THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #63: A review of "The Mirror of Cagliostro" by Robert Arthur

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Here we have an oddity. This story, on the surface, is very much a polite horror story, but when you get beneath the skin a bit, there is something savage, and even a little modern, about it.



This one starts off in London with Charles, the Duke of Burchester, strangling a pretty young girl to death in a private room at a restaurant. He casually goes home to his parents, and shortly thereafter, with Scotland Yard pounding at his door, he jumps out his window to his death below.


Fast forward about fifty years to Paris, where Harry Langham, a Boston student, is working on a thesis on the subject of Alexander Cagliostro, a man who claimed to be a wizard in the late 18th Century. Harry wants to denounce the fool, but something about him seems genuine. He goes to an expert on the subject, and this leads him to the catacombs of the Church of St. Martin, where he is led to the tomb of Yvette Dulaine. The monk opens the coffin to reveal a body free of corruption. In fact, the monk claims that she is not dead at all, but is still alive, a victim of Cagliostro, doomed to live forever without the comfort of death. Harry thinks the monk is full of shit and that the body is actually a wax figure.


He later changes his mind after he buys a mirror once owned by Cagliostro. One night, he sees a vision of Yvette in the mirror, and afterward, an image of a man appears in the looking glass, claiming to be another victim of Cagliostro. After luring Harry into the mirror, it is revealed that the man is actually Cagliostro, and he has now escaped the mirror, where he now hides in Harry’s body, as he did with the Duke of Burchester (remember him?).


Harry, now stuck in the world of the mirror, learns of poor Yvette’s plight and vows to escape this place and exact his revenge against Cagliostro. The problem is, in the meantime, Cagliostro is using Harry’s body to murder and kill, and the fiend is doing his best to get close to Harry’s intended love, but for what nefarious purposes?


Arthur weaves an incredible story here. The scene where Charles murders that girl is really kind of modern, almost Columbine-ish. His parents have no idea as to what he’s been up to, and it’s obvious that they fear him. Yet at the same time, the tone of the story is so genteel, it reeks of British higher society. Meanwhile, Cagliostro, who has also used the Marquis de Sade and Jack the Ripper as stolen vessels, is running around, committing horrible atrocities and getting away with it all. (Apparently, his actual body is still hanging around somewhere, much like Yvette’s, incorruptible.)


SPOILER ALERT: Harry discovers that the mirror world is an exact replica of Cagliostro’s home at the time it was created. This means that it contains the wizard’s library, which also contains many books with many solutions to Harry’s problem. Naturally, he uses this against Cagliostro to earn his freedom and destroy the mirror, thus saving Yvette’s soul. The scene where Cagliostro melts down into a puddle of putrification is incredible. It’s really a masterpiece of trickery, and to go into exactly how Harry makes this happen is kind of cheap. Read it for yourself. END OF SPOILERS.


When you get down to it, very few things are scarier than losing your ability to control your own body. Someone else, living in your skin, committing acts that you will be blamed for. Horrible acts. How can you fight against something like that? Well, give this story a try and find out.


[This story first appeared in FANTASTIC STORIES OF IMAGINATION and cannot be read online at this time.]