Graham Masterton - Mirror

It was midnight before Martin dropped Dick back at the Hyatt on Sunset. Dick wanted to have another drink, but Martin stayed in the car with the engine running. 'Dick — I have to work. This may be magic land to you, but to me it's the salt mines. So do me a favor, will you, have a safe journey home, and give Nancy a kiss for me, and good night.'

'I loved you, you know,' Dick told him, leaning over the side of the Mustang with his eyes boiled and his toupee crooked. He breathed wine and rum straight into Martin's face. 'I loved you like a fucking brother.'

'Good night, Dick,' Martin told him, and clasped his hand for the tenth time, and at last managed to drive away.

'Fartin' Martin!' Dick shouted out as he teetered on the sidewalk outside the hotel. 'That's what they always called you! Heeyoo! Far-Tin Mar-Tin!'

'Dick the Prick,' Martin replied under his breath as the traffic signals at Sierra Bonita intersection turned green, and he turned left on squealing tires toward Franklin Avenue.

When he let himself back into the house, Wanda's bicycle was still parked in the hallway, and he tripped over it in the darkness, catching his shin on the pedal. 'Goddamn it!' he hissed at it, and would have kicked it if the landing light hadn't been suddenly switched on, and Wanda hadn't appeared.

'Martin?' she called. 'Is that you?'

Martin climbed the stairs. 'It is I, fair Wanda, and the pedal of your bicycle has just added injury to the most insulting evening of my entire adult life.'

Wanda was a short blond girl of seventeen. She was still plump with puppy fat, but her face was pretty, like a little painted matrioshka doll, with rosy cheeks and China-blue eyes. She was wearing a pink jogging suit with a printed picture of Bruce Springsteen on the front, and pink sneakers. Oddly, she was carrying a saucer half filled with milk.

'Where are you going with that?' Martin asked her. 'Your cat was crying; I thought it might be hungry.' Martin glanced up toward the door of his apartment. 'My cat?' he said in a hollow voice.

'It's been crying for hours; ever since you left, almost.' Martin took a breath. Thank God for that, Lugosi must have reappeared. At least Ramone and he could be friends again. 'Come on,' he told Wanda, and took the saucer from her, and led the way upstairs. 'You couldn't have gotten in, anyway, the door's locked.'

'I don't mind cat-sitting as well as baby-sitting,' Wanda told him. 'I love cats.'

Martin unlocked the apartment door. 'This cat doesn't belong to me. It just decided to pay me a visit this afternoon, and not to leave.' He switched on the light in the hallway. 'It's called Lugosi — you know, after Bela Lugosi, who played Dracula. Believe me, it's well named.'

He opened the sitting room door. 'Lugosi! Your uncle Martin's home!'

He reached around to switch on the light, but the bulb popped instantly, and the room remained dark. 'Damn it,' said Martin. 'That's about the fifth bulb in five weeks. They don't make anything the way they used to. Hold on, I'll switch on the desk lamp.'

He crossed the room; and his dark reflection crossed the room toward him. 'Mr and Mrs Capelli are late,' he remarked to Wanda as he reached over to find the desk-lamp switch.

'It's an anniversary or something,' Wanda told him. 'They said they wouldn't get back until one o'clock.'

'You're not going to cycle home at one o'clock?' Martin asked her.

He tried the desk lamp, but that didn't work, either. 'Would you believe it? This one's gone, too. Wanda -'

He was about to ask her to go to the kitchen and bring him two new light bulbs when he heard a low, guttural, hissing sound. He froze, still holding the saucer of milk. 'Lugosi?' he called.

'Was that him?' asked Wanda, peering into the shadowy room. 'He sure sounded weird.'

Martin paused for a moment, listening. Then he heard the scratching of claws on the wood-block floor, and that same hissing sound.

'Lugosi, it's only me. It's your uncle Martin. Come on, chum. Wanda's brought you some milk; some luvvy-wuvvy nonradioactive low-fat enriched-calcium milk.'

There was a very long silence. Wanda said, 'What's his name? Lugosi?'

'That's right. Why don't you try calling him?' 'Okay,' said Wanda. 'Lugosi! Lugosi! Here, pussy-pussy-pussy! Come on, Lugosi!'

Martin set the saucer of milk down on the desk. There was something about Lugosi's utter silence that he didn't like. He strained his eyes to see through the shadows — looking for anything, a paw, a tail, a reflection of yellow feline eye. Maybe the cat's experience in the mirror had traumatized it; maybe it was hurt. He looked and he listened but for one suspended heart-beat after another the room was silent, except for the muffled growling and grinding of greater Los Angeles, outside the window in the California night.

'Here, Lugosi!' called Wanda. 'Here, pussy-pussy!' It was then that Martin heard the faint thump-thump-thump of a furry tail on the floor, and the low death-rattle sound of a cat purring.

'Sounds like he's under the desk someplace,' he told Wanda, and hunkered down to take a look.

Thump, thump, thump. Prrrrrr-prrrrrr-prrrrrr. 'Lugosi?' he asked, and his voice was clogged with phlegm. Two eyes opened in the darkness. Two eyes that burned incandescent blue, like the flames of welding torches.

'Lugosi?' asked Martin, although this time it was scarcely a question at all.

Something hard and vicious came flying out from under the desk and landed directly in his face, knocking him backwards onto the floor. He was so surprised that he didn't even shout out, but Wanda did - a startled wail, and then a piercing scream.

He felt claws tearing at his neck; claws tearing at his cheeks. His mouth was gagged with soft, fetid fur.

Panicking, he seized the cat's body in both hands and tried to drag it away from his face, but its claws were hooked into his ears and his scalp, and he couldn't get it free.

'Aaahh!' he heard himself shouting. 'Wanda, help me! Wanda!'

Wanda came blustering into the room and slapped at the cat, but didn't know what else to do. Martin rolled over and over on the floor, tipping over his chair with his pedaling legs, colliding against his desk; but the cat clung viciously to his head, lacerating his face with claws that felt like whips made out of razor wire.

My eyes! thought Martin in terror. It's trying to claw out my eyes!

He managed to force his left hand underneath the cat's scrabbling body and cover his face. He could taste blood and choking fur. With his right hand, he groped for his desk, missed it, then found it, and dragged open the bottom drawer with a crash. His hand plunged into it, searching for any thing-a knife, a hammer, a pair of pliers.

His fingers closed around the handle of a large screwdriver — the same one he had used to fix the mirror to the sitting room wall. Grunting, struggling, he raised the screwdriver and jabbed it into the cat's body: once, twice, three times — blunt-edged metal into soft thrashing fur. The third time, the cat spat like a serpent and tore at him wildly, and so he stabbed it again. It uttered a long, harsh scream that was like nothing that Martin had ever heard in his life before.

The cat sprang off him, careened sideways against the wall, then flew at Wanda, tearing at her legs. Wanda screamed and fell. The cat instantly leaped onto her face and ripped at one side of it with an audible crackle of skin and muscle.

But Martin was up on his feet now. Coughing, stumbling, he seized hold of the cat by the scruff of its neck, and lifted it up and held it high, even though it was flailing and writhing like a maggot on a fishhook, and scrabbling furiously at his hand with its hind legs.

Martin rammed the cat's head against the wall, burying his thumb into its neck so that it cackled for air. Its eyes bulged -those flaring blue eyes - and it stretched its mouth open so wide in strangulated hatred that it dislocated its jaw.