The Other Side of the Mirror Pt. 03

Part 3 - Emma

Emma Wheeler had come to Selsdon Battersely in search of Alice Compton, had been shocked to read of her disappearance in the newspapers, had wanted to do something. She had known Alice since a young girl, not that she had lived in Selsdon Battersely herself: it had been a holiday friendship. Their parents had got to know each other when on holiday and going to the same place had met again and again. She had even stayed with Alice in Selsdon Battersely. The two girls had played together and developed a warm friendship. They had walked miles together. Emma liked to walk.

A shock to hear of the disappearance and she had come to stay, not with Alice's father, and had lodged at Simon's house where his parents ran a B&B. She could not understand why Alice had disappeared and had come of her own volition with the slightly crazy idea she could find her. She had talked with Alice's father, seen her room and noted the suddenness of it all. It was not as if Alice had disappeared when known to be out and about or in another town or known to have a relationship with someone. She had talked to people and in her quick and rather suspicious way had felt, and felt strongly, something was being hidden by some. Even Simon Trenchard had seemed to have a look of panic in his eyes when she had talked to him about Alice, asked how well he knew her.

All in all, her enquiries proved fruitless, she was not some female Sherlock Holmes or reincarnation of Miss Marple, let alone Precious Ramotswe... until she heard a particular sound.

Emma paused on the landing, heading for the bathroom at the B&B. She could hear sounds through a bedroom door - Simon's bedroom door. Emma knew nobody was in there with Simon, yet the sounds were unmistakeable - the sound of penis squelching in a vagina. She paused, just so intrigued and went closer. Perhaps she had always been nosy, perhaps it was the frustration of not solving the Alice Compton mystery, perhaps it was because she knew no one else was in the house, perhaps it was simply because she could. Emma bent and peered through the keyhole of the old door.

She would not have cast herself in the role of 'Peeping Tom' but she saw Simon completely naked and... and with Alice Compton. There was no mistaking her face, her friend's face, even with Simon's cock in her mouth. It was a momentary sight and Emma was straightening and banging upon the door calling Simon's name. Eventually, though it was little time, the door knob turned and there was Simon's face peering around the door. Emma pushed and barged into the room. There was no one there, no one in the room with him. She rushed in, pushing Simon out of the way. Nobody there at all. No Alice. No Alice hiding under the bed, no Alice in the wardrobe. No Alice, no woman at all just a naked Simon Trenchard standing with his hands over his genitalia.

The embarrassment - but she had seen, had really seen... What could she say, what could she say to explain herself? Yet Simon seemed strangely quiescent, there was no anger, no outrage - no nothing, really. He seemed to have almost a guilty look about him as if he had been caught doing something he should not. Perhaps it had been a trick of the light and she had seen him reflected whilst masturbating in that big mirror in his room. Perhaps... but she was so sure.

"Sorry... I." And she fled.

It was the very next day she overheard the name 'Mandrake Mortimer' spoken quietly in the tea shop in the village by a couple of women on the next table. They spoke quietly but she heard the word 'mirror' and a contemptuous 'men.' Quite why it intrigued her she could not put a finger on, but it did. And once Emma Wheeler's interest was roused it was not easily assuaged. Yet people clammed up when she mentioned the name 'Mandrake Mortimer.' Clammed up as if a door had been slammed shut. She even caught one woman glancing at a nearby mirror with a look of fear on her face. It was clear to Emma there was a connection between the person and mirrors. She was told it was just a 'silly superstition' and not to worry herself about it. But that led to research.

'The small village of Selsdon Battersely is mentioned in the Domesday Book and has a quaint Norman church with an unusual lytch gate dating from...'

The old guidebook meandered here and there but eventually,

'Ghost stories abound but one of the most curious is about one Mandrake Mortimer, a member of the local gentry and a reputed rake who is said to haunt both the old pub and the rectory. It is not clear what he did or how he died, but the local superstition warns young women from meeting him in the night. You have been warned!'

Emma snorted, the guide told her nothing. It had been written in a jokey style. Perhaps the researcher had found out very little or been told less. But what was it about mirrors?

"Don't ever say that name!" Yet another local woman warned but would not say more.

Emma had seen the cottage built into hillside, knew old Joe Costin lived there on his own. It was not at all what she normally did but, passing on one of her nocturnal walks, the light coming through the curtains of a window drew her eye. She paused by the cottage window and saw the curtains were slightly ajar. It was movement that caught her eye, not a natural inclination to pry. To see old Joe naked, stark naked there in his bedroom was perhaps not surprising and certainly not at all arousing to a young girl: to see him with an erection perhaps embarrassing, and in a man 75 or more probably a bit shocking, but it was what he was doing with his penis that really shocked. Instead of pulling her eyes and head away and hurrying on, cross with herself for being so nosey and getting such an eyeful she just stood rooted to the spot.

There he was, Joe Costin, standing at a remarkably outsize mirror for his bedroom, it reached right to the floor with an ornate gold frame, he was as naked as the day he was born and with his cock so visible and up. He was not alone, not really alone, because, impossibly, out of the mirror came the bottom half of a woman, a girl indeed, and it was her bottom that was towards him and held in his hands. One hand to each hip as he pulled and pushed the bottom moved to him and then away. Not an unusual way for sexual intercourse to be carried out. Emma had been 'taken' that way herself, in the way of the animals by boyfriend's past: not that she really liked that, or the idea of being 'taken.' Sexual intercourse was a mutual act between consenting women and men. There should be no element of the man taking the woman. They were equal partners. She preferred to be on top rather than on the bottom thereby avoiding any possible subjugating or subordinating the woman to the man. In a way she did not really like, as a matter of principle rather than sexual desire, the male penetrating the female. It gave the 'wrong' message even if there was a certain biological imperative for things to be that way.

Joe was doing more than simply subjugating the female. It was all suddenly terribly clear to Emma, the awful, terrible secret of the men in Selsdon Battersely enjoying women who could not resist or say 'no.' It was even worse than that, Joe was not just having his way with her, she could see his penis was not in her vagina but her bottom, Joe was sodomising her and clearly enjoying it immensely if his grunts and groans were anything to go by.

It so paralleled what she had thought she had seen with Simon, so suddenly connected that word 'mirror' with the mystery. Emma was anything but stupid, her mind made connections quickly. Was this what the men in Selsdon Battersely did? Was this the guilty secret of the men? The ability to pull unresisting women out of a mirror or at least the part they desired. To join Mandrake Mortimer in his misdeeds.

"Joe Costin!" She said in a firm voice. It was an admonishment. The effect was immediate and dramatic. Joe stiffened and then suddenly turned, pulling his erection from the girl's bottom and just stared at Emma with his mouth open as she looked in at the curtains. The now released bottom turned in the mirror and the woman's head came into view. And that was the greater shock. It was Alice, Alice Compton but not as she knew her. Not with that wry amused smile, a smirk almost and such a look of lust on her shining face: that was not her Alice at all. It was all so sudden, such a quick change of scene. Emma's eyes flicked back to the standing, gawping old man and then it happened. His old, wrinkled penis, sticking out level from his body, his old wrinkled foreskin fully retracted with his glans full and shining, his old but fully erect penis went into the male spasm. Presumably he had gone too far within Alice's bottom at just the moment she had called and was incapable of stopping the ejaculation. From the end of his penis came the ejaculate, white and spurting towards Emma at the window. The old man just standing there as his cock bounced a little and did that stupid male thing, splat, splat, splat out and onto the carpet.

Emma turned in both disgust and confusion and ran, not knowing what to think, her solitary and tranquil walk thoroughly disturbed by the awful revelation at Joe Costin's cottage. She had to talk to someone but who?

Back at her lodgings after a long and confused walk in the dark, Emma climbed the stairs and again heard noises from Simon's room. An awful thought came to her. She did not peek this time, did not knock but just turned the door knob and opened it.

Simon was as naked as before but this time he did not have his hands covering his sex, it was there for her to see, fully exposed or would have been had not half of it been inside the red lips of a dark-haired girl, her face incredibly half in and half out of the mirror on the wall. His head had turned towards the door as it had opened, his mouth open in surprise, though not as open as that of the girl. Simon stepped backwards, his penis released from the girl's mouth jerked upwards and stood erect and oscillating. The girl gave an awful conspiratorial grin towards Emma and then withdrew into the mirror.

How could such a thing be? Emma stepped forward staring not at Simon but at the retreating girl in the mirror, seeing her going back and back into the mirrored room until she was gone, and all Emma could see was her own reflection and that of Simon. He was trying to hide his erection with his hands - and failing.

"Put your hands down and listen to me, you, you..."

Simon sat on his bed, penis hanging down. It had been awful, the tirade from Emma Wheeler, the venom she had unleashed against him, and men generally, as he had stood there before her, so exposed, so naked and with his penis not yet down. He had thought before how good it would be to have had Emma in his bedroom, to be naked with her, his earlier, sexual, thoughts had been very much spoilt by the reality.

Words and more words, her flow had been unceasing for quite a time. And then she had left, banging the door behind her.

On the wall the mirror hung just like any other mirror. There was nothing untoward. The girl had disappeared like smoke in the wind.

Simon turned from it to the door and knew he would have, had the mirror been open to Emma, had she had said that name a third time, pushed her through. What an awful thing to have done, murder almost - perhaps, perhaps sort of... but he was chillingly certain he would have done just that when she threatened him with exposure. Not quite murder, but... He had not thought himself that sort of person. It had been awful the way she had disparaged his personality, had said she had never really liked him and had, indeed, sneered at the way she had seen him looking at her. It was not good to hear, on and on.

Emma tried again speaking to village women. The one who had told her not to say, 'that name' had stared at her for a moment and then said, "You should speak to old mother Watson."

The old woman lived by herself, a rather ramshackle old place crying out for restoration. Had seemed pleased and then amused by her visitor calling and by her questions. Slowly Emma had led the conversation around to Mandrake Mortimer. "I have seen..." she said.

The old woman had cackled, it was just as if she was an old witch herself.

"Me have been enjoying young Mortimer for fifty-seven years. Me young friend Jane disappeared from the village within weeks o' saying the name, Sara six months later but I was too canny. Me sees them in the mirror, just as they were but I don't join them. Not me, no never."

Emma sat in the old woman's parlour, tea cup in her hand, shocked at what she was hearing. This old woman was complicit in the men's misdeeds. There was no unity within the sexes, it was not black and white - not just another thing to chalk up against men.

"I shouldn't be telling you this. You so young."

But she didn't stop, told Emma what she enjoyed, and it was most everything Emma could have imagined and some she could not have thought of on her own.

"Them young maids aren't wise, let their lusts carry 'em away with young Mortimer. They don't hold on, lets little white fingers slip and be drawn int' mirror." She tapped the side of her nose. "I be too canny. Come you on, I'll show you some't."

Emma was worried, worried, as she ascended the rickety and steep stairs of old mother Watson's cottage, quite what she was going to be shown. She did not want to see the old woman engaged in sexual activity. any more than she had Joe Costin, she was unsure what she would see and what she did see shocked her.

The old woman's bedroom was surprisingly pretty, quite a boudoir and her single bed massive Everything feminine, if very old fashioned, everything very feminine if you discounted the chains and shackles.

"I puts these on, you see, perhaps just me feet, perhaps just me hands, maybe both, and then I locks them with yon key and puts that up the bed and then he can't draw me through, I can't go with him however much I wants to. And I do, I so do when that big John Thomas is in me. It's a lovely. But I can't and that's me trick." Her cackle only seemed to emphasise the point.

Emma's eyes moved from shackles to mirror. She knew something of bondage, had thought it another degrading thing men practised upon women, chaining them or binding them as if captives or slaves and taking a perverse sexual pleasure in the helplessness of their captives. The gagging and the schoolgirl clothes, the ropes and chains. She had not thought it something a woman would do voluntarily, still less to protect herself from a man. For a moment she imagined herself doing the same as an experiment.

Emma could see, as she listened, that it might be the most wonderful thing. Able to summon up the most handsome man and enjoy the procreative act with no consequences, only... only, it took a strong will, a strong feminine will, not to ultimately be drawn through the mirror.

"He tries to draw me back in't mirror, but he can't. Not all the way 'cos of them chains and then I can't reach the key 'cos it's too far away. And on I ride as long as I wants." The old woman leered at Emma. "Hee, hee, hee. As long as I wants 'cos his cock it don't go down. He spunks but it don't go soften, yer see, not like other men. I gets me fill so long as I wants. And I wants long!" Again, the cackle.

"I see..." Emma had admonished Joe Costin, been appalled at Simon, yet was not sure what she thought of Old Mother Watson. The old woman seemed to have got one up on Mandrake Mortimer - a victory, of sorts, for womankind against the men. The woman was enjoying Mortimer as much as Joe Costin was enjoying Alice and probably others besides. Was she to look through Joe Costin's curtains another night she could well imagine the dirty old man with his hands clasped around another naked girl's head, her torso perhaps pulled through the mirror, her breasts hanging and swinging as he thrust his hard penis in and out of her mouth.

And yet, yet there was Old Mother Watson drawing Mandrake Mortimer's spunk again and again - leastways that was how the old woman described her nocturnal play.

If the old woman could be strong, so could Emma. Emma could see the danger but, in her heart, thought she could be strong enough to withstand this Mandrake person however handsome and male he was. He was only a man, after all, and she was a modern female with no illusions about men, intolerant of anything that smacked of patronising or chauvinism. Nonetheless she was taking no chances. Her trip to the city and her unusual purchases saw to that.

Emma had no doubt in her mind that she had to try, had to speak to Alice, had to try and draw her back through the mirror. How could such a thing happen, something so fantastical, so impossible in a modern, rational world? She thought almost of enlisting Simon's help, insisting he should help, but dismissed that with a contemptuous flick of her hair.

Emma stood in front of the large mirror in her bedroom, a full-length mirror for dressing. Just a simple piece of mirror glass, no ornate frame or anything, just the sort you might find in any hotel... or B&B. It was not difficult saying the name 'Mandrake Mortimer,' not difficult saying it once or even twice but a third time was not so easy. Even Emma faltered at that.

"Mandrake Mortimer," she had done it. Three times like some magic incantation. She stood in her jeans and her shirt, not naked: sex was not at all her object. At first, nothing, nothing at all, no swirling mist or anything like that in the mirror. No eerie music in the background slowly building to a crescendo like in a film. Nothing at all. Emma was about to shrug her shoulders and go and read a book when, behind her, she saw in the mirror a reflection of somebody who was not there, somebody over by the wall of her room; her head whipped around to look behind her but there was nothing, nobody there; she felt the hair to the back of her neck rising and prickling - a primaeval instinctive physical reaction as she willed herself to stay calm; the figure behind her, or rather not behind her at all but in front of her in the mirror, was male, obviously male, not Alice at all.

The figure was tall with dark hair, black curly hair, and a beard to match, completely naked and clearly completely unembarrassed by the contrast with her. He took a step towards her and Emma swallowed, she had not really expected to find herself reacting in quite the way she was. The man seemed to exude sexuality, her eyes could not help but flick over his body, could not help being drawn to his undoubtedly handsome face, to his full lips and, the closer he came the more she could see, his blue, blue eyes.

Woman are not naturally hairless across their bodies, legs need shaving, wax may need to be applied or hairs plucked. The idea of the hairless woman is unreal, without intervention the hair is all there though often fine. Women have moustaches, women have hair to their arms and legs, it is just often very fine. It is an unreal contrast with men, though even they, vary in their hairiness. This man, though, it seemed to Emma exuded masculinity and the hairiness, the dark, curly hairiness of his body, seemed to make it the more so.

And then, after all the visible musculature, the hair and the height of the man there was his penis. Emma would have scoffed at the idea of penis envy, would have been the first to make some disparaging remark about men thinking with their 'pricks,' would never have thought of a penis, an erect penis, as 'magnificent' or 'proud' and certainly would have been disparaging about the importance of size, yet, yet... Her eyes were drawn to the man's large and upright organ. It was just so rigid, so fine, with the most pleasing curve to its shaft.

She could not help it, she felt her body reacting, her sex tingling and becoming wet, her nipples within the soft cups of her brassiere rising. Again, she swallowed as the man, now feet from her, casually dropped his hand to his penis and drew back his foreskin, fully revealing the smooth lilac purple of his knob, so rounded, so sexual, so very much shaped to penetrate a woman, so very much there in front of her.