Graham Masterton - Mirror

Martin gently carried the package over to one of the scores of tables that had been stored in the Hollywood Divine's cellar. He cleared off the dust and the rat droppings, and then he laid the package down. 'Do you have a knife?' he asked Ramone. Without saying a word, Ramone unenthusiastically produced a switchblade and flicked it open.

'Huevo Duro,' he muttered.

Handling the knife with extreme care, Martin sawed through the braided hair which seemed to be all that was keeping this messily tied package together. Then he folded back each leaf of the black tissue paper until he revealed what

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was inside. As soon as the package was open, Ramone crossed himself and whispered, 'Madre mia.'

Lying on the black paper were four claws — thick and horny and black. They were like no other claws that Martin had seen before. They weren't lion claws, because lion claws are narrow and hooked at the end. They weren't eagle talons — they were far too large. Martin reached out and picked one up between finger and thumb, and asked, 'What in hell kind of a creature did these come from?'

'Believe me, I'm sure glad the rest of it ain't here,' Ramone told him. 'Come on, man, that stuff is bad news. I mean really bad news.'

Martin laid down the claw and picked up the wad of padding. It was black and shiny, not unlike horsehair. In fact it was hair of some kind, and it was attached to a small soft leathery patch that looked like a torn piece of dried-up scalp. It felt extremely old, almost mummified, and it felt extremely nasty.

'What do you think it could be?' Martin asked.

'Well, I don't know,' said Ramone, 'but I hate it.' He peered at it more closely, and then he said, 'You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of voodoo. You know, witch doctors, that kind of thing. And those disgusting African statues all covered in skin and bits of fabric and you don't know for sure where any of it's been, you know?'

Martin juggled the heavy claws in the palm of his hand. 'I don't know. What on earth was Boofuls' grandmother doing with the key to this stuff?'

'Maybe she wasn't,' Ramone suggested. 'It's been fifty years, right? Maybe this stuff belongs to somebody else altogether.'

'You don't think that, do you?' Martin replied. 'Not after what's been happening with the mirror? This all ties up somehow.'

Ramone peeled back the tissue paper a little farther. 'Hey, look — you missed something.'

In one corner of the package, there was a small screwed-up piece of black tissue. Martin opened it up and found another key, identical to the key with which he had opened the safe-deposit box. He held it up and examined it closely.

'I wonder what this opens?' he asked.

He turned it over. There was the same manufacturer's name on it, Woods, and it looked as if it probably opened another of the boxes. But this time there was no number on it.

'If we had all night, we could try opening every box here,' Ramone suggested.

But at that moment, the desk clerk reappeared, wending his way through the furniture. 'I got to lock up now. Did you find what you were looking for?'

'More or less,' said Martin.

The desk clerk frowned at the black-tissue package. 'That's not dope or anything?'

Martin shook his head. 'Sorry to disappoint you. This is just relics; and not particularly valuable relics at that. You know what I mean, sentimental value only.'

The desk clerk sniffed dryly; the thumping sniff of the habitual cokehead. 'Sure, sentimental value only. Now I got to lock up.'

Dr Ewart Rice stood in his dressing room in his undershirt and his formal black pants, his suspenders hanging down like a recently released catapult. He was shaving, and humming to himself. The early evening sun shone warmly through the white percale blind that he had drawn down over the window, and reflected in the hot water in the washbasin, so that a spindly light fairy danced on the wall in front of him.

He and Mrs Rice had been invited to dinner that evening by one of his pleasantest friends, Bill Asscher, the movie producer. The Asschers' dinners could always be counted on for superb food, hilarious conversation, pretty girls, and generous martinis. Mrs Rice always said that he made a fool of himself when he went to the Asschers' dinners, but Dr Rice always replied that if a man couldn't make a fool of himself by the time he was sixty years old, then he was a fool.

He rinsed his razor in the washbasin and reached for his hand towel. From the bedroom next door, he heard Mrs Rice

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calling, 'Aren't you ready yet, Ewart? If we have to go, we might as well go on time. Then we can leave on time!'

'Won't be a moment!' Dr Rice called back.

He examined himself closely in the mirror. He never let it show, not to other people, but he was really quite vain. He liked to look absolutely immaculate: immaculately groomed, immaculately shaved. As far as he was concerned, the thought of going out in public with sleep in the corner of his eye or hair growing out of his nostrils was anathema.

He turned his face from one side to the other. Sixty, but still handsome in a Celtic way. Perhaps that left-hand sideburn could do with a trim. He couldn't stand the thought of a pretty girl sitting next to him at dinner covertly glancing at his left-hand sideburn and thinking, What raggedy sideburns this old coot has. Dr Rice's vanity was vanity of top Wesselton quality, in that he could imagine himself inside the minds of everybody he met, and of course in his imagination they were all thinking about him and nothing else.

Dr Rice opened the drawer next to the washbasin and took out his sharp hairdressing scissors - professional scissors, not on sale to the public. He leaned toward the mirror again, holding up the scissors in his right hand, tugging the skin of his cheek with the fingertips of the left hand, taking a last appraising look.

He blinked. His eyes seemed to blur. He blinked again, but his face in the mirror was still blurry. He wiped the glass with a dry facecloth, thinking it must have steamed up, but his face remained just as indistinct.

'Agnes!' he called, thinking that the maid had tried to clean his mirror with wax polish. 'Agnes, this mirror, I can't see a thing!'

'I'm just putting on my eyelashes,' Mrs Rice replied.

Dr Rice looked back at the mirror; and then he shivered, the way people do in a sudden icy draft. Staring at him out of the reflected bathroom was not his own face, but the face of a child, a blond-haired, bland-faced child, with pinprick eyes and an expression of bright childish malice.

Almost paralysed with fright, Dr Rice widened his eyes and tried to outstare the image in the mirror. If he stared at it hard enough, it would go away. Ghosts and spirits can never stand up to scrutiny in broad daylight.

But outside the window, the evening sun began to die, and the dressing room suddenly grew darker, as if it were a cage that had been draped in black baize. And the pale child's face remained, staring back at Dr Rice fierce and unabashed, almost gleeful.

'Pickle-nearest-the-wind,' the child mouthed. 'Pickle-nearest-the-wind. '

'Go away,' said Dr Rice in a hoarse whisper. 'Go away, do you hear me? Go away!'

'Did you say something, dear?' his wife called out.

'Go away, go away, go away,' Dr Rice intoned.

'You told tales,' the child replied. 'Tell-tale-tit, your tongue shall be split, and every cat and dog in town shall have a little bit.'

'Go away,' Dr Rice begged him.

But now the child's eyes opened wider, and his smile grew broader and merrier, and Dr Rice found himself raising his right hand up to the side of his face, his right hand in which he was holding his sharp professional scissors.