Graham Masterton - Mirror

'I'm a widow,' said Mrs Harper, as if she felt a need to explain why the interior of her house was a living museum of twenty-year-old contemporary design. 'Arnold died in 1971, and, well — it all just reminds me.'

Martin nodded, to show that he understood. Mrs Harper said, 'He didn't like the Boofuls furniture, either. I mean he actually hated it. But his father had bought it, just before the war. His father was setting up house, you see, and he went to an auction and bought it — well, because it was so cheap. It was only afterward that somebody told him who it used to belong to. And what's more ... it used to stand in the very room where poor little Boofuls was - you know - done away with. Quite the most awful thing ever. I mean even worse than Charles Manson, because she chopped that dear little child into - well, I don't even like to think about it. And nor does anybody else, more's the pity.'

'Can we - er - look at it?' asked Martin.

'Well, of course. It's down in the cellar. I mean it hasn't seen the light of day since Arnold's father gave it to us. Arnold didn't even want it but his father insisted. Arnold never had the nerve to stand up against his father. Well, not many people did. He was an absolute tyrant.'

Mrs Harper led the way through to the kitchen. She stood up on tiptoe, revealing so much skinny leg that Martin had to look away, and groped around on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard to find the key to the cellar.

'I should sell up, you know, and move to San Diego. My sister lives there. This big old house is such a nuisance.'

She unlocked the cellar and switched on the light. Martin hesitated for a moment and then followed her down the steep wooden steps. The smell of drains was even stronger down here, and it was mingled with a smell of dried-out lumber and cats.

'You watch your step, now,' said Mrs Harper. 'Those last two steps are pretty rotten. We had termites, you know. Arnold thought they were going to eat the whole house right around our ears.'

'They didn't touch the furniture?'

'Don't ask me why,' said Mrs Harper, her pink-fingernailed claw illuminated for a moment as she clutched the stair rail. 'They ate just about everything else. They even ate the handle of Arnold's shovel, I'll always remember that. The whole darned handle. But they never touched the furniture. Not a nibble. Perhaps even termites have respect for the dead.'

'Yes, maybe they do,' said Martin, peering into the gloom of the cellar.

Mrs Harper beckoned him forward. 'It's all over here, behind the boiler.'

Martin caught his sleeve on an old horse collar which was hooked on a nail at the side of the stairs. It took him a moment to disentangle himself, but when he had, Mrs Harper had disappeared into the darkness behind the boiler. 'Mrs Harper?'

There was no reply. Martin groped forward a little farther. The boiler was heavy cast iron, one of those old-fashioned types, and almost looked as if it had a grinning face on it, with mica eyes. 'Mrs Harper?'

He came cautiously around the corner of the boiler and there she was. But the back of his scalp shrank in alarm, because she was suspended three feet above the floor, at a frightening diagonal angle, her white bouffant hair gleaming like the huge chrysalis of some gigantic moth.

'Ah!' Martin shouted; but almost at the same time Mrs Harper turned her head and he realized that he was looking at a reflection of her; and that the real Mrs Harper was standing beside him quite normally.

'I'm sorry,' she said without much sympathy. 'Did I startle you?'

'No, I uh -' Martin gestured toward the mirror that was hanging from the ceiling.

'Well,' Mrs Harper smiled. She rubbed her hands together. 'That was Boofuls' mirror. That was the very mirror that watched him die.'

'Very nice,' said Martin. He was beginning to wonder whether it had been such a good idea coming down here to look at Boofuls' old furniture. Maybe the tedium of retyping his A-Team script had something to recommend it. Maybe some memories are better left alone.

'The chairs and the sofa are back here,' said Mrs Harper. She dragged at the corner of a dustcover and revealed the shadowy outlines of an elegant reproduction sofa and two matching chairs. They were gilded, French chateau style, with pale green watered-satin seats - grubby and damp-stained from so many years in Mrs Harper's cellar. Martin peered at them through the gloom.

'Do you have any more lights down here?' he asked.

'Well, there's a flashlight someplace .. .' Mrs Harper fussed, making it quite obvious that she didn't want to go looking for it.

'Don't worry,' Martin told her. 'I can see them pretty good. Is that the liquor cabinet back there?' He pointed toward a huge rococo piece of bowfront furniture with engraved windows, partially concealed by a sheet.

'That's right; and it still has all the original decanters, with solid-silver labels. Gin, whiskey, brandy. Not that Boofuls ever drank, of course, at his age.'

She thought this was quite amusing and let out a high, whinnying snort.

Martin approached the furniture with a mixture of dread and fascination. He ran his hand along the back of the sofa, and thought, Boofuls actually sat here. The experience was more disturbing than he had expected. News clippings and photographs were one thing — but they were flat and two-dimensional. Boofuls had never actually touched them. But here was his furniture. Here were his chairs. Here was the mirror that must have hung over his fireplace. Real, touchable objects. To Martin, they were as potent as Hitler's shirts, or Judy Garland's ruby slippers, or Jackie Kennedy's pink pillbox hats. They were proof that a legend had once been real; that Boofuls had actually lived.

He said nothing for a long time, his hands on his hips, breathing the musty sawdust atmosphere of Mrs Harper's cellar.

'You said that nobody was interested in buying them,' he remarked to Mrs Harper at last.

'I didn't say that nobody was interested in buying them,' Mrs Harper retaliated. 'I simply said that nobody seemed interested in selling them for me. It's the profit margin, I suppose.'

Martin nodded and looked around him. It was the two chairs he coveted the most — those and the mirror. The mirror would look absolutely stunning on his sitting room wall, instead of all those cuttings and photographs and letters - and it would have a far greater emotional effect. Instead of saying, 'Oh, yes, here's my collection of publicity pictures of Boofuls,' he would be able to announce, 'And this - this is the actual mirror which was hanging in Boofuls' sitting room when he was murdered.'

Shock! Shudder! Envy!

'Erm .. . how much do you want for this stuff?' Martin asked Mrs Harper casually. 'Chairs, mirror, sofa, liquor cabinet, stools. Supposing I took them all off your hands?'

'Well... I wouldn't mind that at all,' said Mrs Harper. She rubbed the back of the gilded sofa and sucked in her false teeth, and her eyelashes fluttered like chloroformed moths.

'How much?' asked Martin, thinking of the $578 sitting in his savings account at Security Pacific. Surely she wouldn't ask more than five hundred bucks for a few worn-out pieces of 19305 furniture. She might even pay him to cart them away.

Mrs Harper thought for a moment, her hand pressed to her forehead. 'I don't know,' she said. 'I've had so many different valuations. Some very high, some very low. But you're a real Boofuls fan, aren't you? A genuine devotee. And, you know, it seems kind of mean to make you pay an extortionate price -especially since you're trying to keep his memory alive.'

Martin shrugged, and shuffled his feet. 'That's really generous of you. But I wouldn't like you to take a loss.'