Mirror (27 page)

‘He wouldn’t go near this mirror? Did he say why not?’

‘Well, he said it was – powerful, dangerous, I don’t know.’

‘And he wouldn’t help?’

Martin shook his head.

‘Maybe I can talk to him,’ said Mr Capelli. ‘Maybe I can persuade him.’

‘I don’t think so, Mr Capelli. Homer Theobald died this afternoon. He had some kind of hemorrhage. I don’t know whether it had anything to do with the mirror, but believe me, it seems like the mirror doesn’t like to be crossed.’

Mr Capelli said, ‘I’m going to call Father Lucas.’

‘All right,’ Martin agreed. ‘I guess anything’s better than sitting on our hands.’

Mr Capelli went downstairs. Martin waited for a while, watching the mirror in the hope that Emilio might reappear; then he went through to the bathroom and took a hot shower. By the time Mr Capelli came back he had sobered up, and coffee was perking in the kitchen.

‘Did you talk to the priest?’ Martin asked him.

‘I talked to his housekeeper. She says he’s at the hospital, somebody’s dying, he has to give them the last rites. He’s going to call me when he returns home.’

Martin poured out coffee. ‘In that case, there isn’t anything else we can do, is there? Just sit tight and hope that Emilio
hasn’t
gone into the mirror; and that the cops find him.’

Mr Capelli went through to the sitting room, and Martin followed him.

‘I never dreamed such a terrible thing could happen,’ said Mr Capelli. He approached the mirror and touched its surface with both hands. ‘I never dreamed.’

He turned around and there were tears streaming down his cheeks. ‘You don’t know what Emilio means to me, Martin. You just don’t know. He’s all I have left, all I have left. And now I can’t find him, I feel like I’ve lost my own soul.’

Martin hugged Mr Capelli close and patted his back to soothe him. ‘Come on, Mr Capelli, everything’s going to work out. We’ll find Emilio, I promise you.’

Mr Capelli looked up. ‘How can you make such a promise?’

‘Because I’m not going to rest until we get him back. I’m going to try everything. Police, priests, mediums, everything. And I’m going to find out all about this mirror, why it’s got this power, what the hell it wants.’

‘Well, you’re a good boy, Martin,’ said Mr Capelli with a sniff. ‘I just wish you never bring this terrible mirror home with you. I could cut off my own hands for helping you to carry it.’

When Mr Capelli had gone back downstairs, Martin went into the kitchen and drank two strong cups of black coffee, one after the other. Then he returned to the sitting room and pushed the sofa around so that it faced the mirror. He was determined he was going to keep a vigil here, in case Emilio reappeared.

He switched out the lights and made himself comfortable on the sofa under an Indian blanket that Jane had bought when she went to Phoenix that time. The only reason she hadn’t taken it with her was that Martin had kept it in the trunk of his car and she hadn’t found it.

He took off his wristwatch and propped it on the arm of the sofa so that he could see it easily. It was a few minutes after midnight. Monday morning already. He yawned, stifled it, and then yawned again. He shouldn’t find it difficult to stay awake all night. After all, his mind was racing and he was up to his ears in caffeine; and if he
did
start feeling at all sleepy, he had a few bennies in the bottom drawer of his desk.

He stared at himself in the mirror. A pale-faced man sitting on a sofa in a moonlit room. It looked rather like one of those surrealistic paintings by Magritte. He remembered seeing one Magritte painting in which a man is looking into a mirror, and all he can see is the back of his own head.

Mirrors, he thought, have always been mysterious. But he was going to unravel the particular mystery of
this
mirror even if it killed him.

He didn’t realize that he was gradually falling asleep; that his head was drooping to one side, that his fingers were slowly opening like the petals of a water lily.

He jerked, and his eyes fluttered open for a moment, but then he dropped even more deeply into sleep than he had been before. His breathing became thick and harsh, the breathing of a man who has drunk too much wine. His wristwatch ticked softly beside him: one o’clock, one-thirty. Outside, the street was deserted, the night was silent.

He dreamed that he was traveling through the night on a bus, mile after mile, hour after hour, and that he was the sole passenger. He knew that the bus was traveling in the wrong direction, and that it would take him days to get back to where he really wanted to go. He tried to stand up, to talk to the driver, but the bus was swaying so much that he kept overbalancing back into his seat.

He shouted out. His voice sounded small and congested, but he was sure the driver could hear him. The driver, however, refused to turn around, refused to answer.

They drove farther and farther into the darkness. ‘Where are we going?’ he kept shouting. ‘Where are we going?’

At last the driver turned around. To Martin’s terror, his face was the gilded face of Pan. He grinned wolfishly and stared at Martin with gilded eyeballs.

‘
Pickle-nearest-the-wind
,’ somebody said, with cold breath close to Martin’s ear.

He whispered and groaned and shifted in his sleep, but he didn’t wake up. His wristwatch showed that it was two o’clock.

In the mirror, the sitting room door opened a little way, although the real sitting room door didn’t move at all. A cold stripe of moonlight fell across the floor, and in that moonlight was a small shadow, the shadow of a boy.

The shadow remained still, unmoving, for almost a minute; but you could have told by the faintest trembling of the door that the boy was holding the handle, and listening, and waiting.

At last the boy came into the reflected room. He was about eight years old, with curly blond hair and a pale face with tiny pinpricked eyes. He was wearing a lemon-yellow shirt and a pair of lemon-yellow shorts, and white ankle socks and sandals.

The moonlight caught his curls so that they gleamed like white flames. His expression was extraordinary: elated, fierce, like a child who has become so overexcited that he begins to hyperventilate.

He stood motionless for a moment; and then he smiled even more widely and began to walk toward the mirror. He didn’t hesitate for a second, but stepped straight through it, so that he was standing in the moonlight in the real room. Behind him, the surface of the mirror warped and rippled for a moment, as if it were a pool of mercury.

The boy approached the man sleeping on the sofa. He watched the man for a very long time. The man’s watch softly chirruped away the minutes. The man snuffled and groaned and said something indistinct. The boy smiled to himself; and then reached out and took hold of the man’s open hand.

Martin, in his sleep, felt the small cold hand slide into his.

‘Emilio?’ he asked. His mouth felt dry, and he opened and closed it two or three times to try to moisten his tongue. His eyes flickered, then opened.

The boy grinned. ‘Hello, Martin.’

Martin opened his eyes wide and stared. The shock of waking up and finding that Boofuls was actually holding his hand was so violent and numbing that he couldn’t do anything at all, he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.

‘Did I frighten you?’ asked Boofuls. His voice was clear and reedy, with the precise enunciation of prewar years. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you. You knew I was coming, didn’t you? You did
know
.’

Martin’s hand shrank out of Boofuls’ grasp. He began to shudder and to draw his legs up on the sofa. For one instant, his mind was right on the very edge of complete madness; right on the brink of giving up any kind of responsibility whatsoever. But the boy was so calm and smiling, so utterly real, that the madness shrank away, like a shadow disappearing under a door, and Martin found himself sitting on his sofa face-to-face with a real boy who had been horribly and publicly killed nearly fifty years ago.

‘I
have
frightened you, haven’t I?’ said Boofuls.

Martin gradually eased his feet back onto the floor. He didn’t take his eyes off Boofuls even for a moment. He was frightened that, if he glanced away, Boofuls would disappear. He was just as frightened that he would still be here.

‘You mustn’t be frightened, really,’ said Boofuls. ‘I’m only a boy, after all.’

‘You’re a
dead
boy,’ Martin whispered.

Boofuls laughed. ‘Do I
look
dead? Do I
feel
dead? Here – take my hand and tell me that I’m dead.’

Martin hesitated, but Boofuls took his hand and pressed it against his chest. Martin could feel the steady beating of his heart; the rising and falling of his lungs.

‘Well, okay, you’re not dead,’ he said. ‘You ought to be dead, but you’re not.’

‘You don’t
want
me to be dead, do you?’ asked Boofuls. ‘Not like
she
did. And she wasn’t the only one, either. Lots of people wanted me dead. But I’m here, I’m me. That’s enough, isn’t it? And you
like
me, don’t you? I know you do!’

‘I like your pictures,’ said Martin, although it seemed like a pretty vapid thing to say, under the circumstances. But then – looking over Boofuls’ shoulder, back toward the mirror – he said, ‘Where’s Emilio? Did Emilio go into the mirror?’

‘Emilio?’ Boofuls replied quite tartly. ‘I don’t know anybody called Emilio.’

‘The boy you were playing with. The little Italian boy.’

‘Oh,
him
,’ said Boofuls. ‘He’s all right.’

‘Is he
in
there?’ Martin demanded, pointing toward the mirror. ‘That’s what I want to know.’

Boofuls said, ‘You mustn’t shout at me, you know. If anybody shouts at me, I have one of my fits.’

‘I know about your fits. I know pretty well everything about you.’ Martin stood up, circling around Boofuls and then approaching the mirror. ‘But you listen to me, I know something about this mirror, too. It has its own particular properties. It tries to suck things in; it
can
suck things in if it’s allowed to. But for everything that goes in, something else has to come out. A ball for a ball, a cat for a cat, and now what?
You’re
here – and the only way you could have gotten out is if somebody similar went into the mirror to take your place. I think that somebody similar was Emilio.’

Boofuls listened to this, and then smirked, and then burst out laughing, a brassy little childish laugh.

‘Did I say something funny?’ Martin asked him savagely. And all the time he was thinking:
What am I doing? I’m actually talking to Boofuls, the real Boofuls, the real genuine murdered boy from all those years ago
. The shadow of madness still quivered behind the door.

‘He
wanted
to play,’ said Boofuls. ‘I didn’t
make
him. He came because he wanted to. I didn’t make him, I promise.’

‘So where is he now, exactly?’

‘I don’t know. He’s probably playing somewhere. There are lots of children to play with. Well, some of them want to play, anyway.’

‘It’s nearly three o’clock in the morning.’

‘Well,’ said Boofuls, ‘it’s
different
in there.’

‘Is he safe?’ Martin demanded. ‘If I were to go into that mirror, too, could I find him and bring him back?’

Boofuls frowned and looked away.

‘I asked you a question,’ Martin shouted at him.

Boofuls’ lower lip stuck out, and his eyes suddenly filled up with tears. ‘I didn’t – I didn’t mean to do anything wrong – I thought – it would be all right. He wanted to play – he said that he
wanted
to play – and it was all right – his grandfather said it was all right.’

Martin hunkered down beside this strange curly-headed boy in his lemon-yellow clothes and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Emilio told you that? Emilio said that he had permission from his grandfather?’

Boofuls nodded tearfully and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.’

Martin held Boofuls close. He felt cold under his thin summer clothing, but apart from that he felt just like any other child. His tears fell on Martin’s shoulder.

At last, Martin sat down on the sofa and took hold of Boofuls’ hands and looked him straight in the face. ‘Walter,’ he said, ‘I have to ask you some serious questions.’

‘You mustn’t call me Walter. Nobody’s allowed to call me Walter.’

‘That’s your name, though, isn’t it?’

‘That was
his
name.’

‘Your father’s name, you mean?’

Boofuls nodded. ‘I’m not allowed to talk about my father.’

‘Do you know who he was? Did you ever meet him?’

‘I’m not allowed to talk about my father.’

‘But, Boofuls, listen, those people who didn’t allow you to talk about your father, they’re all dead now; and they’ve been dead for a very long time. It doesn’t matter anymore. What we have to do now is find out how
you
managed to stay alive in that mirror and how we’re going to get Emilio back and what we’re going to do about you.’