Graham Masterton - Mirror

Martin cautiously touched his bandaged chin. 'So there could have been no - what would you call it? - group hysteria, something like that? I mean you didn't get together and discuss the Boofuls murder to the point where you all temporarily flipped?'

Dr Rice shook his head. 'There was no "flipping" that night, I can assure you. I had to drink three large Scotches one after the other, just to reassure myself that I wasn't completely losing my reason.'

'The other doctors and nurses — are they still here?'

'Only Sister Boniface. The rest, I regret, have passed on. Cirrhosis, cancer, auto accident; a fair cross section of modern fatalities.'

'Can I speak to Sister Boniface?'

'You may, if you wish; but her sighting was extremely brief. She had been sitting with Mrs Crossley before she died; and after her death she stayed to do the usual tidying up. She was covering Mrs Crossley's face with a sheet when she thought she heard a noise, just above her head. She looked up, and there was Boofuls - well, lying, as it were, on the ceiling. She screamed, and the police guard came in, and Boofuls vanished.'

Dr Rice picked up a gold mechanical pencil from his desk and began to turn it end over end. 'It disturbed her deeply, seeing Boofuls like that. Who would ever believe that she had seen a dead boy smiling at her from the ceiling? She went quite to pieces. Well — it was only our annual storytelling rituals that helped her to keep her feelings in perspective. She's a poor soul, Sister Boniface, and no mistake.'

Martin looked at Dr Rice narrowly. 'What do you think of all this?' he asked him bluntly. 'I mean, is it bullshit, or are we all going crazy, or what?'

Dr Rice gave him a tight smile. 'I saw what I saw, Mr Williams. You saw what you saw. To each, his own experience. Let us simply say that no one can take that experience away from us, no matter how unhinged they think we might be.'

He raised his head and looked at Martin benignly. 'Either we were all witnesses to an extraordinary manifestation — the power of love, perhaps, to extend beyond the moment of death — or else we are all quite mad.'

Martin sniffed, and found it painful. 'Welcome to the nuthouse, in other words.'

Sister Boniface was taking her lunch in the hospital gardens when they found her. She was sitting in the shade of an Engelmann oak, eating a vege-burger out of a polystyrene box.

She was so thin that she was almost transparent; with rimless spectacles; and a face that looked like Woody Alien if he had been seventy years old, and a nun. She blinked as Martin and Dr Rice approached, and closed her lunch box, as if she had been caught doing something indiscreet.

'Hello, Sister,' said Dr Rice. 'This is Martin Williams. Martin, this is Sister Boniface. Martin writes for television, Sister.'

'Yes?' Sister Boniface smiled. 'How do you do, Mr Williams? You're not writing one of those hospital series, are you? St Elsewhere? Something like that?'

Martin shook his head. 'You watch all of those things? Do you know something, I can never imagine nuns watching television.' 'We tend not to collectively,' said Sister Boniface. 'The wimples get in the way.'

'Humorist, too,' Dr Rice muttered out of the side of his mouth. 'You know what I mean?'

Sister Boniface said, with some precision, 'You came about Boofuls.'

Martin glanced at Dr Rice. 'How did you know about that?'

'Well, Mr Williams, all hospitals have their grapevines. I understand you had nightmares last night; Nurse Newton told me. Naturally, I asked her whether you were suffering from any particular anxieties—and, well, Nurse Newton is an excellent nurse, but not discreet.'

Martin was sweating. The midday sun was hot; and the salt from his perspiration irritated his stitches.

'I understand that you saw Boofuls in his grandmother's room, the night she died.'

Sister Boniface nodded, her starched wimple waving up and down like a snow-white sea gull. 'That is correct.' 'He was floating on the ceiling, right?' 'That is quite correct. He was floating on the ceiling.' Her voice was so equable that when she looked up at Martin and her eyes were filled with tears, he was taken by surprise. She put aside her vege-burger and reached out her hand and clutched the sleeve of his shirt. 'Oh, Mr Williams, that poor child! It still haunts me now!'

Dr Rice said, 'Mr Williams has seen Boofuls, too, Sister Boniface, just this week.'

'Then you believe?' asked Sister Boniface, her eyes widening.

'Well, of course I believe,' said Martin. 'I saw —'

Sister Boniface awkwardly climbed onto her knees on the pebble paving. 'Mr Williams, all these years, it's been such a trial! Whether to believe in it or not! A miracle, a vision, right in front of my eyes!'

Martin knelt down beside her and gently helped her up onto her feet again. Underneath her voluminous white robes, she felt as skeletal as a bird. 'Sister Boniface, I'm not sure that it's a miracle. I don't know what it is. I'm trying to find out. But I'm not at all sure that it's — well, I'm not at all sure that it comes from God.'

Sister Boniface reached out her long-fingered hand and gently touched Martin's cheek. 'You are a good man,' she said. 'I can feel it in you. But it had to be a miracle. What else? He was floating on the ceiling, smiling at me. As clear as daylight.'

'He didn't speak?' asked Martin.

'No, nothing,' said Sister Boniface. 'He was there for a second, then he was gone.'

'You screamed?'

'Of course I screamed! I was very frightened.'

'Well, sure, of course you were. What with Mrs Crossley's body and everything.'

Sister Boniface sat up straight. 'I am not frightened by death, Mr Williams. I am frightened only by the face of pure goodness; and by the face of pure evil.'

'How long did you stay with Mrs Crossley that evening?' Martin wanted to know.

Sister Boniface shrugged. 'They asked me to come into the room to help with the last rites. Mrs Crossley was a Catholic, you know. Afterward . . . well, I just stayed where I was, helping, until it was time for them to take her away.'

Martin slowly massaged the back of his neck. This was getting him nowhere at all. He had learned that Boofuls had appeared as a mirror-ghost on the night he was murdered; but he had learned nothing at all about why he had been killed; and how he had gotten into the mirror-world, or why he should have decided to reappear now.

'You've been very helpful,' he told Sister Boniface. 'I'm sorry if I brought it all back to you.'

Sister Boniface smiled distantly. 'You haven't brought it back to me, Mr Williams. I never forget it. I never stop thinking about it. Was I visited by God, do you think, or by the devil? I fear that I shall never know. Not in this life, anyway.' Martin hesitated for a moment, and then bent his head forward and kissed her hand. Her skin was dry and soft, like very fine tissue paper.

'There is one thing,' she said.

Martin looked up. Sister Boniface's eyes were unfocused, as if she were trying to distance herself from what she was going to say next.

'What is it?' he asked her.

'I was the only member of the hospital staff who stayed with Mrs Crossley from the moment she was brought into the hospital to the moment she died.' 'And?'

'She didn't speak,' said Sister Boniface. 'But she did regain consciousness for a very short time. She lay there, staring at the ceiling, gasping for breath. Then, when she and I were alone together for a short while, she beckoned me closer. She pointed toward her bracelet, which they had taken off when they first tried to resuscitate her, but which was still lying on the table beside the bed. It was a charm bracelet, with little gold figures of cats and moons and stars on it. But there was a key attached to it, too; quite an ordinary key. She gestured that I should take the key off the bracelet, and when I had done so, she pressed it into my hand, and closed my fingers over it.'