Graham Masterton - Mirror

'That, I think, is the whole idea,' said Martin. 'But Boofuls and that lady friend of his weren't going to stick around and get miserable with the rest of us.'

'They left?'

'A couple of minutes ago.'

'So where do you think they went?'

Martin said, 'I have a very good idea. But first I want to go home. I have a feeling that it's time we went looking for Emilio.'

They were only halfway across the lobby when they heard a high, agonized screaming sound: so high at first that it didn't sound human. They stopped and stared at each other; then they turned back toward the movie-theater doors. There was another scream; and then another; and then a terrifying howl and a noise like wooden buckets being knocked together.

One of the ushers, white-faced, said, 'Is that the sound track, or what?'

But then Martin went up to the swing doors and tried to push them open and there was a heavy collision of bodies on the other side, and more screaming, and he couldn't push them more than an inch or two.

'Man - what the hell's happening?' gasped Ramone.

A cop came running through the lobby, followed by two more. Martin said, 'I can't get the doors open, it seems like there's a whole lot of people pushing against them on the other side.'

The cops pushed with him, but there was a dead weight behind the doors which they couldn't budge. The screaming inside the theater grew louder, and there was more thumping and scrabbling and knocking.

'Upstairs!' shouted one of the cops. 'Jack — you take the side!'

The first cop bounded up the stairs to the theater balcony. Martin and Ramone followed him, panting with fear and effort. The noise inside the building was almost unbearable. It sounded like hell itself. There were no intelligible cries for help: only a muffled, brutish moaning, and endless screaming, and that terrible hollow knocking. The cop reached the doors to the balcony and instinctively drew his gun. Then he kicked the doors open and dodged to one side. Well - for Christ's sake, who knew what mayhem was going on in there. A fire, a riot, a sniper. It could be anything. Already Martin could hear police sirens warbling in the street outside.

There was a second's pause. Then the cop yelled out, 'Freeze! Police!' But it was only fear that had made him shout. The woman who suddenly appeared in the open doorway was no threat to anybody.

Martin whispered, 'Oh, God. He's done it.'

Ramone crossed himself and shook his head, but couldn't speak.

The woman was blond, and might have been pretty when she first arrived at the premiere. But now it was impossible to tell. Her face was smashed as if it had been hit with a hammer. Her hair was stuck up with blood like a cockatoo's crest; one of her eyes was gone. Her white jawbone protruded through the raw flesh of her cheek, a mush of broken bone, and Martin could even see a gold tooth. She had been wearing a green silk evening dress and a white mink stole. The dress had been torn down to her waist at the front, baring her breasts, and the mink stole was nothing more than a bloodstained rope.

She swayed for a moment and made a crunching, bleating noise for somebody to help her; but as she staggered forward, Martin saw that her right arm had been torn off at the elbow, literally torn off, leaving a dangling loop of bloody muscle, and that the woman was bleeding to death right in front of them. She collapsed and slid down the side of the door, leaving a wide smear of blood.

'Ambulance!' the cop shouted out. 'For God's sake, get an ambulance!'

'Ramone,' said Martin tensely; and stepped past the fallen woman while the cop yanked off her bloodstained panty hose so he could improvise a tourniquet. The woman's smashed-up face was pressed close to the carpet. She didn't even murmur. Martin felt bile surge up inside his throat, but he had to swallow it down.

Ramone peered into the darkness of the theater. The screaming and the moaning had subsided a little now; but they could still hear tearing noises, and there was still an occasional drawn-out shriek of agony.

'You don't have to go in there,' Ramone told Martin, serious-faced.

'Yes, I do,' said Martin. 'I started all this. I let Boofuls loose.'

'Man, it wasn't your doing,' Ramone replied. 'There was Satan in that mirror and Satan would have found a way of getting out of there one day, no matter who bought it. If anybody let him out, Emilio did.'

Martin hesitated, and swallowed once more, and then said, 'I still have to go see what's happened.'

The cop shouted, 'Medics! Where the hell are those medics?' and then to Martin, 'You can't go in there, mister. I don't want any more casualties than we got already.'

Martin ignored him and stepped through the half-open doors into the semidarkness of the theater balcony. Followed closely by Ramone, he walked along the back row of seats and then stood looking down at the whole interior of the theater.

The movie had finished, the screen was silvery blank, and the theater was suddenly silent. A battlefield after a battle. Hundreds of people were strewn across the seats, and almost all of them were dead. The smell of flesh and blood and opened-up human bodies was so sweet and hot and pungent that Martin had to press his hand over his nose and mouth.

Gradually, the theater lights brightened, and police and paramedics appeared at the various entrances around the auditorium. They stood, like Martin and Ramone, in silence. There was nothing else they could do. Mann's Chinese Theater had been full to capacity this evening with nearly one thousand five hundred of Hollywood's glitterati, and now they were all torn to pieces.

'I wouldn't have believed it,' Ramone whispered. 'If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it.'

Martin cast his eyes around the theater. A director from 20th Century-Fox Television with whom he had once had lunch at the Fine Affair lay sprawled just in front of him, his mouth wide open, his shirtfront crimson with blood. His head was a mass of blood and bruises. His wife lay beside him, almost naked, her hair torn from her scalp, one of her legs twisted underneath her.

A world-famous cinematographer, who two years ago had won an Oscar for his vivid scenes of death and destruction in Vietnam, stood half propped, armless, like a grisly Venus de Milo, against a tangle of bodies.

In every aisle, bodies in evening dress lay heaped, and blood soaked in dark tides into the carpet. The stench was intolerable — bile and blood and partially digested dinners. And everywhere, in every direction, there were heaps of jewelry, furs, silk, and glistening heaps of soft intestines. A massacre, in black-tie.

'What did they dor Ramone asked hoarsely. 'What happened to them?'

'They clawed themselves to pieces, that's all,' said Martin. His voice in the huge auditorium sounded small and flat. 'They went mad with grief. Mad with despair. Mad with whatever, I don't know. You saw how upset they were, all that crying. They've been trampling on each other, strangling each other, tearing each other's arms off. And all that knocking, they were hitting their heads against the seats and the walls.'

Ramone said, 'I can't take any more of this, man. I never ever seen one dead person before, except for my grandmother. I can't take any more.'

It was then, however, that the movie screen flickered and came to life. A faint faded image of Boofuls, triumphant. Martin turned to face it and stared at it as if Boofuls were speaking to him personally.

And he said this: 'And He was asking him, " What is your name?" And he said to Him, "My name is Legion, for we are many." Now there was a big herd of swine feeding there on the mountainside. And they entreated Him, saying, "Send us into the swine that we may enter them." And coming out, the unclean spirits entered the swine; and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea, about two thousand of them; and they were drowned in the sea.'