Graham Masterton - Mirror

Martin closed the book. The ball was still there. He stood looking at it for a long time, not moving. Then he went across to his desk and switched off the light, so that the sitting room was completely dark. He paused, and then he switched it back on again. The ball in the mirror hadn't moved.

'Shit,' he said; and for the very first time in his life he felt that something was happening to him which he couldn't control.

He could have gotten Jane back if he had really wanted to - at least, he believed that he could. He could have been wealthier if he had written all the dumb teleplays that Morris had wanted him to write. But he had been able to make his own decisions about things like that. This ball was something else altogether. A ball that existed only as a reflection in a mirror, and not in reality?

'Shit,' he repeated, and switched off the light again and shuffled off to the bedroom. He dropped his red flannel bathrobe and climbed naked onto his futon. He was about to switch off his bedside light when a thought occurred to him. He padded back to the sitting room and closed the door. If there was anything funny about that mirror, he didn't want it coming out and jumping on him in the middle of the night.

Irrational, yes, but he was tired and a little drunk and it was well past midnight.

He dragged the covers well up to his neck, even though he was too hot, and closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.

He was awakened by what sounded like a child laughing. He lifted his head from the pillow and thought, Goddamned Emilia, why do kids always have to wake up at the crack of dawn? But then he heard the laughter again, and it didn't sound as if it were coming from downstairs at all. It sounded as if it were coming from his own sitting room.

He sat up straight, holding his breath, listening. There it was again. A small boy, laughing out loud; but with a curious echo to his voice, as if he were laughing in a large empty room. Martin checked his clock radio. It wasn't the crack of dawn at all: it was only 3:17 in the morning.

He switched on his light, wincing at the brightness of it. He found his bathrobe and tugged it on, inside out, so that he had to hold it together instead of tying it. Then he went to the sitting room door and listened.

He listened for almost a minute. Then he asked himself: What are you afraid of, wimp? It's your own apartment, your own sitting room, and all you can hear is a child.

He licked his lips, and then he opened the sitting room door. Immediately, he reached out for the light switch and turned on the main light. Immediately, he looked toward the mirror.

There was nobody there, no boy laughing. Only himself, frowsy and pale, in his inside-out bathrobe. Only the desk and the typewriter and the bookshelf and the pictures of Boofuls.

He approached the mirror slowly. One thing was different. One thing that he could never prove was different, not even to himself. The blue and white ball had gone.

He looked toward the reflected door, half open, and the peep of the passageway outside. It's very like our own passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond.

How different? thought Martin with a dry mouth. How different? Because if a ball had come bouncing into the reflected room, there must have been somebody there to throw it; and if it had disappeared, then somebody must have walked into that reflected room when he was asleep and picked it up.

'Oh God.' He swallowed. 'Oh, God, don't let it be Boofuls.'

CHAPTER TWO

Henry Polowski, the gatekeeper at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, swore that when Boofuls was driven out of the studio that night in August 1939, he pressed his face to the rear window of his limousine and just for one terrible second he looked like a skull. Bone-white, with hollow eye sockets and naked teeth. Henry had shouted out loud.

'You can laugh all you want, but it was a genuine premonition,' Henry told the reporters who had been crowded all night around the Hollywood police headquarters. 'I saw it, and if you don't believe it, then that's your problem, not mine.'

'Didn't you tell anybody what you saw?' Henry was asked by Lydia Haskins of the Los Angeles Times. 'If you really saw it, and you really believed it to be a genuine premonition, why didn't you make any attempt to warn somebody?'

'What would you have done?' Henry retaliated. 'My partner heard me shout and asked me what was wrong, and I said Boofuls just went by and - I don't know — he was looking funny. So my partner said, what kind of funny? Making faces, that kind of funny? I said no, but I was sure something bad was going to happen to that boy.'

'And that was the only attempt you made to tell anybody what you thought you saw?' Lydia Haskins persisted.

'Lady,' said Henry, 'I didn't think I saw it. I saw it.'

'How does that make you feel now?' called out Jim Keller, from the Hollywood Reporter. 'Does that make you feel guilty in any way, now that Boofuls is dead?'

'How would you feel?' Henry retorted. 'I saw that little boy looking like a skull at 5:27 that evening, and by 6:30 he was hacked into pieces. I loved that little boy. We all did. How the hell would you feel?'

Jim Keller shrugged. 'Pretty damn bad, I guess.'

'Well,' said Henry, 'that's the way I feel. Pretty damn bad.'

Martin pressed his remote control, and the video-recorded newsreel shrank from his television screen. He had watched that recording over and over during his research for Boofuls! For some perverse reason, he had always wanted to believe that Henry Polowski was telling the truth — even though the gatekeeper had been fired two weeks later after the Hollywood Reporter revealed that he was an alcoholic and had twice been hospitalized for DTs.

Martin had the discolored press cutting lying on his desk.' "I Saw Skull" Gatekeeper Saw Giant Roaches, Martians.' Martin had some sympathy for him. Anybody would, if they had seen in their sitting room mirror the reflection of a blue and white ball for which there was no corresponding blue and white ball in the material world.

But the ball had vanished, just as Boofuls had vanished. Not just the boy, but his glory, too. Martin thought it was remarkable that so few people could recall the hysterical adulation that used to be showered on the small golden-haired boy called Boofuls. His limousine was often mobbed to a standstill in the middle of the street. Women were caught almost every night trying to break into his mansion in Bel Air to kidnap him. 'He needs me,' they used to plead as they were dragged away across the lawns. 'He needs a mother!'

It was true, of course, that Boofuls was an orphan. He had been born Walter Lemuel Crossley in Boise, Idaho, in March 1931, the illegitimate son of Mary Louise Crossley, a nineteen-year-old stenog at Ressequie State Insurance on Fort Street, Boise.

Mary Crossley brought Boofuls up alone for two years, apparently relying on welfare and home typing and occasional ex gratia payments from Boofuls' unknown father.

The day before Boofuls' second birthday, however, Mary Crossley took an overdose of aspirin after an argument with one of her boyfriends (not, apparently, Boofuls' father). As far as Martin had been able to make out, it seemed unlikely that she seriously intended to kill herself. She had taken overdoses before. But this time she developed pneumonia after being stomach-pumped, and died four days later. Boofuls was taken into state care for six months, then fostered for a further three months, and eventually sent to live with his recently widowed grandmother, Mrs Alicia Crossley, ninety miles away in Twin Falls.

In February 1935 — for reasons that Martin had never been able to discover — Mrs Alicia Crossley took Boofuls to Los Angeles, California. They lived for a while at the Palms Boarding House in Venice. Mrs Crossley appears to have supported them both by taking a waitressing job and then housecleaning. But in May of the following year — again for no clear reason — Boofuls was taken by his grandmother to audition for Jacob Levitz' new musical, Whistlin' Dixie. Almost miraculously, he was selected out of more than six hundred juvenile hopefuls for the part of Tiny Joe. He had no drama experience, he couldn't tap, his voice was untrained. His only assets were his golden curls and his heart-shaped face and his sweet, endearing lisp.