Graham Masterton - Mirror

'No,' he pleaded.

The child smiled. 'Tell-tale-tit.'

'I didn't mean to tell. He asked me. I didn't think I was doing anything wrong.'

' You told, you told, you told.'

'I didn't mean to!' Dr Rice wept. 'Please, my God, I didn't mean to. He asked me about you, that's all. I didn't think you were still -'

'You didn't think I was still alive? You didn't think I was still here? Then you are foolish, aren't you? Just as foolish as your wife says you are. Because I have been here since time began and I shall always be here, long after you are ashes!'

Mrs Rice said, 'Ewart? Is anything wrong? You really do sound most peculiar.'

But Dr Rice, when he opened his mouth, found that he was unable to speak. His throat felt as if it were being gripped in a steel claw; he couldn't do anything but gag for air. His left hand scrabbled against the counter beside the washbasin, knocking over his Gucci razor stand and his bottles of after-shave and his porcelain dish of Chanel soap. His right hand turned toward his face, his thumb and fingers slowly and inexorably prized apart by some uncontrollable tightening of his muscles, so that the pointed blades of the scissors opened, too.

As he gargled for air, his mouth stretched open and his tongue protruded, mauve from lack of oxygen, fat with effort, glistening and wagging.

' Tell-tale-tit, your tongue shall be split, and every cat and dog in town shall have a little bit!'

Dr Rice cut into his own tongue with the hairdressing scissors. There was a terrible crunch of flesh that he could feel right down to the roots of his tongue, right down to the pit of his stomach. His throat muscles contracted in an attempt to scream, but the grip on his neck remained, and there was nothing he could do but choke and struggle.

Blood gushed down the front of his undershirt as if he were pulling on a bright red sweater, and splattered into his shaving water. But the child in the mirror hadn't finished with him yet. His trembling hand opened up the blades of the scissors again, and enclosed his tongue from the side this time, so close to his lips that he cut his mouth as well. He could feel the sharpness of the scissors on the top and bottom of his tongue, and his eyes bulged in hysterical terror.

If I've split my tongue, that can be sewn up and healed. But oh, God, if I cut it right off—

The boy's face was sparkling with delight. 'You told, you told, you toldr

'Gggnnggghh,' pleaded Dr Rice.

'You told, and you shouldn't, and now you have to pay!'

Dr Rice's right hand went into a taut slow-motion convulsion and closed the grips of the scissors. He cut right through to the first split, and half of his tongue dropped into his washbasin. Then, shuddering all over, he raised his left hand and gripped the remaining half of his tongue by its tip and scissored that off, too.

Then he stood in front of the mirror, staring at it in shock, his lips closed, but a thin, dark, glutinous cascade of blood poured down his chin. Everything was bloody: his face and his hair and his clothes and his dressing room. He looked like a circus clown who had gone beserk with his pot of scarlet makeup.

Mrs Rice came into the dressing room, her hair stiffly lacquered, buttoning up the cuff of her shiny blue evening dress as she came. 'Ewart, what on earth are you playing at? We've only got fifteen minutes before we -'

Her husband stared at her pitifully out of a mask of blood. She stood with her hand over her mouth, staring back at him, and she didn't know what to do.

The man came flip-flapping on monkish leather sandals along the sidewalk, his spectacles reflecting the streetlights, his pipe clenched comfortably between his teeth. His Standard poodle trotted beside him on a long leash.

'Just as far as the bushes at the end of the development,' he informed his poodle. 'Then you can do your ah-ahs and we can turn around and head for home.'

He passed the front door of the Rice house. 'That poor Dr Rice. God alone knows what happened to him. Taken away like that, in an ambulance. God alone knows.'

It was then that the poodle stopped and stiffened and started to growl, way down deep in its throat.

'What's the matter, Redford? What is it, boy?"

The poodle continued to growl. The Rices' neighbor peered through the shadows at the side of the Rice residence; and there was a window open and a white blind flapping.

The neighbor hesitated. He wasn't too keen to go and investigate, since he knew that Dr Rice was still in the hospital and Mrs Rice was with him, and that the house was empty. There had been three armed burglaries already that month in the Hollywood Reservoir district; and in one of them, a friend of his had been shot in the shoulder. All the same, he waited, frowning, to see if there was any sign of a burglar in the house, and he slipped his poodle off the leash.

'Heel, Redford.'

There was a lengthy pause. All the man could hear were the endless orchestrations of the cicadas and the distant muttering of traffic on the freeways. The poodle whined and snuffled.

Suddenly, the white blind at the side of the house snapped up, with a heart-stopping clatter, and a large dark shape bounded out of the window and ran across the lawn.

The poodle rushed silently after it and caught up with it just behind a large flowering shrub. The neighbor ran forward, then abruptly stopped and told himself'Whoa!' when he heard the ferocity of the snarling in the shadows. He reached into his coat pocket and took out his flashlight, and cautiously probed the darkness with its thin beam.

He didn't understand what he saw; but it still made his stomach feel as if it were gradually filling up with ice water. A hefty brindled tomcat was crouched in the bush, savagely gnawing at a piece of blue-gray meat. His own poodle was standing beside the cat, and he was chewing something, too. A shredded piece of it was hanging from one side of his jaw.

'Redford!' the neighbor screamed at his dog. And then, to the cat, he screamed, 'Shoo! Get the hell out of it! Shoo!'

The cat stayed where it was, staring at him with eyes that gleamed frighteningly blue in the light of his flashlight. The poodle, too, refused to come to heel.

'Redford, you son of a bitch!' the neighbor screeched, and lifted the leash to smack his poodle across the nose.

But the cat spat at him so evilly, and Redford growled with such mutinous ferocity, that the man backed away, and shrugged, and said, 'Okay, forget it. Forget it. You want to squat in a bush and eat squirrels, see if I care. Just don't expect any Gravy Train tomorrow, that's all.'

Detective Ernest Oeste of the Hollywood police was sent back to the Rice residence at eleven-thirty that evening in order to retrieve two pieces of Dr Rice's tongue which had been overlooked by paramedics when they first answered his wife's emergency call.

There was no question of the pieces being sewn back into place. The damage to Dr Rice's tongue was far too extensive. But they were needed as evidence that Dr Rice had (almost unbelievably) inflicted his injuries upon himself.

'He loved to talk, why should he do such a thing?' Mrs Rice had wept.

Detective Oeste had to report after a lengthy search that Dr Rice's tongue had apparently been taken and eaten by a rat or a cat.

Detective Oeste's immediate superior, Sergeant Frederick Quinn, sat for a very long time in front of his report sheet before typing, 'Cat got his tongue'. Almost immediately, he deleted it, and typed, 'Evidence removed by predatory animals'.

'Can you believe this case?' he asked the world.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Martin returned to Franklin Avenue that Sunday night exhausted; and a little drunk, too. Ramone had taken him to his favorite restaurant and bar, Una Porcion, on Santa Monica, three blocks west of the Palm. They had drunk three bottles of Lopez de Heredia and eaten countless tapas - cheese, squid, spicy sausage, sardines, meatballs.