Graham Masterton - Mirror

'You heard me — go out of the room.' Ramone stared at him. 'What you going to do?' 'Just go!' Martin shouted.

Still shaking, Ramone retreated from the sitting room. Martin heard his sneakers squeaking along the hallway toward the kitchen, heard the kitchen door slide shut.

With a bitter-tasting mouth, Martin edged up to the desk and took hold of his typewriter. It was a heavy Olivetti electric. His father had given it to him when he sold his first teleplay: it was reconditioned, from the typing pool at the Security Pacific Bank. It hadn't ever worked too well: it kept skipping fs and m's. But all that Martin cared about right now was that it was the heaviest liftable object in the room.

He tugged out the electric cable, rolling out the page of screenplay he had been working on. The cat's head opened its mouth in another hideous yawn, its eyes trying to focus on him as he circled around the back of the desk and picked the typewriter up in both hands. He licked his lips. His heart was thumping like a skin drum. His blood rushed through his head and almost deafened him.

'Oh, God,' he whispered, and lifted the typewriter up above his head. If he caught Lugosi's head with one of the corners, he should be able to shatter his skull in one blow. It was crucial, however, that he didn't lose his nerve and pull the typewriter back at the very last moment.

Give yourself a count of three, he told himself. Then do it. The typewriter was so heavy that his arms were beginning to tremble. Do it! he ordered himself. One, two three, and do it!

At that second, though, the cat's head seemed to rear up from the desk and swivel around. Martin almost dropped the typewriter, then cradled it in his arms staring at the head in paralyzed horror.

It rose higher and higher, on a furry neck that seemed to pour right out of the surface of the desk like a snake, yard after yard of it, until it looped and coiled down the side of the drawers and onto the floor. It was more like a python than a cat, and its sleek strange head remained lifted up in front of him on its endless ribboning neck, staring at him with agony and venomous hostility.

There was a moment when Martin believed he was really going mad - when he could hardly grasp that he was standing here at all, clutching his typewriter, with his cat-apparition swaying in front of him, and still pouring out of his desk.

He was breathing through his mouth in harsh, staccato gasps, as if he had been running. Ha—ha—ha—ha!

Then the cat started to lean toward him, its teeth bared, and he knew that it was no joke, no dream, no optical illusion. He heaved the typewriter — but it missed and bounded noisily across the floor. Then he threw his jelly jar of pencils and ballpoints, and that caught Lugosi on the side of the neck; but all the cat did was to sway back and hiss at him in fury.

'Ramone!' he yelled. But whatever Ramone was doing, he didn't hear. He was probably standing in the kitchen with his fingers jammed into his ears, so that he wouldn't have to listen to Martin crushing Lugosi's head.

Martin edged around his desk and the cat snake began to flow around it after him, its head still balanced five or six feet in the air, at eye level, fixing him with its unblinking yellow stare. He hesitated, and the cat-snake hesitated. There was no sound in the room but his own tightened breathing and the whispering of the cat-snake's fur across the boarded floor, like a woman trailing a long mink scarf.

'Ramone,' Martin repeated, but so quietly that Ramone couldn't possibly have heard him.

He cautiously reached forward, keeping his eyes onAe cat-snake all the time, until his fingers touched the brass handle of his top drawer. The handle rattled, and the cat-snake flared its mouth open, its teeth dripping strings of glistening saliva, and its body began to slide toward him across the floor.

Now or never, he told himself. He yanked open the drawer, scattering the contents everywhere — pencils, erasers, rubber

bands, paper clips, typewriter ribbons, book matches, correction fluid, and, most important of all, correction-fluid thinner.

The small plastic bottle of thinner rolled across the room and under his sofa. Martin glanced quickly at the cat-snake and then scrambled for it. The bottle had rolled almost out of reach, right under the back of the sofa next to the woven basket which contained his yucca pot.

He lay flat on his stomach and stretched his arm under the sofa. His fingertips touched the very edge of the bottle. It rolled a half inch farther away. Straining his arm even more, his shoulder pressing painfully against the underside of the sofa's frame, he just managed to reach the bottle and delicately take hold of the cap between two fingertips, so that he could tease it nearer. 'Come on, suckah,' he said under his breath. He had just managed to flick it into the palm of his hand when he felt something indescribable slide around his right thigh. He screamed out loud and rolled over, and there was Lugosi, the cat who had metamorphosed into a snake, winding itself around his leg and forcing its sleek reptilian head under * his left arm and around the back of his neck.

Martin scrabbled behind him and snatched at the cat-snake's fur. Underneath the softness, there was a hard muscular hosepipe of a body. Martin managed to get a grip on it, grunting with effort, and then he rolled over twice on the floor like a child turning somersaults at nursery school, so that the cat-snake unwound from his back.

'Ramone!' Martin shouted. 'Ramone, for God's sake!' He managed to catch the cat-snake just below the jaw and clench it tight. It spat and fumed at him and twisted its head from one side to the other. It was unbelievably strong; and the tighter he gripped it, the stronger it seemed to grow - until he was using every ounce of strength just to keep its spitting jaws away from his face.

He rolled over again, and again, and this time he managed to wedge up his knee and pin the cat-snake against the floor. It thrashed and whipped and it writhed, fifteen or sixteen feet of it. In seconds, it would thrash its way free, and then God only knew what it was going to do.

With his teeth, Martin unscrewed the cap of the thinner fluid, and then held Lugosi's head flat against the floor while he squirted almost the whole contents straight into the cat-snake's eyes and mouth and all over its head, until its furry scalp was furrowed with pungent liquid.

The cat-snake twisted and turned in agony, and for the first time uttered more than a hiss: a low, guttural kkhakk-khhakk-khakkk which prickled the hair at the back of Martin's neck. He dropped the bottle of thinner and grasped the cat-snake's neck in both hands, squeezing and squeezing as tightly as he could.

The sitting room door opened: Ramone walked in. He was obviously expecting to see Martin clearing up the remains of Lugosi's smashed head. Instead, he was confronted with a flailing snake out of a nightmare.

'Lighter,' Martin shouted. 'Lighter — before it dries!'

Ramone was open-mouthed. 'Wha - dries? What dries? What are you talking about? What, man? What the hell is that? Oh, Christ!'

'Your lighter!' Martin repeated, practically shrieking at him now. 'Set light to its head! I've just sprayed it with thinner!'

Ramone, stunned, fumbled in his shirt pocket for his Zippo. He thumbed it clumsily, but it flared up, and he held it out to Martin at arm's length.

'Light it!' Martin shouted. 'Light it, for pete's sake!'

With jiggling, juggling hands, Ramone touched the flaming Zippo to the top of Lugosi's head. Immediately, the cat-snake's fur burst into flame, and its yellow eyes bulged with pain. A terrible convulsion went right through its body, a convulsion that Martin felt right down to his stomach: a shudder of fear and suffering and self-disgust. But all he could do was hold on tight, while the cat-snake wagged its fiery head from side to side. He knew for a certainty that if he released his grip, it would still go after him, and it would probably burn him to death, too.