The Mirror (38 page)

"Haven't you done enough?" she said to the mirror. "I've learned my lesson." She'd go back and marry Mr. Strock even though she knew he hadn't long to live. "Please don't show me any more."

But how could she return, knowing all she knew? The knowledge would be a curse to haunt her nights and days.
How can I stay here? I'm too weak to withstand the temptations of this world.

Brandy had lain awake for hours the night before, her thoughts full of Marek Weir.

In the Garretts' living room, Marek shifted uncomfortably on the antique settee made for long ago and shorter bodies. "I tried to draw her out last night. She wouldn't talk. Look, I'm not hiding anything from you."

Rachael prowled the room. "Marek, Jerry and I have talked this out and come up with absolutely nothing. We thought you might at least have a fresh viewpoint."

"I have a crazy idea I can't get out of my head and it's as fresh as hell, but I don't think you'll believe it any more than I do."

"Try us." Jerry stared into the scotch he wasn't drinking.

"This'll sound strange coming from a so-called scientist, but . . . Shay seems like another person. I'd almost swear you switched twins on me."

"Where is she now?" Jerry looked over his shoulder toward the archway to the hall.

"Last I knew she was upstairs talking to a mirror."

"That's not so crazy, Rachael. I've talked to mirrors before," Jerry snapped. "So have you."

"Only when practicing to give a talk. And, Marek, that thought wasn't so fresh."

"I haven't finished. You've heard of dual or multiple personalities? More than one inhabiting the same body but who surface alternately? I sense a stranger looking at me from Shay's eyes."

Jerry stared at Marek over his glass. Rachael stopped pacing. They'd felt it too.

"The thing about this theory that doesn't work is, at least from what little I know about it, this occurs in people with a history of instability. For it to happen literally overnight to a normal--"

"She's had chickenpox, strep, colds, flu, a broken arm and her teeth straightened," Rachael said. "Never anything mental except the bitchy fours and the rebellious teens. I read all the books. I'd have noticed."

"There's always possession." Jerry rolled his eyes. "I mean, as long as we're getting fresh. Maybe she's possessed."

"And Gale doesn't get back for a week." Rachael opened a glass-fronted cabinet, took out a blue glass bottle and put it back.

"Let's just keep her calm and call Gale the minute he gets back," Jerry said. "She's always liked him."

"Well, the three of us had better keep an eye on her." Rachael gave Marek a hard look.

He thought it ironic they should include him in a three-way deal. He'd sensed their opposition to his marrying their daughter. They clung to Shay but wouldn't admit it. No man on earth deserved the treasure they'd created.

His ailing mother'd been pleased at having her last son finally settle down. Louise Weir was of the opinion that no man could survive without a wife. His oldest brother now lived with his third wife. The middle brother was on the verge of divorcing his first. But Louise didn't know that. She wanted only to see her youngest safely settled before she died.

Had his mother's wishes anything to do with Marek's sudden proposal to Shay after a brief three-month courtship?

He considered this again that evening when Shay sat beside him in the Porsche. "I want to run out to NCAR for a minute. Then I thought maybe a movie. There're several in town you wanted to see."

"Yes, that will be fine."

Her hand clutching the armrest whitened as he turned a corner, came up as if to ward off a blow as he stopped behind another car. A sharp intake of breath when he stepped on the gas . . .

Marek almost ran a red light watching the odd play of expressions.

Delight. Wonder. Dismay.

Her head swiveled as if she were sightseeing in an exotic vacation spot. Here in the town where she'd lived her entire life.

When she looked at him, he read fascination mixed with distrust and fear. They didn't jibe. To be able to read Shay's face at all was a new experience. Before, she'd cloaked her emotions with sophisticated boredom or the protective deadpan Marek saw everywhere and knew he wore himself.

The display on her face now was almost childlike. But at the same time he sensed a mature woman behind those wide amber eyes. It was just that the woman wasn't Shay Garrett.

Marek was shaken and intrigued by the other woman who was Shay. She regarded him with shocked innocence one moment and something resembling infatuation the next.

None of it made sense but the dual-personality theory was becoming more plausible. He couldn't believe in possession.

"National Center for Atmospheric Research," she read from the sign she'd seen dozens of times, and sounded mystified.

As they left the rows of houses to climb the graceful curves to NCAR he pointed out a deer and her fawn grazing on the green-belt area which the city had closed off to the destruction of developers.

Shay merely glanced at them. He could remember her making him stop for half an hour at such a sight when he'd first known her. But now she looked at the mountains and then back at Boulder as if to get her bearings.

This isn't in your field, Weir, not something you can punch into the number cruncher. Leave it for the shrink.

He pulled into the parking lot on top of the mesa. Shay gaped at the concrete towers.

"You've never seen that building before, have you?" A growing dryness in his throat.

"No." She couldn't seem to drag her eyes from it.

Shay Garrett had driven up here just four days before to collect him for a luncheon date.

Marek walked around to open her door. "You'd better come in with me."

She hung back as he led her to the sidewalk. Her arm trembled when he took it and he glanced up at the futuristic building ... an impression of a series of towers connected by cubes, colored a muted pink to blend with the green of pine and reddish-pink rock of the mountain backdrop. Blue-green tinted windows like square eyes, the tiny balconies between like noses. Impressive yes, but not frightening.

Shay hesitated at the glass doors but he drew her into the lobby. Because of the change in his fiancee, Marek was suddenly aware of the sterile straight lines of the place. The silence broken only by the echoing click of their heels on terrazzo.

"Dr. Weir," the guard greeted him from behind his waist-high enclosure.

Shay stared at the television monitors.

"Evening, Harry." Marek signed the off-hours register and led her to a back elevator.

"Shay, it's not only this place. You don't know me either, do you?" he asked when the door had closed on them.

She grabbed his arm as they descended to the basement, looking at the floor and then the walls. "I think you must be the devil himself."

She flung her arms around his neck when the elevator door opened.

"Then why did you come out with me this evening?"

"Because I'm weak and can't resist the chance to ride in your wonderful automobile." The strange woman inside the familiar body seemed suddenly to realize her position. She blushed and moved away. "And because I have a foolish curiosity to know more than I need to. It's sure to be the death of me."

The exaggerated slowness of her speech, the rather archaic arrangement of her words . . .
and she's even forgotten what it's like to ride in cars and elevators.
Marek considered amnesia and rejected it for insanity. Yet there was a consistency about her that appeared sane.

"This place has no scent," she whispered as they walked down the hall. "All places smell of something."

"What did you expect, the smell of sulfur?" He looked into frightened eyes. "Shay, I don't know what's happened to you but I'm not meaning to scare you. This is just the place where I work. It isn't hell and I'm not the devil."

He checked the monitor outside the computer room to see what stage his program had reached and found it listed in the output status. "Relax, please. There's nothing to be afraid of."

But inside the computer room the normal clicking, clacking, sloshing, rattling of various peripheral machines all at different rates and tones over the constant roar of the cooling system seemed to belie his words. He grabbed his stack of cards and the printout from a shelf in the output bin and got Shay away from the place.

Back in the elevator, he glanced over the printout sheet of the numerical storm model he was building and decided his theories were all awash here too. "I want to drop this off in my office," he said to Shay and then thought aloud, "Either the programmer goofed or. . ."

Marek was so irritated with the errors in his model that he walked into Martin as they stepped into the hall.

"Shay, you remember Martin Black." Marek stopped to pick up the book he'd knocked from Martin's hand.
No, you probably don't.

"How do you do," Shay answered formally.

"Sorry to hear about your grandmother, Shay, and the postponement of your wedding. Don't wait too long, will you? The world'll be a safer place once you get this young swinger out of circulation." Martin laughed, patted her shoulder and disappeared into the elevator.

When Marek unlocked the door at the end of the hall, Shay seemed reluctant to go outside.

"I promise I won't throw you over the parapet."

"This is like a strange castle," she said as they walked the open catwalk to his tower room.

"Well, you've already seen the dungeons so it can't get any worse, can it?"

Marek laid the computer cards and printout on his desk. Shay moved to the window.

It was barely dusk but the automatically timed lights blazed the map of the city streets below.

"So many lights . . ."

"So much for the energy crunch, huh?"

"I hadn't realized the town had grown this vast."

"Yeah . . . uh . . . Shay, let me take another quick look at this."

Sitting at the desk he scanned the printout sheets. He could hear her moving about the room, writing on the blackboard.

Marek looked up once to see her examining titles in one of the bookcases. He went back to his coded numbers, only to be interrupted again.

"You must be the devil." Shay pointed to the photographs of thunderclouds and lightning on one wall. "You made the storm that caused the mirror to . . . no, that's foolish." She covered her face with her hands. A lock of platinum hair escaped the puritanical bun she'd affected.

"If I'm the devil, I could make a storm or a mirror or whatever. But I'm not and I don't make them, I study them . . . storms that is." In his heart, Marek knew hers was a disturbed mind, a case of sudden insanity. But his mind wouldn't buy it.

"Shay, to my older colleagues I'm a cloud dynamicist by day and a swinging single at night. To your parents I'm the monster who's offered to take their daughter away from them." He stood to hold her but she moved away. "To you, I thought I was the man you were going to marry, but suddenly I'm a devil. Right now I don't know who I am."
I'm not a bit sure who you are either.

Then he noticed the ornate chalk scrawl on a lower corner of the blackboard.
I am Brandy.
It wasn't in Shay's handwriting.

"Brandy, who--"

"We buried her this morning," his fiancee said.

Something in her voice sent a superstitious thrill along the higher reaches of his spine.

Marek watched Shay sit silently through the movie, her body stiff, her eyes never leaving the screen.
As if this is her first film.

"What did you think of it?" he asked as they walked back to the car.

"It was a very . . . interesting play. But cold. Such horrid things happening to those poor people." A streetlight glistened on wet cheeks as she looked up at him. "And no sympathy for them ... no hope."

Marek had come to expect nothing but cold technique and brittle feeling in films. He had come to accept and enjoy it. But if this'd been the first he'd seen, would he have said much the same thing?

"This abortion that was done to the young girl," Shay said thoughtfully. "Was it really to kill an unborn child?"

"Yes. But it didn't happen, Shay, in that movie any more than it would in a play. It's just a story to . . . ?" Marek stopped, wondering at the need to make so inane an explanation to an adult.

"But this abortion is practiced in life here . . . now?"

"Yes."

Marek took Shay to her old favorite, McDonald's. They had a running joke about her taste for the fast-food fare and usually went there after a movie.

But tonight the quarter-pound burger was undercooked, the bun soggy, the fries too salty and she asked if there was alcohol in her Coke.

Merek wondered if the wedding would take place at all. The change in Shay seemed so complete. Was it wise for her parents to wait for their friend Gale to return before seeking professional help?