Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers: Magical Tales of Love and Seduction

The House of Nine Doors: The Man Who Came But Did Not Go Ellen Kushner

IN THE HEART OF the city there is a certain House …

The young man had been coming to the House of Nine Doors for several weeks now, asking always for the services of the same man. Tonight, as Carlin prepared himself for his nameless client (and are not all clients of that House nameless by choice and by courtesy?) the Master of the House stopped him. “You say he never touches you, Carlin.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“And yet he seems to enjoy himself fully.”

“I think so. I certainly do.”

“Do you?” The Master of the House, who was called Eyas for his hawklike qualities, ruffled the dark hair of his employee. “I’m glad. What is he afraid of, I wonder?”

Carlin shrugged his muscular shoulders. “Me? Himself?”

“People pay good money not to be afraid here. What’s his secret, then?”

Carlin wished the Master would not play with his hair that way. Attention from Eyas was always piquant, frequently stimulating, and he needed to save his energies for the client ahead. “I think he is ashamed of his desire.”

“As are so many. But, tcha!” The Master ran his finger down to his chin, and the man licked his lips. “You know how to help him get over that, surely.”

“He does not want me to. He made that very plain.”

Eyas sat up straight. “Does not want you to? Or,” he shifted the emphasis to quite another meaning, “does not want you to?”

“Really doesn’t,” Carlin explained.

Eyas fingered his nipple. “I love secrets.”

“Shall I find this one out for you, sir?”

The Master of the House said, “I will soon make you fit to find out nothing at all. No, don’t be offended. And don’t go. I’ll be sure you make good money tonight, but leave this one to me. Oh — how does he tip?

“Too high.”

“Not a nobleman, then; their fathers always teach them exactly how much.”

At the First Door of the House, anyone may knock and be admitted. The porter did not speak, but made a question with his face, and the client nodded briefly. And so the porter led him, as usual, through the Fourth Door, which is the Door of Joy Unasked For. It opens onto a hall hung with green and gold like a woodland in spring, and always there is the faint scent of jonquils. In that hall waited a girl as fresh and young as dawn, with long hair down her back, but her form girded with silver armor, and a long hunting knife at her side. She knew this client did not want his hat and cloak removed, and so she simply escorted him up to a door bound in brass. She knocked and disappeared, and the client entered the room.

It was the usual room, dark with wood and red velvet, candlelit, cushioned. He began to take his gloves off, but stopped when he noticed the room’s other occupant.

“Is there a mistake?” he asked in a low voice. “You’re not … precisely what I require.”

The slender man lying decoratively on the floor cushions wore the simplest of white robes. His close-cropped hair stood up like a brush. Although his eyebrows were dark, his hair was bleached almost to white. “I am not Carlin, of course, sir. He cannot come tonight. If you wish to wait, another man, darker than I, and more to your taste, should be free in a matter of an hour or so. But the Master of the House thought I might serve.”

“Oh, he did, did he? What does he know of me and what I want?”

“He would not be Master if he did not know us all.” The blond stretched his body back against the cushions luxuriously. His robe opened on a supple set of muscles, but his chest had been stripped hairless: no way of knowing whether he were a blond by courtesy only. “I know it does not please you for me to join you on the bed, sir. With your permission, I’ll stay here where you may see me clearly.”

The young client perched on the edge of the canopy bed. He removed his gloves, but that was all. He had the smooth white hands of a scribe, a scholar, or a dandy. His face hid in the shadows of his hat, his figure in the heavy folds of his cape. But his voice was a young voice, pitched low, without inflection, to cover its youth. “What is your name?”

“That will be your choice,” said the blond. “Will you not name me, sir? For a friend, maybe, or for a lover?”

“You would let me do that?” The client scowled. “Very well,” he said maliciously; “I will name you for my dog. You shall be — Fluff.”

“As you please, sir. Fluff is my name.”

“No, no!” he objected, not laughing. The notion did not amuse him. “I don’t care what you call yourself.”

“Bliss is my name,” the blond said; “if you would have it so.”

“I would have it so, indeed.” He gestured with one leather glove. “Very well, Bliss, stay. But take off the robe.”

The blond stood with a dancer’s economy of motion, his eyes modestly cast down. “Quickly, sir, or slowly?”

There was a moment’s startled silence, swiftly recovered from: “Slowly,” the client purred.

And slowly Bliss slipped the robe from one shoulder, and then the other, letting the soft cloth caress his skin, letting the client see the effect that the performance, and the sensation, were having on him.

The client saw. “Goodness!” he squeaked, by which Bliss knew that Carlin sometimes required more encouragement. He already knew of their relative endowments, and watched to see if the young man appreciated them.

He did. He was looking very hard at the one in question. Bliss took two steps toward the bed, and saw the young man on it freeze as if he’d seen a dangerous animal moving. Bliss converted the movement to a langorous dance with the robe, trailing it over his body until the fine white cloth hung like a scarf from the end of his fingers, stretching out toward the bed — as if he were the trainer, now, and the young man the frightened animal he was trying to coax toward him. And so he remained that way for one moment, for two, the white cloth waving faintly in the stillness of the room …

“What?” the client demanded. “What am I supposed to do?”

“It is an offer,” said Bliss. “An offer without words.”

“You need offer me nothing,” the young man said gruffly. “I can have whatever I want.”

Bliss’s hand held steady, and he met his client’s eyes. “And yet I offer it: The robe from my body, still warm, and faintly scented, for you to do with as you please: to smell, to stroke, to tear to shreds—”

“Give it to me!”

“Quickly, or slowly?”

The young man’s hands were clenched. “Quickly!”

Bliss flung him the robe; it unfolded in midair, landed against the young man like a spider’s web, a gossamer net. The young man tore it from his face, crumpled it into a ball and breathed in deeply.

“And will you give me nothing in return?” asked Bliss.

“You don’t need it. You’re already randy as a buck in spring.”

“That’s not why I’d want it.”

“Why, then?”

“So that you might see your hand on me.”

Mutely, the client held out one red leather glove. Bliss knelt to take it, and pressed it to his lips.

The sharp intake of breath from the bed confirmed his guess. He ran the leather along his chest, across his thighs. Only then did he raise his eyes, shyly, to the client. The young man’s hand had vanished inside his cloak, to where a man might keep his dagger. And further down, to where a man kept other things and kept them well. The hand stirred the cloth steadily, and his breathing was audible. Bliss suppressed a smile. He teased the glove across his nipples, and gasped loudly at the sensation, in tandem with the excited young man.

“Ah, yes!” the client breathed. “That’s good. Go on.”

Bliss stood very still. His naked body was flushed and hard, gleaming in the candlelight. Only his breathing flashed light and dark. “Go on?” he asked, though he knew perfectly well what was meant.

The client’s eyes were bright and feverish. “Yes, yes, go on!” His hand stopped moving. “You must take your pleasure,” he added gruffly.

“Alone?”

“You know better than to ask that. Let us each …” His hand stirred the cloth.

But Bliss did not move.

And neither did the client. “What is the matter?” he asked. “You must be — doesn’t it hurt, your, ah …”

Bliss said, “It pleases you to see it thus. I would be a poor servant to release it so quickly. You shall look your fill. And when you have had it to bursting, only then shall we concern ourselves with me.”

His client’s free hand wrapped itself around the white robe. “You will watch me? You like doing that?”

“Very much. Like candle and mirror, we increase each other’s brightness. I like to watch you look at me. I like what looking at me does to you.

“Hmph,” said the young man; “Carlin is not so bold.”

“He is a different man. You must not think, because we have many skills, that we do not have feelings, here in the House of Delight.”

“I’m not sure I believe you, but what difference does it make?”

“None, sir; you are wise. When you enter this House, you leave the World behind. Outside, it is dangerous not to distinguish truth from lies. Here, and only here, the lies are always for your benefit — and certain truths cannot be hid.”

“My truths are hid,” the young man said.

“Only some of them. Or will you lie and say I do not please you?”

“You please me very much. You’re beautiful. Different, but beautiful.”

“They all say that when they’re excited. See if you think so afterward.”

“You’re excited. Am I beautiful?”

“I’ve no idea. Your hand is beautiful. Your voice is beautiful.”

“Close your eyes.”

Bliss closed them. He felt the stir of air, heard the hiss of cloth, and the sputter of wax when the candlewicks flickered.

“You may look.”

Both the young man’s hands were folded on his lap, encased again in gloves. He was breathing hard, and his voice was mischievous, pitched high with excitement. “I think you will go first after all.”

“As you wish.”

“Show me.”

The blond man put his finger in his mouth, twirled it there and removed it, shining with spit. He ran it down his chest to his navel and through the thicket of hair that was, indeed, dark. It traveled a straight line to the tip of his shaft, and circled the hole where a drop of moisture already shone.

The client moaned deep in his throat.

Then Bliss’s hand traveled gently over his own body, touching the places an eager lover touches, sometimes gentle and sometimes rough, using the backs of his nails and the tips of his fingers. His thighs, corded with muscle, began to tremble.

“Now!” hissed the client.

“Not yet,” Bliss answered faintly. He raised his arms over his head, curving like the arc of the moon, his whole body and its desire exposed.

The young man growled, “If I say now, then it is now!”

But Bliss stood poised upon his toes. “The robe,” he whispered.

“I have it.”

Bliss held out his arms, like a woman just stepped out of the bath. And the young man stumbled off the bed, unfurling the gossamer robe.

He let it fall on the trembling man’s shoulders, and took a step closer. Bliss’s heat seemed to scorch the only part of him not covered, his face.

“Ease me,” said Bliss, not moving.

“I cannot.”

“Keep all your clothes, even your gloves, sir, if you will, but I beg you—”

“How?”

“Ah. I will show you.”

The young man stayed behind him. “Lie down, first. On the cushions.”

Bliss did as he was bid, hands at his side. His tense body seemed to lie only on the surface of the pillowed floor, straining upward. The young man stood above him, fold upon fold of cloth falling across his body like a sculpture. But his gloved hands were twisting above the naked figure.

“Feast on me,” Bliss said; and the young man knelt clumsily. The brim of his hat brushed Bliss’s chest. When the tip of his tongue touched the tip of the other man’s member, Bliss breathed deeply and did not thrust.

“How soft your skin is!” the soft lips murmured against him. By which the naked man knew that he had indeed been right all along. He felt the delicate nibblings and trembled as he fought the urge to pull the mouth down over his throbbing cock. The strokes grew more deliberate, longer and more avid, now here, now there, sweet and incomplete. His fingers clenched despite himself. Finally, “I wonder,” he said, “if you would find it distasteful to close your mouth around me — no teeth, you understand — and feast in earnest?”

There was no answer but the thing that he desired, wrapping him in a sensation even he could not be separate from. It was as though the layers of clothing above him had turned into a ravening succubus, pulling the pleasure out of him like hunger itself finally fed. And yet he retained enough sense to lift his hands to his lover’s head, pressing and stroking the back of his neck, burying his fingers in his lover’s hair and one by one pulling the long pins that held it in place — so that as his body arced helplessly up in chaotic ecstasy, the long bright hair came cascading down around them both.

“Oh!” his client cried. “Oh, no!”

Hair clung to his damp face, and tangled in the buttons of his coat.

“Never mind,” said Bliss. “It’s nothing.”

The client wiped his mouth with the back of his glove. But he did not pull back when Bliss kissed the glove, and licked some of the moisture off of it. “Am I still beautiful?” Bliss asked.

“Oh, yes. Very.”

“Come, then.” The naked blond rose lazily to his feet, drawing the other with him, floating across to the red velvet bed.

He held his patron in his lap. The fine hair got in their way, but he drew it gently back, disclosing one scarlet earlobe. Bliss pulled it, stroked it, raised his sharp teeth to it. The other ear was pierced by a small gold hoop, which could be drawn through the ear around and around in a tiny point of pleasure.

“I feel dizzy,” his patron said, fingers clenched. “I feel crazy!”

“Yes.” The hands kept up their stroking. “That’s what it’s supposed to feel like.”

The gloves were torn off; one hand reached under the cloak again.

“Together,” Bliss said, reaching after it, and was not pushed away.

Their fingers met in the moist hot darkness, where there was no man’s treasure at all. For a moment they clung there together.

“Do it!” she said fiercely. “I want you to!”

She pulled at his hand and at her clothes at the same time.

“Sweet mistress.” He leaned into her, stilling her hands. “I can do better than that.” With practiced hands he unlaced the breeches. “You will go virgin to your marriage bed, and still be satisfied here.”

At last he uncovered the fair triangle, damp with sweat and heat. “A treasure for a prince,” he said earnestly.

“Don’t be impertinent,” she snapped, or tried to: to her dismay it came out langorous, flirtatious.

“I beg your pardon, madam,” he said, and slid his finger down.

She had been ready for a long time. He felt her stiffen.

“Not yet!”

He stopped. “Not yet,” she gasped, “not so soon, I don’t want it over too soon—”

“My dear mistress,” he toyed with her delicate folds, “with me, it is never over too soon.”

He ran his face along the sides of her coat, her ruched-up cloak, down to the soft skin of her naked belly. His lips were warm on her skin. His fingers stroked her arms, her legs, methodically, gently, with a soothing rhythm that said that all was well, all would be well, if she would trust her body and its needs to him, and just as she was beginning to be a little soothed, his mouth moved down to somewhere altogether new.

She cried out in awe. Nothing so living and warm had ever touched her there. His tongue darted like a fish amongst the coral shoals of her flesh, coral waving like fans in the deep sea waves of her pleasure. She could feel him straining with passion, could hardly believe anyone wanted her this way, wanted to do this with her, rocking her up and down, inside and out, somewhere beyond sight and sound.

She had always had to control and tease herself; now there was nothing to control, feeling him slipping long and luxurious there were nothing larger, nothing less slick and supple of a man’s might go …

She let the world come apart.

He was hard with excitement, but he channeled it all into her pleasure, his skill burning for her. She was bucking her hips without knowing it, riding him, being ridden by her own strong desire, as hard for him to keep control of as a yearling, he relentlessly working to keep her pleasure coming in waves until she shook with it. And still he drove her, and the pleasure drove her, until she was writhing and pummeling him and crying her way to stillness.

She lay at last at peace, sprawled across the taut-muscled, naked man. With his thumb he stroked her side.

“Thank you,” she gasped eventually, feeling something must be said under the circumstances. “I didn’t know — that is, I usually like the look of men who are a bit more, ah, more heavily-built.”

“Next time, you must ask for what you want.”

She said, still nervously needing to explain, “I am too young to marry. They tell me. I must be ‘finished’ first, whatever that means. But every man I see — the soldiers, my dancing master, even the baker’s boy …”

“I know.” He drew a mass of her hair through his hands. “You will enjoy Carlin. He knows as well as I what to do for a lady of quality.” She turned her bright eyes on him, and he laughed softly. “Did you think you were the only one, here at the House of Heart’s Desire?”

Born among the great, she recognized authority when she heard it. “Are you …?” she asked.

“I am. And your ladyship’s servant, for as long as you require it. Return to us whenever you wish. You are as safe here as in your nurse’s arms. You will go to your noble husband as virgin as the day you were born.”

“If I can wait that long,” she muttered rebelliously.

“If you find that you cannot, there are ways to repair it — but you wouldn’t like them, they hurt. And should a mistake call a new soul down from heaven … there are many ladies who have found their way here to send it back.”

She smiled and drew her hand down his spine. “I will invite you to dance at my wedding.”

“And I will come,” he answered, kissing her hand, “though it be beyond the farthest sea.”

He added, “Your time is not quite up,” although it was; and he took her in his arms and kissed her mouth as sweetly as a young boy would do who knew nothing of the many uses of the tongue.

“Now,” said Eyas, “I shall summon a very dependable servant of mine named Hannah, who will help you wash all the sweat and moisture off you. She will particularly enjoy washing your hair — which, I’m afraid, has become tangled and rather sticky.”

Ellen Kushner writes:

It’s an all-too common experience, that I’m sure most of my fellows in this volume are familiar with. “What do you write?” someone asks me, at a party, say; and when I answer, “Fantasy,” they give me what is meant to pass for a sophisticated leer.

Well, now I’ve finally done it. There is no magic in this short story, but a great deal of fantasy.

Actually, this story, editor Terri Windling, and I go back a long way together. When we were in our twenties, living on New York’s lawless Upper West Side and looking for assured income, we came up with the idea of marketing a series of erotic novels set in a generic fantasy-style city, centered around an exotic brothel called The House of Nine Doors. We did the fun part first: figuring out who all the continuing characters would be — and then got down to the distasteful chores of plotting and writing sample chapters. The core of this story was one of those.

Our proposed series was packed with sexually ambiguous people, lots of tortured longing, devious machinations, twisted desires and sublimated passion: just like everything else on the market these days. Back then, our radical vision would have sold like hotcakes. So I would just like to formally and publicly say, to all the pusillanimous editors who brainlessly turned it down: You’re Jerks!

Oooh. That felt good.