Graham Masterton - Mirror

The sobbing kept on, high and despairing and strangely echoing. There was no doubt about where it was coming from, though. The sitting room door was half open, and the moonlight was shining hard and detailed on the wood-block floor, and that was where the crying was coming from. The real boy, thought Martin. Oh, Jesus, it's the real boy. But the real boy, whoever he was — whatever he was — would have to be confronted. Come on, Martin, he's only a kid, right? And if he turns out to be Boofuls, then he's not only a kid but a ghost, too. I mean — how can you possibly be frightened by the prospect of coming face-to-face with a ghost kid?

He reached out his hand as stiffly as if it were attached to the end of an artificial arm, and pushed the sitting room door open wide. The door gave a low groan as it strained on its hinges. The boy's crying went on, a hair-raising oh-oh-oh-oh-oh that aroused in Martin both urgency and terror. Urgency to save the child from whatever it was that was causing him to cry so pitifully. Terror that it might be something so unexpected and so dreadful that he wouldn't be able to do anything at all but freeze.

Shortly after Jane had left him, Martin had dreamed again and again of being rooted to the spot, unable to move while people laughed at him, while bristle-haired monkeys ran away with his furniture, while Jane was gruesomely raped in front of him by grinning clowns.

The greatest fear of all was the fear of walking into this sitting room and finding that he couldn't do anything but stand paralyzed and helpless.

He took a steadying breath, then another, and adrenaline surged around his veins like nighttime traffic on the interstate.

Then he took three decisive steps into the room, and immediately ducked and turned to face the mirror, with a heavy off-balance interpretation of the football block that his high school coach had always been trying to teach him, duck, Williams, weave, for Christ's sake, you're a quarterback, not a fucking cheerleader, and he couldn't help shouting out ah! because he came face-to-face in the mirror with his own terrified wildness - white cheeks, staring eyes, sticking-up hair, and his bright red bathrobe wrapped around him like bloodstained bandages.

He paused for a moment while his heaving chest subsided and his pulse gradually slowed, and he caught his breath.

'Shit,' he whispered; because his own appearance still unnerved him. But cautiously, he took two or three steps toward the mirror, and then hesitated and listened. The boy's sobbing continued, although it had become quieter and more miserable now, an endless low-key oh-oh-oh, that was even more heartrending than the loud sobs and cries that Martin had heard before.

He reached out and touched the mirror. The glass was cold and flawless and impenetrable. There was no question of it melting into a silver mist like Alice's mirror in Through the Looking-Glass. He pressed his forehead against it. His gray eyes stared expressionlessly back at him from only an inch away. God, he thought, what can I do? But the boy continued to weep.

Martin moved to the extreme left side of the mirror, in an effort to see into the corridor. He could make out two or three feet of it, but that was all. He went back to the sitting room door and wedged a folded-up copy of Variety underneath it to keep it wide open, but when he returned to the mirror he found that he couldn't see very much more.

Yet it sounded as if the child was crying in his bedroom. Not his real bedroom, but the bedroom in the mirror.

He shivered. The sitting room felt unnaturally cold. And the strained, high pitiable voice of that crying child was enough to make anyone shiver. He thought, What the hell am I going to do? How the hell can I stop this sobbing?

He remembered what Mr Capelli had told him about his grandmother, how she smashed every mirror in the house when somebody died, because mirrors took a little piece of your soul every time you looked into them. Maybe if he broke this mirror, the real boy's soul would be released, and he wouldn't have to suffer anymore. On the other hand, supposing this mirror was his only contact with the real world, and with anybody who could help him? Supposing he was crying out to be saved? Yet from what, or from whom? And if life in the mirror was that desperate, why hadn't he cried out before, during all those years when the mirror had been hanging up in Mrs Harper's cellar?

Or maybe he had, and Mrs Harper had chosen to ignore him.

The weeping went on, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!

Martin slapped the flat of his hand against the mirror. 'Listen!' he shouted. 'Can you hear me? Whoever's in there — can you hear me?'

He waited, but there was no reply. He felt an extraordinary mixture of rage and helplessness, pinned against this mirror, and because he was hyperventilating, he felt that he was floating, too, like a fly pressed against a window, and for one moment he didn't know whether he was up or down. It was a split-second insight into life without gravity, life without an understanding of glass. A fly can beat against a window until it dies, and never realize that the world outside can easily be reached by flying round a different way.

'Can you hear me?' Martin shouted. 'I'm here! I'm right here! I can help you!'

Then suddenly he thought: What the hell am I doing? If the boy's in my bedroom, I can take the mirror down from the wall and drag it into the bedroom and then I can see for myself.

He went to his desk, opened up two or three drawers, and at last found his ratchet screwdriver. Fumbling, overexcited, he took out the screws that held the mirror to the wall, one by one; and then hefted the mirror as gently as he could manage onto the floor. When he had done so, the mocking carving of Pan or Batchus was grinning directly into his face: ancient carnality staring with gilded eyeballs at modern fright.

Martin lifted his jacket off the back of his chair, folded it up, and wedged it under the bottom of the frame so that it wouldn't be damaged when he dragged it across the floor. Then, a little at a time, he pulled it toward the open door, pausing every now and then to wipe his forehead with the back of his arm and to catch his breath.

'Jesus, why am I doing this?' he asked himself. But the child's weeping went on; and that was why.

He dragged the mirror across the room until it faced the open door which led to the hallway. Then he leaned over the glass and peered inside. The real hallway was empty, and so was the hallway in the mirror. Everything was identical. Identical door, identical carpet, identical wallpaper, brightly illuminated by the light that fell across the corridor from Martin's bedroom.

But the light appeared only in the mirror. When Martin glanced back toward the real corridor, his bedroom was in darkness, just the way he had left it. He had gone looking for the real boy without switching on his bedside lamp. Quite apart from which, the light that shone out of his mirror-bedroom was bright and clinical, like the lights in a hospital or an institution, while his real bedside lamp was muted by an orangey shade.

The boy's whimpering suddenly turned to high-pitched, terrified gasps. Martin rested the huge mirror against the corner of his desk and hurried clumsily toward his bedroom.

He hadn't yet reached the door, however, when the light in the mirror-bedroom was hurriedly switched off, and the child's gasps died away. Martin stood in the doorway for nearly a minute, straining his eyes, straining his ears, but the manifestation had gone. The apartment was silent, the mirror reflected nothing more than the sitting room door and part of the wall and a 1937 poster for Sunshine Serenade.