Graham Masterton - Mirror

Boofuls laughed as Martin waded toward him through the treacle of his nightmare. A sweet, high laugh that echoed and reechoed until it sounded like thousands of pairs of clashing scissors. Martin reached the end of the corridor at last, and reached out to Boofuls to snatch him down from his invisible crucifix. But — with a cold and bruising collision — he came up against a sheet of frigid plate glass. Boofuls laughed at him. He was nothing more than an image in a mirror - a reflection of a boy who was long dead.

Martin struck out wildly, shouting and kicking and thrashing his arms. 'Boofuls! Boofuls! For God's sake, Boofuls!'

Dr Ewart Rice poured himself another cup of lemon tea. The late morning sunshine played softly through the rising steam and across the olive-green leather of his desk. There was such quiet in his office, and such tranquillity in his manner, that Martin felt almost as if he had found a sanctuary, and this was its priest.

'You're sure you won't have another cup?' Dr Rice asked him. He was a thin, drawn man, with a beak of a nose and furiously tangled white eyebrows. He wore a brown tweed suit, and a very clean soft shirt in tattersall check. There was the faintest lilt of Scottishness in his accent; a great precision in the way he pronounced his words.

'We tell the story for amusement, of course,' he explained, tapping his spoon on the side of his teacup. 'But I suppose, in a way, we also tell it as a ritual of faith. Because, it did happen, you know. We did see Boofuls, all five of us. We all decided that it would be worse than useless to tell the newspapers or the police. At the very least, we would have been laughed at. At the very worst, we might have ruined our careers. But it was real enough, don't you know, the first and last time that any of us had seen what you might describe as a ghost, and that was why we embroidered it into a hospital legend.'

He smiled. 'I suppose you could say that by keeping the story alive, we were exorcising the ghost. An annual ritual of bell, book and candle. Or, at the very least, a way of reassuring ourselves that we hadn't all gone mad.'

'You're not mad,' Martin told him.

Dr Rice sipped his tea and then set his cup down. 'You seem very certain about that.'

Martin nodded. 'I am. Because Tm not mad, and I've seen Boofuls, too.'

' You've seen him?' Dr Rice asked with care. 'I suppose by that you mean recently?'

Martin said, 'I've been a Boofuls fan ever since I was young. I'm a screenwriter now; I write for movies and television. I've written a musical based on his life — not that I've managed to sell it yet. In Hollywood, the name of Boofuls seems to carry a built-in smell of its own. The smell of failure, if you know what I mean.'

Dr Rice said, 'Aye,' and sipped more tea.

'This week, I bought the mirror that used to hang over Boofuls' fireplace,' Martin explained. 'Ever since then, I've had nothing but trouble.'

'And you say you've seen him?'

'In the mirror, yes. And that's why I wanted to talk to you.'

Dr Rice said, 'Yes, I can see why. It's all very disturbing. As a rule, I am not a believer in mysterious occurrences. I am a gynecologist; and once you have seen the mystery of human creation repeated over and over again in front of your eyes, then I am afraid that, by comparison, other mysteries tend to dwindle into insignificance.'

'I don't think there's anything insignificant about this mystery,' Martin told him, and explained about the two mismatched balls; and how Emilio had tried to step into the mirror; and what happened to Lugosi.

'I'm in the hospital because of that mirror,' said Martin. 'I've had thirty-eight stitches, and I could have been killed. That's not insignificant to me."

Dr Rice was silent for a long time, his soft, withered hands lying in his lap like fallen chestnut leaves. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and controlled, but that made his account of what had happened on the night that Mrs Alicia Crossley was brought to the Sisters of Mercy sound even more frightening.

'There was, of course, enormous excitement. The press were everywhere. The lobby was filled with reporters and photographers and cameramen from movie newsreels. I arrived at seven o'clock for my night duty, and I had to struggle to get into the building.'

He paused, and then he said, 'Mrs Crossley died around eight o'clock, I think. After that, there were a few hours of comparative quiet, because the press had all rushed off to file their stories for the morning editions. I was on the gynecological floor, that's floor five. There were two babies being delivered that night, so I was constantly to-ing and fro-ing between the two delivery rooms.'

'Is that when you saw Boofuls?' asked Martin.

Dr Rice said, 'Yes. It was a quarter of ten. I was walking along the corridor between what they used to call Delivery Room B and the main stairs when I saw a small boy standing at the end of the corridor, looking lost. I called out to him, but he didn't seem to hear me. He was crying, and saying "Grandma, where's grandma?" over and over.

'I went right up to him. I was as close to him as you and I are sitting now. Closer, maybe. I put my hand out, I could see what was right in front of my eyes, but somehow my brain wouldn't believe it. I put my hand out to touch him even though he was standing not outside but inside the mirror. The mirror was like a glass door, no more; or a window. It was completely impossible; it couldn't happen. It flew right in the face of everything I'd ever understood about science, about the world, about what can exist and what can't exist. And, believe me, this couldn't exist, but there it was, right in front of my eyes.

'The boy had stopped crying, and he had covered his face with his hands, and was playing peek-a-boo through his fingers. I shouted at him, "Can you hear me?" two or three times, and then at last he took his hands away from his face. I wish he hadn't.'

Martin sat back, waiting for Dr Rice to finish, knowing that it took extra courage for him to explain what he had seen.

'His face looked normal at first. A little pale, maybe, but in those days a lot of children used to suffer from anemia. But then suddenly something red and thin started to dangle from his nostril, then another, then another, until they were dropping out onto the floor. He opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue, and his whole tongue was wriggling with them. Meat worms, the kind that eat corpses. They were pouring out of him everywhere. I expect you can understand that I dropped my clipboard and my smart new stethoscope and ran outside. I was in a terrible state.'

'Do you think it was some kind of hallucination?' asked Martin. 'After all, everybody knew that Boofuls was dead; there was mass hysteria; and you were right there in the thick of it.'

Dr Rice smiled ruefully. 'Don't you think I've asked myself that same question a thousand times? Was it a hallucination? Was it a dream? Was it tiredness? But no, my friend, I'm afraid not. I saw Boofuls quite clearly. I was in perfectly sound health, well rested, no hangovers. I couldn't afford to drink in those days! The only conceivable explanation as far as I'm concerned was that he was really there. Or, at least, that his spirit was really there.'

'Do you believe in spirits?' asked Martin. 'Do you?' Dr Rice retaliated.

'I don't &believe in them, let's put it that way. Especially now that I've seen Boofuls.'

Dr Rice said, 'Altogether, five of us saw him. Well — I believe six, but one of the nurses refused to admit that she'd seen anything out of the ordinary. All five of us had similar experiences — that is, we all saw Boofuls weeping in a mirror — all at approximately the same time, about quarter of ten, but what makes the whole affair so fascinating is that we were all on different floors, and two out of the five who saw him I didn't even know.'