Graham Masterton - Mirror

Martin glanced up toward his sitting room window. It was blank, as usual, with the sky reflecting off the glass.

'You won't talk?' he said to Emilio. 'In that case, I'd better go see for myself.'

He got up from the steps and bounded quickly upstairs, three steps at a time, until he reached the landing just outside his front door. There was a small plastic name tag on it saying M. Williams. Underneath, J. Berrywell had been scratched out. Even when they were living together, Jane had insisted on keeping her maiden name.

He hesitated. A real boy. For some irrational reason, he felt a prickle of genuine alarm. There were no boys in his apartment, of course, real or unreal. Emilio had simply invented an imaginary playmate. He was just the age for it, after all, and he had no friends of his own age, not on this block. But all the same, Martin found the idea of it unexpectedly unsettling, as if his apartment had been intruded upon by something he didn't understand.

He opened the front door. He hardly ever locked it, because there was nothing worth stealing, except for his typewriter, and he had been hoping for years that somebody would take that, so that he could buy a new one with the insurance money.

The apartment was silent. The midafternoon sunlight fell across the wood-block floor in a dazzling diagonal. From the bedroom, the pale face of Boofuls watched him as he trod softly along the corridor to the sitting room door.

He paused. He called, 'Hello?' But there was no reply.

What did you expect? he asked himself. A whole chorus of Walt Disney ghosts to come charging out of the closets chorusing 'Fooledyou, Martin!'?

He eased the sitting room door wide open. Then he peered around it. In the mirror, his own face peered back. There was nobody else in the room. No boy; not even a sign of a boy, like an abandoned blue and white ball.

'Kids,' he said under his breath, meaning Emilio in particular.

It took him only a couple of moments to look around the rest of the apartment. There were no boys hiding in the closets among his clothes; there were no boys crouching under the bed. But as he went through to the kitchen to find himself a fresh bottle of wine, he was sure for an instant he could hear somebody giggling.

He hesitated and listened, but there was nothing. He stepped out of the kitchen into the hallway, holding the bottle of wine in his hand, and there was Emilio with his hands in the pockets of his shorts. Martin looked at him without saying anything.

'Can I play with him?' asked Emilio.

'Can you play with whom, Emilio?' Martin replied, deliberately pedantic.

Emilio swung one shoulder toward the sitting room. 'The

boy, of course.'

Martin said, 'Emilio, my little lunatic, there is no boy.'

'There is, too, a boy.'

'Well, that's right, and your grandfather's car turns into a robot.'

'I've seen it! He showed me!'

'All right,' cooed Martin. 'All right, don't lose your cool. Let's just say that I'm one of these real skeptical adults you see on children's television — you know the kind of adult I mean. The kind of adult who can't understand what the hell Flipper is trying to say to him, and takes a swipe at Lassie when she's trying to drag him off to the abandoned mine by the trouser leg.'

Emilio didn't understand a word of what Martin was saying; but it made Martin feel better, and it stopped Emilio's fretting.

'If there really is a boy,' said Martin gently, 'all you have to do is introduce him to me. Let me shake the boy by the hand, and say good afternoon, boy. Then I'll believe you.'

'You can't shake his hand,' Emilio retorted.

'I know I can't, Emilio, because he's imaginary.' He tapped Emilio's forehead with his fingertip quite hard. 'He exists only in there.'

'No,' Emilio protested. 'He's real. But you can't shake his hand because he's in the mirror.'

Martin straightened himself up. Emilio was looking up at him, his grubby little face serious, his eyes wide, his fists clenched.

'Emilio,' he said, 'has it occurred to that one-byte brain of yours that the real boy in the mirror might be you? A reflection of you? Or was your face so filthy that you didn't recognize yourself? Maybe you thought it was Paul Robeson.'

Emilio was getting cross again. 'He's real! He's real! But he's only in the mirror! I'm in the mirror, and he's in the mirror. But I'm in the room, and he's not in the room!'

Martin thought of the blue and white ball, and how it had come bouncing into the mirror. He thought of how he had gone back to look at it again and found that it had vanished. It's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond.

A slow cold feeling crawled down his back, like a snail making its way down a frozen drainpipe.

'This boy . . . did he look anything like you?' he asked Emilio.

Emilio wiped his hand over his face as if he were attempting to erase his own features and come up with some other face: placid, blank, with eyes like Little Orphan Annie.

'He looked like .. .' and he tried to explain, but he couldn't, even with mime. 'He looked like . . .' and then he suddenly rushed through to the bedroom and pointed to the poster of Boofuls pinned to the wall.

'He looked like that?' Martin asked him, with a deeper feeling of dread.

'He's a real boy,' Emilio repeated. 'He's a real boy!'

Martin laid his hands on Emilio's shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. 'Emilio, he was a real boy, but he's been dead for nearly fifty years.'

Emilio frowned.

'I don't know what you saw in that mirror,' Martin told him, 'but it wasn't a real boy. It was just your imagination. Do you understand what I mean? It was just like ... I don't know, your mind was playing a trick on you.' 'I saw him,' Emilio whispered. 'I talked to him.' Martin couldn't think what else to say. He stood up and rubbed his hands on the legs of his pants, the way pitchers do. 'I don't know, Emilio, man. It sounds pretty screwy to me.'

At that moment there was a cautious knock at the apartment door, and Emilio's grandmother came in. She was carrying a glass oven dish with a checkered cloth draped over the top of it.

Martin had always liked Mrs Capelli. She was the grandmother that everybody should have had: cheerful, philosophical, always baking. She had white hair braided into elaborate plaits and a face as plain and honest as a breadboard. She wore black; she always wore black. She was mourning for her dead sister. Before that, she had been mourning for her dead brother. When she and Mr Capelli went out shopping in their long black Lincoln together, they looked as if they were going to a funeral.

'I brought you lasagne,' she said.

Martin accepted the dish with a nod of his head. 'I'm trying to diet. But thanks.'

'Well, you can share it with the boy.' Mrs Capelli glanced around the apartment as if she expected to see someone else.

'The boy?' asked Martin.

'Emilio told me you had a boy staying here. He was playing with him all morning. He's your nephew you spoke to me about?'

Martin exchanged an uncomfortable look with Emilio. If he said that there was no boy, then Emilio would get a hard time for lying. On the other hand —

But, no. He needed Emilio's confidence right now. If there was something odd in the mirror, if there was some kind of manifestation, then so far young Emilio was the only person who had seen it. Emilio might be the only contact with it, like a medium. After all, he was a boy and Boofuls had been a boy.

Maybe there was some kind of left-over vibe in the mirror that Emilio was tuning in to. Or something.

He lifted up the cloth that covered the lasagne and inhaled the aroma of fresh tomatoes and thyme and fresh-grated Parmesan cheese. 'Petey will probably eat all of this on his own,' he remarked as casually as he could. 'Petey's a real pasta maven.'