Graham Masterton - Mirror

Boofuls said, 'You mustn't shout at me, you know. If anybody shouts at me, I have one of my fits.'

'I know about your fits. I know pretty well everything about you.' Martin stood up, circling around Boofuls and then approaching the mirror. 'But you listen to me, I know something about this mirror, too. It has its own particular properties. It tries to suck things in; it can suck things in if it's allowed to. But for everything that goes in, something else has to come out. A ball for a ball, a cat for a cat, and now what? You're here — and the only way you could have gotten out is if somebody similar went into the mirror to take your place. I think that somebody similar was Emilio.'

Boofuls listened to this, and then smirked, and then burst out laughing, a brassy little childish laugh.

'Did I say something funny?' Martin asked him savagely. And all the time he was thinking: What am I doing? Fm actually talking to Boofuls, the real Boofuls, the real genuine murdered boy from all those years ago. The shadow of madness still quivered behind the door.

'He wanted to play,' said Boofuls. 'I didn't make him. He came because he wanted to. I didn't make him, I promise.'

'So where is he now, exactly?'

'I don't know. He's probably playing somewhere. There are lots of children to play with. Well, some of them want to play, anyway.'

'It's nearly three o'clock in the morning.'

'Well,' said Boofuls, 'it's different in there.'

'Is he safe?' Martin demanded. 'If I were to go into that mirror, too, could I find him and bring him back?'

Boofuls frowned and looked away.

'I asked you a question,' Martin shouted at him.

T

Boofuls' lower lip stuck out, and his eyes suddenly filled up with tears. 'I didn't — I didn't mean to do anything wrong - I thought — it would be all right. He wanted to play — he said that he wanted to play - and it was all right - his grandfather said it was all right.'

Martin hunkered down beside this strange curly-headed boy in his lemon-yellow clothes and laid a hand on his shoulder. 'Emilio told you that? Emilio said that he had permission from his grandfather?'

Boofuls nodded tearfully and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. 'I didn't mean to do anything wrong.'

Martin held Boofuls close. He felt cold under his thin summer clothing, but apart from that he felt just like any other child. His tears fell on Martin's shoulder.

At last, Martin sat down on the sofa and took hold of Boofuls' hands and looked him straight in the face. 'Walter,' he said, 'I have to ask you some serious questions.'

'You mustn't call me Walter. Nobody's allowed to call me Walter.'

'That's your name, though, isn't it?'

'That was his name.'

'Your father's name, you mean?'

Boofuls nodded. 'I'm not allowed to talk about my father.'

'Do you know who he was? Did you ever meet him?'

'I'm not allowed to talk about my father.'

'But, Boofuls, listen, those people who didn't allow you to talk about your father, they're all dead now; and they've been dead for a very long time. It doesn't matter anymore. What we have to do now is find out how you managed to stay alive in that mirror and how we're going to get Emilio back and what we're going to do about you.'

'You can't get Emilio back.'

Martin felt a small sick feeling in the bottom of his stomach; and it wasn't only caused by last night's Spanish wine. When he thought about Lugosi's grisly transmogrification into a cat-snake, the prospects of getting Emilio back from beyond the mirror seemed desperately remote. Or even if they could get him back, it seemed highly unlikely that he would be the same normal five-year-old boy that he had been before.

It seemed to Martin that the mirror changed the shapes of living creatures so that they took on the physical appearance of what they really were. Lugosi, like most cats, had been sinuous and coldhearted and carnivorously minded. That was why he had taken on the shape of a snake.

Maybe he was wrong, but Martin strongly suspected that the world beyond the mirror was just like the world of the dead, the way that Theo had described it to him. Maybe it was the very same world. Maybe the mirror was a window that looked into heaven; or purgatory; or straight into hell.

The strongest piece of evidence was Boofuls, the living, breathing, long-dead Boofuls.

Martin said, a little unsteadily, 'Okay ... let's take this one step at a time. First of all, what's beyond that mirror?'

Boofuls turned to the mirror and frowned. 'Hollywood,' he said.

'But not this Hollywood?'

'No,' Boofuls agreed. 'Hollywood the other way around.'

'Let me ask you this: where do you live in Hollywood?'

'Sixteen sixty-five Stone Canyon Drive, Bel Air. The house is called Espejo.'

'Is your grandmother still alive?'

Boofuls shook his head. 'She hung herself.'

'But she didn't hang herself until she'd killed you. So how come you're still alive and she's not?'

'Because I didn't want her to be.'

'But that's not up to you, is it? Deciding whether people live or die?'

Boofuls said nothing in reply to that question, but stared at Martin intently with those piggy little eyes. Martin could see now just what the M-G-M makeup department had done to give him that wide, dreaming look. Boofuls was pretty, in a way, but if Martin had been Jacob Levitz, he certainly wouldn't have looked at him twice when he auditioned for Whistlin' Dixie.

Perhaps Boofuls had been fresher looking in 1935, thought Martin, with a sudden dash of black humor. After all, in those days, he hadn't been dead for fifty years.

Martin slowly rubbed the palms of his hands together.

'Okay,' he said, 'if your grandmother's dead, who takes care of

you?'

'Miss Redd takes care of me. Miss Redd always took care of

me.'

Martin sat back. 'I never heard of Miss Redd.'

Boofuls shrugged, as if to say that wasn't his fault. 'Would

you like some orange juice?' Martin asked him. 'Anything to

eat?'

Boofuls brightened up. 'Do you have Ralston's?' Martin said, Tm sorry. How about Count Chokula?' Boofuls looked disappointed. 'I'm collecting Ralston box tops,

for the Tom Mix Straight-Shooters ring.'

'The Tom Mix Straight-Shooters ring? That's a radio premium, isn't it. Or wasn't it? They haven't given away stuff like

that on the radio since —'

He stared at Boofuls in horrified fascination. He suddenly

realized that he wasn't simply talking to a living ghost, he was

talking to a ghost who still lived in 1939.

Boofuls sat at the kitchen table with a large bowl of Count Chokula and a glass of milk. Martin had made himself another cup of strong coffee. It was four o'clock in the morning, and his head felt as if it were slowly being closed in a car door. Outside the kitchen window, the sky was gradually beginning to lighten; false dawn, the hour of false promises.

Martin sat opposite Boofuls, straddling one of the kitchen chairs. He tried to discover what kind of life Boofuls lived in 'Hollywood the Other Way Around'. He found it almost impossible to imagine an entire city in complete reverse. Yet of course he glimpsed it every day of the week, every hour of the day. Hollywood the Other Way Around appeared in store windows, barbershop mirrors, polished automobiles, shiny cutlery - everywhere and anywhere he came across a reflecting surface.

It was the idea of walking around inside those reflecting surfaces that he found so difficult to grasp. But Boofuls, with his mouth full of chocolate cereal, said, 'Why? You do it all the time. You can see yourself there.'

'Well, sure,' said Martin, 'but that's not actually me, is it, that's Me the Other Way Around. A left-handed me, a me who parts his hair on the opposite side, a me with a mole on my right cheek instead of my left.'