Graham Masterton - Mirror

Father Quinlan said more quietly, 'It all started, somehow, with Boofuls. I had my suspicions, from the moment I started researching. I found a letter written by Bill Tilden . . . well, you know what he was like, Stumpy Tilden. Tennis coaching for pretty young boys, that kind of thing. In 1936, he wrote a letter to a close friend, and said that he had met an exquisite child who had offered him hope and happiness, "unimaginable" hope and happiness. The boy's name was Walter Cross-ley, a.k.a Boofuls. But Bill Tilden wasn't the only one. Every- | body in Hollywood, whether they were homosexual or not, j was entranced by Boofuls: his sweetness, his apparent purity, and the feeling that, when they were around him, he made them feel confident and happy and capable of everlasting success.'

Father Quinlan said more seriously, 'He was nothing more and nothing less than a child possessed by Satan. That's my opinion, anyway, I was never able to confirm it. How can you confirm such a thing? I could never discover who his father was, and I could never discover the identity of the woman who always used to accompany him to the Hollywood Divine.'

'Miss Redd?' put in Martin.

Father Quinlan nodded. 'That's right, the mysterious Miss Redd. I've never been able to find any pictures of her or press references or anything at all. But several anonymous letters that were sent to the church in 1938 mention Miss Redd.' He reached over and poured Martin some more wine. 'However,' he said, 'let's get back to your mirror.'

'Boofuls' mirror,' Martin admitted.

Father Quinlan smiled. 'I thought so. Well - Father Lucas thought so.'

'He was quite right,' said Martin. He turned to Father Lucas and gave him a nod of admiration. Father Lucas, in return, lifted up his glass of wine.

Father Quinlan said, 'This isn't easy to piece together. Some of the faculty here think that I'm obsessive about it. But the Revelation contains some remarkably clear facts and figures, apart from scores of extraordinary implications. Miss Redd, for example. In the Revelation, Satan appears as a red dragon. Perhaps it means nothing at all. Perhaps I'm being paranoid. Oh, yes, priests can be paranoid. But we have one more important authority to turn to; and I'm rather proud of this.'

He walked across the room to a large oak cabinet, carved with bunches of grapes. He took a small key out of his vest pocket and opened it. Inside, there were rows of small shelves. Father Quinlan drew out a small package of papers, closed the door, locked it, and returned to the sofa.

'This,' he said, 'is an unpublished commentary'on Unusual Properties of Looking-Glasses, by Charles Lutwidge Dodg-son.'

Martin said, in astonishment, 'Charles Lutwidge Dodgson? You mean Lewis CarrolR'

Father Quinlan untied the faded silk ribbon which held the papers together. 'The very same; and we've had it authenticated, too, by the British Museum.'

'But it must be worth a million dollars. An unpublished book by Lewis Carroll?'

'Well . .. another Alice adventure might be worth something. But not so many people know that Lewis Carroll was more of a mathematician than a storyteller. He wrote A Syllabus of Plane Algebra and an Elementary Treatise on Determinants, as well as Euclid and His Modern Rivals.''

Father Quinlan turned the musty leaves of the manuscript; and there was a smell of dust and burned cream. 'This is all very scrappy .. . not what you'd call a book at all. Notes, really; and some of them very disjointed. But the most interesting part about it is what he has to say about mirrors. He always believed that there was some kind of wonderland on the other side of mirrors; but his first real revelation about mirrors came early in the winter of 1869 when he became extremely ill, pneumonia probably, and he lay in bed at his home in Oxford quite close to death.'

Father Quinlan looked Martin straight in the eye. 'Carroll may have been delirious; but he tells in this commentary how he walked through the mirror in his sickroom in just the way that Alice did. "The glass melted away, just like a bright silvery mist." He found himself in looking-glass land, where everything was reversed.

'He writes here, "Not just writing, and pictures, but Christian morality itself had been turned from left to right. Inside the mirror was the domain of demons, the ante-room of Hell itself."'

Father Quinlan said, 'He tried to tell his friends; he tried to tell the Bishop of Oxford. But after Alice in Wonderland they chose not to believe him. So he wrote Through the Looking-Glass as an Alice story . . . mainly because he knew that it would find the widest audience. It was a warning, expressed in childish language, in the hope that — even if adults refused to believe the danger they were in - then perhaps children would. Through the Looking-Glass is the single most specific warning about the return of Satan since the Revelation itself.'

He handed Martin one of the pages. On it, in Lewis Carrol's own handwriting, was written 'Jabberwocky':

Beware the jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Father Quinlan brought over some more wine. 'Later in the book, Carroll explains away this gibberish-poem with all sorts of nonsensical definitions. But ask any child about the Jab-berwock, and he or she will tell you about nothing except a dark wood, and a ferocious dragonlike creature, and a boy who slays it by chopping it into pieces. Alice herself says, "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don't exactly know what they are! However somebody killed something". See what it says here:

"Thejabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!"

Then,

"One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back."'

Father Quinlan smiled. 'Well, it's pretty amusing stuff. But these notes aren't amusing at all. Carroll says here, "7 believe that I came as close to death as a man may go and yet return to the real world. I saw darkness; and I saw unimaginable beings; human-beings with heads as huge as carnival-masks; creatures with hunchbacks; dogs that spoke. It seems to me now like a dream, or rather a nightmare, but I am convinced that I saw Purgatory, the realm in which each man takes on his true form. In the land beyond the looking-glass, in the world of reflections, is the life after death, and the life before death. I understand now the closeness of Christianity, which teaches each man that he will have his reward or his punishment in the world beyond, and the Hindu religion, which teaches that a man will be reincarnated according to the life he has led." '

'But the Jabberwock?' asked Martin. 'What does the Jab-berwock have to do with Boofuls, and my mirror?'

'Absolutely everything,' said Father Quinlan. 'The Jabberwock is the mirror image of Satan. Carroll derived the name from Jabbok, a mountain stream of Gilead, one of the main tributaries of the River Jordan. It was in the waters of Jabbok that Satan's image was supposed to have been reflected when he fell from heaven. It may or may not be a coincidence that CarrolPs doctor at the time was called Dr James Crowe, and that the letters c-r-o-w-e make up the remainder of the name Jabberwock.'

Martin put down his glass of wine and dry-washed his face with his hands. 'God, this seems so farfetched.'

'Any more farfetched than holy water flying straight through a mirror and landing only in the reflected room? Any more farfetched than your friend Emilio disappearing into a mirror and refusing to come back? No, Mr Williams, this isn't farfetched at all. What we are seeing here is Satan's plan for his own resurrection, as foretold in the Book of Revelation. Somehow, he possessed the boy Boofuls; and the boy Boofuls regularly held blasphemous Sabbaths at the Hollywood Divine; and he used his money and his influence to gather together the scattered remnants of Satan's physical body.'