Mirror (50 page)

‘The rope’s just fine. Why don’t you try walking forward a little, let’s see if it pays out from here.’

Martin took two or three steps across the unfamiliar, back-to-front sitting room, and Ramone called out, ‘That’s okay, that’s terrific. The rope is following you into the glass.’

Alison took hold of Martin’s hand. ‘I can’t believe this is happening, this is just too strange for words.’

Martin went across to his desk and picked up a copy of
The headline read
and underneath, the entire text was in reverse. He looked at Alison and saw that she was a mirror image of herself; that her hair was parted on the opposite side, and that her wristwatch had changed from her left wrist to her right. He checked his own watch. The second hand was sweeping around the dial counterclockwise.

‘We don’t have too long, if this thunder and lightning is anything to go by,’ Martin told Alison. It was thundering just as violently in the mirror-world as it was in the real world. ‘Let’s go see if Emilio’s downstairs.’

He turned to Ramone and called, ‘Ten minutes! Give us ten minutes! Then tug on the rope a little, just to remind us!’

‘You got it!’ Ramone shouted back.

Martin crossed the sitting room and opened the door, with Alison following closely behind him. It was odd to open the door the other way round, with the hinges on the right side instead of the left. The corridor that led to the front door of his apartment looked the same, however. Martin even noticed the small rectangular mark in the plaster where he had dug in his screwdriver to kill the cat. Exactly the same, except that it was on the opposite wall.

He glanced into the kitchen. Everything appeared to be identical to the real world, apart from the lettering on the spice jars –
– and the newspaper lying on the table,
‘So far so good, as they say in the adventure stories,’ he told Alison. More thunder shook the evening air; and somewhere they heard the rattle of shingles falling from a roof.

Still trailing the rope, Martin and Alison went to the front door of Martin’s apartment and opened it up. The stairway was gloomy, but it didn’t look any different from the stairway in the real world. Except – Martin lifted his head and sniffed. There was something different about it. There was no smell. No garlic, no herbs, no subtropical mustiness. In fact, no smell at all.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Alison, coming up close behind him and touching his shoulder.

Martin shook his head. ‘Nothing, not yet. But there’s no smell. Normally this place smells like La Barbera’s.’

Alison sniffed, too. ‘I guess it’s because we’re inside the mirror. Have you ever pressed your nose to a mirror? Cold, no smell.’

Cautiously, they made their way down the stairs. Their rope zizzed on the top stair as it paid out behind them; their only connection with the real world. They reached the landing and stood outside the Capellis’ front door. The card next to the bell read
, in sloping handwriting.

‘Okay, I’m going to ring the bell and see if Emilio’s in here,’ said Martin. ‘But there’s one thing you have to know. People in the mirror-world may sometimes look weird. You know, really grotesque. That’s because they take on their real shape – their physical looks and their personalities combined. At least, that’s what Father Quinlan said; and Lewis Carroll, too.’

Alison nodded mutely. Martin pressed the doorbell.

Twelve

RAMONE SAT ON
the sofa, gripping the rope in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. He didn’t feel at all happy, watching the rope disappear a little at a time over the gilded frame of the mirror and into nothing at all. He could see his reflection, holding the rope, and his reflection didn’t look happy, either.

He jiggled his foot and whistled ‘Samba Negra’. Outside the house, the thunder still collided, and spasmodic bursts of dazzling lightning pierced the venetian blinds. He heard more sirens, down toward Hollywood Boulevard. There was a smell of Apocalypse in the air, an end-of-the-world atmosphere, ozone and fear and freshly spilled blood.

Ramone stood up, still holding the rope, and went across to the windowsill to pour himself another glass of red wine. He parted the slats of the venetian blind, and down in the street he saw a woman running, not jogging, but really running, as if all the devils of hell were after her. A flash of lightning illuminated her face and it was grim and white, like one of those Japanese Noh masks.

Disturbed, Ramone closed the slats again and turned back toward the mirror.

To his surprise, Martin was standing in the room, right in front of the mirror, smiling at him.

‘Martin! For Christ’s sake! You trying to give me a heart attack or something?’

Martin said nothing, but approached him slowly, rubbing his hands together, still smiling.

‘What happened?’ asked Ramone. ‘Where’s Alison? Did something go wrong? You took your rope off.’

Martin said, ‘Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine.’

‘Did you find Emilio?’

‘Emilio? Oh, no. No, not yet. But I guess we will, given time.’

Ramone peered at Martin closely. ‘Man, are you all right? You sound really strange.’

Martin smiled. ‘Strange?’

Ramone glanced over his shoulder toward the mirror. ‘Are you sure everything’s okay? What’s Alison doing? Did you leave her in there, or what?’

Martin put his arm around Ramone’s shoulders. ‘The thing is, Ramone, we found out a couple of things while we were inside the mirror. We found out that you can live your life according to a whole lot of different values. You can live it meekly, you know, doing what you’re told all the time, loving your neighbor, paying your taxes; or you can live it to the full.’

Ramone was completely bewildered. ‘Man, I thought you were looking for Emilio.’

‘Well, we were,’ Martin admitted. ‘But – what – he’s only a boy, after all. And what’s one boy, in the great glorious scheme of things?’

Ramone turned his head in an effort to free himself from Martin’s embrace. It was then that he saw Martin’s wristwatch, on his
right
wrist, with a second hand that went around counterclockwise. He jerked around to stare into Martin’s face, and he suddenly understood that Martin’s hair was parted on the opposite side, and that the mole on his right cheek had somehow switched sides.

‘Man, you’re not –’ he choked out.

But then Martin’s eyes flared blue, incandescent blue, and his arm gripped Ramone tightly around the neck, so fiercely that Ramone heard something snap, a bone or a vein or a muscle.

‘Get off me!’ he screamed. ‘Get off me!’

Martin hugged him closer and closer, still grinning, his eyes flaring so brightly that Ramone had to squeeze his own eyes shut.

He struggled blindly; and it was probably just as well that he didn’t see Martin’s mouth stretch wider and wider, and his jaw suddenly gape. Inch by inch, something protruded out of Martin’s mouth. Not his tongue, but the slimy top of another head, pinky gray and wrinkled, which gradually forced its way out from between his teeth, rolling back his lips, compressing his nose and eyes and forehead into a grotesque little caricature of himself, like a Chinese monkey.

The head which emerged from Martin’s mouth was another version of Martin, smaller and less well formed, but its pale eyes burned fiercely blue, and its mouth was filled with sharp savage teeth, dripping with glutinous saliva.

Ramone, fighting, kicking, opened his eyes. He stared for one terrified second, and then he let out a bellow of desperation.

Martin’s second head stretched its mouth open with a sickening gagging noise and bit into Ramone’s face. The lower teeth buried themselves in his open mouth; the upper teeth crunched into his eyebrows. The creature’s jaws had a grip like a steel hunting trap; and when Ramone tried to force his hands into its mouth to prize it loose, its teeth were so sharp that his fingers were cut right down to the bare bone.

In a final convulsive effort to break free, Ramone twisted his body first one way and then the other. He couldn’t see what effect this had – the creature’s gaping mouth completely covered his eyes – but this twisting did nothing but drag the head further and further out of Martin’s mouth, on a long slippery pinkish neck that seemed to disgorge forever.

Ramone dropped to the floor, rolling wildly from side to side, but the snakelike head refused to release its grip. Instead, it began to ripple all the way along the length of its neck as if its muscles were building up strength for one last terrible bite.

Ramone thumped on the wood-block floor, like a wrestler pleading for mercy. One thump – two, three – and then the creature’s neck bulged once, in a hideous muscular spasm, and its teeth crunched through flesh and bone, right into Ramone’s sinus cavities, biting his tongue through at the root, chopping his optic nerves; and then tugging backward, taking the whole of his face with it.