Mirror (8 page)

‘Shit,’ he whispered; because his own appearance still unnerved him. But cautiously, he took two or three steps toward the mirror, and then hesitated and listened. The boy’s sobbing continued, although it had become quieter and more miserable now, an endless low-key
oh-oh-oh
, that was even more heartrending than the loud sobs and cries that Martin had heard before.

He reached out and touched the mirror. The glass was cold and flawless and impenetrable. There was no question of it melting into a silver mist like Alice’s mirror in
Through the Looking-Glass
. He pressed his forehead against it. His gray eyes stared expressionlessly back at him from only an inch away.
God
, he thought,
what can I do?
But the boy continued to weep.

Martin moved to the extreme left side of the mirror, in an effort to see into the corridor. He could make out two or three feet of it, but that was all. He went back to the sitting room door and wedged a folded-up copy of
Variety
underneath it to keep it wide open, but when he returned to the mirror he found that he couldn’t see very much more.

Yet it sounded as if the child was crying in his bedroom. Not his real bedroom, but the bedroom in the mirror
.

He shivered. The sitting room felt unnaturally cold. And the strained, high pitiable voice of that crying child was enough to make anyone shiver. He thought,
What the hell am I going to do? How the hell can I stop this sobbing?

He remembered what Mr Capelli had told him about his grandmother, how she smashed every mirror in the house when somebody died, because mirrors took a little piece of your soul every time you looked into them. Maybe if he broke this mirror, the real boy’s soul would be released, and he wouldn’t have to suffer anymore. On the other hand, supposing this mirror was his only contact with the real world, and with anybody who could help him? Supposing he was crying out to be saved? Yet from what, or from whom? And if life in the mirror was that desperate, why hadn’t he cried out before, during all those years when the mirror had been hanging up in Mrs Harper’s cellar?

Or maybe he had, and Mrs Harper had chosen to ignore him.

The weeping went on,
oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!

Martin slapped the flat of his hand against the mirror. ‘Listen!’ he shouted. ‘Can you hear me? Whoever’s in there – can you hear me?’

He waited, but there was no reply. He felt an extraordinary mixture of rage and helplessness, pinned against this mirror, and because he was hyperventilating, he felt that he was floating, too, like a fly pressed against a window, and for one moment he didn’t know whether he was up or down. It was a split-second insight into life without gravity, life without an understanding of glass. A fly can beat against a window until it dies, and never realize that the world outside can easily be reached by flying round a different way.

‘Can you hear me?’ Martin shouted. ‘I’m here! I’m right here! I can help you!’

Then suddenly he thought:
What the hell am I doing? If the boy’s in my bedroom, I can take the mirror down from the wall and drag it into the bedroom and then I can see for myself
.

He went to his desk, opened up two or three drawers, and at last found his ratchet screwdriver. Fumbling, overexcited, he took out the screws that held the mirror to the wall, one by one; and then hefted the mirror as gently as he could manage onto the floor. When he had done so, the mocking carving of Pan or Bacchus was grinning directly into his face: ancient carnality staring with gilded eyeballs at modern fright.

Martin lifted his jacket off the back of his chair, folded it up, and wedged it under the bottom of the frame so that it wouldn’t be damaged when he dragged it across the floor. Then, a little at a time, he pulled it toward the open door, pausing every now and then to wipe his forehead with the back of his arm and to catch his breath.

‘Jesus, why am I doing this?’ he asked himself. But the child’s weeping went on; and that was why.

He dragged the mirror across the room until it faced the open door which led to the hallway. Then he leaned over the glass and peered inside. The real hallway was empty, and so was the hallway in the mirror. Everything was identical. Identical door, identical carpet, identical wallpaper, brightly illuminated by the light that fell across the corridor from Martin’s bedroom.

But the light appeared only in the mirror
. When Martin glanced back toward the real corridor, his bedroom was in darkness, just the way he had left it. He had gone looking for the real boy without switching on his bedside lamp. Quite apart from which, the light that shone out of his mirror-bedroom was bright and clinical, like the lights in a hospital or an institution, while his real bedside lamp was muted by an orangey shade.

The boy’s whimpering suddenly turned to high-pitched, terrified gasps. Martin rested the huge mirror against the corner of his desk and hurried clumsily toward his bedroom.

He hadn’t yet reached the door, however, when the light in the mirror-bedroom was hurriedly switched off, and the child’s gasps died away. Martin stood in the doorway for nearly a minute, straining his eyes, straining his ears, but the manifestation had gone. The apartment was silent, the mirror reflected nothing more than the sitting room door and part of the wall and a 1937 poster for
Sunshine Serenade
.

‘
You’re … Whistlin’ Dixie
…’ whispered the faintest of echoes; and it might have been nothing more than a truck horn blaring, far across the valley, or the early morning wind blowing under the door.

Martin looked around his bedroom, although he knew that he wouldn’t find anything. The spirit of the mirror had gradually evaporated with the false dawn. He went back into the sitting room and looked at it, gilded and baroque and full of its own secrets.

He could take it back to Mrs Harper, he supposed; but she would probably insist that a contract of sale was a contract of sale, and refuse to return his money. He could try to sell it to Ramone Perez at The Reel Thing, but he doubted if Ramone would give him more than a couple of hundred bucks for it. Or he could take it down to the city dump and heave it onto the smoldering piles of trash and forget that he had ever seen it.

But, cautiously laying his hand on it, he began to feel that this mirror and all its mysteries were a burden which he had been chosen by destiny to accept. Not great historical destiny; not the kind of destiny which had steered the lives of Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great or George Washington; but that quirky, accidental, walked-through-door-A-instead-of-door-B destiny that affects the lives of almost all of us. The mirror had been hanging in Mrs Harper’s cellar waiting for him, ever since he was small. He had gone to school, played ball, grown up, started writing teleplays, argued with Morris Nathan, and all the time the mirror had been there, waiting for that phone call, waiting for those last few steps up Mrs Harper’s cracked concrete path.

Grunting with effort, he dragged the mirror back to the wall where it had been hung before, propped it up on his typewriter case, just as he had before, and screwed it back into place. Then he tossed his screwdriver back into his desk drawer and went through to the kitchen. He opened up the refrigerator, took out a carton of deeply chilled orange juice, and drank almost half of it straight from the carton. His palate ached with the cold, and he stood in the middle of the kitchen for a while with his hand clamped over his mouth, his eyes watering.

‘You’re a martyr,’ he told himself. ‘You know that?’

He went back to the bedroom, loosened the sash of his bathrobe, and straightened his futon. Above him, Boofuls smiled up at heaven, with his golden curls and his wide eyes and his white, heart-shaped face.

‘Could be that you’ve scared me just a
little
,’ Martin admitted.

Then he frowned at the poster more closely. He stood on his futon, and raised his hand, and gently touched the paper with his fingertips. Beneath Boofuls’ eyes it was dimpled, as if it had been moistened and then left to dry.

He stared at Boofuls for a very long time. ‘Could be that you’ve scared me a hell of a lot.’

Later that morning he drove over to Morris’ house with the rewritten
A-Team
script. It was roastingly hot, and he walked up Morris’ pathway between the red-flowering bougainvillea, feeling exhausted and irritable. Alison was lying on her inflatable sunbed, slowly rotating on the pool, her nose gleaming with sunscreen like a white beacon. A stereo tape player on the diving board played music from
Cats
.

He found Morris in the white Mexican-tile solarium reclining on a huge white ottoman surrounded by white telephones and stacks of multicolored screenplays. Morris was swathed in white toweling, and he was feeding himself with small green grapes.

‘Good morning, Morris,’ he said, dropping the rewrite onto the floor beside him.

‘Ah, just the man I was looking for,’ Morris replied. ‘Pull up a seat. Pour yourself a glass of Perrier. Do you want a grape?’

Martin noisily dragged over a white-painted cast-iron chair, startling a white crested cockatoo that hung from the solarium ceiling in a white cage that Morris had brought back from Tangiers. The cockatoo screeched while Morris gave Martin one of his long old-fashioned looks and fed his mouth with grapes as if he were loading the chamber of a .38 with bullets.

‘Listen, Martin,’ he said at last, and then paused while the cockatoo let out one more screech. ‘This Boofuls thing, it’s going to do you some damage if you’re not careful. Yesterday evening I was having dinner at the Bel Air Hotel and June Lassiter came over and gave me a
very
difficult time about that dreck you tried to sell her. She said she doesn’t like to deal with writers direct, and more than that she doesn’t like to deal with projects like that. It’s a hoodoo, I told you. You’re going to embarrass everybody. You’ve already embarrassed me. What could I say, that I washed my hands of it? But in any case I apologized on your behalf.’

Martin snapped, ‘You had absolutely no right to do that.’

‘Well, somebody had to.’ Morris smirked, shifting his weight on the ottoman. ‘You drag that idea around to one more major studio, my friend, and you will find that the drawbridge of opportunity has lifted and you are standing like a
shlemiel
on the outside. And let me tell you this: I’m not going to be the
nebach
who throws you a rope to get back across the moat.’

Martin stood up, noisily scraping his chair back and setting off the crested cockatoo into a frenzy of whooping and screaming. ‘You’ve been watching too many old Burt Lancaster movies,’ he retorted. ‘And do you think I’d take hold of the rope even if you threw it to me?’

‘Calm down, will you?’ Morris told him; and then turned around to the cockatoo and bellowed, ‘Stop that
krechsing
, you dumb bird!’

‘Morris,’ said Martin, ‘this sounds crazy, but I think I’ve found him.’

‘Who? What are you talking about? Shut up, bird! You know what Alison calls that bird? Dreyfuss. She thinks it looks like Richard Dreyfuss.’

‘Boofuls,’ Martin told him, his voice unsteady.

‘Whunh?’ Morris frowned. ‘Martin, will you make yourself clear? I have sixty screenplays to go through here, sixty. Look at this one,
Scarlett O’Hara, the Early Years
. What’s the matter with these people? And you’ve turned into some kind of
nar
over Boofuls. All I hear from you is Boofuls, Boofuls, Boofuls. I would wish him dead, if he weren’t already.’

‘Well, that’s it,’ Martin interrupted. ‘I don’t think he is. I mean, not properly.’

Morris picked another grape and ate it very slowly. ‘You don’t think that Boofuls is properly dead?’

Martin nodded.

Morris heaved himself up into a sitting position. ‘Martin, if I thought you could afford it, I’d send you along to Dr Eisenbaum. What is it, the heat? I’m giving you too many
A-Team
rewrites, what?’

Martin took a deep breath. ‘I bought a mirror that used to hang in Boofuls’ house. In fact, it was supposed to be hanging over the fireplace the day that his grandmother killed him.’

‘Go on,’ said Morris, his voice low with apprehension. Whatever Martin was going to say, Morris definitely wasn’t going to like it.

‘Well – I’ve only had it a couple of days – I bought it Wednesday – just after I came out to see you – some woman on Hillside Avenue had it stored in her cellar.’

‘And?’

‘It’s pretty difficult to explain, Morris, but I think he’s in it.’

‘In what?’ Morris frowned.

‘In the mirror,’ Martin explained. ‘I think that, somehow, Boofuls is kind of – well, it‘s real hard to describe it, but he’s kind of
stuck
, you know, stuck inside the mirror. Maybe not him, but his spirit, or part of his spirit. Jesus, Morris, he was crying last night, he was crying for almost a half hour! I heard him!’

Morris thought about this for a long time, his hand poised just in front of his open lips. ‘Boofuls is stuck inside your mirror?’

‘I knew it!’ said Martin. ‘I knew you’d think I was crazy! But it’s true, Morris. I don‘t know how it’s happened and it’s scaring me shitless; but he’s there!’

‘You’ve seen him?’

‘No, I haven’t, but I heard him crying.’

‘How do you know it’s Boofuls if you haven’t seen him? How do you know it wasn’t some kid crying in the next apartment?’