want?”
“Knowledge,” you answer, thinking of the doormaker, and the great panels of flawed glass that form the shell of your prison. However, you have also made yourself quite peckish with speculations about literally eating your own arse. “But first… What can you do?”
I’m chopping onions like a good house husband while the beef, a nice skirt cut, stews away in a vat of spices. I’ve never cooked Mexican before but you told me you had a hankering so I’m cooking all the BBC Good Food recipes at once. Like always when left to my own devices in the kitchen I’m singing, currently a stupid song about brass instruments. “Sou-sa-ma-phone / I’ve got a sou-sa-ma-phone / and that’s why the girls won’t leave me alone…”
The third dull thud finally gets my attention. It’s coming from the living room.
“Raven?” I call. No answer. Then, another thud, strangely metallic.
The knife that comes with me isn’t an intentional weapon, but I don’t mind having it with me. The living room is empty and the light muted as the evening sun bleeds out of the darkening sky. Everything’s quiet.
I’m about to turn back to the kitchen when there’s another thud. Ah, the mirror. Of course it is. Used for checking hair and hats before leaving the house, it’s currently vibrating slightly from an utterly unexplained thwack.
Mirrors scream occult bullshit. Something bad is about to happen. I freeze, then walk to the wall on which it’s mounted, preventing my image from appearing anywhere in it. You told me the mother of your recent meals is a witch and I don’t want to risk being a horror-movie idiot by falling into such a trap.
“Raven?” I call out, hoping I’m not interrupting anything important. “The, uh. The mirror is being weird. You know about that?”
Your voice floats musically down the stairs. “You’re ruining the fun!”
I grin, unobserved. “Sorry! Abundance of caution!”
“Just look in the damn mirror!”
So I do.
It’s not my reflection I can see. In fact the mirror appears to have become a perfect window into your room upstairs. The annoyed twist to your lips is excruciatingly beautiful.
You’re seated at the desk you use as a vanity. I can see the tops of bottles and spray canisters at the bottom lip of the mirror. You yourself are softly and flawlessly illuminated by your vanity lights, giving you the appearance of a work of art.
You look down at the knife I’m still carrying and hold out your hand. I stupidly look at the knife too like I’m trying to determine if there is some trick going on. When you flex your hand impatiently I gingerly begin offering the handle to the mirror surface.
There is no mirror surface. My hand continues to move through the glass without hindrance. My mouth falls open with astonishment.
You smile broadly as you watch the knife emerge from the glass. This is going to be so much fun!
I feel it when your fingers wrap around and then supplant mine. The sharp belly of the knife is tucked away from my wrist so I’m in no danger as you draw the knife away from my grasp. I begin to withdraw my hand but your other one catches it and gently brings to rest on your desk.
I flinch when you reposition the cutting edge over the flesh pad of my thumb. There’s a little artery there, right beneath the razor.
Like my hand is an onion or a chilli, you slice. Just the surface, but you split the tiny vessel and blood wells rapidly out.
Then your mouth is upon it. I feel the velvet grasp of upper and lower lip either side of your cut. Your teeth worry the skin, keeping the wound from at all slowing the flow. Every now and then I feel a cycle of pressure as you swallow a lazily-pooled mouthful.
It’s like you’re right there. I can’t believe it. The two rooms might as well be joined.
You glance up at me and take a final mouthful. Then you release me, licking clean the insides of your lips. Curiously you don’t stop the flow. I withdraw my hand still bleeding.
What happens next is a blur. Quite literally. You seem to gesture with your hands and the image bulges out, or contacts in, or something. Like a lens is distorting. When the picture settles you’re still there, but…
Your hand, the size of a tank, floats effortlessly into view. A finger the size of the dining table hooks and beckons.
Well, what am I going to do, disobey?
I thrust my whole arm through the aperture. Getting closer to the image also gives me a better vantage point.
Seen from below you’re… terrifying. Gorgeous and made incomprehensible by your incredible relative size, nevertheless you somehow trigger the normally quiet area of the brain reserved for detecting dragons, or oncoming trains.
Your fingernails come together, thumb and index, to grasp my arm at the shoulder. Instantly, blood flow stops. You’re probably being gentle as anything, but there is simply no question that if you pinched your nails together even moderately hard, you would instantly server my arm from my body.
Then you bring your mouth closer.
I think I make a noise. I nearly faint, though, so I don’t remember. Your smirking lips hang broad as my arm span. The subtle crenellations of their soft texture catch the light with the matte sheen of painstaking burgundy.
Nothing I’ve ever seen has prepared me for this. Your mouth hovers right before me and I can just stupidly watch.
Something that large should not be able to move so swiftly and confidently. Your lips pucker and take in my wrist, then the tiniest suck is enough to draw my entire arm into warmth and wetness.
Your tongue curls thrillingly beneath my outstretched hand and then falls away as you suck. Instantly the skin over my entire arm flashes red in a lovebite that will take a fortnight to disappear. The little cut explodes but you barely taste the extra spatter.
When you open your mouth I feel what it means to be food. I’d fit. Your throat, that shapely, glistening passage, would find me a challenge but still work me down. Your tongue is bigger than me and is almost entirely muscle. You could crush the breath and life out of me by just squeezing your tongue against the roof of your mouth. All this is to say nothing about your teeth, designed to deal with things my size and smaller.
When you lick my blood, the red line is lost against the slick, felten immensity of your tongue. What was a mouthful for you is now a crayon drawing between taste buds.
You are a goddess. The only reason I don’t start to weep at the sight of you is that I simply don’t have the brainpower.
When your lips close they twist again, apparently pleased with the effect they have had.
You lean back and look casually to the side in order to call to me, “Don’t burn the food!'”
Your voice is your normal voice.
Before the image dissolves you push my arm back through the portal with your finger then give me a wink. I’m left blinking in the living room. My world has upended. Did I dream that? Surely shoving a little girl down your throat is more likely than what just happened.
“… Food!” you call out again, having not heard me move for two minutes.
I head jerkily to the kitchen. With my current faculties it’ll take me ten minutes for me to realise where my knife went.