Graham Masterton - Mirror

'Don't you worry about that. As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing is for Boofuls' belongings to have a loving home.'

Martin looked up at the mirror. Now that his eyes were becoming more accustomed to the shadows, he could distinguish the details of the gilded frame. It was quite a large mirror — six feet wide and nearly five feet high — which had obviously hung over a fireplace. The sides of the frame were carved as luxuriant tangles of grapevines. At the top, there was a grinning gilded face which looked like Bacchus or Pan. The glass itself was discolored and measled at one corner, but most of it reflected back Martin's face with a clarity that was almost hallucinatory, as if he were actually looking at himself in the flesh, instead of a reflection. No wonder he had been so alarmed to see Mrs Harper floating in the air.

He reached out to touch the mirror and felt the chilly glass of its surface, untouched by sunlight for nearly twenty years. How does a mirror feel when it has nothing to reflect - nobody to smile at it, nobody to preen their hair in it, no rooms for it to look at, no evanescent pictures for it to paint of passing lives? 'Mirrors are lonely,' Tennyson once wrote.

'Seven thousand,' said Mrs Harper. 'How about that?'

'I beg your pardon?' asked Martin, caught off balance.

'Seven thousand for everything,' Mrs Harper repeated. 'It's the lowest I can go.'

Martin rubbed the back of his neck. Seven thousand was out of the question. Even his car wasn't worth seven thousand. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'That's more than I can afford. I'm not Aaron Spelling, I'm afraid.'

'I couldn't go any lower,' said Mrs Harper. 'It would be worth a whole lot more, even if it hadn't belonged to Boofuls.'

'Well, that's that, I guess,' said Martin in resignation. 'Thank you for letting me look at it, anyway. At least it gives me some idea of how Boofuls' room was furnished. That could be quite a help with my screenplay.'

'How much can you afford?' asked Mrs Harper.

Martin smiled and shook his head. 'Nothing like seven thousand. Nothing like one thousand. Five hundred, and that's tops.'

Mrs Harper looked around. 'I guess I could let you have the barstools for five hundred.'

'You'd be willing to sell pieces separately?'

'Well, I wasn't planning to. But since you're such a devotee.'

'Do you think you could sell me the mirror for five hundred? I really covet the mirror.'

Mrs Harper puckered her lips. 'I'm not at all sure about that. That's very special, that mirror. French, originally — that's what Arnold's father told me.'

'It's very handsome,' Martin agreed. 'I can just imagine it in my apartment.'

'Maybe seven-fifty?' Mrs Harper suggested. 'Could you go to seven-fifty?'

Martin took a deep breath. 'I could pay you five hundred now and the rest of it next month.' That wouldn't leave him very much for living on, he thought to himself, but if he finished his A-Team rewrite tonight and maybe asked Morris to find him a couple of extra scripts to work on — anything, even Stir Crazy or Silver Spoons.

Mrs Harper stood in silence for a long while, and then she said, 'Very well. Five hundred now and two-fifty by the end of next month. But you make sure you pay. I don't want any trouble. I've got lawyers, you know.'

Martin found an old wooden fruit box and dragged it across the cellar floor so that he could stand on it to reach the mirror. The late Arnold Harper had hung it up on two large brass hooks, screwed firmly into the joists of the sitting room floor above them. Martin lifted the mirror gently down, making sure that he didn't knock the gilded frame on the floor. It was desperately heavy, and he was sweating by the time he had managed to ease it down onto the floor. Mrs Harper watched him, making no attempt to assist him, smiling benignly.

'It's a wonderful thing, isn't it?' she said, peering into it and teasing her bouffant hair. 'They sure don't make mirrors like this one anymore.'

Martin found that he didn't have the strength to lift the mirror and carry it up the stairs, so he bundled a dustcover underneath one corner of it and dragged it across the floor. Then, panting, step by step, he pulled it up the wooden staircase until he reached the hallway. It took him almost five minutes to maneuver it through the cellar door into the kitchen. Mrs Harper stood halfway up the stairs watching, still offering no help. Martin almost wished that he hadn't bought the goddamn thing. His arms were trembling from the weight of it. His cheek was smeared with grime and he was out of breath. '

'You can bring your car up to the side of the house if you want to,' said Mrs Harper — and that was the only contribution she made. Martin nodded, leaning against one of the kitchen cupboards.

'You'll take a personal check?' he asked her.

'Oh, sure. Just so long as you're good for it. It's all money isn't it? That's what Arnold used to say.'

After another ten minutes, Martin managed to drag the mirror out of the kitchen door and tilt it into the back seat of his Mustang. Mrs Harper allowed him to borrow the dustcover to protect it, provided he promised that he would bring it straight back. 'I promise,' he told her. 'I'll bring it straight back.'

He drove off slowly down Hillside, and Mrs Harper stood on her steps and waved his check. Glancing at her in his rearview mirror, he thought that for somebody who had just let him have a valuable antique at a knock-down price, she looked a little too pleased with herself. She had probably asked him for double what the mirror was actually worth.

Still, he was now the owner of the actual mirror that had graced Boofuls' fireplace, and maybe that would bring him luck. He hummed 'Flowers From Tuscaloosa' as he slowly drove his huge angular purchase back to Franklin Avenue.

Mr Capelli was home early, and he helped Martin to carry the mirror upstairs. Mr Capelli was small and rotund, with a bald head and spectacles that looked as if they had been ground out of two glass bottle-stoppers. 'I shouldn't even lift a basket of groceries,' he grumbled. 'My doctor's going to kill me alive.'

'Mr Capelli, you don't know how much I appreciate this,' Martin told him. 'This mirror used to belong to Boofuls. True. It used to hang over his fireplace, in his sitting room in Bel Air.'

Mr Capelli examined the mirror with his mouth turned down at the corners. 'This used to belong to Boofuls? This actual mirror?'

'This actual mirror. In fact, when his grandmother chopped him up, this actual mirror was probably reflecting the whole scene.'

Mr Capelli shuddered. 'That's bad, you shouldn't keep something like this.'

'It's a mirror, Mr Capelli, that's all.'

'Well, that's what you say. But in Sicily, you know what my grandmother always used to do? Whenever somebody died, she went around and smashed every mirror in the house, and this was because every time a person looks in a mirror, the mirror takes a little tiny teentsy bit of their soul. So the only way that their whole soul can go to heaven when they die is for somebody to smash all of their mirrors, and let out that little bit that the mirror took away from them when they were alive.'

Martin shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and smiled. 'What's the famous Italian sausage?' he asked.

'Mortadella,' said Mr Capelli.

'No, no, the other one. The big, smooth one.'

'Baloney.'

'That's it!' said Martin. 'And I couldn't agree with you more.'

'Hey! You don't talk to me that way,' snapped Mr Capelli. 'You want me to make you take this mirror back out again?'

'All right, I'm sorry,' said Martin, and laid his hand on Mr Capelli's shoulder. 'It's really going to look great. It's going to make this apartment look twice the size.'