Graham Masterton - Mirror

Martin had blurted out a quick 'Hasta luego', and that had been the beginning and end of a beautiful relationship.

He sipped wine and thought about getting back to the A-Team rewrite, but it was pretty hard to get into Murdock's latest outbreak of nuttiness when he was feeling so down about Boofuls! He whispered the words along with the tape. ' You were - Whistlin' Dixie!'

Just then the telephone rang. He let it ring for a while. He guessed it was Morris, more than likely, wanting to know when the rewrite was going to be completed. The way he felt at the moment, January 2010. At last, however, Martin turned away from the window and picked up the receiver.

'Hello? Martin Williams.'

'Hey, Martin!' said an enthusiastic voice. 'I'm real glad I got in touch with you! This is Ramone!'

'Oh, Ramone, hi.' Ramone worked behind the counter at The Reel Thing, selling everything from souvenir programs for the opening night of Gone With the Wind to Ida Lupino's earrings. It was Ramone more than anybody else who had helped him to build up his unique collection of Boofuls souvenirs.

'Listen, Martin, something real interesting came up. A lady came into the store this morning and said she had a whole lot of furniture for sale.'

Martin cleared his throat. 'I could use some furniture, sure. But actually I was thinking of taking a trip out to the Z-Mart furnishing warehouse in Burbank. I can't afford anything antique.'

'No, no, no, you're not getting my drift,' said Ramone. 'This lady bought some of the furniture from Boofuls' old house. There was an auction, you get it, after the kid was killed, and everything was sold. Drapes, tables, knives and forks. They even sold the food out of the refrigerator. Can you imagine what kind of a ghoul would want to eat a murdered kid's ice cream?'

'But what happened? This woman bought some of the furniture?'

'Maybe not her personally, but her husband or her father or somebody. Anyway, she has, what, lemme see, I made a list here — she has two armchairs, a liquor cabinet, a sofa, four barstools, and a mirror.'

'Are you going to sell it for her?'

'No, not my scene, furniture. And — you know — apart from you, nobody's too keen on Boofuls stuff. I told her to advertise in the paper. Maybe some sicko will want it.'

'What are you trying to say? That I'm a sicko, too?'

'Aw, come on, man, I know you're legitimate. You should see some of the guys who come in to look through Carole Landis' underwear, stuff like that.'

Martin said, 'I'd like to see the furniture, sure, but I really don't have too much spare cash right now.'

'Well, that's up to you,' Ramone told him. 'But if you're interested, the lady's name is Mrs Harper, and she lives at 1334 Hillrise. There's no harm in taking a look, is there?'

'All right, I guess not, thanks for thinking of me.'

'No sweat, man. Whenever I hear the name Boofuls, I think of you.'

'I hope that's a compliment.'

'De nada,' said Ramone, and hung up.

Martin finished his wine. He knew what he ought to do: and that was to sit down dutifully at his typewriter and zip another sheet of paper into the platen and carry on writing the A-Team. However much he disagreed with Morris; however chagrined he felt for Morris' reaction to Boofuls! Morris was an industrious agent with matchless contacts, and he made his writers money. If Martin didn't finish this rewrite by tomorrow morning, it was quite conceivable that Morris would never be able to sell him to Stephen J Cannell Productions ever again.

But, damn it, he was so dispirited, and so damn sick of writing slick and silly dialogue. An expedition to Hillrise Avenue to look over some of Boofuls' original furniture might

be just what he needed to lift his spirits. Just to touch it would be something — to touch the actual furniture that little Boofuls had sat on himself. It would make him seem more real, and Morris Nathan more imaginary, and just at the moment Martin couldn't think of a better tonic than that.

Hillrise Avenue was a steeply sloping street up by the Hollywood Reservoir. The houses had been avant-garde in 1952; today they were beginning to show signs of shabbiness and wear. Hillrise was one of those areas that had never quite made it, and was resignedly deteriorating for the eventual benefit of some smart real-estate developer.

Martin parked his Mustang with the rear wheels cramped against the curb and climbed out. From here, there was a wide, distant view of Los Angeles, smoggy today, with the twin tombstones of Century City rising above the haze. He mounted the steep concrete steps to 1334, sending a lizard scurrying into the undergrowth.

The house was square, strawberry pink, with Spanish balconies all the way around. The garden around it was dried up and scraggly. The paths were overgrown with weeds, and most of the yuccas looked sick. The roof over the front porch was heaped with dead, desiccated vines, and there was a strong smell of broken drains.

He rang the doorbell. It was shrill, demanding, and distant, like a woman shrieking in the next street. Martin shuffled his Nike trainers and waited for somebody to answer. 'All those times you shook in your shoes,' he sang softly. ' You were — Whistlin Dixie!'

The front door opened. Out onto the porch came a small sixtyish woman with a huge white bouffant hairstyle and a yellow cotton mini-dress. She wore two sets of false eyelashes, one of them coming wildly adrift at the corner of her eye, and pale tangerine lipstick. She looked as though she hadn't changed her clothes or her makeup since the day Sergeant Pepper had been released.

Martin was so startled that he didn't quite know what to say. The woman stared at him, her left eye wincing, and eventually said, 'Ye-e-es? Are you selling something?'

'I don't see anything,' the woman remarked, peering around the porch. 'No brushes, no encyclopaedias, no Bibles. Do you want to clean my car, is that it?'

'Actually, I came about the furniture,' said Martin. 'You're Mrs Harper, right? Ramone Perez called me from The Reel Thing. He's kind of a friend of mine. He knows that I'm interested in Boofuls.'

Mrs Harper stared at Martin and then sniffed, pinching in one nostril. 'Is tha-a-at right? Well, if you're interested in Boofuls, you seem to be just about the only person in the whole of Hollywood who is. I've taken my furniture to every auction house and movie memorabilia store that I can find, and the story's always the same.'

'Yes?' said Martin, wanting to know what it was — this story that was always the same.

'Well,' pouted Mrs Harper, 'it's macabre, that's what they say. I mean, there's a market in motion picture properties. The very coffin that Bela Lugosi lay in when he first played Count Dracula. The very bolt that went through Boris Karloff's neck. But nobody will touch poor little Boofuls' furniture.'

Martin waited for a moment, but Mrs Harper obviously wasn't going to volunteer anything more. 'I was wondering — maybe I could come in and take a look at it.'

'With a view to purchase?' Mrs Harper asked him sharply; then fluttered her left eye; then squeezed it shut and said, 'Darn these lashes! They're a new brand. I don't know what you're supposed to keep them on with. Krazy Glue, if you ask me. They will . .. curl up. I've seen centipedes behave themselves better, and live ones at that.'

She led Martin into the hallway. The interior of the house was sour-smelling and gloomy, but it had once been decorated in the very latest fab 19608 style. The floor was covered with white shag carpet throughout, matted like the pelt of an aging Yeti. The drapes were patterned in psychedelic striations of orange and lime and purple, and white leather chairs with black legs and gold feet were arranged around the room at diagonal angles. There was even a white stereo autochange record player, which reminded Martin so strongly of the Beatles and the Beach Boys and his high school dances that he felt for one unnerving moment as if he were sixteen years old.