Graham Masterton - Mirror

Martin hugged Mr Capelli close and patted his back to soothe him. 'Come on, Mr Capelli, everything's going to work our. We'll find Emilio, I promise you.'

Mr Capelli looked up. 'How can you make such a promise?'

'Because I'm not going to rest until we get him back. I'm going to try everything. Police, priests, mediums, everything. And I'm going to find out all about this mirror, why it's got this power, what the hell it wants.'

'Well, you're a good boy, Martin,' said Mr Capelli with a sniff. 'I just wish you never bring this terrible mirror home with you. I could cut off my own hands for helping you to carry it.'

When Mr Capelli had gone back downstairs, Martin went into the kitchen and drank two strong cups of black coffee, one after the other. Then he returned to the sitting room and pushed the sofa around so that it faced the mirror. He was determined he was going to keep a vigil here, in case Emilio reappeared.

He switched out the lights and made himself comfortable on the sofa under an Indian blanket that Jane had bought when she went to Phoenix that time. The only reason she hadn't taken it with her was that Martin had kept it in the trunk of his car and she hadn't found it.

He took off his wristwatch and propped it on the arm of the sofa so that he could see it easily. It was a few minutes after midnight. Monday morning already. He yawned, stifled it, and then yawned again. He shouldn't find it difficult to stay awake all night. After all, his mind was racing and he was up to his ears in caffeine; and if he did start feeling at all sleepy, he had a few bennies in the bottom drawer of his desk.

He stared at himself in the mirror. A pale-faced man sitting on a sofa in a moonlit room. It looked rather like one of those surrealistic paintings by Magritte. He remembered seeing one Magritte painting in which a man is looking into a mirror, and all he can see is the back of his own head.

Mirrors, he thought, have always been mysterious. But he was going to unravel the particular mystery of this mirror even if it killed him.

He didn't realize that he was gradually falling asleep; that his head was drooping to one side, that his fingers were slowly opening like the petals of a water lily.

He jerked, and his eyes fluttered open for a moment, but then he dropped even more deeply into sleep than he had been before. His breathing became thick and harsh, the breathing of a man who has drunk too much wine. His wristwatch ticked softly beside him: one o'clock, one-thirty. Outside, the street was deserted, the night was silent.

He dreamed that he was traveling through the night on a bus, mile after mile, hour after hour, and that he was the sole passenger. He knew that the bus was traveling in the wrong direction, and that it would take him days to get back to where he really wanted to go. He tried to stand up, to talk to the driver, but the bus was swaying so much that he kept overbalancing back into his seat.

He shouted out. His voice sounded small and congested, but he was sure the driver could hear him. The driver, however, refused to turn around, refused to answer.

They drove farther and farther into the darkness. 'Where are we going?' he kept shouting. 'Where are we going?'

At last the driver turned around. To Martin's terror, his face was the gilded face of Pan. He grinned wolfishly and stared at Martin with gilded eyeballs.

' 'Pickle-nearest-the-wind,' somebody said, with cold breath close to Martin's ear.

He whispered and groaned and shifted in his sleep, but he didn't wake up. His wristwatch showed that it was two o'clock.

In the mirror, the sitting room door opened a little way, although the real sitting room door didn't move at all. A cold stripe of moonlight fell across the floor, and in that moonlight was a small shadow, the shadow of a boy.

The shadow remained still, unmoving, for almost a minute; but you could have told by the faintest trembling of the door that the boy was holding the handle, and listening, and waiting.

At last the boy came into the reflected room. He was about eight years old, with curly blond hair and a pale face with tiny pinpricked eyes. He was wearing a lemon-yellow shirt and a pair of lemon-yellow shorts, and white ankle socks and sandals.

The moonlight caught his curls so that they gleamed like white flames. His expression was extraordinary: elated, fierce, like a child who has become so overexcited that he begins to hyperventilate.

He stood motionless for a moment; and then he smiled even more widely and began to walk toward the mirror. He didn't hesitate for a second, but stepped straight through it, so that he was standing in the moonlight in the real room. Behind him, the surface of the mirror warped and rippled for a moment, as if it were a pool of mercury.

The boy approached the man sleeping on the sofa. He watched the man for a very long time. The man's watch softly chirruped away the minutes. The man snuffled and groaned and said something indistinct. The boy smiled to himself; and then reached out and took hold of the man's open hand.

Martin, in his sleep, felt the small cold hand slide into his.

'Emilio?' he asked. His mouth felt dry, and he opened and closed it two or three times to try to moisten his tongue. His eyes flickered, then opened.

The boy grinned. 'Hello, Martin.'

Martin opened his eyes wide and stared. The shock of waking up and finding that Boofuls was actually holding his hand was so violent and numbing that he couldn't do anything at all, he couldn't move, couldn't speak.

'Did I frighten you?' asked Boofuls. His voice was clear and reedy, with the precise enunciation of prewar years. 'I didn't mean to frighten you. You knew I was coming, didn't you? You did know.'

Martin's hand shrank out of Boofuls' grasp. He began to shudder and to draw his legs up on the sofa. For one instant, his mind was right on the very edge of complete madness; right on the brink of giving up any kind of responsibility whatsoever. But the boy was so calm and smiling, so utterly real, that the madness shrank away, like a shadow disappearing under a door, and Martin found himself sitting on his sofa face-to-face with a real boy who had been horribly and publicly killed nearly fifty years ago.

'I have frightened you, haven't I?' said Boofuls. Martin gradually eased his feet back onto the floor. He didn't take his eyes off Boofuls even for a moment. He was frightened that, if he glanced away, Boofuls would disappear. He was just as frightened that he would still be here.

'You mustn't be frightened, really,' said Boofuls. 'I'm only a boy, after all.'

'You're a dead boy,' Martin whispered. Boofuls laughed. 'Do I look dead? Do I feel dead? Here -take my hand and tell me that I'm dead.'

Martin hesitated, but Boofuls took his hand and pressed it against his chest. Martin could feel the steady beating of his heart; the rising and falling of his lungs.

'Well, okay, you're not dead,' he said. 'You ought to be dead, but you're not.'

'You don't want me to be dead, do you?' asked Boofuls. 'Not like she did. And she wasn't the only one, either. Lots of people wanted me dead. But I'm here, I'm me. That's enough, isn't it? And you like me, don't you? I know you do!'

'I like your pictures,' said Martin, although it seemed like a pretty vapid thing to say, under the circumstances. But then — looking over Boofuls' shoulder, back toward the mirror — he said, 'Where's Emilio? Did Emilio go into the mirror?'

'Emilio?' Boofuls replied quite tartly. 'I don't know anybody called Emilio.'

'The boy you were playing with. The little Italian boy.'

'Oh, him,'' said Boofuls. 'He's all right.'

'Is he in there?' Martin demanded, pointing toward the mirror. 'That's what I want to know.'