Graham Masterton - Mirror

'Allure, Ramone,' he greeted him. Saying 'allure' instead of 'hello' had been kind of a private joke between them ever since they had gone downtown together one evening to watch a Brazilian art movie, in which everybody had said 'allure'. 'Allure, jfuanita.' 'Allure, Caspar.'

Ramone said, 'That ginger-headed girl was in here, yessday afternoon, asking about you.'

'Yeah?' said Martin. 'That ginger-headed girl' was a student from his Monday evening tele-writing class, Norma, who had considered his A-Team rewrites 'miraculous'; and had wanted to take him to bed to 'you know, transfuse the talent'.

The Reel Thing was more than a store: it was a shrine. Anything and everything that was important to movie buffs was assembled here. Shirley Temple dolls in sailor suits and cowboy outfits and Scottish plaids. Buck Rogers disintegrator guns and rocket ships. Tom Mix pocket knives and six-shooters. And box after box after box of signed studio glossies —Joan Crawford and Adolphe Menjou and Robert Redford and Dorothy Dell.

The whole store smelled of forty-year-old movie programs and dust and old clothes and stale cigarette smoke from a thousand long-forgotten parties. But anybody who cared for movies could spend hours in here, touching with reverence the gowns of Garbo; or the white Stetsons of William Boyd; or the short-sleeved shirts of Mickey Rooney. The artifacts were nothing at all. It was what they conjured up that made them valuable.

Martin picked up a yellowed copy of Silver Screen with the enticing headline 'What It Takes to Be a 1939 Girl'.

'Did you look at the stuff?' Ramone asked him scooping up chili and pickle with his fingers.

Martin dropped the magazine back into its rack. 'Oh yes, I looked at the stuff, all right.'

'No good?' asked Ramone.

'Depends what you mean by no good.'

Ramone's tabby cat, Lugosi, was resting on a stack of Screen-lands, his paws tucked in, his eyes slitted against the sunlight that came in through the window.

Martin stroked him under his chin, but Lugosi opened his eyes and stared back at him in irritation, his vexation emphasized by the way one pointed tooth was caught on his lip. Lugosi was definitely a one-man cat.

Ramone said, with his mouth full, 'It was genuine Boofuls stuff, I saw the paperwork. It was auctioned by M-G-M along with a whole lot of Shirley Temple properties.'

'I bought the mirror,' said Martin. Then, 'Listen Ramone, can you get some time off? I have to talk this over with somebody.'

Ramone wiped his hands on a paper napkin, rolled it up, and tossed it with perfect accuracy into a basket. 'I was going out to Westwood, anyway. Kelly can take care of the store. Kelly! Donde estd usted?'

A small girl with owlish designer spectacles and a long blond braid down the middle of her back came into the store from the back. She wore a loose white T-shirt with the slogan 'Of All the T-shirts in All the World I Had to Pick This One'.

'Hasta luego, Kelly,' said Ramone, picking up his car keys. 'I'm going down to Westwood with Fartin' Martin here to look at that stuff in Westwood.'

'Kay,' said Kelly in a nasal Valley accent, and began to shuffle movie programs. Ramone whistled to his cat Lugosi and Lugosi jumped down straightaway and followed them out of the store.

The 'stuff in Westwood' proved to be disappointing. Two crushed and faded cocktail gowns that were supposed to have belonged to Marilyn Monroe. The nervy middle-aged woman who was selling them chain-smoked and paced up and down. 'They have stains on them,' she said at last, as if this were the selling point that was going to make all the difference.

'Stains?' asked Ramone, holding one of the gowns up.

'For goodness' sake, you know, stains,' the woman snapped back. 'Robert Kennedy.'

Martin, who was sitting back on the lounger watching Ramone af work, shook his head in disbelief. He couldn't conceive of anything more tasteless than trying to sell Marilyn Monroe's cocktail gowns with Robert Kennedy's stains on them.

Ramone dropped the gowns back on the chair. 'I'm sorry, I can't offer you anything for these. There's no authentication, nothing. They're different sizes, too. They could have belonged to two different people, neither one of whom was Marilyn.'

'You're doubting my word?' the woman said stiffly.

'That's not what I'm saying. All I'm saying is, thanks — but no thanks.'

They took a walk along the beach. There was a strong ocean breeze blowing and it ruffled their clothes. Lugosi followed them at a haughty distance, occasionally lifting his head to sniff the wind.

'I never knew cats liked the seashore,' Martin remarked.

'Oh, Lugosi loves it. All that fish, all those birds. He'd go swimming if he could find a costume the right size.'

Ramone took out a cheroot and lit it with a Zippo emblazoned with the name Indiana Jones, his hands cupped over the flame.

'How about that woman with the Marilyn Monroe dresses,' said Martin. 'Wasn't she something?'

'If they were genuine, I would have given her a hundred fifty apiece,' Ramone told him.

'How do you know they weren't?'

Ramone shook his head. 'You get an eye for it; a touch for it. Marilyn never would've worn anything that looked like that. A shmatteh, that's what the Jewish people call dresses like that. And besides, there are no pictures of Marilyn wearing them, either of them, and if she ever wore two tight low-cut gowns, like that, don't you think that somebody would've taken pictures? She was a chubby broad, to say the least.'

When he saw Martin looking at him in surprise, he grinned and said, 'It's true! I can remember every Marilyn Monroe picture ever, in my head. And James Dean. And Jayne Mansfield. And what they were wearing.'

Martin said, 'I want you to come take a look at this boy in the mirror. I want you to tell me that it's Boofuls.'

Ramone blew out smoke. 'Pretty far-out shit, hunh?'

'You don't have to believe me until you see it for yourself.'

'I believe you!' Ramone replied, spreading his arms. 'Why shouldn't I believe you? I come from a very superstitious family.'

'I just don't know what to do,' said Martin. 'I mean, supposing it really is him? Supposing there's some way of getting him out of there?'

'Like the tennis ball, you mean? Well, I don't know. It's pretty far-out shit. But whatever happened, if you did it, if you got him out, you'd be sitting on some kind of a gold mine, hunh? You're the guy who wants to make a Boofuls musical, and what do you got? You got the actual Boofuls. And all this stuff about him being chopped up, well, they're going to have to forget that, aren't they, if he's all in one piece?'

'I guess so,' Martin agreed, a little unhappily. 'It was just the way that he tried to grab Emilio and pull him into the mirror — well, that scared me. It's possible that nothing would have happened ... I mean, maybe this particular mirror has some kind of weird scientific property which allows objects to pass right through it. Maybe Emilio could have gone to play in mirrorland and come back whenever he felt like it.'

'Do you really think that's possible?' asked Ramone.

Martin shook his head. 'If the same thing happens to Emilio that happened to that ball. . . well, maybe he could get inside the mirror, but I'm not at all sure we'd ever get him out again.'

Ramone tossed away his cheroot and stood for a moment with his hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans, staring out at the ocean. 'You know I come down here every time I feel that life is terrible, that people are mean and small and bitter, that human ambition is just a crock of shit.'

He paused, watching the gray water glittering in the sunshine. 'And you know something?' he said. 'Looking out at all that infinity, looking out at all that water, all that distance, that does nothing for me, whatsoever. So the sea is big, so what, that doesn't make life any better.'