The Dickens Mirror (60 page)

“Shite.” The word fell from his mouth, and then nothing more came for a time.

For a time.

IT WAS NAKED
and in tatters, decayed skin peeling away in greenish strips as he’d always imagined. Its head was bulbous, the long hair dragging in dank tangles like wet seaweed. Its jowls sagged, sloughing from bone. Its man’s breasts already had, exposing a bird’s cage of ribs and the soft and blackened rot of dead muscle and putrid, liquefied fat. When it flexed its gnarled, clawed hands, a scatter of moist, scaled skin flaked off to drop with sodden splats on stone.

Only the eyes were different, and they were black mirrors, smooth as stones, and captured the light so well Doyle saw himself—his pale, horrified face—twice over.

“Arrrtieee.”
When this monstrosity gave his ruined head a rakish cock, there was a wet ripping sound as the skin over his neck and decayed tendon unraveled. There was a series of crackles as vertebrae crumbled, so that when his father smiled, he did so on end, with his left ear flat on that shoulder. “Been waiting on you, oh … a long time, son.”

Yes
. Black Dog chuffed from somewhere behind.
And do you know, poppet, that quote? I believe you’re right. In your beginnings, you
do
find your end
.

THE SCREAM FINALLY
came then.

It didn’t last long.

THIS IS …

“WHAT?” BLINKING, TONY
snaps to. For a moment, his mind is a little muzzy, as if he’s just swum to consciousness from a drugged sleep. But then the world firms, and there’s slick, cool tile under his bare feet and light dew on his cheeks from a steamy shower. Mist veils the bathroom mirror. Behind the fog, a vague silhouette of a boy waits. Water drips from the ceiling because he’s forgotten the exhaust again, and his father’s going to bust his chops about that because the parsonage is so goddamned old and the last thing he needs is to go hat in hand to the deacons and blah, blah, blah. Next to the shower stall, a tongue of wallpaper has come unglued, and that sucks. He’ll have to fix that before school. Superglue, this time: Christ, that stuff never comes off.

Must’ve zoned out
. Michael Jackson’s tinny soprano sputters from his piece-of-crap Sony transistor, and for what must be the ten trillionth time, old Michael’s warning that they’re going to
geeeet
you. Tony clutches his tired Snoopy electric toothbrush in one hand, a half-strangled Crest tube in the other. If Matt were home, he’d have a cow, bitching about Tony not rolling the tube
up from the bottom. Tony guesses the Marines make tight-asses out of everyone. Sometimes he thinks he squeezes the Crest around the middle just to give his brother something to complain about and settle them into their old ways again: Matt busting his balls, then wrestling him into a headlock for a knuckle rub while Tony squirms and yells,
Quit it, you asshole, quit it!

Mainly, though, it’s because every time Matt walks through that door, a huge surge of relief washes through Tony because, thank Christ, his brother’s still alive. Like,
I didn’t imagine you
. Which is so damned crazy.

No way he’ll tell anyone about that either. The doe-eyed social worker’ll probably say he’s not dealing with his mom and all, but she can screw herself. Let cancer eat up your mom from the inside out, lady, and then see how great you feel. (The social worker is his dad’s idea. Says they all need to come to a state of grace, which is weird coming from a pastor. But his dad’s a total basket case. So Tony goes.)

He can’t recall what he’s just been thinking. Probably nothing, but he does that a lot these days. His eyes drop first to the Dickens novel he’s got to write that damned paper for: a ten-pager comparing and contrasting Dickens’s use of doubles in this monster with either
Great Expectations
or that story … 
The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain
? Gag him with a spoon. At least
Haunted Man
is short, the last Christmas book Dickens published, and anyone with half a brain can see that Evil Genius is really Redlaw. Thank God, they’re going on to Sherlock Holmes next.
Hound of the Baskervilles
—now
that’s
a story. That black dog gives him the shivers. He wonders if he can talk the teacher into trying Lovecraft after that. Talk about …

“Spooky,” he whispers, and for no reason he can figure,
a shiver races through his body. His arms go sandpapery with goose bumps. His eyes slide from
Our Mutual Friend
to the
Twisted Tales
he snagged in April. Moist air’s curled the comic’s pages, but whaddaya expect from cheap paper? Hacker’s wondering if maybe they’ve been in this foxhole forever. Like Hacker’s entire life is that one day, lived over and over again. Of course, the kicker’s that Hacker and his men are toys who only think they’re real.

And now, Tony can kind of relate.

Have I been here before?
His eyes roam his bathroom, the fogged mirror. “Of course you have,” he says. “You live here. It’s time for school.”

You’re stressed, that’s all
.

His mom’s cancer, for one. His eyes find Hacker, frozen on the page. He’s obsessed with this story; reads it over and over again. The social worker would say he’s not “metabolizing” his brother’s deployment, like the fact that Matt might wind up with his brains splattered all over the insides of a helo off the coast of Grenada has given him terminal heartburn.

On the other hand, she might have a point. Like his friend Trey’s already seen
The Dead Zone
ten trillion times, but him? Walked out, chest tight and sweat lathered on his neck. Thing that got him? The whole bullshit about dead zone visions, like you could or
should
change the future. If you did, where did it end? Like, okay, save his brother from getting on the one helo that’ll take a nosedive into the ocean, right? But what about the guy who takes his brother’s place? He has a family, too.

See, you can go nuts thinking about stuff like that, which is probably why his science teacher, Steele, says he outta go into theoretical physics, because it’s so loopy. Like there are all these other Tonys in all these other universes and timelines. In at least
one, yeah, his brother dies. Or there’s a Tony with a mom who doesn’t have lung cancer, or who does but gets better, and blah, blah. Thing is, he’s having a hard enough time dealing with the life he already has, thanks. Steele’s a nutjob. Get away from him with that crap.

So he couldn’t watch
The Dead Zone
. Walked out of
Blue Thunder
, too. That Roy Scheider loop-de-loop scared the shit out of him. Pull that crap in a real helo, you’ll drop like a fucking stone, same as Malcolm McDowell. (And you’re supposed to cheer about that?
Yay, the bad guy cracked up. He’s paste. Real Marines crash during training missions all the time. Yay
.)

Trey says they ought to stick to Disney movies, ha-ha. On the other hand,
Something Wicked This Way Comes
was pretty boss, what with old Mr. Dark and his freaky Mirror Maze, which showed you yourself at different times and ages, like those multiverses Steele talks about? And where your image might get trapped in a mirror and then you never get out? Scared the pants off him. He’s already seen the movie five times. Doesn’t know why. But it feels … familiar.

On the radio, Michael Jackson winds down. There’s a pause, a burp of static. A span of dead space in which he hears his mother, muffled but distinct, dying down the hall:
kak-hakak-kak-kak
.

For that split second, Tony thinks—and maybe for the first time ever:
I’m like Hacker. This is the only morning of my life and the only day I’ll ever know, and that stupid song will start over again, you just watch
.

So he snaps off the radio. He can’t remember if he’s ever done that. But what the hell’s he going to do if Michael starts up again? Never leave the goddamned bathroom? Hang out like Schrödinger’s cat and wait for someone outside this box to decide?

“Screw that,” he says. Hiding behind mist, his fuzzy reflection has no opinion. But in the center of his chest, his heart gives a sudden, hard kick. (Has it ever beat before?) He senses that what he does next is important; it just is.

He puts the toothbrush down, but carefully, and squares his mangled tube of Crest alongside. Then, he uses the side of a hand on the mirror. Has he ever done this? He can’t remember. Why is he breathing so fast?

His face, from his light blue eyes to his mop of curly brown hair, appears first. Everything looks … right. Normal. He squeegees the rest of his face into being: squared cheekbones, an aquiline nose, thin lips. Naked from the waist up because of the towel around his middle. It’s him all right. Shower stall in the background, the edge of the toilet. Shit, he better put that seat down, though.

He huffs a relieved sigh. The knot in his stomach unclenches. Fear-sweat has pearled his upper lip, which he now wipes dry. “Well, what the hell did you expect, you nut?” he says. Other than parroting his every move, his reflection has nothing to say for itself.

From beyond the bathroom door, his mother calls, “Honey?”

She’ll give him a kiss that tastes of death. He will brush his teeth again. Cut him a break. He’s not a monster. He loves her. But he’s only a kid.

And look on the bright side: he’s not a toy; he’s not Redlaw, haunted by himself, or a character in a comic book, like Hacker, that poor schmo.

“Coming, Mom.” Picking up his toothbrush, he throttles the tube into letting go of a green worm of Crest. The ooze of it sickens him a little, and for a fleeting moment, he eyes the glistening, sluglike glop and thinks,
Squirmer
. Something that makes
no sense but which also gives him a queasy, frightened feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Stop it, you moron.” The boy in the mirror doesn’t disagree. So he sets to work on his teeth.

Yeah, yeah, his life isn’t perfect. A lot of the time, it’s not even all that great. But it’s better than nothing.

Tomorrow, though … different toothpaste.

If he remembers.

“OH, THAT’S A
fabulous question. There’s actually a reason for that change from the first book to the second, and it’s right out of Ray Bradbury,” the writer says. She’s standing at a lectern in the store’s café. Behind her is a table piled high with stacks of books, and the bookstore’s manager is off to the side, a clutch of Sharpies in one hand. “He wrote this great story all about this guy who goes back in time to hunt dinosaurs, only when he gets back, everything’s changed because he stepped off the path and crushed a butterfly. This was before the whole chaos theory thing got going, the butterfly effect? You know, a butterfly flaps its wings in Kansas, and there’s a tsunami in Japan? Bradbury’s point was that one small change can produce ripples that have profound effects for the whole system. So I did the same thing. I’ve been playing with multiverses and different timelines throughout both books, right? And the nature of reality? Like how do you know you’re really in one, or awake at all?”

“Oh.” It’s a guy in the second row. “I get it. So that’s why the book is by McDermott in the first novel, but you know, the
real
book”—the guy holds up his copy—“has your name on it. It’s kind of this metatextual clue that something
major
has changed in that particular timeline.”

“Or I’m just messing with your head, and you’re going to freak when you get to that part and read what you just said and realize you’re all characters in my novel, and I’m the only real person in the room,” the writer says.

“Or crawled in through a back door for a visit with all your book-people,” a girl chimes in.

“There’s always that,” the writer says.

The first guy frowns. “Yeah, but so you’re saying they were all book-people, or they
were
real, only some of them weren’t, or maybe even some were book-people who kind of wrote themselves into our reality, only they can’t tell the difference and only
think
they’re real?”

“Yes,” the writer says, and everyone laughs.

“See?” An elbow to her right ribs, and then Lily’s leaning closer. “She
totally
speaks your language,” Lily whispers. “Please?”

“No, Lily, I already told you,” Emma mutters. They’re standing way at the back, out of earshot of the crowd. All the chairs were filled, but that was fine. From the number of people, Emma figures the signing line’s going to stretch halfway to the front door. “Great, she knows physics, but so what? It’s really not my kind of book.”

“But I don’t want to talk to her by myself.” Lily heaves a tragic, long-suffering,
if-you-were-half-the-friend-you-say-you-are
sigh. “She probably gets a trillion requests for this kind of crap.”

“Come on, she’s not Stephen King. Have they made any movies of her stuff?”

“No.”

“Well then, see? You’re only a big deal writer if they make a movie.”

“But I’m afraid of sounding
duuumb
.” Lily scrunches up her entire face. “Her stuff is
weird
and there are a lot of characters and it’s
hard
. Like there’s this science and stuff? You have to really
think
. Although you’d love this. One of the main characters, Emma?
Sooo
totally you.”

Which she so
totally
couldn’t take. That report on Jane Austen her freshman year just about killed her. Every time she sees her name in a book, her mind trips. She has to remind herself,
No, you nut, that didn’t happen to you
.

“Wow,
thinking
as you read, keeping track of characters—that’s rough.” Zero sympathy on this one; Lily stepped in this cow patty on her own. Emma flicks an appraising glance at the writer. Fifties, probably; short red hair that has to be a dye job. Tank top, cargo pants, one of those paracord survival bracelets. Steampunky glasses. At least she doesn’t look like anyone’s crazed Aunt Bertha, let out of the attic for a little air.