Graham Masterton - Mirror

Martin climbed up onto the boxes and ran his fingers down the labels until he found 531.

Til give you a thousand to one the key don't fit,' said Ramone. 'Nobody with your luck is going to find the right box first time.'

'Theo said the Hollywood Divine,' Martin told him. 'And, believe me, Theo was really psychic. Well, sensitive, that's what he said.'

'I guess anybody would be sensitive working for Elmore Sweet,' Ramone commented.

Martin took out the key that Sister Boniface had given him and fitted it into the lock of the safe-deposit box. As he did so, he was certain that he heard somebody whistling, somewhere upstairs in the derelict hotel. He hesitated, and listened, and then he heard it again. It was an odd little melody from Sunshine Serenade. Boofuls sang it at the very end of the movie, when he believed (mistakenly, of course) that he had lost his mother.

Apples are sweeter than lemons

Lemons are sweeter than limes

But there's nothing so sweet as the mem'ry of you

And the sadness of happier times

The song was unusual because it had been written by George Garratt rather than Boofuls' regular team of writers; and because - after Garratt had argued with L. B. Mayer over 'artistic differences' — the whole sequence had been cut out of the prints that had been sent out on general release. Martin knew the song because it was still included in the video of Sunshine Serenade that his friend Gerry had sent him from the M-G-M archives, but who else would have known it?

Fido, possibly, if he had ever heard Boofuls singing it. Or George Garratt, except that in 1958 George Garratt had washed down two bottles of chloral hydrate pills with a fifth of Polish vodka and been found to be DO A at Laurel Canyon Hospital. Or — if his image in Martin's mirror had been more than just an image, and if there was any truth at all in what Nurse Newton had said about him — Boofuls himself.

'That didn't seem to make too much difference — him being dead.'

Ramone said, 'What's wrong, man? You look like you seen a ghost.'

Martin strained his ears, but the whistling had died away, faint and echoing, somewhere upstairs in the gloomy corridors of the Hollywood Divine Hotel.

'Did you hear something?' he asked Ramone.

Ramone shook his head.

'I don't know ... I thought I heard somebody whistling.'

Ramone sniffed. 'Probably the wind, mi amigo. Or the plumbing.'

All the same, Martin was sure that he had heard that plaintive, unremembered song. 'The Sadness of Happier Times', words and music by George Garratt, vocal rendition by Walter Lemuel Crossley, known all over the world as Boofuls.

Martin tried to turn the key in the lock of the safe-deposit box. It was stiff and rusted, but he gradually managed to budge it. 'There! It's the right key, I'm sure of it! It's just so darn hard to turn it!'

'Just don't break it, that's all,' Ramone cautioned him, 'otherwise you're never going to get this suckah open.'

The levers grated together; and then quite suddenly the key turned all the way around, and Martin was able to lift open the door. The door of the safe-deposit box was quite small — only nine inches by four — but the inside was nearly two feet deep. Now that it was resting on its back, Martin would have to put his hand inside it like a lucky dip. He peered into it cautiously. Ever since that brindled cat Pickle had come flying out at him from the darkness underneath his desk, he had felt cautious about sticking his head in where it wasn't wanted, and also where it was wanted.

Ramone tried to look inside, too, and they bumped heads.

'Looks like it's empty,' said Ramone; not without relief.

'Well, I won't be able to tell until I put my hand in,' Martin replied.

'You're going to put your hand in? Supposing there's something in there?'

Martin lifted his head and looked at him. 'Something in there? Something like what?'

'Well, I don't know, man, supposing it's a trap. Supposing that nun that gave you the key wasn't a real nun, supposing she was just another one of these hallucinations — well, it could have happened, you can't deny it could have happened — and supposing she knows there's some kind of booby trap inside here, just waiting for somebody like you to stick his hot little hand right into it. I mean, supposing it's something as bad as that cat? I mean, do you like your hand, or what?'

'Ramone —' Martin interrupted him. 'The likelihood of there being anything inside this box is pretty damn remote, wouldn't you say? Quite apart from the high probability that whatever was in here was probably collected by its rightful owner fifty years ago, the hotel management wouldn't have simply dragged these boxes down here and dumped them without going through them first. People used to keep money and diamonds and passports in these boxes, my'friend. I can't believe that anything like that would have gotten left behind, can you?'

Ramone said, 'Money and diamonds and passports don't bite your fingers off. I'm talking about that supernatural stuff.'

Martin hesitated for a moment. He didn't like to admit it, but it had occurred to him, too, that something vicious from the world beyond might be nestling in the bottom of this safe-deposit box; or even something vicious from the here and now. Hadn't he read that scorpions can survive for fifty years without food or water?

At length, however, he carefully dipped his bare hand into the darkness of the open box, feeling all around the sides as he did so. Bare metal, nothing so far. He ventured further. All the time, Ramone was watching him intently, chewing at his lip. 'You feel anything, man? Is there anything there?'

Martin was about to take his hand out when his fingers skimmed something that felt like soft tissue paper. 'Hold on,' he said. 'There's something here.'

He patted the bottom of the safe-deposit box and felt a package of some sort, in very fine crinkled paper.

'It's not a booby trap, is it?' Ramone asked him.

'No, no. I don't think so. It's a package. I can't work out what's in it. Something hard, by the feel of it; no — more than one, maybe three or four. They're hard and they're curved. There's something crunchy, too. Maybe it's straw, or wood shavings. Hold on — if I can squeeze my other hand in, I can lift it out.'

With intense concentration, Martin pushed his other hand into the safe-deposit box until he could take hold of the package on both sides. It was very loosely wrapped together, and he was worried that if he lifted it up with one hand, the contents — whatever they were — would tumble out.

'Steady, man,' said Ramone as he slowly raised the package out of the safe-deposit box and laid it carefully down.

Martin reached back inside the box, but there was nothing else there. 'This is it,' he said. 'The sole contents.'

The package was a loose assembly of thin black tissue paper, tied with a thin greasy braid of something that could have been human hair. Where the hair was knotted, it was sealed with black wax, on which somebody had imprinted the crest from a signet ring or a brass seal. Martin gently shook the package, and inside he could feel a number of heavy curved objects, about four or five inches long, and a wad of crisp padding.

'Let's take it under the light and open it up,' Martin suggested.

Ramone's eyes widened. 'Supposing the mirror doesn't want us to? Supposing it tries to fix us the way it fixed Homer Theobald? You want to die with your lungs coming out of your mouth, because sure as hell I don't.'

'I always thought you were the great Huevo Duro? Martin teased him.

'Huevo Duro,' Ramone repeated with contempt. It was Spanish for hard-boiled egg.