Mirror

MIRROR

Graham Masterton

Mr Capelli's right. That mirror's driving you bananas. Get rid of it, before something comes shimmering out of it that gets rid of you . . .

He grasped the screwdriver handle tightly and tugged. Nothing happened. The blade was jammed too tight. He placed the flat of his left hand firmly against the plaster, readjusted his grip, and tugged again.

The result was instantaneous. The cat's eyes flared open, and it screamed at him. He screamed, too, just as loudly.

The cat dropped. Martin fell backward, jarring his back against the handle of his bedroom door. As quickly as he could, he bundled the green plastic around the writhing animal and twisted the top of the bag tight.

'Oh God, please make it die,' he'gibbered. 'Oh God, oh God, please make it die.'

MIRROR

Graham Masterton

CHAPTER ONE

Morris Nathan lifted his folded sunglasses up in front of his eyes like a lorgnette and watched in satisfaction as his fourth wife circled idly around the pool on her inflatable sunbed. 'Martin,' he replied, 'you should save your energy. Nobody, but nobody, is going to want to make a picture about Boofuls. Why do you think that nobody's done it already?'

'Maybe nobody thought of it,' Martin suggested. 'Maybe somebody thought of it, but felt that it was too obvious. But it seems like a natural to me. The small golden-haired boy from Idaho state orphanage who became a worldwide star in less than three years.'

'Oh, sure,' Morris agreed. 'And then got himself chopped up into more pieces than a Colonel Sanders Party Bucket.'

Martin put down his drink. 'Well, yes. But everybody knows that, I mean that's part of the basic legend, so I haven't actually shown his death in any kind of graphic detail. You just see him being driven out of the studio that last evening, then fade-out. It's a bit like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You remember the way that ended.'

Morris lowered his sunglasses and squinted at Martin thoughtfully. 'You know something, Martin? I used to deceive myself that I married for intellect, can you believe that? Conversation, wit, perception - that's what I wanted in a woman. Or at least, that's what I kidded myself I wanted in a woman. My first three wives were all college graduates. Well, you remember Sherri, don't you — my third? Who could forget her, I ask? But then one day just after^ Sherri and I were divorced, I was looking through my photo albums, and I realized that each of my wives had one thing in common that wasn't anything to do with intellect.'

He turned and looked fondly out at the twenty-nine-year-old titian-haired woman in the tiny crochet bikini circling around and around on the breeze-ruffled surface of the pool.

'Jugs,' he said, 'that's what I married them for. And I was being a fool to myself for not admitting it. I was like the guy who buys Playboy and tells himself he's buying it for the articles.' He wiped his mouth with his open hand. 'It's infantile, sure. But that's what I like. Jugs.'

Martin shielded his eyes with his hand and peered out at the woman in the pool. 'You made a good choice this time, then?'

'Well, sure. Because Alison has the figure without the brains. If you subtract her I Q_ from her bra size, you get a factor of eleven. And, believe me, next time I meet a woman I take a shine to, that's going to be the only statistic I'll ever want to know.'

Martin paused for a moment before getting back to the subject of Boofuls. He didn't want Morris to think that he wasn't interested in Alison, or how small her mind was, or how enormous her breasts. He picked up his vodka-and-orange-juice, and sipped a little, and then set it down on the white cast-iron table.

'I have the treatment here if you want to read it,' he said, clearing his throat.

Morris slowly shook his head. 'It's poison, Martin. I can't think of a single producer who isn't going to hate the idea. It has the mark of Cain. All the sickness of Fatty Arbuckle and Lupe Velez and Sharon Tate. Forget it. Everybody else has.'

'They still show Whistlin' Dixie on late-night television,' Martin persisted. 'Almost anybody you meet can remember at least two lines of "Heartstrings", even if they don't know who originally sang it.'

Morris was silent for a long time. A pair of California quail fluttered onto the roof of his Tudor-style poolhouse and began to warble and look around for dry-roasted peanuts. Eventually, Morris said, 'You're a good writer, Martin. One day you're going to be a rich writer, that's if you're lucky. But if you try to tout this particular property around Hollywood, you're not going to be any kind of writer at all, because nobody

is going to want to know you. Just do yourself a favor and forget that Boofuls ever existed.'

'Come on, Morris, that's ridiculous. That's like trying to say that Shirley Temple never existed.'

'No, it's not. Shirley Temple wasn't brutally hacked to death by her grandmother, now, was she?'

Martin rolled up his screenplay into a tight tube and smacked it into the palm of his hand. 'I don't know, Morris. It's something I really want to do. It has absolutely everything. Songs, dancing, a sentimental story line.'

Alison had paddled herself to the side of the pool and was climbing out. Morris watched her with benign possessiveness, his sun-reddened hands clasped over his belly like Buddha. 'Isn't she something?' he asked the world.

Martin nodded to Alison and said, 'How're you doing?'

Alison reached out and shook his hand and sprinkled water all over his shirt and his screenplay. 'I'm fine, thanks. But I think my nose is going to peel. What do you think?'

'You should use sunscreen, my petal,' said Morris.

Alison was quite pretty in a vacant sort of way. Snub nose, with freckles. Pale green eyes. Wide, orthodontically immaculate smile. And really enormous breasts, each one as big as her head, barely contained in her crochet bikini top. By quick reckoning Martin worked out that her IQ^was 29, give or take an inch.

'Are you staying for lunch?' Alison asked him. 'We only have fruit and yogurt. You know — my figure and Morry's turn-turn.'

Martin shook his head. 'I only came over to show Morris my new screenplay.'

Alison giggled and leaned forward to kiss Morris on his furrowed scarlet forehead. 'I hope he liked it, he's been so-o-o grouchy today.'

'Well, no,' said Martin, 'as a matter of fact he hated it.'

'Oh, Morry,' Alison pouted.

Morris let out a leaky, exasperated sigh. 'Martin has written a screenplay about Boofuls.'

Alison made a face of childish disgust. 'Boofuls? No wonder Morry hated it. That's so icky. You mean a horror picture?'

'Not a horror picture,' Martin replied, trying to be patient.

'A musical, based on his life. I was going to leave out what happened to him in the end.'

'But how can you do that?' asked Alison innocently. 'I mean, when you say "Boofuls", that's all that anybody ever remembers. You know — what happened to him in the end.'

Morris shrugged at Martin as if that conclusively proved his point. If a girl as dumb as Alison thought that it was icky to write a screenplay about Boofuls, then what was Paramount going to think about it? Or M-G-M, where Boofuls had been shooting his last, unfinished picture on the day he was murdered?

Martin finished his drink and stood up. 'I guess I'd better go. I still have that A-Team rewrite to finish.'

Morris eased himself back on his sunbed, and Alison perched herself on his big hairy thigh.

'Listen,' said Morris, 'I can't stop you trying to sell that idea. But my advice is, don't. It won't do you any good and it'll probably do you a whole lot of harm. If you do try, though, you don't bring my name into it. You understand?'

'Sure, Morris,' said Martin, deliberately keeping his voice flat. 'I understand. Thanks for your valuable time.'

He left the poolside and walked across the freshly watered lawn to the rear gate. His sun-faded bronze Mustang was parked under a eucalyptus just outside. He tossed the screenplay onto the passenger seat, climbed in, and started the engine.

'Morris Nathan, arbiter of taste,' he said out loud as he backed noisily into Mulholland Drive. 'God save us from agents, and all their works.'

On the way back to his apartment on Franklin Avenue he played the sound track from Boofuls' last musical, Sunshine Serenade, on his car stereo, with the volume turned all the way up. He stopped at the traffic signals at the end of Mulholland, and two sun-freckled teenage girls on bicycles stared at him curiously and giggled. The sweeping strings of the M-G-M Studio Orchestra and the piping voice of Boofuls singing 'Sweep up Your Broken Sunbeams' were hardly the kind of in-car entertainment that anybody would have expected from a

thin, bespectacled thirty-four-year-old in a faded checkered shirt and stone-washed jeans.

'Shall we dance?' one of them teased him. He gave her a tight smile and shook his head. He was still sore at Morris for having squashed his Boofuls concept so completely. When he thought of some of the dumb, tasteless ideas that Morris had come up with, Martin couldn't even begin to understand why he had regarded Boofuls as such a hoodoo. They'd made movies about James Dean, for God's sake; and Patricia Neal's stroke; and Helter Skelter; and Teddy Kennedy's bone cancer. I mean, that was taste? What was so off-putting about Boofuls?

He turned off Sunset with a squeal of balding tires. He parked in the street because his landlord, Mr Capelli, always liked to garage his ten-year-old Lincoln every night, in case somebody scratched it, or lime pollen fell on it, or a passing bird had the temerity to spatter it with half-digested seeds. Martin called the Lincoln 'the Mafiamobile', but not to Mr Capelli's face.

Upstairs, in his single-bedroom apartment, his coffee cup and his breakfast plate and last night's supper plate were stacked in the kitchen sink, exactly where he had left them. That was one feature of living alone that he still couldn't quite get used to. Through the open door of the bedroom, he could see the rumpled futon on which he now slept alone, and the large framed poster for Boofuls' first musical Whistlin' Dixie. He walked through to the bare white-painted sitting room, with its single antique sofa upholstered in carpetbag fabric and its gray steel desk overlooking the window. Jane had taken everything else. She and her new boyfriend had simply marched in and carried it all away, while Martin had carried on typing.

The boyfriend had even the nerve to tap the desk and ask Jane, 'You want this, too?'

Without looking up from the tenth draft of his A-Team episode, Martin had said, in his BA Baracas accent, 'Touch this desk and you die, suckah!'

Jane's departure had brought with it immediate relief from their regular shouting contests, and all the tension and discomfort that had characterized their marriage. It had also given Martin the opportunity to work all day and half of the night without being disturbed. That was how he had been able to finish his screenplay for Boofuls! in four days flat. But after three weeks he was beginning to realize that work was very much less than everything. Jane might have been demanding and awkward and self-opinionated, but at least she had been somebody intelligent to talk to, somebody to share things with, somebody to hold on to. What was the point of sitting in front of the television on your own, drinking wine on your own, and laughing out loud at E.R. with nothing but a lunatic echo to keep you company?

Martin dropped his rejected screenplay onto his desk. The top of the desk was bare except for his Olivetti typewriter, a stack of paper, and a black-and-white publicity still of Boofuls in a brass frame. It was signed, 'To Moira, with xxx's from Boofuls'. Martin had found the photograph in The Reel Thing, a movie memorabilia store on Hollywood Boulevard: he had no idea who Moira might have been.

The wall at the side of his desk was covered from floor to ceiling with photographs and cuttings and posters and letters all of Boofuls. Here was Boofuls dancing with Jenny Farr in Sunshine Serenade. Boofuls in a sailor suit. Boofuls in a pretend biplane in a scene from Dancing on the Clouds. An original letter from President Roosevelt, thanking Boofuls for boosting public morale with his song 'March, March, March, America!' Then the yellowed front page from the Los Angeles Times, Saturday, August 19, 1939: 'Boofuls Murdered. Doting Grandma Dismembers Child Star, Hangs Self.

Martin stood for a long time staring at the headlines. Then, petulantly, he tore the newspaper off the wall and rolled it up into a ball. But his anger quickly faded, and he carefully opened the page out again and smoothed it on the desk with the edge of his hand.

He had always been entranced by 19303 Hollywood musicals, ever since he was a small boy, and the idea for Boofuls! had germinated in the back of his mind from the first week he had taken up screenwriting (that wonderful long-gone week when he had sold a Fall Guy script to Glen A Larson). Boofuls! had glimmered in the distance for four years now, a golden mirage, his one great chance of fame and glory. Boofuls!, a musical by Martin Williams. He couldn't write music, of course, but he didn't need to. Boofuls had recorded over forty original songs, most of them written by Glazer and Hanson, all of them scintillating, all of them catchy, and most of them deleted, so they wouldn't be too expensive for any studio to acquire. Boofuls! was a ready-made smash, as far as Martin could see, and nobody had ever done it before.

Morris Nathan was full of shit. He was only jealous because he hadn't thought of it and because Martin had shown his first signs of creative independence. Morris preferred his writers tame. That's why people like Stephen J Cannell and Mort Lachman always came to him for rewrites. Morris' writers would rewrite a teleplay four hundred times if it was required of them, and never complain. Not out loud, anyway. They were the galley slaves of Hollywood.

Although he never worked well when he was drinking, Martin went across to the windowsill and uncorked the two-liter bottle of chardonnay red which he had been keeping to celebrate Morris Nathan's enthusiastic acclaim for the Boofuls! idea. He poured himself a large glassful and drank half of it straight off. Morris Nathan. What a mamzer.

He went across to the portable Sony cassette recorder which was all the hi-fi that Jane had left him, and rewound it to the beginning of 'Whistlin' Dixie'. Those gliding strings began again, that familiar introduction, and then the voice of that long-dead child started to sing.

All those times you ran and hid Never did those things you should have did All those times you shook in your shoes Never had the nerve to face your blues You were - Whistlin' Dixie!

Martin leaned against the side of the window and looked down into the next-door yard. It was mostly swimming pool, surrounded by bright green synthetic-grass carpeting. Maria was there again, on her sunbed, her eyes closed, her nose and her nipples protected from the morning sun by paper

Sno-Cones. Maria worked as a cocktail waitress at the Sunset Hyatt. Her surname was Bocanegra, and she had thighs like Carmen Miranda. Martin had asked her for a date one day, about fifteen seconds before a huge Latin bodybuilder with pockmarked cheeks had appeared around the corner of her apartment building and scooped his arm around her and grinned at Martin and said, 'Cdmo la va, hombre?'

Martin had blurted out a quick 'Hasta luego', and that had been the beginning and end of a beautiful relationship.

He sipped wine and thought about getting back to the A-Team rewrite, but it was pretty hard to get into Murdock's latest outbreak of nuttiness when he was feeling so down about Boofuls! He whispered the words along with the tape. ' You were - Whistlin' Dixie!'

Just then the telephone rang. He let it ring for a while. He guessed it was Morris, more than likely, wanting to know when the rewrite was going to be completed. The way he felt at the moment, January 2010. At last, however, Martin turned away from the window and picked up the receiver.

'Hello? Martin Williams.'

'Hey, Martin!' said an enthusiastic voice. 'I'm real glad I got in touch with you! This is Ramone!'

'Oh, Ramone, hi.' Ramone worked behind the counter at The Reel Thing, selling everything from souvenir programs for the opening night of Gone With the Wind to Ida Lupino's earrings. It was Ramone more than anybody else who had helped him to build up his unique collection of Boofuls souvenirs.

'Listen, Martin, something real interesting came up. A lady came into the store this morning and said she had a whole lot of furniture for sale.'

Martin cleared his throat. 'I could use some furniture, sure. But actually I was thinking of taking a trip out to the Z-Mart furnishing warehouse in Burbank. I can't afford anything antique.'

'No, no, no, you're not getting my drift,' said Ramone. 'This lady bought some of the furniture from Boofuls' old house. There was an auction, you get it, after the kid was killed, and everything was sold. Drapes, tables, knives and forks. They even sold the food out of the refrigerator. Can you imagine what kind of a ghoul would want to eat a murdered kid's ice cream?'

'But what happened? This woman bought some of the furniture?'

'Maybe not her personally, but her husband or her father or somebody. Anyway, she has, what, lemme see, I made a list here — she has two armchairs, a liquor cabinet, a sofa, four barstools, and a mirror.'

'Are you going to sell it for her?'

'No, not my scene, furniture. And — you know — apart from you, nobody's too keen on Boofuls stuff. I told her to advertise in the paper. Maybe some sicko will want it.'

'What are you trying to say? That I'm a sicko, too?'

'Aw, come on, man, I know you're legitimate. You should see some of the guys who come in to look through Carole Landis' underwear, stuff like that.'

Martin said, 'I'd like to see the furniture, sure, but I really don't have too much spare cash right now.'

'Well, that's up to you,' Ramone told him. 'But if you're interested, the lady's name is Mrs Harper, and she lives at 1334 Hillrise. There's no harm in taking a look, is there?'

'All right, I guess not, thanks for thinking of me.'

'No sweat, man. Whenever I hear the name Boofuls, I think of you.'

'I hope that's a compliment.'

'De nada,' said Ramone, and hung up.

Martin finished his wine. He knew what he ought to do: and that was to sit down dutifully at his typewriter and zip another sheet of paper into the platen and carry on writing the A-Team. However much he disagreed with Morris; however chagrined he felt for Morris' reaction to Boofuls! Morris was an industrious agent with matchless contacts, and he made his writers money. If Martin didn't finish this rewrite by tomorrow morning, it was quite conceivable that Morris would never be able to sell him to Stephen J Cannell Productions ever again.

But, damn it, he was so dispirited, and so damn sick of writing slick and silly dialogue. An expedition to Hillrise Avenue to look over some of Boofuls' original furniture might

be just what he needed to lift his spirits. Just to touch it would be something — to touch the actual furniture that little Boofuls had sat on himself. It would make him seem more real, and Morris Nathan more imaginary, and just at the moment Martin couldn't think of a better tonic than that.

Hillrise Avenue was a steeply sloping street up by the Hollywood Reservoir. The houses had been avant-garde in 1952; today they were beginning to show signs of shabbiness and wear. Hillrise was one of those areas that had never quite made it, and was resignedly deteriorating for the eventual benefit of some smart real-estate developer.

Martin parked his Mustang with the rear wheels cramped against the curb and climbed out. From here, there was a wide, distant view of Los Angeles, smoggy today, with the twin tombstones of Century City rising above the haze. He mounted the steep concrete steps to 1334, sending a lizard scurrying into the undergrowth.

The house was square, strawberry pink, with Spanish balconies all the way around. The garden around it was dried up and scraggly. The paths were overgrown with weeds, and most of the yuccas looked sick. The roof over the front porch was heaped with dead, desiccated vines, and there was a strong smell of broken drains.

He rang the doorbell. It was shrill, demanding, and distant, like a woman shrieking in the next street. Martin shuffled his Nike trainers and waited for somebody to answer. 'All those times you shook in your shoes,' he sang softly. ' You were — Whistlin Dixie!'

The front door opened. Out onto the porch came a small sixtyish woman with a huge white bouffant hairstyle and a yellow cotton mini-dress. She wore two sets of false eyelashes, one of them coming wildly adrift at the corner of her eye, and pale tangerine lipstick. She looked as though she hadn't changed her clothes or her makeup since the day Sergeant Pepper had been released.

Martin was so startled that he didn't quite know what to say. The woman stared at him, her left eye wincing, and eventually said, 'Ye-e-es? Are you selling something?'

'I don't see anything,' the woman remarked, peering around the porch. 'No brushes, no encyclopaedias, no Bibles. Do you want to clean my car, is that it?'

'Actually, I came about the furniture,' said Martin. 'You're Mrs Harper, right? Ramone Perez called me from The Reel Thing. He's kind of a friend of mine. He knows that I'm interested in Boofuls.'

Mrs Harper stared at Martin and then sniffed, pinching in one nostril. 'Is tha-a-at right? Well, if you're interested in Boofuls, you seem to be just about the only person in the whole of Hollywood who is. I've taken my furniture to every auction house and movie memorabilia store that I can find, and the story's always the same.'

'Yes?' said Martin, wanting to know what it was — this story that was always the same.

'Well,' pouted Mrs Harper, 'it's macabre, that's what they say. I mean, there's a market in motion picture properties. The very coffin that Bela Lugosi lay in when he first played Count Dracula. The very bolt that went through Boris Karloff's neck. But nobody will touch poor little Boofuls' furniture.'

Martin waited for a moment, but Mrs Harper obviously wasn't going to volunteer anything more. 'I was wondering — maybe I could come in and take a look at it.'

'With a view to purchase?' Mrs Harper asked him sharply; then fluttered her left eye; then squeezed it shut and said, 'Darn these lashes! They're a new brand. I don't know what you're supposed to keep them on with. Krazy Glue, if you ask me. They will . .. curl up. I've seen centipedes behave themselves better, and live ones at that.'

She led Martin into the hallway. The interior of the house was sour-smelling and gloomy, but it had once been decorated in the very latest fab 19608 style. The floor was covered with white shag carpet throughout, matted like the pelt of an aging Yeti. The drapes were patterned in psychedelic striations of orange and lime and purple, and white leather chairs with black legs and gold feet were arranged around the room at diagonal angles. There was even a white stereo autochange record player, which reminded Martin so strongly of the Beatles and the Beach Boys and his high school dances that he felt for one unnerving moment as if he were sixteen years old.

'I'm a widow,' said Mrs Harper, as if she felt a need to explain why the interior of her house was a living museum of twenty-year-old contemporary design. 'Arnold died in 1971, and, well — it all just reminds me.'

Martin nodded, to show that he understood. Mrs Harper said, 'He didn't like the Boofuls furniture, either. I mean he actually hated it. But his father had bought it, just before the war. His father was setting up house, you see, and he went to an auction and bought it — well, because it was so cheap. It was only afterward that somebody told him who it used to belong to. And what's more ... it used to stand in the very room where poor little Boofuls was - you know - done away with. Quite the most awful thing ever. I mean even worse than Charles Manson, because she chopped that dear little child into - well, I don't even like to think about it. And nor does anybody else, more's the pity.'

'Can we - er - look at it?' asked Martin.

'Well, of course. It's down in the cellar. I mean it hasn't seen the light of day since Arnold's father gave it to us. Arnold didn't even want it but his father insisted. Arnold never had the nerve to stand up against his father. Well, not many people did. He was an absolute tyrant.'

Mrs Harper led the way through to the kitchen. She stood up on tiptoe, revealing so much skinny leg that Martin had to look away, and groped around on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard to find the key to the cellar.

'I should sell up, you know, and move to San Diego. My sister lives there. This big old house is such a nuisance.'

She unlocked the cellar and switched on the light. Martin hesitated for a moment and then followed her down the steep wooden steps. The smell of drains was even stronger down here, and it was mingled with a smell of dried-out lumber and cats.

'You watch your step, now,' said Mrs Harper. 'Those last two steps are pretty rotten. We had termites, you know. Arnold thought they were going to eat the whole house right around our ears.'

'They didn't touch the furniture?'

'Don't ask me why,' said Mrs Harper, her pink-fingernailed claw illuminated for a moment as she clutched the stair rail. 'They ate just about everything else. They even ate the handle of Arnold's shovel, I'll always remember that. The whole darned handle. But they never touched the furniture. Not a nibble. Perhaps even termites have respect for the dead.'

'Yes, maybe they do,' said Martin, peering into the gloom of the cellar.

Mrs Harper beckoned him forward. 'It's all over here, behind the boiler.'

Martin caught his sleeve on an old horse collar which was hooked on a nail at the side of the stairs. It took him a moment to disentangle himself, but when he had, Mrs Harper had disappeared into the darkness behind the boiler. 'Mrs Harper?'

There was no reply. Martin groped forward a little farther. The boiler was heavy cast iron, one of those old-fashioned types, and almost looked as if it had a grinning face on it, with mica eyes. 'Mrs Harper?'

He came cautiously around the corner of the boiler and there she was. But the back of his scalp shrank in alarm, because she was suspended three feet above the floor, at a frightening diagonal angle, her white bouffant hair gleaming like the huge chrysalis of some gigantic moth.

'Ah!' Martin shouted; but almost at the same time Mrs Harper turned her head and he realized that he was looking at a reflection of her; and that the real Mrs Harper was standing beside him quite normally.

'I'm sorry,' she said without much sympathy. 'Did I startle you?'

'No, I uh -' Martin gestured toward the mirror that was hanging from the ceiling.

'Well,' Mrs Harper smiled. She rubbed her hands together. 'That was Boofuls' mirror. That was the very mirror that watched him die.'

'Very nice,' said Martin. He was beginning to wonder whether it had been such a good idea coming down here to look at Boofuls' old furniture. Maybe the tedium of retyping his A-Team script had something to recommend it. Maybe some memories are better left alone.

'The chairs and the sofa are back here,' said Mrs Harper. She dragged at the corner of a dustcover and revealed the shadowy outlines of an elegant reproduction sofa and two matching chairs. They were gilded, French chateau style, with pale green watered-satin seats - grubby and damp-stained from so many years in Mrs Harper's cellar. Martin peered at them through the gloom.

'Do you have any more lights down here?' he asked.

'Well, there's a flashlight someplace .. .' Mrs Harper fussed, making it quite obvious that she didn't want to go looking for it.

'Don't worry,' Martin told her. 'I can see them pretty good. Is that the liquor cabinet back there?' He pointed toward a huge rococo piece of bowfront furniture with engraved windows, partially concealed by a sheet.

'That's right; and it still has all the original decanters, with solid-silver labels. Gin, whiskey, brandy. Not that Boofuls ever drank, of course, at his age.'

She thought this was quite amusing and let out a high, whinnying snort.

Martin approached the furniture with a mixture of dread and fascination. He ran his hand along the back of the sofa, and thought, Boofuls actually sat here. The experience was more disturbing than he had expected. News clippings and photographs were one thing — but they were flat and two-dimensional. Boofuls had never actually touched them. But here was his furniture. Here were his chairs. Here was the mirror that must have hung over his fireplace. Real, touchable objects. To Martin, they were as potent as Hitler's shirts, or Judy Garland's ruby slippers, or Jackie Kennedy's pink pillbox hats. They were proof that a legend had once been real; that Boofuls had actually lived.

He said nothing for a long time, his hands on his hips, breathing the musty sawdust atmosphere of Mrs Harper's cellar.

'You said that nobody was interested in buying them,' he remarked to Mrs Harper at last.

'I didn't say that nobody was interested in buying them,' Mrs Harper retaliated. 'I simply said that nobody seemed interested in selling them for me. It's the profit margin, I suppose.'

Martin nodded and looked around him. It was the two chairs he coveted the most — those and the mirror. The mirror would look absolutely stunning on his sitting room wall, instead of all those cuttings and photographs and letters - and it would have a far greater emotional effect. Instead of saying, 'Oh, yes, here's my collection of publicity pictures of Boofuls,' he would be able to announce, 'And this - this is the actual mirror which was hanging in Boofuls' sitting room when he was murdered.'

Shock! Shudder! Envy!

'Erm .. . how much do you want for this stuff?' Martin asked Mrs Harper casually. 'Chairs, mirror, sofa, liquor cabinet, stools. Supposing I took them all off your hands?'

'Well... I wouldn't mind that at all,' said Mrs Harper. She rubbed the back of the gilded sofa and sucked in her false teeth, and her eyelashes fluttered like chloroformed moths.

'How much?' asked Martin, thinking of the $578 sitting in his savings account at Security Pacific. Surely she wouldn't ask more than five hundred bucks for a few worn-out pieces of 19305 furniture. She might even pay him to cart them away.

Mrs Harper thought for a moment, her hand pressed to her forehead. 'I don't know,' she said. 'I've had so many different valuations. Some very high, some very low. But you're a real Boofuls fan, aren't you? A genuine devotee. And, you know, it seems kind of mean to make you pay an extortionate price -especially since you're trying to keep his memory alive.'

Martin shrugged, and shuffled his feet. 'That's really generous of you. But I wouldn't like you to take a loss.'

'Don't you worry about that. As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing is for Boofuls' belongings to have a loving home.'

Martin looked up at the mirror. Now that his eyes were becoming more accustomed to the shadows, he could distinguish the details of the gilded frame. It was quite a large mirror — six feet wide and nearly five feet high — which had obviously hung over a fireplace. The sides of the frame were carved as luxuriant tangles of grapevines. At the top, there was a grinning gilded face which looked like Bacchus or Pan. The glass itself was discolored and measled at one corner, but most of it reflected back Martin's face with a clarity that was almost hallucinatory, as if he were actually looking at himself in the flesh, instead of a reflection. No wonder he had been so alarmed to see Mrs Harper floating in the air.

He reached out to touch the mirror and felt the chilly glass of its surface, untouched by sunlight for nearly twenty years. How does a mirror feel when it has nothing to reflect - nobody to smile at it, nobody to preen their hair in it, no rooms for it to look at, no evanescent pictures for it to paint of passing lives? 'Mirrors are lonely,' Tennyson once wrote.

'Seven thousand,' said Mrs Harper. 'How about that?'

'I beg your pardon?' asked Martin, caught off balance.

'Seven thousand for everything,' Mrs Harper repeated. 'It's the lowest I can go.'

Martin rubbed the back of his neck. Seven thousand was out of the question. Even his car wasn't worth seven thousand. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'That's more than I can afford. I'm not Aaron Spelling, I'm afraid.'

'I couldn't go any lower,' said Mrs Harper. 'It would be worth a whole lot more, even if it hadn't belonged to Boofuls.'

'Well, that's that, I guess,' said Martin in resignation. 'Thank you for letting me look at it, anyway. At least it gives me some idea of how Boofuls' room was furnished. That could be quite a help with my screenplay.'

'How much can you afford?' asked Mrs Harper.

Martin smiled and shook his head. 'Nothing like seven thousand. Nothing like one thousand. Five hundred, and that's tops.'

Mrs Harper looked around. 'I guess I could let you have the barstools for five hundred.'

'You'd be willing to sell pieces separately?'

'Well, I wasn't planning to. But since you're such a devotee.'

'Do you think you could sell me the mirror for five hundred? I really covet the mirror.'

Mrs Harper puckered her lips. 'I'm not at all sure about that. That's very special, that mirror. French, originally — that's what Arnold's father told me.'

'It's very handsome,' Martin agreed. 'I can just imagine it in my apartment.'

'Maybe seven-fifty?' Mrs Harper suggested. 'Could you go to seven-fifty?'

Martin took a deep breath. 'I could pay you five hundred now and the rest of it next month.' That wouldn't leave him very much for living on, he thought to himself, but if he finished his A-Team rewrite tonight and maybe asked Morris to find him a couple of extra scripts to work on — anything, even Stir Crazy or Silver Spoons.

Mrs Harper stood in silence for a long while, and then she said, 'Very well. Five hundred now and two-fifty by the end of next month. But you make sure you pay. I don't want any trouble. I've got lawyers, you know.'

Martin found an old wooden fruit box and dragged it across the cellar floor so that he could stand on it to reach the mirror. The late Arnold Harper had hung it up on two large brass hooks, screwed firmly into the joists of the sitting room floor above them. Martin lifted the mirror gently down, making sure that he didn't knock the gilded frame on the floor. It was desperately heavy, and he was sweating by the time he had managed to ease it down onto the floor. Mrs Harper watched him, making no attempt to assist him, smiling benignly.

'It's a wonderful thing, isn't it?' she said, peering into it and teasing her bouffant hair. 'They sure don't make mirrors like this one anymore.'

Martin found that he didn't have the strength to lift the mirror and carry it up the stairs, so he bundled a dustcover underneath one corner of it and dragged it across the floor. Then, panting, step by step, he pulled it up the wooden staircase until he reached the hallway. It took him almost five minutes to maneuver it through the cellar door into the kitchen. Mrs Harper stood halfway up the stairs watching, still offering no help. Martin almost wished that he hadn't bought the goddamn thing. His arms were trembling from the weight of it. His cheek was smeared with grime and he was out of breath. '

'You can bring your car up to the side of the house if you want to,' said Mrs Harper — and that was the only contribution she made. Martin nodded, leaning against one of the kitchen cupboards.

'You'll take a personal check?' he asked her.

'Oh, sure. Just so long as you're good for it. It's all money isn't it? That's what Arnold used to say.'

After another ten minutes, Martin managed to drag the mirror out of the kitchen door and tilt it into the back seat of his Mustang. Mrs Harper allowed him to borrow the dustcover to protect it, provided he promised that he would bring it straight back. 'I promise,' he told her. 'I'll bring it straight back.'

He drove off slowly down Hillside, and Mrs Harper stood on her steps and waved his check. Glancing at her in his rearview mirror, he thought that for somebody who had just let him have a valuable antique at a knock-down price, she looked a little too pleased with herself. She had probably asked him for double what the mirror was actually worth.

Still, he was now the owner of the actual mirror that had graced Boofuls' fireplace, and maybe that would bring him luck. He hummed 'Flowers From Tuscaloosa' as he slowly drove his huge angular purchase back to Franklin Avenue.

Mr Capelli was home early, and he helped Martin to carry the mirror upstairs. Mr Capelli was small and rotund, with a bald head and spectacles that looked as if they had been ground out of two glass bottle-stoppers. 'I shouldn't even lift a basket of groceries,' he grumbled. 'My doctor's going to kill me alive.'

'Mr Capelli, you don't know how much I appreciate this,' Martin told him. 'This mirror used to belong to Boofuls. True. It used to hang over his fireplace, in his sitting room in Bel Air.'

Mr Capelli examined the mirror with his mouth turned down at the corners. 'This used to belong to Boofuls? This actual mirror?'

'This actual mirror. In fact, when his grandmother chopped him up, this actual mirror was probably reflecting the whole scene.'

Mr Capelli shuddered. 'That's bad, you shouldn't keep something like this.'

'It's a mirror, Mr Capelli, that's all.'

'Well, that's what you say. But in Sicily, you know what my grandmother always used to do? Whenever somebody died, she went around and smashed every mirror in the house, and this was because every time a person looks in a mirror, the mirror takes a little tiny teentsy bit of their soul. So the only way that their whole soul can go to heaven when they die is for somebody to smash all of their mirrors, and let out that little bit that the mirror took away from them when they were alive.'

Martin shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and smiled. 'What's the famous Italian sausage?' he asked.

'Mortadella,' said Mr Capelli.

'No, no, the other one. The big, smooth one.'

'Baloney.'

'That's it!' said Martin. 'And I couldn't agree with you more.'

'Hey! You don't talk to me that way,' snapped Mr Capelli. 'You want me to make you take this mirror back out again?'

'All right, I'm sorry,' said Martin, and laid his hand on Mr Capelli's shoulder. 'It's really going to look great. It's going to make this apartment look twice the size.'

'Hmh,' Mr Capelli retorted. 'Maybe I should charge you twice the rent.'

Just then, Mr Capelli's young grandson, Emilio, came out of Mr Capelli's apartment to see what all the noise was about. He was five years old, with straight black hair and olive skin and huge eyes like a sentimental painting of a sad puppy. As soon as he saw they were carrying a mirror, he made faces at himself in it.

'That's a great improvement,' said Martin as Emilio crossed his eyes and squashed his nose flat with his finger.

'Hey, that's my grandson you're talking about,' Mr Capelli protested. 'He's a good-looking boy.'

'That's because he doesn't take after his grandfather,' Martin said, grinning.

'Treble the rent!' retorted Mr Capelli.

'Watch yourself, Emilio,' Martin warned. 'This mirror's real heavy. You don't want to get squished.'

'I do too want to get squished,' Emilio told him cheekily. 'That can be arranged,' said Martin under his breath.

When Mr Capelli had gone, Martin carefully took down all his Boofuls photographs and cuttings. Then he dragged the mirror noisily up against the wall beside his desk. There were four brass plates at the side of the mirror, two on each side, which had obviously been used to screw the mirror firmly into the chimney breast over Boofuls' fireplace. Martin rooted around in his desk drawer until he found four two-inch screws and half a dozen wall plugs. Jane had taken his electric drill, but the wall was quite soft, and he was able to gouge out four holes in the plaster with his screwdriver.

It took him nearly an hour to fix up the mirror. But when it was screwed firmly into place, he stood back and admired it and didn't regret for one moment that he had spent all of his savings on it, even if Mrs Harper had probably screwed him for two or three hundred dollars more than it was actually worth. With its gilded frame and its brilliant glass, it gave his apartment a whole new dimension, adding light and space and airiness.

He poured himself a glass of wine. Then he sat down at his desk. Portrait of a successful young screenwriter feeding a sheet of paper into his typewriter. Portrait of a successful young screenwriter knocking next season's A-Team into shape.

He worked all afternoon. The sun began to steal away, sliding out of the room inch by inch, lighting the building next door, then shining on nothing but the tallest yuccas in the street outside.

BA: I swear — if this fruitcake don't stop — I'm going to

take him apart. Hannibal: Come on now, BA, we're talking comradeship here.

Shoulder to shoulder.

It was well past seven when Martin switched off his typewriter and sat back in his chair. He knew that he was going to have to rewrite the scene in which Hannibal disguises himself as a monk, but apart from that he was just about finished. He was particularly pleased with the moment when Murdock starts juggling pool balls and B.A. joins in the juggling act in spite of himself. He jotted on his notepad, 'Can Mr. T juggle? If not, can he be taught? Are there any brilliant black jugglers? There must be! But what if there aren't? Can some white juggler black his hands up and stand right behind him while he dummies it?'

He poured himself another glass of wine. Maybe his luck was going to change, after all. Maybe some of Boofuls' success would radiate out of his mirror and bless Martin's work. Martin raised his glass to himself and said, 'Prost!'

It was then, in the mirror, that he saw a child's blue and white ball come bouncing through the open door behind him, and then roll to a stop in the middle of the varnished wood floor.

He stared at it in shock, with that same shrinking-scalp sensation that he had felt this afternoon when he had seen Mrs Harper floating in midair. 'Emilio?' he called. 'Is that you?'

There was no reply. Martin turned around and called, 'Emilio?' again.

He got up out of his chair, intending to pick the ball up, but he was only halfway standing when he realized that it wasn't there anymore.

He frowned, and walked across to the door, and opened it wider. The passageway was empty; the front door was locked. 'Emilio, what the hell are you playing at?'

He looked in the bedroom. Nobody. He even opened up the closet doors. Just dirty shirts and shorts, waiting to be washed, and a squash racket that needed restringing. He checked the bathroom, then the kitchen. Apart from himself, the apartment was deserted.

'Hallucination,' he told himself. 'Maybe I'm falling apart.'

He returned to the sitting room and picked up his glass of wine. He froze with the glass almost touching his lips. In the mirror, the blue and white ball was still there, lying on the floor where it had first bounced.

Martin stared at it and then quickly looked back into the real sitting room. No ball. Yet there it was in the mirror, perfectly clear, as plain as milk.

Martin walked carefully across the room. Watching himself in the mirror, he reached down and tried to pick the ball up, but in the real room there was nothing there, and in the mirror room his hand appeared simply to pass right through the ball, as if it had no substance at all.

He scooped at it two or three times and waved his hand from side to side exactly where the ball should have been. Still nothing. But the really odd part about it was that as he watched his hand intently, it seemed as if it were not the ball that was insubstantial, but his own fingers - as if the ball were real and that reflection of himself in the mirror were a ghost.

He went right up close to the mirror and touched its surface. There was nothing unusual about it. It was simply cold glass. But the ball remained there, whether it was a hallucination or a trick of the light, or whatever. He sat in his chair and watched it and it refused to disappear.

After half an hour, he got up and went to the bathroom to shower. The ball was still there when he returned. He finished the wine, watching it all the time. He was going to have a hangover in the morning, but right now he didn't much care. 'What the hell are you?' he asked the ball. He pressed his cheek against the left side of the mirror and tried to peer into his own reflected hallway, to see if it was somehow different. Looking-Glass House, he thought to himself, and all those unsettling childhood feelings came back to him. If you could walk through the door in the mirror, would the hallway be the same? Was there another different world in there, not just back to front but disturbingly different?

In his bookshelf, he had a dog-eared copy of Alice Through the Looking-Glass which Jane had bought him when they were first dating. He took it out and opened it up and quickly located the half-remembered words.

Alice was looking into the mirror over her sitting room fireplace, wondering about the room she could see on the other side of the glass.

It's just the same as our drawing-room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair - all but the bit just behind the fire-place. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit! I want so much to know whether they've a fire in the winter: you never can tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room, too — but that may only be pretence, just to make it look as if they had afire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way: I know that, because I've held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold one up in the other room. But now we come to the passage. You can see just a little peep of the passage in Looking-Glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond.

Martin closed the book. The ball was still there. He stood looking at it for a long time, not moving. Then he went across to his desk and switched off the light, so that the sitting room was completely dark. He paused, and then he switched it back on again. The ball in the mirror hadn't moved.

'Shit,' he said; and for the very first time in his life he felt that something was happening to him which he couldn't control.

He could have gotten Jane back if he had really wanted to - at least, he believed that he could. He could have been wealthier if he had written all the dumb teleplays that Morris had wanted him to write. But he had been able to make his own decisions about things like that. This ball was something else altogether. A ball that existed only as a reflection in a mirror, and not in reality?

'Shit,' he repeated, and switched off the light again and shuffled off to the bedroom. He dropped his red flannel bathrobe and climbed naked onto his futon. He was about to switch off his bedside light when a thought occurred to him. He padded back to the sitting room and closed the door. If there was anything funny about that mirror, he didn't want it coming out and jumping on him in the middle of the night.

Irrational, yes, but he was tired and a little drunk and it was well past midnight.

He dragged the covers well up to his neck, even though he was too hot, and closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.

He was awakened by what sounded like a child laughing. He lifted his head from the pillow and thought, Goddamned Emilia, why do kids always have to wake up at the crack of dawn? But then he heard the laughter again, and it didn't sound as if it were coming from downstairs at all. It sounded as if it were coming from his own sitting room.

He sat up straight, holding his breath, listening. There it was again. A small boy, laughing out loud; but with a curious echo to his voice, as if he were laughing in a large empty room. Martin checked his clock radio. It wasn't the crack of dawn at all: it was only 3:17 in the morning.

He switched on his light, wincing at the brightness of it. He found his bathrobe and tugged it on, inside out, so that he had to hold it together instead of tying it. Then he went to the sitting room door and listened.

He listened for almost a minute. Then he asked himself: What are you afraid of, wimp? It's your own apartment, your own sitting room, and all you can hear is a child.

He licked his lips, and then he opened the sitting room door. Immediately, he reached out for the light switch and turned on the main light. Immediately, he looked toward the mirror.

There was nobody there, no boy laughing. Only himself, frowsy and pale, in his inside-out bathrobe. Only the desk and the typewriter and the bookshelf and the pictures of Boofuls.

He approached the mirror slowly. One thing was different. One thing that he could never prove was different, not even to himself. The blue and white ball had gone.

He looked toward the reflected door, half open, and the peep of the passageway outside. It's very like our own passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond.

How different? thought Martin with a dry mouth. How different? Because if a ball had come bouncing into the reflected room, there must have been somebody there to throw it; and if it had disappeared, then somebody must have walked into that reflected room when he was asleep and picked it up.

'Oh God.' He swallowed. 'Oh, God, don't let it be Boofuls.'

CHAPTER TWO

Henry Polowski, the gatekeeper at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, swore that when Boofuls was driven out of the studio that night in August 1939, he pressed his face to the rear window of his limousine and just for one terrible second he looked like a skull. Bone-white, with hollow eye sockets and naked teeth. Henry had shouted out loud.

'You can laugh all you want, but it was a genuine premonition,' Henry told the reporters who had been crowded all night around the Hollywood police headquarters. 'I saw it, and if you don't believe it, then that's your problem, not mine.'

'Didn't you tell anybody what you saw?' Henry was asked by Lydia Haskins of the Los Angeles Times. 'If you really saw it, and you really believed it to be a genuine premonition, why didn't you make any attempt to warn somebody?'

'What would you have done?' Henry retaliated. 'My partner heard me shout and asked me what was wrong, and I said Boofuls just went by and - I don't know — he was looking funny. So my partner said, what kind of funny? Making faces, that kind of funny? I said no, but I was sure something bad was going to happen to that boy.'

'And that was the only attempt you made to tell anybody what you thought you saw?' Lydia Haskins persisted.

'Lady,' said Henry, 'I didn't think I saw it. I saw it.'

'How does that make you feel now?' called out Jim Keller, from the Hollywood Reporter. 'Does that make you feel guilty in any way, now that Boofuls is dead?'

'How would you feel?' Henry retorted. 'I saw that little boy looking like a skull at 5:27 that evening, and by 6:30 he was hacked into pieces. I loved that little boy. We all did. How the hell would you feel?'

Jim Keller shrugged. 'Pretty damn bad, I guess.'

'Well,' said Henry, 'that's the way I feel. Pretty damn bad.'

Martin pressed his remote control, and the video-recorded newsreel shrank from his television screen. He had watched that recording over and over during his research for Boofuls! For some perverse reason, he had always wanted to believe that Henry Polowski was telling the truth — even though the gatekeeper had been fired two weeks later after the Hollywood Reporter revealed that he was an alcoholic and had twice been hospitalized for DTs.

Martin had the discolored press cutting lying on his desk.' "I Saw Skull" Gatekeeper Saw Giant Roaches, Martians.' Martin had some sympathy for him. Anybody would, if they had seen in their sitting room mirror the reflection of a blue and white ball for which there was no corresponding blue and white ball in the material world.

But the ball had vanished, just as Boofuls had vanished. Not just the boy, but his glory, too. Martin thought it was remarkable that so few people could recall the hysterical adulation that used to be showered on the small golden-haired boy called Boofuls. His limousine was often mobbed to a standstill in the middle of the street. Women were caught almost every night trying to break into his mansion in Bel Air to kidnap him. 'He needs me,' they used to plead as they were dragged away across the lawns. 'He needs a mother!'

It was true, of course, that Boofuls was an orphan. He had been born Walter Lemuel Crossley in Boise, Idaho, in March 1931, the illegitimate son of Mary Louise Crossley, a nineteen-year-old stenog at Ressequie State Insurance on Fort Street, Boise.

Mary Crossley brought Boofuls up alone for two years, apparently relying on welfare and home typing and occasional ex gratia payments from Boofuls' unknown father.

The day before Boofuls' second birthday, however, Mary Crossley took an overdose of aspirin after an argument with one of her boyfriends (not, apparently, Boofuls' father). As far as Martin had been able to make out, it seemed unlikely that she seriously intended to kill herself. She had taken overdoses before. But this time she developed pneumonia after being stomach-pumped, and died four days later. Boofuls was taken into state care for six months, then fostered for a further three months, and eventually sent to live with his recently widowed grandmother, Mrs Alicia Crossley, ninety miles away in Twin Falls.

In February 1935 — for reasons that Martin had never been able to discover — Mrs Alicia Crossley took Boofuls to Los Angeles, California. They lived for a while at the Palms Boarding House in Venice. Mrs Crossley appears to have supported them both by taking a waitressing job and then housecleaning. But in May of the following year — again for no clear reason — Boofuls was taken by his grandmother to audition for Jacob Levitz' new musical, Whistlin' Dixie. Almost miraculously, he was selected out of more than six hundred juvenile hopefuls for the part of Tiny Joe. He had no drama experience, he couldn't tap, his voice was untrained. His only assets were his golden curls and his heart-shaped face and his sweet, endearing lisp.

Jacob Levitz, however, was thrilled with his discovery. He called him 'the Boy Shirley Temple'. His only stipulation was that the boy would have to change his name. 'Walter Lemuel Crossley' didn't sound like a five-year-old child movie star; it sounded more like a middle-aged insurance agent from Boise.

Metro held a 'Name the Child Star' contest in the newspapers, and the short list of names was sent to Louis B Mayer. Mr Mayer read them, hated them all, and scribbled in the margin, 'B. Awful'. This half-illegible comment was taken by a wholly illiterate secretary to be Mr Mayer's own suggestion for little Walter's new name, and she typed it and sent it to the publicity office. At least, that was the way that Mr Mayer told the story, and Boofuls himself never contradicted him.

Whistlin Dixie, of course, became one of the most successful musicals of all time. Booful's show-stopping song 'Heartstrings' sold more copies that year than 'All My Eggs in One Basket'; and when he accepted his Oscar in 1937 for Captains Courageous, Spencer Tracy joked that he had only beaten Boofuls for the award 'because they thought it was too heavy for him, and he might drop it'.

Boofuls never won an Oscar, although one hit musical followed another - Dancing on the Clouds, Surname Song, Sunshine Serenade, and Flowers From Tuscaloosa. Boofuls appeared on the cover of every major magazine, golden-haired, shining-eyed, from Screenland to McCall's. It was reported in Variety in the spring of 1938 that he was a millionaire six times over. Just before Christmas, 1938, he and his grandmother moved into a huge white mock-Gothic house on Stone Canyon Drive in Bel Air. They engaged sixteen servants, including a butler and a cook; two private tutors; a dance teacher; and a drama coach. They owned seven automobiles, including two white Lincoln limousines, one for each of them. They named the mansion 'Espejo'.

In June 1939, Boofuls was cast for the leading role of Billy Bright in Jacob Levitz' most ambitious musical to date — a nine-million-dollar production called Sweet Chariot. Billy Bright was supposed to be a dead-end kid accidentally shot dead while trying to prevent his father robbing a bank - to become (almost inevitably) a do-gooding angel.

On Friday, August 18, three days after the start of principal photography, Boofuls was driven home in his limousine from M-G-M at 5:27 p.m., according to the log kept by doorman Henry Polowski. He was seen by a group of fans turning into the east gate of Bel Air, and he waved to them and smiled.

His head gardener, Manuel Estovez, saw Boofuls come out onto the loggia at the back of the mansion at approximately 6:12 p.m. He was wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt and white shorts and white ankle socks. He waved to Mr Estovez, and Mr Estovez waved back.

Shortly after 6:21 p.m., the Bel Air police received a garbled telephone call from the Crossley mansion, a woman's voice saying, 'He's dead now. I've got him at last. He's dead.' A police patrol arrived at the house just before 6:35 p.m. and gained entry to the house through the French windows which overlooked the swimming pool. It appeared that - unusually — all of the indoor servants had been given the day or the afternoon off.

Inside the white-carpeted sitting room, they found what was left of Boofuls — 'chopped into spareribs', as one officer put it. Another officer said that he had never seen so much blood in his life. A quick search of the twelve-bedroom house also revealed the body of Mrs Crossley, hanging by a noose from the wrought-iron chandelier in the main stairwell, half strangulated but still alive. She died twenty minutes later without saying anything at all.

The coroner's verdict three weeks later was that Mrs Alicia Crossley had murdered her grandson, Walter Lemuel Cross-ley, while suffering from temporary mental disorder and had then taken her own life. Boofuls was buried with unusual quietness at Forest Lawn. The horror of what had happened kept many people away - the thought that they were burying nothing more than a box of bits. A plain white Carrera marble headstone was erected, with the simple gold inscription 'boofuls, 1931-1939'. You can still see it now.

Over the years, nine books had been written about the Boofuls murder, probably the best of which was Boofuls: The Truth) by Kenneth Mellon. Martin had read them all; and to put it kindly, some of them were more sensational than others. All of them agreed, however, that Mrs Crossley's irrational attack on her celebrated young charge could probably be traced back to earlier bouts of depression that she had suffered when she was younger. She had lost a little boy of her own in 1911, and after she had given birth to Mary, Boofuls' mother, she had been warned by her doctor not to get pregnant again.

Three of the books suggested that Mrs Crossley was taking revenge on Boofuls for her daughter's suicide attempt and subsequent death. Punishing him, as it were, for living a life of wealth and fame when her dear dead daugher had died in poverty, and known none of it.

The author of Hollywood Hack! claimed that she had killed Boofuls to get her revenge on his unknown father, but there was no serious evidence to support this theory, and in any case nobody had ever been able to find out who his unknown father was. Some reporters had pointed their finger at Howard Q. Forbes, the vice-president of Ressequie State Insurance, but Howard Q. Forbes had been balding and bespectacled, with a cardiac history, and even if it was not impossible that he was Boofuls' father, it seemed at least unlikely.

There was an unconfirmed report that Mary Crossley had been seen one night on Kootenal Street in Boise in the passenger seat of a large black Cadillac limousine, but the supposed witness had later admitted that he might have been 'overtired'.

Martin had collected scores of magazine articles, too — even the ridiculous 'true life' dramatizations from Thrilling Detective and Sensational Police Stories. 'The tiny body desperately twisted and turned beneath her as she hacked into his snow-white sailor suit with her blood-spattered cleaver.' Boo-fuls hadn't been wearing a sailor suit, of course; and oddly enough, the murder weapon had never been found.

In spite of Boofuls' gruesome and infamous death, however, Martin had always felt that the child had been possessed of some kind of special magic. Some incandescence that was almost unreal. His friend Gerry at the M-G-M library had videotaped all of Boofuls' musicals for him, and he watched them again and again. Every time he saw that curly-headed little boy dancing and singing, he found it harder to believe that a seven-year-old could have such brightness and energy and wit, such absolute perfection of timing.

Every time he looked at Boofuls' movements, listened to his breathing, watched his choreography - and in particular when he looked at his eyes - he felt as if he were watching a grown man masquerading in a child's body.

'He passed me by as close as this, and I wasn't mistook. I saw it clear like daylight. He was white, white like bone, and his eyes were empty, no eyeballs, just like a skull, and naked teeth.' Martin had played the fifty-year-old newsreel over and over. The same blurting sound track, the same flickering of flashbulbs, the same evasive ducking of the head, as if Henry Polowski had been damned by his inattention to play the same scene over and over and over again. 'And what did you do, Mr Polowski?' 'What would you do? You wouldn't believe your eyes. You can laugh all you want, but it was a genuine premonition. I saw it, and if you don't believe it, then that's your problem, not mine.'

Martin switched off the video recorder with his remote control. It was almost ten o'clock; and in twenty minutes he had an appointment with June Lassiter at 20th Century-Fox. He knew June well enough to wave at her across the crowded bar of the Cock 'n' Bull, and to be assured of a wave back; but he didn't know how sympathetic she was going to be to the idea of a big-budget musical. Especially a big-budget musical about Boofuls.

Still, he thought, gathering up his screenplay and sliding it carefully into his Reel Thing tote bag, nobody ever got anywhere in Hollywood by sitting at home and wishing.

He took one last look at the mirror before he left. It reflected nothing but the sitting room and himself and the morning sunlight. He was beginning to think that he must have hallucinated that ball. Maybe he would go talk to his friend Marion Gidley about it. She was into self-hypnosis and self-induced hallucinations and all that kind of stuff.

As he closed the door of his apartment behind him, he came across Emilio playing on the landing with a Transformer robot. 'How're you doing, Emilio?' he asked him.

Emilio looked up with big Hershey-colored eyes. 'Hi, Martin. Doing good.'

'What's that you've got there?'

'Datson 280 sports car, turns into an evil robot, look.'

With a complicated fury of clicking and elbow twisting, Emilio turned the sports car into a robot with a pin head and spindly legs. Martin hunkered down and inspected it. 'Pretty radical, hunh? I wish my car would turn into a robot.'

'Your car's junk.'

'Who said that?'

'My grandpa, he said your car's junk, and he wishes you wouldn't park it right outside the house, people are gonna think it belongs to him.'

'My car's better than that hearse that he drives.'

'My grandpa's car turns into a robot.'

'Oh, yeah?'

'It does, too, turn into a robot. He told me.'

Martin affectionately scruffed Emilio's hair, which Emilio hated, and got up to leave. He was halfway down the next flight of stairs, however, when he thought of something. 'You

don't happen to own a ball, do you?' he asked Emilio through the banister rails.

'Grandpa gave me a baseball.'

'No, no — I mean one of those bouncing plastic balls, blue and white.'

Emilio wrinkled up his nose and shook his head, as if the idea that he would own a bouncing blue and white ball was utterly contemptible. 'No way, Jose.'

Martin reached through the banister and tried to scruff his hair again, but Emilio ducked away. 'Don't keep doing that!' he protested. 'What do you think I am, some kind of gerbil?'

Martin laughed, and went off to keep his appointment at Fox.

June Lassiter was very calm and together and California-friendly; a woman's woman with frizzed-up black hair and pale, immaculate, hypo-allergenic makeup that had been created without causing any pain to animals. She wore a flowing white suit and a scarf around her neck that had been handprinted on raw silk by Hopi Indians. She took Martin to the Fox commissary and bought him a huge spinach salad and a carafe of domestic Chablis that was almost too cold to drink.

'You're raising ghosts, that's the trouble,' she drawled. Martin had a large mouthful of spinach, and all he could do was look at her thin wrist lying on the table with its faded tan and its huge loose gold bangle, and munch, and nod.

June said, 'Boofuls is one of those code words in Hollywood that immediately make people's brains go blank; you know, like Charles Manson.'

'People have tackled difficult Hollywood topics before. Look at Mommie Dearest.'' I

'Oh, sure,' June agreed. 'But in Mommie Dearest, Joan Craw- j ford eventually redeemed herself, and all the terrible things ' that she was supposed to have done to her children were | rationalized and forgiven. She was a drunken carping bitch j but she was a star, and in Hollywood that excuses everything. How can you do that with Boofuls? The boy was chopped up by his crazed grandmother and that was the end of the story. No redemption, no explanation, just an abrupt and brutal ending — even if you don't depict it on the screen.'

Martin wiped his mouth with his napkin. 'So what's the verdict?'

'Well, Martin, I haven't read your screenplay yet and it may be brilliant. I mean I've heard Morris talking about you and he's very complimentary about your work. But I have to tell you that Boofuls is the kiss of death. The only person who might conceivably touch it is Ken Russell; and you know what kind of a reputation he's got; enfant terrible, even at his age. Even if he'd agree to do it, you'd still have the devil's own job raising the money for it.'

Martin sat back. 'I don't know. It seems like such a natural. The music, the dancing, and if you could find the right kid to play Boofuls ...'

June shook her head. 'My advice to you is to file it and forget it. Maybe one day you'll be wealthy enough and influential enough to develop it yourself.'

They spent the rest of their lunch talking gossip: who was making which picture, and who was making whom. When they were leaving, June stood in the empty parking space marked G. Wilder and said, 'Get your name painted here first, Martin. Then make your musical.'

Martin gave her what he hoped was a laconic wave and walked back to his car, with his screenplay under his arm. As he went, he whistled 'Heartstrings'.

You play . . . such sweet music How can .. . I resist Every song . . .from your heartstrings Makes me feel I've .. .just been kissed

But he drove back along Santa Monica Boulevard with the wind whirring in the pages of the screenplay as it lay on the seat beside him, and he felt like tossing it out of the car. He was beginning to believe that Morris was right, that he was carrying this screenplay around like a sackful of stinking meat.

Hollywood's golden boy of the 1930s had died more than one kind of death.

He returned to his apartment shortly before three o'clock. Emilio was playing in the sunshine on the front steps. Emilio had obviously finished his lunch, because his T-shirt was stained with catsup. The steps were proving an almost insurmountable obstacle to a deadpan plastic Rambo; and the afternoon was thick with the sound of machine-gun fire.

'Full-scale war, hey?' asked Martin. Emilio didn't look up. Martin sat down on the steps and watched him for a while. 'It beats me, you know, how Rambo can gross seventy-five million dollars, with all its shooting and killing and phony philosophy ... and here, here' — slapping his screenplay in the palm of his hand - 'is the most entertaining and enchanting musical ever made, and everybody sniffs at me as if I've trodden in something.'

Emilio continued his war; this time with heavy shelling, which involved extra saliva.

'You should come up and watch some of my Boofuls movies,' Martin told him. 'Then you'd believe, you little Philistine.'

Emilio shaded his eyes with his grubby hand and looked at him. 'Who's Boofuls? Is he a cartoon?'

'Is he a cartoon? My God, doesn't that grandfather of yours teach you anything? Boofuls was a boy, just like you, except that he could sing and dance and make people happy. In other words he didn't sit in the dirt all day with some grotesque reproduction of Sylvester Stallone, pretending to zap Asiatics. Who's Boofuls, for God's sake.'

Emilio picked up a green plastic helicopter and waved it around for a while. 'That boy in your room can dance,' he remarked.

'Well, that's Boofuls,' said Martin. 'The boy in the poster, just above my bed.'

'No,' Emilio contradicted, shaking his head. 'The boy in your other room. The real boy.'

Martin frowned; and then reached out and took hold of Emilio's wrist, so that the helicopter was stopped in midattack. 'What real boy? What are you talking about?'

Emilio pouted and wouldn't answer.

'You went into my room?' Martin asked him. 'Today, when I was out, you went into my room?' ,

Emilio refused to do anything but pout.

'Listen, Emilio, if you went into my room I won't be mad at you. Come on, it's your grandfather's house, you can go where you want.'

Emilio slowly and sulkily twisted his wrist away.

Martin glanced up toward his sitting room window. It was blank, as usual, with the sky reflecting off the glass.

'You won't talk?' he said to Emilio. 'In that case, I'd better go see for myself.'

He got up from the steps and bounded quickly upstairs, three steps at a time, until he reached the landing just outside his front door. There was a small plastic name tag on it saying M. Williams. Underneath, J. Berrywell had been scratched out. Even when they were living together, Jane had insisted on keeping her maiden name.

He hesitated. A real boy. For some irrational reason, he felt a prickle of genuine alarm. There were no boys in his apartment, of course, real or unreal. Emilio had simply invented an imaginary playmate. He was just the age for it, after all, and he had no friends of his own age, not on this block. But all the same, Martin found the idea of it unexpectedly unsettling, as if his apartment had been intruded upon by something he didn't understand.

He opened the front door. He hardly ever locked it, because there was nothing worth stealing, except for his typewriter, and he had been hoping for years that somebody would take that, so that he could buy a new one with the insurance money.

The apartment was silent. The midafternoon sunlight fell across the wood-block floor in a dazzling diagonal. From the bedroom, the pale face of Boofuls watched him as he trod softly along the corridor to the sitting room door.

He paused. He called, 'Hello?' But there was no reply.

What did you expect? he asked himself. A whole chorus of Walt Disney ghosts to come charging out of the closets chorusing 'Fooledyou, Martin!'?

He eased the sitting room door wide open. Then he peered around it. In the mirror, his own face peered back. There was nobody else in the room. No boy; not even a sign of a boy, like an abandoned blue and white ball.

'Kids,' he said under his breath, meaning Emilio in particular.

It took him only a couple of moments to look around the rest of the apartment. There were no boys hiding in the closets among his clothes; there were no boys crouching under the bed. But as he went through to the kitchen to find himself a fresh bottle of wine, he was sure for an instant he could hear somebody giggling.

He hesitated and listened, but there was nothing. He stepped out of the kitchen into the hallway, holding the bottle of wine in his hand, and there was Emilio with his hands in the pockets of his shorts. Martin looked at him without saying anything.

'Can I play with him?' asked Emilio.

'Can you play with whom, Emilio?' Martin replied, deliberately pedantic.

Emilio swung one shoulder toward the sitting room. 'The

boy, of course.'

Martin said, 'Emilio, my little lunatic, there is no boy.'

'There is, too, a boy.'

'Well, that's right, and your grandfather's car turns into a robot.'

'I've seen it! He showed me!'

'All right,' cooed Martin. 'All right, don't lose your cool. Let's just say that I'm one of these real skeptical adults you see on children's television — you know the kind of adult I mean. The kind of adult who can't understand what the hell Flipper is trying to say to him, and takes a swipe at Lassie when she's trying to drag him off to the abandoned mine by the trouser leg.'

Emilio didn't understand a word of what Martin was saying; but it made Martin feel better, and it stopped Emilio's fretting.

'If there really is a boy,' said Martin gently, 'all you have to do is introduce him to me. Let me shake the boy by the hand, and say good afternoon, boy. Then I'll believe you.'

'You can't shake his hand,' Emilio retorted.

'I know I can't, Emilio, because he's imaginary.' He tapped Emilio's forehead with his fingertip quite hard. 'He exists only in there.'

'No,' Emilio protested. 'He's real. But you can't shake his hand because he's in the mirror.'

Martin straightened himself up. Emilio was looking up at him, his grubby little face serious, his eyes wide, his fists clenched.

'Emilio,' he said, 'has it occurred to that one-byte brain of yours that the real boy in the mirror might be you? A reflection of you? Or was your face so filthy that you didn't recognize yourself? Maybe you thought it was Paul Robeson.'

Emilio was getting cross again. 'He's real! He's real! But he's only in the mirror! I'm in the mirror, and he's in the mirror. But I'm in the room, and he's not in the room!'

Martin thought of the blue and white ball, and how it had come bouncing into the mirror. He thought of how he had gone back to look at it again and found that it had vanished. It's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond.

A slow cold feeling crawled down his back, like a snail making its way down a frozen drainpipe.

'This boy . . . did he look anything like you?' he asked Emilio.

Emilio wiped his hand over his face as if he were attempting to erase his own features and come up with some other face: placid, blank, with eyes like Little Orphan Annie.

'He looked like .. .' and he tried to explain, but he couldn't, even with mime. 'He looked like . . .' and then he suddenly rushed through to the bedroom and pointed to the poster of Boofuls pinned to the wall.

'He looked like that?' Martin asked him, with a deeper feeling of dread.

'He's a real boy,' Emilio repeated. 'He's a real boy!'

Martin laid his hands on Emilio's shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. 'Emilio, he was a real boy, but he's been dead for nearly fifty years.'

Emilio frowned.

'I don't know what you saw in that mirror,' Martin told him, 'but it wasn't a real boy. It was just your imagination. Do you understand what I mean? It was just like ... I don't know, your mind was playing a trick on you.' 'I saw him,' Emilio whispered. 'I talked to him.' Martin couldn't think what else to say. He stood up and rubbed his hands on the legs of his pants, the way pitchers do. 'I don't know, Emilio, man. It sounds pretty screwy to me.'

At that moment there was a cautious knock at the apartment door, and Emilio's grandmother came in. She was carrying a glass oven dish with a checkered cloth draped over the top of it.

Martin had always liked Mrs Capelli. She was the grandmother that everybody should have had: cheerful, philosophical, always baking. She had white hair braided into elaborate plaits and a face as plain and honest as a breadboard. She wore black; she always wore black. She was mourning for her dead sister. Before that, she had been mourning for her dead brother. When she and Mr Capelli went out shopping in their long black Lincoln together, they looked as if they were going to a funeral.

'I brought you lasagne,' she said.

Martin accepted the dish with a nod of his head. 'I'm trying to diet. But thanks.'

'Well, you can share it with the boy.' Mrs Capelli glanced around the apartment as if she expected to see someone else.

'The boy?' asked Martin.

'Emilio told me you had a boy staying here. He was playing with him all morning. He's your nephew you spoke to me about?'

Martin exchanged an uncomfortable look with Emilio. If he said that there was no boy, then Emilio would get a hard time for lying. On the other hand —

But, no. He needed Emilio's confidence right now. If there was something odd in the mirror, if there was some kind of manifestation, then so far young Emilio was the only person who had seen it. Emilio might be the only contact with it, like a medium. After all, he was a boy and Boofuls had been a boy.

Maybe there was some kind of left-over vibe in the mirror that Emilio was tuning in to. Or something.

He lifted up the cloth that covered the lasagne and inhaled the aroma of fresh tomatoes and thyme and fresh-grated Parmesan cheese. 'Petey will probably eat all of this on his own,' he remarked as casually as he could. 'Petey's a real pasta maven.'

He saw Emilio's eyes widen; as if the Hershey chocolate of his irises had melted into larger pools. But he winked at Emilio behind the upraised cloth, and he could see that Emilio understood.

'He's here now?' asked Mrs Capelli, beaming. 'I love boys! Always rough-and-tumble.'

'Well, he - er — he's running an errand for me - down at the supermarket.'

'You send a little boy all on his own to the supermarket? Ralph's, you mean?'

'Oh, no, no, just to Hughes, on the corner.'

'Still,' said Mrs Capelli disapprovingly. 'That's a bad road to cross, Highland Avenue.'

'Oh, he's okay, he walks to school in New York City, crosses Fifty-seventh Street every morning, hasn't been squished yet.'

Mrs Capelli's forehead furrowed. 'I thought you said he lived in Indianapolis.'

'Sure, yes, Indianapolis! But that was a couple of years ago. Now he lives in New York.'

Slowly, Mrs Capelli turned to leave, her eyes still restlessly looking around the apartment as if she expected 'Petey' to come popping out from behind a chair. Martin knew that she kept a constant watch on the landing from her chair in the parlor downstairs, and since she hadn't seen Petey go out, she was obviously suspicious that Martin was keeping him hidden. Maybe he had measles, this Petey, and Martin didn't want her to know, because Emilio may catch them.

'You do me a favor,' she said at last as she went out through the door. 'You bring your Petey down to see me when he gets back. I give him chocolate cake.'

'Sure thing, Mrs Capelli,' Martin told her, and opened the door for her. She eased herself down the stairs, one stair at a time, holding on to the banister. When she reached the door of her apartment, Martin gave her a little finger-wave, and said, 'Don't you worry, I'll bring him down. He'll feed your canary for you. If there's anything he likes better than pasta, it's chocolate cake.'

Mrs Capelli paused, and then nodded, and then disappeared into her apartment, leaving the door slightly ajar.

Martin came back to Emilio and stood in front of him with his arms folded.

'You believe me,' said Emilio. 'You believe there's a boy.' 'Did I say that?' 'But you said "Petey".'

'Emilio, there is no boy. I said that just to get you out of trouble. What do you think your grandmother would have said if I had totally denied it? She would have thought you were some kind of juvenile fruitcake. She would have had you locked up, or worse.'

Emilio looked bewildered. 'There is a boy,' he insisted. 'Come and see him.'

'All right,' said Martin, 'let's take a look at him; even if we can't shake him by the hand.'

Emilio ran into the sitting room and stood right in front of the mirror, impatient to prove that he was right. Martin followed him more slowly, checking the details of the real room against the reflected room. Two realities, side by side, but which one was real?

He checked everything carefully, but there were no obvious discrepancies. The screenplay of Eoofuh! lay on his desk at corresponding angles in each room; one of his shoes lay tilted over, under the chair. The Venetian blinds shivered in the sunlight.

Emilio pressed the palms of his hands against the glass. 'Boy!' he called loudly. 'Boy, are you there? Come out and play, boy! Come say hello to Martin!'

Martin, in spite of himself, found his attention fixed on the doorway in the mirror. It didn't move; not even a fraction; and no boy appeared.

'Boy!' Emilio demanded. 'Come out and play!' They watched and waited. Nothing happened. No blue and white ball, no laughter, no boy. Martin was seriously beginning to believe that this was all a hallucination.

'Maybe he doesn't feel like playing anymore,' Martin suggested.

'He does, too!' Emilio protested. 'He said he always wants to play. The trouble is, they make him work, even when he's tired, and they always make him wear clothes he doesn't like, and he has to sing when he doesn't want to and dance when he doesn't want to.'

'Did he tell you what his name was?' asked Martin.

Emilio said nothing.

'Emilio, listen to me, this is important, did he tell you what his name was? He didn't call himself Boofuls, did he? Or Walter maybe? Or just Walt?'

Emilio shook his head.

'Well, what did he do? Did he play ball? Did he dance? Did he sing?'

Emilio stared at Martin but remained silent.

'Listen,' said Martin, turning back toward the mirror, 'maybe he doesn't want to play right now. Maybe it's — I don't know, bathtime or something. Even boys who live in mirrors have to take baths, right? Why don't you come back tomorrow and we'll try again?'

Emilio banged both hands on the mirror. 'Boy!' he shouted, his voice more high-pitched and panicky. 'Boy! Come out and play!'

Martin hunkered down beside him. 'I really don't think he wants to come out, Emilio. Come back tomorrow morning, okay, and we'll call him again.'

Emilio suddenly turned on him. His voice was a sharp little bark. 'You don't want me to see him, do you? You don't want me to play with him! You think he belongs to you! It's not your mirror! It's not your mirror! It's his mirror! He lives in it! And you can't tell him what to do, so there!'

Martin had never heard Emilio screaming like this before, and he was mildly shocked. He took hold of Emilio's shoulder and said, 'Listen .. . this may be a story that you've made up

to impress me, and on the other hand it may not. But either way, I'm on your side. If there is a boy in that mirror, I want to find him.'

'And let him out?' asked Emilio.

Martin made a face. 'I don't know. Maybe there just isn't any way of getting him out.'

'There's a way,' Emilio told him quite firmly. 'Well, how do you know?' 'Because the boy told me, there's a way.' 'All right, as long as it doesn't involve breaking the mirror — I just paid seven hundred fifty dollars for that thing.'

'We won't break the mirror,' Emilio assured him with unsettling maturity.

Martin leaned back against the peach-painted landing wall and looked down at this self-confident little child with his chocolate-brown eyes and his tousled hair and the catsup stains on his T-shirt, and he didn't know whether to feel amused or frightened.

After all, the likelihood was that this was the biggest leg-pull ever. Either that, or Emilio was simply making it all up. After all, there were pictures of Boofuls all over Martin's apartment. If he was going to pretend that he had played with an imaginary boy there, what could be more natural than pretending he looked like him?

He closed the apartment door and walked back into his bedroom. The soulful eyes of little Boofuls stared at him from the Whistlin' Dixie poster. He reached up and touched with his fingertips the golden curls, the pale, heart-shaped face.

'You don't scare me, little boy,' he said out loud. 'You don't scare me at all.'

But he gave the poster a quick backward look as he left the room, and went back to work on the A-Team.

He awoke abruptly at three o'clock in the morning, his eyes wide, his ears singing with alertness. He hesitated for a moment, then he sat up in his futon so that he could hear better. He was quite sure that he could hear somebody crying, a child.

The sound was muffled by the raiding of the yuccas in the street outside, and by the steady warbling of the wind through the crack at the side of his bedroom window. But it was a child, all right, a boy, keening and crying as if his heart were going to break.

Shivering with apprehension, and with the chill of the night, Martin reached across the floor and dragged his red flannel bathrobe toward him. He wrapped himself up in it and tied the belt tight, and then he climbed out of his futon and tiptoed across the bedroom and opened the door.

The sobbing kept on, high and despairing and strangely echoing. There was no doubt about where it was coming from, though. The sitting room door was half open, and the moonlight was shining hard and detailed on the wood-block floor, and that was where the crying was coming from. The real boy, thought Martin. Oh, Jesus, it's the real boy. But the real boy, whoever he was — whatever he was — would have to be confronted. Come on, Martin, he's only a kid, right? And if he turns out to be Boofuls, then he's not only a kid but a ghost, too. I mean — how can you possibly be frightened by the prospect of coming face-to-face with a ghost kid?

He reached out his hand as stiffly as if it were attached to the end of an artificial arm, and pushed the sitting room door open wide. The door gave a low groan as it strained on its hinges. The boy's crying went on, a hair-raising oh-oh-oh-oh-oh that aroused in Martin both urgency and terror. Urgency to save the child from whatever it was that was causing him to cry so pitifully. Terror that it might be something so unexpected and so dreadful that he wouldn't be able to do anything at all but freeze.

Shortly after Jane had left him, Martin had dreamed again and again of being rooted to the spot, unable to move while people laughed at him, while bristle-haired monkeys ran away with his furniture, while Jane was gruesomely raped in front of him by grinning clowns.

The greatest fear of all was the fear of walking into this sitting room and finding that he couldn't do anything but stand paralyzed and helpless.

He took a steadying breath, then another, and adrenaline surged around his veins like nighttime traffic on the interstate.

Then he took three decisive steps into the room, and immediately ducked and turned to face the mirror, with a heavy off-balance interpretation of the football block that his high school coach had always been trying to teach him, duck, Williams, weave, for Christ's sake, you're a quarterback, not a fucking cheerleader, and he couldn't help shouting out ah! because he came face-to-face in the mirror with his own terrified wildness - white cheeks, staring eyes, sticking-up hair, and his bright red bathrobe wrapped around him like bloodstained bandages.

He paused for a moment while his heaving chest subsided and his pulse gradually slowed, and he caught his breath.

'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 Batchus 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's house with the rewritten A-Team script. It was roastingly hot, and he walked up Morris's 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?'

'Because there are no kids in the next apartment, and because I've watched every single movie that Boofuls ever made, over and over and over. If I don't know Boofuls' voice when I hear it, then nobody does!'

Morris pressed his grape into his mouth, burst it between his bright gold teeth, and flapped his chubby little hand at Martin dismissively, almost effeminately. 'Martin, you're letting this whole thing get to you, that's all. It's got to your brain! It happens, I've seen it happen before. Some writer called Jack Posnik wanted to make an epic war picture about the Philippine War, that's another one of those hoodoo subjects. He ended up wearing an army uniform and calling himself Lieutenant Roosevelt.'

'Morris,' said Martin, 'I went back to my room and my poster was wet. My poster of Boofuls had tear stains on it. I swear it!'

Morris looked at him narrowly. 'Are you a Catholic?' he asked him, and his tone was unusually fierce. 'You know, I've heard of weeping madonnas, stuff like that —'

'Morris, listen to me, for God's sake. Think what kind of a story we've got here! Think what kind of a picture this could make!'

At that moment, Alison came padding into the room on wet bare feet. Today she was wearing a bright yellow bikini that scarcely covered her at all. She was a darker shade of brown than she had been before, apart from that white blob of sunscreen on her nose.

'Martin!' she exclaimed. 'I thought it was you!'

'Well, I think I was just leaving,' said Martin.

'I guess you were,' Morris told him. 'But listen - please — for your own sake and for mine, too, let this Boofuls business rest for a while. I'll tell you what I'll do. Next week, you and I will fly down to San Diego together, and we'll spend a lazy weekend on my boat, yes? Fishing and eating and drinking wine, and we'll talk this whole thing through, unh? See if we can't come up with something a little more acceptable, yes? Something with a little more taste? And, you know, something you can sell, already, without raising everybody's hackles.'

Martin looked at Alison, and Alison laid her hand possessively on Morris' shoulder and gave Martin an encouraging smile. Nice girl, he thought, not so much of a tsatskeh as he had first thought. She deserved better than Morris and his chauvinistic garbage about jugs.

'My mother used to adore Boofuls,' she said by way of being conciliatory.

'Sure,' said Martin. Then, to Morris, 'Enjoy the rewrite. I may be a shlemiel but I can still write first-rate dialogue.'

He walked back out into the hot sunshine. This was one of those times when he felt like buying himself a very large bottle of chardonnay and sitting in his room listening to Z Z Top records and getting drunk.

On his way home, he felt so hot that he stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought two frozen juice bars, one for himself and one for Emilio. When he arrived home, however, carrying one empty stick and one leaking juice bar, he found Emilio's toy cars lying in the dust beside the front steps, but no sign of Emilio.

'Emilio!' he called around the side of the house. The sticky orange juice was already running down his wrist.

A small boy in a rainbow-striped T-Shirt was walking a scruffy ginger mongrel along the sidewalk. 'Hey, kid!' Martin called. 'How would you like a juice bar? It's a little runny but it won't kill you.'

The boy stuck out his tongue and ran away, sneakers pit-patting on the sidewalk, all the way to the corner of Yucca. Martin shrugged. He guessed it was better that children didn't j talk to strange sweating screenwriters with melting juice bars. He dropped the bar into the gutter, and across the street an elderly woman in a cotton hat stared at him as if she had discovered at last the man responsible for polluting the whole of the Southern California environment.

Martin went into the house and climbed the stairs. It smelled of disinfectant and Parmesan cheese, but at least it j was cool.

Morris had depressed him this morning. He didn't mind so j much that Morris disliked the idea of a Boofuls musical; he j was professional enough to accept that some people were going \ to regurgitate their breakfast at nothing more than the mention i of motion pictures that other people swooned over. But he was j deeply upset that June Lassiter could have called up Morris \ behind his back and complained about him. It made him feel like a clumsy amateur, an outsider; as if he hadn't yet been accepted by Hollywood Proper. .

He had almost reached the top landing when he heard Emilio laughing. Too bad, he thought philosophically — the juice bar wouldn't have survived the climb from the street in any case. But as he turned the corner of the stairs he saw that his own apartment door was ajar and that the upper landing was illuminated by a triangular section of sunlight.

He approached the apartment door as quietly as he could. He heard Emilio giggling again.

'You can't throw it! You can't throw it!' And then more laughter. Then, 'You can't throw it, it won't come through.'

Martin eased open the door and tiptoed as quickly as he could along the hallway toward the sitting room. Emilio was scuffling around, his sneakers squeaking on the wood-block floor, and he was giggling so much that Martin was worried for a moment that he was choking.

Martin tried to see through the crack in the doorjamb. He glimpsed Emilio's faded red sneakers, flashing for a moment, and then Emilio's black tousled hair. But the door wasn't open wide enough for him to be able to see the mirror on the end wall; and if he had opened it any farther, he suspected that he would scare away whoever or whatever Emilio was playing with.

Emilio laughed. 'Stop throwing it!'

But then Martin heard another voice — a voice that didn't sound like Emilio's at all. A young, clear voice, echoing slightly as if he were talking in a tunnel or a high-ceilinged bathroom. 'Get another ball! Get another ball!' And then a strange ringing giggle.

Martin felt as if somebody had lifted up his shirt collar at the back and gradually emptied a jug of ice water down his back.

What had he said to Morris? If I don't know Boofuls' voice when I hear it, then nobody does.

Emilio said, 'What? What? Another ball?'

' We have to have two! If you throw a ball to me, I can throw a ball back to you!'

A moment's hesitation. Then Emilio saying, 'Okay, then, wait up', and dodging toward the door on those squeaking sneakers.

At once, Martin swung the door open wide. It banged and shuddered against the wall. He lifted Emilio bodily out of his way and jumped right into the middle of the room.

He thought he saw a blur that could have been an arm or could have been a leg. But then again, it could have been nothing at all.

The mirror was empty, except for himself and the room and the late morning sunlight; and just behind him, a bewildered-looking Emilio.

Martin swung around. 'Where is he?' he demanded, his voice cracking.

Emilio shook his head. 'I don't know what you mean.' 'The boy, the real boy. Where is he?' 'He's-'

'Listen, Emilio, I was standing right behind the door. I heard him. I heard him with my own ears.'

Two clear tears unexpectedly dropped onto Emilio's cheeks, and rolled down on either side of his mouth, and fell on the floor.

'He said I mustn't tell anybody. He said they punish him if anybody finds out.'

Martin got down on one knee and hugged Emilio close. 'You listen to me, old buddy, I'm not going to hurt him. I'm his friend, the same way that you are.' 'He says he's frightened.'

'Well, what does he have to be frightened about? He doesn't have to be frightened of me. I can help him. At least, I think I can help him.'

Emilio shook his head. 'He says he's frightened.' 'All right,' said Martin, and stood up. He looked toward the mirror and wondered if the real boy was listening to them. 'But if that boy really is who I think he is - and if he's gotten himself trapped inside that mirror or something — for whatever reason - and he's frightened - well, I'm sure that I can find some way to help him — because I know more about him than he knows about himself.'

Emilio glanced quickly at the mirror, almost furtively, and then asked, 'Can I go now?'

Martin grinned and shrugged. 'Sure you can go. This isn't the third degree.'

Emilio didn't know what he meant but he went, anyway. He was passing the kitchen door, however, when he said, 'Are you going to have him through for dinner?'

'Through?'

'Well, you know, like through the mirror.'

Martin came along the hallway and gave Emilio a pretend Rocky punch. 'You're way ahead of yourself Emilio.'

'But he likes lasagne.'

'He told you that?'

'He likes Swedish meatballs and he likes lasagne and he likes pecan pie.'

'So your grandmother's lasagne won't go to waste?'

'No, sir.'

Martin watched Emilio climb back down the stairs. It was extraordinary how easily children accept the strange and the supernatural, he thought. But maybe this mirror wasn't as strange and as supernatural as it appeared to be. He had read in Popular Radio that mirrors could sometimes pick up radio signals from powerful transmitters, because of their silver backing, and that their glass could vibrate sufficiently to make people hear disembodied voices. Late one night in 1961, in Pasadena, the wife of a grocery-store manager was lying in bed waiting for her husband to come home when her dressing-table mirror began to pick up a live Frank Sinatra interview from Palm Springs. Her husband, coming home late, heard a man's voice in his wife's bedroom, and shot to kill. He wounded his wife and then turned the gun on himself.

He returned to the sitting room and leaned against the mirror with his arms upraised and listened and waited for a long time. No boy. Nothing.

'Walter!' he shouted. 'Boofuls! Come here, Boofuls, let me take a look at you! I'm your biggest fan, Boofuls! Why'n't you step out and give me that sailor's hornpipe, hunh? Come on, Boofuls, I've devoted three years of my life to writing and rewriting about you. Three years - and three complete transfusions of blood and sweat. The least you can give me is a couple of minutes of hornpipe.'

He waited five minutes, ten. Nothing happened. No Boofuls appeared. After a while, Martin turned away from the mirror and looked across at his typewriter. He had some work to do on a Knight Rider teleplay. He might just as well sit down and get to it. Trying to get in touch with boys who lived in mirrors wasn't going to pay the rent.

He switched on his tape player and inserted the sound track of Suwannee Song. Immediately the flutes thrilled and the drums rattled, and the sitting room was filled with the opening march, when Boofuls was strutting like a drum major in front of a regiment of two hundred black minstrels, as they paraded along the levee.

Surrr . .. wannee Song! Suwannee Song! You can blow your flute and you can bang your drum and you can march along!

Martin sat down at his desk, zipped a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter, and started work on the latest adventures of Michael Knight. He wondered mischievously if Kit the talking car could turn out to be gay: if he could come out of the garage, so to speak.

Surr . .. wannee Song! Suwannee Song!

It's the song, it's the song, it's the song of the South!

He didn't know what it was that caught his eye; what it was that stopped him typing ' What is it, David? Bad guys?' and turn around in his chair and stare intently at the mirror. But the blue and white ball came rolling out from under the table, halfway across the room, to settle there, rocking slightly from side to side before it came completely to rest.

He turned to look at the real room. The ball wasn't there. He switched off his typewriter and walked up to the mirror and stared at the blue and white ball for two or three thoughtful minutes. Then he went back to his desk and opened up the bottom drawer and took out a tennis ball that he had used for practice last summer.

' We have to have two!' the boy had called out. 'If you throw a ball to me, I can throw a ball back to you.'

Martin hesitated for a while, tossing the old gray tennis ball up and down in his hand. Then, without warning, he threw it at the mirror, quite hard, half expecting to break it, half hoping to break it.

There was a sharp smacking sound, and the ball ricocheted off the glass and rolled across the floor. It came to rest only five or six inches away from the toe of his Nike sneakers.

But it wasn't a dingy gray tennis ball. It was a bright new blue and white bouncing ball. And when he turned in shock and looked toward the mirror, he saw his own tennis ball there, in exactly the corresponding place, five or six inches away from his toe.

He picked up the blue and white ball. It was quite hard and smelled strongly of rubber and paint. His mirror image picked up the tennis ball and sniffed that, too.

'My God,' he whispered; and approached the mirror, holding up the blue and white ball until it was touching the mirror's surface. His reflection did the same with the tennis ball, until the two balls apparently touched.

Martin could scarcely believe what he was seeing. He turned the ball this way and that, but it remained, without argument, a blue and white ball, while the ball in the mirror remained the same balding gray tennis ball that he had been punting around last year.

He tried one more experiment. He stepped back, and wound back his arm, and pitched the blue and white ball straight toward the glass. Again, there was a smacking sound; but this time the blue and white ball came bouncing back into the real room.

Martin picked up the blue and white ball, turned it around in his hand, and then set it down on his desk, next to his bronze paperweight of a fin de siecle plume dancer. He sat there and watched it, and then poured himself some wine, and watched it some more.

The sun rotated around the room. Next door, beside the pool, Maria Bocanegra came and went, sunning herself with Sno-Cones to protect her nipples; but Martin didn't bother to get up and look. He couldn't keep his eyes off the blue and white ball.

The day died. He didn't understand it. It was a clear night, the lights were sparkling all the way to Watts.

He slept in his chair. The blue and white ball stayed where it was, unmoving.

CHAPTER THREE

He dreamed that night that he was the smallest of sea creatures, crouched in the tiniest of shells, on a broad moonlit beach.

He could feel the grit. He could taste the salt. He could hear the slow, restless convulsions of the ocean; rocks into stones, stones into pebbles, pebbles into sand, year in and year out, even when there was nobody to listen to it.

He felt the terrible fear of being small and defenseless.

He opened his eyes. He was sweating. It should have been hot, but it was stunningly cold. He shivered. He sat up in bed and his breath smoked. He couldn't decide if he was awake or still asleep - if he was Martin Williams or if he was still a mollusk. He called, 'Hello?' even before he was properly awake.

From the sitting room, he could hear whispered voices: two children sharing secrets. He could see lights flickering, too: cold clinical lights, as if somebody were silently welding.

'Emilio?' he called. Then, louder, 'Emilio?'

He drew back his futon and reached for his robe. Quickly he stepped out into the hallway and approached the sitting room door. The light inside the sitting room was spasmodic but intense, and he had to lift his hand to shield his eyes.

He paused outside the door. This time, he didn't feel so much frightened as deeply curious. If he was right, and it was Boofuls, or Boofuls' spirit, then what an encounter this was going to be. If he had lived, Boofuls would be coming up to his sixtieth birthday; Martin was only thirty-four.

He pushed open the door. The room was glaring with static and crackling with cold. He turned and saw Emilio in his Care Bears nightshirt, kneeling in front of the mirror, one hand lifted, and facing him - instead of a true reflection - a small white-faced boy with golden curls, dressed in pale-yellow pajamas.

Martin's heart hesitated, bumped, hesitated, the same way it did on Montezuma's Revenge at Knott's Berry Farm. And the same hyped-up, almost hysterical reasoning: I don't want to do this more than anything else I can think of, but I have to, because it scares me so much I can scarely think how much it scares me.

There was no doubt about it at all. The boy in the mirror was Boofuls. Martin stared at him in horrified fascination. He was there, smiling, his eyes much smaller and paler than Martin would have imagined, but then the studio makeup artists had probably darkened his lashes before he appeared in front of the lights. His hair was thinner, too. Gold, yes, bright gold; and very curly; but thin, the way that little children's hair goes when they're anxious or allergic, or suffering from sibling rivalry.

Emilio bowed his dark head toward the mirror and Boofuls bowed his head toward Emilio. Their movements were exactly reflected, although it was impossible to tell which of them was initiating the action and which was following; or if somehow they were empathizing so intensely that they could both move at once, identical movements.

The scene oddly reminded Martin of one of those Marx Brothers movies in which Harpo appeared behind an empty mirror frame, mimicking the movements of the poor sucker who was trying to adjust his necktie in it.

Emilio whispered, 'We could do it now.

And Boofuls nodded, and Emilio nodded.

Emilio stood up, his arms by his sides. The white-faced Boofuls stood up, too and smiled at him, his arms by his sides.

'One! Two! Three!' said Boofuls.

And it was then that Martin understood what they were going to do - the old gray tennis ball flying into the mirror-world and the bright blue and white ball flying out of it -except that he had found it impossible to throw the blue and white ball back.

'Emilio!' he bellowed. 'Emilio, no!'

Emilio turned, startled. Boofuls turned too — but here his mirror-mimicking failed him, because he looked straight toward Martin the same way that Emilio did. His tiny eyes flared bright sapphire blue for a moment, welding-torch eyes, and he snatched for Emilio with both arms.

But in that instant Williams, who couldn't duck or weave, did his high school coach proud — with a sliding tackle that caught little Emilio around the waist and sent him sprawling across the floor.

For one second, Martin felt an extraordinary pull on Emilio, as forceful and demanding as if he were being sucked out of a depressurized airplane; but he grabbed hold of his desk with one hand, slipped, grabbed again, and clung on to Emilio with the other. After a split second of ferocious suction, the force subsided, the flickering lights died away, and the two of them were left lying on the floor, in cold and darkness and silence.

Martin ruffled Emilio's hair. 'You okay, old buddy?'

To his surprise, there were tears glistening on Emilio's cheeks.

'Hey, come on now,' he said, sitting up. 'What's wrong?'

'I wanted to go,' Emilio sobbed.

'You wanted to go? Go where?'

'Through the mirror, I wanted to go.'

Martin looked at the mirror. Boofuls had vanished. All the glass reflected was themselves and the moonlit room. Somewhere outside, heading south on La Brea, a police siren was whooping. Lonely echoes of urgency and danger.

'Come on,' said Martin, taking hold of Emilio's hand and helping him up. 'Let's go find ourselves a Coke.'

Emilio stood up and looked sadly toward the mirror. 'He only wanted to play.'

'Is that what he said?'

Emilio nodded. 'He said we could play all day, I wouldn't have to go to school. He wants me to meet his friends. He wants me to meet his old man.'

'His old man? You mean his father?'

'That's right. He says we could go for rides; swim in the sea; anything.'

Martin leaned across his desk and picked up the blue and white ball. 'Emilio,' he said, 'do you know where this came from?'

'Unh-hunh.'

'Emilio — it came from in there. It came from the mirror.

Take a look in the mirror right now. What am I holding up? A worn-out old tennis ball right? Yet look at this one. It doesn't make any sense. Like seeing that boy doesn't make any sense. You're not supposed to look into mirrors and see somebody else instead of yourself.'

Emilio wiped his tears with his sleeve.

Martin said, 'The trouble is, Emilio, I can't get my tennis ball back.'

'But this ball's okay,' Emilio told him. 'Why do you want the other one back?'

Martin tossed the ball up into the air and caught it again. 'Emilio, that's not the point. I can't get it back whether I want it or not. Now, supposing you went through that mirror. The way I see it, for anything to get through, one real thing has to be traded for one mirror thing. Can you understand that? It's the same as the boy was telling you yesterday. You can't play ball with just a reflection, it won't go through. You need two balls — one to go in and the other to come out. Just like you need two boys. One to step into the mirror, one to step out.'

Emilio scratched his head like one of the Little Rascals. 'But if that boy has to come out when I go in, how do we play with each other? He said he was going to show me his lead soldiers.'

Martin said, 'Listen to me, planet brain. If this blue and white ball came through the mirror and I can't get my old ball back, do you have any reason to suppose that when that boy comes through the mirror, I'm going to be able to get you back?'

Emilio was silent for a moment, pouting. Then he said, 'I don't want to come back. I don't care. Anything's better than Grannie and Gramps. They always smell like garlic, and there are dust balls under the bed.'

'The same dust balls exist in that mirror,' Martin assured him. 'So do the beds they're under. They've got the same garlic, the same people, the same world. The only difference is that everything's back to front.'

Emilio said wistfully, 'I wish I could see it.'

'It is not so hot, believe me.'

'But it is! Look at that writing!' And he pointed to the letters abfirmag anirfcnug. 'I wonder how you speak it. It's cool.'

'Cool.' Martin smiled, shaking his head, and laid an arm around Emilio's shoulder. 'You should've been a printer, that's what printers have to do, read type back to front. Come, let's get that Coke.'

They went through to the kitchen. Emilio perched on the stool while Martin opened up two cans of Coke.

Emilio said, 'That boy, his name's not really Petey, is it?'

'No,' Martin told him. 'That boy's name is Boofuls.'

'You mean like the same kid in the picture in your bedroom?'

'The very same kid.'

Emilio made a loud sucking noise with his drinking straw. 'But that picture comes from the olden days.'

'That's right. Nineteen thirty-six, to be precise. And that's more than fifty years ago.'

Emilio continued to suck Coke while he thought about that. His face was pale because it was the middle of the night and he should have been asleep, and there were plummy little circles under his eyes.

'How come he's still a kid?' Emilio suddenly wanted to know.

'I don't know,' Martin admitted. 'He's supposed to be dead. I mean I don't think he's actually a real kid. That kid you can see in the mirror is more like a ghost.'

Emilio thought about that and then said, 'Wow. I never met a ghost before.'

'Me neither.' Martin tugged open a bag of Fritos. 'That's why I don't think it's such a good idea your playing with him,' said Martin.' You don't want to wind up a ghost, too, do you?'

'Would I be invisible? I mean if I was a ghost? Could I walk through walls?'

'I don't know. But from everything I've heard about ghosts, ghosts are not too happy. I mean, Boofuls isn't too happy, is he? Listen - do you want anything to eat? Fritos or something? I've got some what-do-you-call-'ems someplace Twinkies.'

Emilio shook his head. He was too tired, and too fascinated by the otherworldly nature of the friend he had met in Martin's sitting room. Martin could almost see it all churning around in his mind, like five different colors of Play-Doh, Tve been playing ball with a ghost, fve been talking to a ghost. A ghost! A real live ghost! Not like Casper; not like Poltergeist, like me! A ghost kid just like me!'

Martin said, 'It's possible, Emilio - it's just possible - that playing with Boofuls might not be safe. Do you understand that? I mean, Boofuls doesn't mean you any harm. Leastways, I don't think he does. But this is all pretty weird stuff, right? And until we can find out what's happening, why he's here, what he wants - well, I think it's better if you don't come up here.'

Emilio looked completely put out. 'Doesn't Boofuls like me?'

'Sure he likes you, Emilio. He probably thinks you're his best pal ever. But just at this moment you two guys have got something to work out between you. Like, he lives on one side of a mirror and you live on the other. And the way I see it, either you're here and he's there, or he's here and you're there. And that's a little too weird for anybody to handle.'

Emilio yawned. 'All right,' he surrendered.

Just then, Mr Capelli came stomping into the kitchen, wrapped up in a gleaming striped satin bathrobe in chrome yellow and royal purple. Underneath it, Martin glimpsed gray woolen ankle socks.

'Emilio!' he exclaimed. 'I've been searching for you everywhere! I walked all the way down to Highland!'

'You've been walking the streets in that robe and they didn't arrest you?' asked Martin with pretended astonishment.

Mr Capelli tugged his bathrobe tighter. 'Mrs Capelli gave me this robe for Christmas.'

'Don't tell me, tell the judge. Thank your lucky stars they don't send people to death row for premeditated bad taste.'

'And what do you call taste, anh? Your wreck of a car, parked outside my house?'

Martin lifted Emilio off his stool and gave him a good-night kiss on the top of the head. Funny how kids' hair always smells the same: fresh, alive, pungent with youth, chestnuts and hot pajamas and summer days.

'Here,' he said, 'you'd better take this young somnambulist back to his bed.'

Mr Capelli took hold of Emilio and clasped him in his arms. 'You're a crazy person, you know that, just like your mamma.

Martin said quietly, as Mr Capelli carried Emilio toward the door, 'Listen, Mr Capelli. . .' but he realized when Mr Capelli turned around that there were tears in his eyes, one of those sudden unexpected pangs of grief for his dead daughter; one of those moments of weakness that hit the bereaved when they're least expecting it.

Emilio's mother, Mr Capelli's daughter, had died three years ago. Her husband, Stanley had walked out on her. (Mrs Capelli had told Martin all about this, like a soap opera, complete with actions: you should have seen the fights, you should have heard the cursing, how two people could hate each other so much, you'd've never believed it.)

Sad, disoriented, feeling that she had somehow fallen from grace, Emilio's mother had overdosed one Sunday morning on Italian wine and Valium. She had been found dead in her apartment white as Ophelia, her arms outspread, her hair outspread, almost beautiful, but smelling like hell itself, and the whole apartment thunderous with blowflies.

Stanley had gone to Saskatchewan to chop timber. Mr and Mrs Capelli had been given custody of Emilio. Garlic, dust balls, and all.

Mr Capelli said, 'It's all right, Martin, he has to get back to bed.'

'Mr Capelli, I have to talk to you,' Martin insisted. 'Could you come right back?'

'Talk?' Mr Capelli demanded.

'About Emilio, please. Can you spare me five minutes?'

'It's gone three o'clock.'

'Sure, yes, I know, but please. I don't know whether it's going to keep until tomorrow.'

He tore off a piece of kitchen towel and handed it to Mr Capelli, and Mr Capelli wiped his eyes. It was an act of acceptance, an act of reconciliation.

'Okay,' Mr Capelli promised. 'But five minutes, no more.'

Martin looked at Emilio resting against his grandfather's shoulder and Emilio was already asleep.

Mr Capelli came up ten minutes later and rapped at the door.

'Hey, come on in,' Martin told him.

Mr Capelli stood in the hallway in his yellow and purple bathrobe, looking tired and embarrassed. Tm sorry,' he said, 'I shouldn't've sounded off. It just gets to me sometimes, you know what I mean, Andrea and all.'

Martin slapped his arm. 'I know. I'm sorry, too. You know what scriptwriters are. Smart-asses, all of us. It's the way we make our living.'

Mr Capelli nodded, oblivious to Martin's irony. 'She was so beautiful, Andrea; and Emilio looks just the same way; nothing of Stanley; that jerk; Stanley had eyes that were too close together, you know? But Emilio is Andrea. Beautiful, Italian, what can I say?'

Martin suggested, 'How about some coffee?'

Mr Capelli said, 'No - no thank you. I don't sleep good already. Just talk.'

'Okay,' said Martin, taking a deep breath. 'This isn't easy okay? Try to bear with me. But even if it doesn't sound logical, try to accept that I wouldn't be telling you if I weren't worried about Emilio.'

'Why are you worried about Emilio?' Mr Capelli demanded. 'Why should you worry about Emilio?'

'Listen, Mr Capelli, Emilio is your grandson, but Emilio is also my friend. Well, I hope he is. I don't think it matters very much how old anybody is, do you? I mean the difference between your age and my age is a lot more than the difference between my age and Emilio's age. So you can't say that he and I don't have any right to be buddies, can you?'

'No, I didn't say that,' replied Mr Capelli stiffly, his hands resting on his knees.

'All right, then,' said Martin. 'What I'm saying is in Emilio's best interest, believe me. If Emilio comes up to my apartment anymore - well I don't want him here anymore.'

Mr Capelli leaned forward, his hands still clutching his knees. 'You're not saying . .. what, you're gay?'

'Oh shit, Mr Capelli!' Martin shouted at him, slapping at the hallway wall. Tm not talking about me! Gay! What the hell is the matter with you? It's that mirror you helped me to carry upstairs.'

'The mirror, hah? Boofuls' mirror? What did I tell you, you shouldn't give it houseroom.'

'Maybe you were right,' Martin admitted. 'I don't know what it is, but there's something wrong with it,' Martin told him. 'It's hard to say what. But it's not your usual kind of everyday mirror.'

'It's a trick mirror,' said Mr Capelli, trying to lighten up this dire and ominous conversation before Martin started talking about death and hackings and all the other gory topics of conversation that (along with saraghine alia brace) invariably gave him nightmares and agonies of indigestion. 'You look in the mirror and what do you see? You don't got clothes on.'

'No, Mr Capelli, it's nothing like that. I mean, it's a kind of a trick mirror, but it doesn't make your clothes disappear or anything like that. It's — well when you look at it, you don't always see what's really there.'

Mr Capelli said nothing; but waited on Martin to explain; his eyes blinking from time to time like a pelican at San Diego Zoo.

'The thing is,' said Martin, 'if Emilio plays with it, he might start to see things - people, maybe, who don't really exist. And — well - if he sees things - people — stuff that doesn't exist - it could be kind of—'

He paused. Mr Capelli was staring at him in that same pelicanlike way, as if he believed that he had completely flipped.

Martin added, 'Dangerous,' and then gave Mr Capelli an idiotic grin.

Mr Capelli tugged at the bulb of his fleshy nose and thought for a while. Then he said, 'Martin, I like you. You've got a choice. Either that mirror goes, or you go, whichever.'

'You're throwing me out?' asked Martin in surprise.

'Of course not. Just the mirror.'

'Mr Capelli, I'm not at all sure I can do that.'

'Why not? Are you crazy? One minute you're saying it's dangerous; you see things in it that aren't there; you're worried about Emilio; the next minute you're saying you can't do that; well, you can do that, it's easy, just do it. Am I asking too much?'

Martin laid his hand on Mr Capelli's shoulder. Mr Capelli peered at it from very close up. 'There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the mirror, Mr Capelli,' said Martin, and Mr Capelli echoed, 'Fundamentally.'

'All I'm saying is, it has this vibe. I don't know, you can call it what you like. It's like a visual echo. An echo you can see.'

'An echo you can see?' Mr Capelli repeated and Martin could see that he was vexed and tired, and that he didn't even want to understand. Mr Capelli's answer to everything that he didn't like, or wasn't sure of, was to turn his back on it.

'All right,' said Martin. 'Boofuls has come alive. Don't ask me how. He's in the mirror, and Emilio has been playing with him, and Emilio has come within an inch of getting inside the mirror, too.'

Mr Capelli stood up. He glanced quickly at Martin, almost casually then nodded. 'Mumh-humh,' he said, and nodded again. Martin watched him with increasing tension.

'Good night, Martin,' said Mr Capelli at length, and turned to leave.

'That's it? Good night?'

'All right, a very good night. What more do you want?'

'I just want you to promise me that you won't let Emilio come up here for a while. I mean, tell him he mustn't. This whole apartment is strictly no go.'

Mr Capelli said, 'In the morning, Martin, you make up your mind. That mirror goes, or you go. The first thing I told you when you brought that mirror back here, what did I say? No good is going to come out of it. That was the first thing I said. And now what's happened? No good has come out of it.'

'Mr Capelli, it could very well be that there's a real boy trapped in that mirror.'

'That's right and it could very well be that some clever people can train a pig to fly straight into a bacon slicer, and another pig to drive the bacon down to Safeway.'

'Mr Capelli-'

'No!' replied Mr Capelli. 'That mirror goes by tomorrow night, otherwise you go. Now, it's late, I don't want to talk about it no more.'

He left, closing the apartment door sharply behind him.

Martin remained in the kitchen, feeling drained and somehow diminished, as if his dream of being a mollusk had shrunk his consciousness down to a microscopic speck. Tired, probably, and anxious, and unsettled by what had happened in the mirror.

He went back to bed and fell asleep almost straightaway. He had no dreams that he could remember, although he was aware of blundering through darkness and wondering if it would ever be light, ever again.

It was nearly eight o'clock, however, when he thought he heard a child's voice, close to his ear, whisper, 'Pickie-nearest-the-wind'.

He sat up. He looked around the room, which was quite bright now. Everything looked normal, although he had the oddest feeling that the drapes and the furniture had jumped back into place when he opened his eyes, as if the whole room had been misbehaving itself, right up until the moment when he had woken up.

The drapes stirred a little as if a child were hiding behind them, but then Martin realized that it was only the morning breeze.

Pickle-nearest-the-wind. What the hell did that mean?

But all the same, he went through to the sitting room, and found a scrap of typing paper on his desk and wrote it down in green felt-tip pen. The phrase had a peculiar quality about it that reminded him of something, although he couldn't think what. Some childhood storybook with drawings of clouds and chimney pots and faraway hills.

He glanced toward the mirror. The grinning gold face of Pan presided over a scene that appeared to be a scrupulous representation of the real room. Only the blue and white ball on his desk remained uncompromisingly different from the gray tennis ball on his reflected desk.

Still holding the scrap of paper in his hand, he walked right up to the mirror and stared at his own face. He looked quite well and quite calm, although he didn't feel it. He wondered if there really was a world beyond the door, a different world, a world where Boofuls had survived after death, a Lewis Carroll world where clocks smiled and chess pieces talked and flowers quarreled, and you had to walk backward to go forward.

Trvas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe ,..

He remembered with a smile the words of 'Jabberwocky', the mirror-writing nonsense poem in Alice Through the Looking-Glass; and how it had always amused him as a small boy to hold the book up to the mirror and read the words the right way around.

It had always seemed so magical that the lettering obediently reversed itself and gave up its secret, every time.

He held up the piece of paper on which he had written 'Pickle-nearest-the-wind'. Perhaps the words meant something if they were reversed: after all, everything else that had been happening to him seemed to have some connection with this damned mirror.

But to his slowly growing astonishment, the words weren't reversed at all. In the mirror, in his own handwriting, the words clearly said, 'Pickle-nearest-the-wind', the right way around.

He stared at the real piece of paper, his hand trembling. 'Pickle-nearest-the-wind', the right way around.

The words refused to be reversed by the mirror. He crumpled the paper up and then uncrumpled it and held it up again. No difference. For some reason beyond all imagination, those words that had been whispered to him in the early hours of the morning completely denied the laws of optical physics.

He stood still for a while, looking at himself in the mirror, wondering what to do. My God, he thought, what kind of a game is going on here?

He left the sitting room, step by step backward, keeping his eyes on the mirror all the time. He shut the door behind him, and locked it, and took out the key. Then he went back to his bedroom, stripped off his bathrobe and dressed.

Ramone was having breakfast when Martin arrived at The Reel Thing; his custom-made sneakers, purple and white and natural suede, perched on the counter like exhibits unto themselves. He was dark, shock-headed, with multiple-jointed arms and legs, and one of those ugly spread-nosed Latino faces that you couldn't help liking. His breakfast was a giant chili dog, with everything on it, and a bottle of lime-flavored Perrier. 'Hey, Martin!' he cried, waving one of his spidery arms. Martin came over and leaned tightly against the counter, close to the cash register.

'Allure, Ramone,' he greeted him. Saying 'allure' instead of 'hello' had been kind of a private joke between them ever since they had gone downtown together one evening to watch a Brazilian art movie, in which everybody had said 'allure'. 'Allure, jfuanita.' 'Allure, Caspar.'

Ramone said, 'That ginger-headed girl was in here, yessday afternoon, asking about you.'

'Yeah?' said Martin. 'That ginger-headed girl' was a student from his Monday evening tele-writing class, Norma, who had considered his A-Team rewrites 'miraculous'; and had wanted to take him to bed to 'you know, transfuse the talent'.

The Reel Thing was more than a store: it was a shrine. Anything and everything that was important to movie buffs was assembled here. Shirley Temple dolls in sailor suits and cowboy outfits and Scottish plaids. Buck Rogers disintegrator guns and rocket ships. Tom Mix pocket knives and six-shooters. And box after box after box of signed studio glossies —Joan Crawford and Adolphe Menjou and Robert Redford and Dorothy Dell.

The whole store smelled of forty-year-old movie programs and dust and old clothes and stale cigarette smoke from a thousand long-forgotten parties. But anybody who cared for movies could spend hours in here, touching with reverence the gowns of Garbo; or the white Stetsons of William Boyd; or the short-sleeved shirts of Mickey Rooney. The artifacts were nothing at all. It was what they conjured up that made them valuable.

Martin picked up a yellowed copy of Silver Screen with the enticing headline 'What It Takes to Be a 1939 Girl'.

'Did you look at the stuff?' Ramone asked him scooping up chili and pickle with his fingers.

Martin dropped the magazine back into its rack. 'Oh yes, I looked at the stuff, all right.'

'No good?' asked Ramone.

'Depends what you mean by no good.'

Ramone's tabby cat, Lugosi, was resting on a stack of Screen-lands, his paws tucked in, his eyes slitted against the sunlight that came in through the window.

Martin stroked him under his chin, but Lugosi opened his eyes and stared back at him in irritation, his vexation emphasized by the way one pointed tooth was caught on his lip. Lugosi was definitely a one-man cat.

Ramone said, with his mouth full, 'It was genuine Boofuls stuff, I saw the paperwork. It was auctioned by M-G-M along with a whole lot of Shirley Temple properties.'

'I bought the mirror,' said Martin. Then, 'Listen Ramone, can you get some time off? I have to talk this over with somebody.'

Ramone wiped his hands on a paper napkin, rolled it up, and tossed it with perfect accuracy into a basket. 'I was going out to Westwood, anyway. Kelly can take care of the store. Kelly! Donde estd usted?'

A small girl with owlish designer spectacles and a long blond braid down the middle of her back came into the store from the back. She wore a loose white T-shirt with the slogan 'Of All the T-shirts in All the World I Had to Pick This One'.

'Hasta luego, Kelly,' said Ramone, picking up his car keys. 'I'm going down to Westwood with Fartin' Martin here to look at that stuff in Westwood.'

'Kay,' said Kelly in a nasal Valley accent, and began to shuffle movie programs. Ramone whistled to his cat Lugosi and Lugosi jumped down straightaway and followed them out of the store.

The 'stuff in Westwood' proved to be disappointing. Two crushed and faded cocktail gowns that were supposed to have belonged to Marilyn Monroe. The nervy middle-aged woman who was selling them chain-smoked and paced up and down. 'They have stains on them,' she said at last, as if this were the selling point that was going to make all the difference.

'Stains?' asked Ramone, holding one of the gowns up.

'For goodness' sake, you know, stains,' the woman snapped back. 'Robert Kennedy.'

Martin, who was sitting back on the lounger watching Ramone af work, shook his head in disbelief. He couldn't conceive of anything more tasteless than trying to sell Marilyn Monroe's cocktail gowns with Robert Kennedy's stains on them.

Ramone dropped the gowns back on the chair. 'I'm sorry, I can't offer you anything for these. There's no authentication, nothing. They're different sizes, too. They could have belonged to two different people, neither one of whom was Marilyn.'

'You're doubting my word?' the woman said stiffly.

'That's not what I'm saying. All I'm saying is, thanks — but no thanks.'

They took a walk along the beach. There was a strong ocean breeze blowing and it ruffled their clothes. Lugosi followed them at a haughty distance, occasionally lifting his head to sniff the wind.

'I never knew cats liked the seashore,' Martin remarked.

'Oh, Lugosi loves it. All that fish, all those birds. He'd go swimming if he could find a costume the right size.'

Ramone took out a cheroot and lit it with a Zippo emblazoned with the name Indiana Jones, his hands cupped over the flame.

'How about that woman with the Marilyn Monroe dresses,' said Martin. 'Wasn't she something?'

'If they were genuine, I would have given her a hundred fifty apiece,' Ramone told him.

'How do you know they weren't?'

Ramone shook his head. 'You get an eye for it; a touch for it. Marilyn never would've worn anything that looked like that. A shmatteh, that's what the Jewish people call dresses like that. And besides, there are no pictures of Marilyn wearing them, either of them, and if she ever wore two tight low-cut gowns, like that, don't you think that somebody would've taken pictures? She was a chubby broad, to say the least.'

When he saw Martin looking at him in surprise, he grinned and said, 'It's true! I can remember every Marilyn Monroe picture ever, in my head. And James Dean. And Jayne Mansfield. And what they were wearing.'

Martin said, 'I want you to come take a look at this boy in the mirror. I want you to tell me that it's Boofuls.'

Ramone blew out smoke. 'Pretty far-out shit, hunh?'

'You don't have to believe me until you see it for yourself.'

'I believe you!' Ramone replied, spreading his arms. 'Why shouldn't I believe you? I come from a very superstitious family.'

'I just don't know what to do,' said Martin. 'I mean, supposing it really is him? Supposing there's some way of getting him out of there?'

'Like the tennis ball, you mean? Well, I don't know. It's pretty far-out shit. But whatever happened, if you did it, if you got him out, you'd be sitting on some kind of a gold mine, hunh? You're the guy who wants to make a Boofuls musical, and what do you got? You got the actual Boofuls. And all this stuff about him being chopped up, well, they're going to have to forget that, aren't they, if he's all in one piece?'

'I guess so,' Martin agreed, a little unhappily. 'It was just the way that he tried to grab Emilio and pull him into the mirror — well, that scared me. It's possible that nothing would have happened ... I mean, maybe this particular mirror has some kind of weird scientific property which allows objects to pass right through it. Maybe Emilio could have gone to play in mirrorland and come back whenever he felt like it.'

'Do you really think that's possible?' asked Ramone.

Martin shook his head. 'If the same thing happens to Emilio that happened to that ball. . . well, maybe he could get inside the mirror, but I'm not at all sure we'd ever get him out again.'

Ramone tossed away his cheroot and stood for a moment with his hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans, staring out at the ocean. 'You know I come down here every time I feel that life is terrible, that people are mean and small and bitter, that human ambition is just a crock of shit.'

He paused, watching the gray water glittering in the sunshine. 'And you know something?' he said. 'Looking out at all that infinity, looking out at all that water, all that distance, that does nothing for me, whatsoever. So the sea is big, so what, that doesn't make life any better.'

They drove back along Sunset in Ramone's patched-up Camaro, with Lugosi sitting primly in the back seat. Together, they sang two or three verses of 'Whistlin' Dixie'; and then fell silent.

'That's it, then,' said Martin, unlocking the sitting room door and ushering Ramone inside.

Ramone gave a soft whistle and padded toward the mirror on squeaking sneakers, holding Lugosi in his arms so that the cat's body hung down. 'That's some piece of glass. Nice frame, too. Who's the dude in the middle?'

'Pan, I think. Or Bacchus. One of those woodsy Roman gods.'

'He's a dead ringer for Charlton Heston, if you ask me. Do you think Charlton Heston ever posed for mirrors? You know, before he became famous?'

Ramone tentatively touched the mirror's surface, then stepped back. 'It's something, isn't it? What did she ask you for it?'

'Five hundred', Martin lied.

'Well,' said Ramone, 'I think she took you. I wouldn't have paid more than two-fifty, two seventy-five. But it's a piece of glass, isn't it?'

'There's the ball,' said Martin, and pointed out the blue and white ball on the desk. Ramone glanced at it, then glanced at the tennis ball in the mirror.

'Now, that is what I call extrano,' said Ramone. He peered at the blue and white ball carefully, and then he said, 'Is it okay if I pick it up?'

'Sure. I've picked it up. It doesn't feel any different from any other kind of ball.'

Ramone threw the ball in the air and caught it, watching himself in the mirror with delight. 'How about that!' he said, laughing. 'In here I'm throwing a blue ball; in there I'm throwing a totally different ball.'

'Try throwing it at the mirror,' Martin suggested, walking across to the windowsill to get the bottle of wine. 'That's it, directly at the mirror.'

'Heyy .. .' said Ramone. 'I just thought of something. If this ball here isn't the same as the ball in the mirror, maybe that guy in the mirror who looks like me — well, maybe he isn't me. Maybe he's somebody who looks like me, okay, but isn't.' Martin poured them each a glass of chardonnay. 'Why don't you ask him?' he suggested.

'Hee! Hee!' Ramone laughed; and then called to his reflection in the mirror. 'Hey, buddy, are you me, or are you just somebody pretending to be me? Because, let's be truthful here, you've got your right arm on your left side and your left arm on your right side, and I sure don't. Why don't you take down your pants and let's see that skull-and-crossbones tattoo, which side of your ass it's on?'

'You didn't tell me you had a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on your ass,' said Martin.

Ramone looked embarrassed. 'I don't either. I was joking, all right. But you say one word!'

'Anyway,' said Martin, 'try throwing the ball at the mirror. Not too hard. You don't want to break it.'

Winding his arm back, Ramone said, 'This is it! This is Rip Collins, just about to make the pitch of his whole career!' 'Just not too hard, okay?' Martin told him. Ramone threw, and the ball smacked against the mirror. Lugosi the cat immediately jumped for it, dancing toward his own reflection. The blue and white ball bounced off the glass and rolled back into the room, but to Martin's horror, Lugosi dived halfway into the mirror's surface right up to his middle, as if he had dived into water.

It looked as if Lugosi had turned into an extraordinary headless beast with a tail at each end, and two pairs of hind legs that clawed and scratched and struggled against each other to get free.

'Get him out!' yelled Ramone, his voice white with terror. 'Martin — for God's sake - get him out!'

Martin scrambled down onto the floor and caught hold of Lugosi's narrow body. He could feel the cat's rib cage through his fur, feel his heart racing. Lugosi's hind legs lashed out wildly, and his claws scratched Martin all the way down the inside of his arm.

Ramone did what he could to keep Lugosi's legs from pedaling, while Martin tried to drag him out. But Martin could feel that same irresistible force that he had felt when he tackled Emilio: that same relentless sucking.

'Martin! Help him!' Ramone shouted. 'Holy shit, Martin — he's being pulled in!'

The force was too strong, too demanding. The cat's body was dragged through Martin's hands, inch by inch, even though he clung on so tightly that he was pulling out clumps of tabby fur. His body, his hind legs, his shuddering outstretched paws, all of them vanished one by one. His reflection shrank too — until at the very end there was nothing but a single dark furry caterpillar that appeared to be waving in midair, and that was the tip of his tail.

Then there was nothing at all, he was gone, and the surface of the mirror was flawless and bright.

Ramone was sweating, 'If I hadn't seen that — if I hadn't seen that, right there in front of me, with my own eyes! Madre mia!'

Martin stood up. His face in the mirror was gray, the color of newspaper. 'Ramone ... I don't know what to say. I had no idea it was going to do that.'

'But it pulled him! It pulled him in!'

Ramone touched the surface of the mirror quickly as if he were touching a hotplate to make sure that it was switched on.

'Ramone —,' warned Martin, 'Christalmighty man, be careful. Supposing you got sucked in?'

Ramone's fright was fragmenting into grief and anger. 'Man — that's my cat\ That's my fucking cat! Six years I've had that cat! I didn't love and feed and take care of that cat just to have some stupid mirror take him away! Some stupid mirror?

Martin came over and gently gripped Ramone by the shoulders. 'Ramone — I'm sorry! If I'd have guessed what was going to happen —'

'Martin, am I blaming you?' Ramone fumed. 'I'm not blaming you, okay? It wasn't your fault! But I want my cat back! He went in the mirror, where is he?'

'Ramone, I really don't know. He's gone, I don't know how and I don't know where.'

Ramone stood up, his eyes staring. 'Well, there's got to be one way to find out, and that's to break this god-damned stupid mirror to pieces!'

'No!' shouted Martin. 'Ramone - listen — there's a boy in that mirror. For all we know, he's managed to stay alive some way - you know, by hiding in the mirror, or something. Listen, I don't understand any of it. But until I do — please, Ramone, don't touch that mirror. You don't know what the hell might happen — how many people might die.'

Ramone bit his lip for a moment and took three angry paces away from the mirror, and then three angry paces back again. 'Thass bullshit! Thass bullshit, Martin, and you know it! What do you care, how many people might die! What the hell just happened to Lugosi? Thass my call'

Martin didn't know what to say. Both of them were still shocked by Lugosi's hair-raising disappearance — into where? into what? It didn't make any sense. It wasn't even as if a mirrorland cat had jumped out to replace him, the way that Boofuls' blue and white ball had come bouncing out to replace Martin's tennis ball.

Martin had thought that he had discovered the mirror's logic; that an object could only pass through to the mirror-world if another object was sent back in return. But Lugosi had been sucked into the surface of the mirror and vanished utterly. And - judging from the way in which his hindquarters had struggled and his heart had been beating — it had been an agonizing and terrifying experience.

Ramone touched the surface of the mirror again; quickly, nervously, jerking his hand back.

'It can suck in a ball, it can suck in a cat. Do you really think it can suck in a man?'

'Ramone,' said Martin, 'that's an experiment I don't even want to think about trying.'

'We-e-ell, maybe; maybe not. But that's my cat in there. I mean he's in there some way. And all I want to do is get him out.'

'Wait,' Martin told him. 'I have an idea. Maybe I can get Boofuls to tell us.'

'Oh, man, Boofuls? You're cracked. Boofuls is dead, Boofuls is hamburger.'

'Yes, well, perhaps he is,' Martin replied trying not to sound too frosty about it. 'But his soul or his spirit or something of what he was is still here - still inside this mirror.'

'Oh, yeah? Where? I don't see any Boofuls. All I see is me and you and some stupid ball that's blue here and gray there, and that doesn't prove anything, and most of all it doesn't get Lugosi back.'

'Will you be patient?' Martin shouted at him.

'I don't want to be patient!' Ramone retorted. 'I didn't even want to come here in the first place!'

'Then go!' yelled Martin.

Ramone tugged open the door. He hesitated for a moment, but then he lowered his head, and turned away and said, 'Shit, man', and left. Martin stood in the sitting room, still breathless, still trembling, and heard Ramone take the stairs three and four at a time.

Then he went to the bathroom and stood over the basin for a long time, listening to his stomach growling. He didn't actually vomit, but he felt as though the inside of his mouth and throat were lined with grease.

Mr Capelli came up to his apartment at half past six that evening. Martin was typing away furiously at an episode of As the World Turns. Mr Capelli knocked on the sitting room door and then stepped in. He was wearing a dark three-piece suit, very formal, and some strong lavender-smelling cologne. He tugged at his cuffs, and cleared his throat, and nodded toward the mirror.

'You don't get rid of it?' he asked.

Martin stopped typing and turned around in his revolving chair. 'I'm sorry. Somebody's coming to pick it up first thing tomorrow morning. That was the earliest I could manage.'

Mr Capelli approached the mirror and straightened his black spotted necktie. Then, with the flat of his hand, he smoothed the hair on the back of his head.

'Going out tonight?' asked Martin, watching him, hoping he wouldn't step too close to the mirror.

Mr Capelli leaned forward and bared his teeth at his reflection. 'Twenty-one thousand dollars' worth of dental work,' he declared. 'Twenty-one thousand dollars! And what do you get? Teeth is all you get.'

Martin said, 'Thanks for keeping Emilio away.'

Mr Capelli turned around. 'Well, it wasn't easy. He said he wanted to play with your nephew.'

'Mr Capelli-'

'Don't say nothing,' said Mr Capelli, raising one hand. 'Whatever it is, I don't want to hear it.'

'Mr Capelli, I tried to explain to you yesterday — my nephew isn't here at all. The boy that Emilio was playing with was Boofuls.'

'Sure,' said Mr Capelli.

'Boofuls appeared in the mirror and Emilio saw him. He was as clear as you are. I saw him myself, with my own eyes.'

'Sure,' said Mr Capelli.

'You don't believe me,' said Martin. 'You don't believe me for one moment.'

'Sure I believe you,' Mr Capelli told him, his mouth taut. 'When I was a boy, my mother and father told me all kinds of stories about ghosts and monsters and things that stared at you out of mirrors. My father used to tell me one story, how he went past his parlor one night, and take a quick look at the mirror, and sitting at the dining table was six people dressed in black, with black veils over their heads, sitting silent, but only in the mirror.'

Martin looked back at Mr Capelli but didn't know what to say.

'I believe you,' said Mr Capelli. 'I believe you, but I don't want to hear nothing about it. I don't want to hear nothing about no other worlds, no mirror-people. Life is hard enough in this world, praise God.'

He turned vehemently back to the mirror. 'Every mirror is evil. Mirror's are for nothing but vanity, for look at your own face, and not the face of other people. This mirror has special evil. Tomorrow morning, you get rid of it. Otherwise, I'm sorry, you have to go.'

Martin nodded. 'All right, Mr Capelli. The guy's coming around at eleven.'

Actually, Martin had made no arrangements yet for getting rid of the mirror. He was simply stalling for time. If Boofuls was really inside it; and if Ramone's cat was inside it, too, he wanted to keep hold of it and make sure that it was safe. He had called Ramone to ask him if he would store the mirror at the Reel Thing for a while, but Ramone had still been out, and Kelly had told him that she didn't have the 'athaw'ty' to say yes.

Mr Capelli laid his hand on Martin's shoulder. 'You get rid of that mirror, understand but you make sure you don't break it, not in this house, anyway. Breaking a mirror like that, who knows what you're going to let out.'

'Sure thing, Mr Capelli,' said Martin. 'And — you know — have a good time.'

Mr Capelli looked down at his suit. Then he stared at Martin as if he had said something utterly insane. 'A good time? We're going to have dinner with my wife's sister.'

CHAPTER FOUR

An old college pal from Wisconsin called him just before seven: Dick Rasmussen, who used to date Jane's younger sister, Rita.

Dick had come to Los Angeles on business, selling luggage, and he insisted they meet for a drink and maybe dinner?

'Dick, I'm real busy. I'm working on As the World Turns.'

'You mean somebody actually sits down and writes that shit? I thought the actors made it up as they went along.'

Reluctantly, Martin agreed to meet Dick at eight o'clock at the Polo Lounge. 'I have to tell you, though, Dick, the only people who go to the Polo Lounge these days are tourists.'

'Martin, I'm under orders from the commandant. If I get back home and Nancy finds out I didn't go to the Polo Lounge, believe me, she's going to have my balls.'

'You married Nancy?

'Not Nancy Untermeyer. Oh, no, no such luck. Nancy Brogan. You remember Nancy Brogan? Little blond girl, used to go around with that pig-faced fat girl, Phyllis whatever-her-name-was. Yeah, we got spliced! Two kids, now, boy and a girl. No - not Nancy Untermeyer, very regretfully. Do you remember the way Nancy Untermeyer used to play the cello in the school orchestra? Whee-oo. She used to look like she was screwing it.'

Reluctantly, Martin dressed in a clean blue shirt and put on his best and only white suit, and rubbed a scuff off his white Gucci sneakers with spit and a Kleenex. He made sure he locked the sitting room door before he left. He didn't want Emilio wandering up here while he was out. On the way out he passed a pink ten-speed bicycle parked against the hall stand: it belonged to Emilio's baby-sitter, Wanda.

His evening with Dick was just as bad as he had imagined it was going to be. Dick was energetic and loud and endlessly excited about Hollywood. He wore a small brown toupee to conceal his thinning crown and a red-and-green-plaid sports coat that might just as well have had 'Hayseed' embroidered on the back. Whenever anybody came into the Polo Lounge, he nudged Martin conspicuously and asked, 'Is that somebody? That isn't Katharine Ross, is it?'

Dick drank pina coladas with paper parasols in them and ate the orange slices with noisy relish. 'This is the land of the orange, right? That isn't Warren Beatty, is it? I mean, you must know all of these people personally, right?'

'Well, I get to know one or two of them.'

Dick slapped him on the thigh. 'George Peppard! I'll bet you know George Peppard!'

An elegantly dressed woman at the next table turned around and gave them a cold, patronizing look. Martin flashed her his Quick Boyish Smile, but she didn't smile back. He felt more like an outsider than ever. He finished up his white-wine spritzer and listened to Dick jabbering and wondered glumly if Rubishness was contagious.

Dick insisted they go for dinner at the Brown Derby. The restaurant was almost empty, apart from a couple from Oregon who had come to Hollywood for a second honeymoon. ' We're not on our second honeymoon, as you might have guessed,' Dick told the wine waiter, and slapped the table and laughed until he was red in the face.

It was midnight before Martin dropped Dick back at the Hyatt on Sunset. Dick wanted to have another drink, but Martin stayed in the car with the engine running. 'Dick — I have to work. This may be magic land to you, but to me it's the salt mines. So do me a favor, will you, have a safe journey home, and give Nancy a kiss for me, and good night.'

'I loved you, you know,' Dick told him, leaning over the side of the Mustang with his eyes boiled and his toupee crooked. He breathed wine and rum straight into Martin's face. 'I loved you like a fucking brother.'

'Good night, Dick,' Martin told him, and clasped his hand for the tenth time, and at last managed to drive away.

'Fartin' Martin!' Dick shouted out as he teetered on the sidewalk outside the hotel. 'That's what they always called you! Heeyoo! Far-Tin Mar-Tin!'

'Dick the Prick,' Martin replied under his breath as the traffic signals at Sierra Bonita intersection turned green, and he turned left on squealing tires toward Franklin Avenue.

When he let himself back into the house, Wanda's bicycle was still parked in the hallway, and he tripped over it in the darkness, catching his shin on the pedal. 'Goddamn it!' he hissed at it, and would have kicked it if the landing light hadn't been suddenly switched on, and Wanda hadn't appeared.

'Martin?' she called. 'Is that you?'

Martin climbed the stairs. 'It is I, fair Wanda, and the pedal of your bicycle has just added injury to the most insulting evening of my entire adult life.'

Wanda was a short blond girl of seventeen. She was still plump with puppy fat, but her face was pretty, like a little painted matrioshka doll, with rosy cheeks and China-blue eyes. She was wearing a pink jogging suit with a printed picture of Bruce Springsteen on the front, and pink sneakers. Oddly, she was carrying a saucer half filled with milk.

'Where are you going with that?' Martin asked her. 'Your cat was crying; I thought it might be hungry.' Martin glanced up toward the door of his apartment. 'My cat?' he said in a hollow voice.

'It's been crying for hours; ever since you left, almost.' Martin took a breath. Thank God for that, Lugosi must have reappeared. At least Ramone and he could be friends again. 'Come on,' he told Wanda, and took the saucer from her, and led the way upstairs. 'You couldn't have gotten in, anyway, the door's locked.'

'I don't mind cat-sitting as well as baby-sitting,' Wanda told him. 'I love cats.'

Martin unlocked the apartment door. 'This cat doesn't belong to me. It just decided to pay me a visit this afternoon, and not to leave.' He switched on the light in the hallway. 'It's called Lugosi — you know, after Bela Lugosi, who played Dracula. Believe me, it's well named.'

He opened the sitting room door. 'Lugosi! Your uncle Martin's home!'

He reached around to switch on the light, but the bulb popped instantly, and the room remained dark. 'Damn it,' said Martin. 'That's about the fifth bulb in five weeks. They don't make anything the way they used to. Hold on, I'll switch on the desk lamp.'

He crossed the room; and his dark reflection crossed the room toward him. 'Mr and Mrs Capelli are late,' he remarked to Wanda as he reached over to find the desk-lamp switch.

'It's an anniversary or something,' Wanda told him. 'They said they wouldn't get back until one o'clock.'

'You're not going to cycle home at one o'clock?' Martin asked her.

He tried the desk lamp, but that didn't work, either. 'Would you believe it? This one's gone, too. Wanda -'

He was about to ask her to go to the kitchen and bring him two new light bulbs when he heard a low, guttural, hissing sound. He froze, still holding the saucer of milk. 'Lugosi?' he called.

'Was that him?' asked Wanda, peering into the shadowy room. 'He sure sounded weird.'

Martin paused for a moment, listening. Then he heard the scratching of claws on the wood-block floor, and that same hissing sound.

'Lugosi, it's only me. It's your uncle Martin. Come on, chum. Wanda's brought you some milk; some luvvy-wuvvy nonradioactive low-fat enriched-calcium milk.'

There was a very long silence. Wanda said, 'What's his name? Lugosi?'

'That's right. Why don't you try calling him?' 'Okay,' said Wanda. 'Lugosi! Lugosi! Here, pussy-pussy-pussy! Come on, Lugosi!'

Martin set the saucer of milk down on the desk. There was something about Lugosi's utter silence that he didn't like. He strained his eyes to see through the shadows — looking for anything, a paw, a tail, a reflection of yellow feline eye. Maybe the cat's experience in the mirror had traumatized it; maybe it was hurt. He looked and he listened but for one suspended heart-beat after another the room was silent, except for the muffled growling and grinding of greater Los Angeles, outside the window in the California night.

'Here, Lugosi!' called Wanda. 'Here, pussy-pussy!' It was then that Martin heard the faint thump-thump-thump of a furry tail on the floor, and the low death-rattle sound of a cat purring.

'Sounds like he's under the desk someplace,' he told Wanda, and hunkered down to take a look.

Thump, thump, thump. Prrrrrr-prrrrrr-prrrrrr. 'Lugosi?' he asked, and his voice was clogged with phlegm. Two eyes opened in the darkness. Two eyes that burned incandescent blue, like the flames of welding torches.

'Lugosi?' asked Martin, although this time it was scarcely a question at all.

Something hard and vicious came flying out from under the desk and landed directly in his face, knocking him backwards onto the floor. He was so surprised that he didn't even shout out, but Wanda did - a startled wail, and then a piercing scream.

He felt claws tearing at his neck; claws tearing at his cheeks. His mouth was gagged with soft, fetid fur.

Panicking, he seized the cat's body in both hands and tried to drag it away from his face, but its claws were hooked into his ears and his scalp, and he couldn't get it free.

'Aaahh!' he heard himself shouting. 'Wanda, help me! Wanda!'

Wanda came blustering into the room and slapped at the cat, but didn't know what else to do. Martin rolled over and over on the floor, tipping over his chair with his pedaling legs, colliding against his desk; but the cat clung viciously to his head, lacerating his face with claws that felt like whips made out of razor wire.

My eyes! thought Martin in terror. It's trying to claw out my eyes!

He managed to force his left hand underneath the cat's scrabbling body and cover his face. He could taste blood and choking fur. With his right hand, he groped for his desk, missed it, then found it, and dragged open the bottom drawer with a crash. His hand plunged into it, searching for any thing-a knife, a hammer, a pair of pliers.

His fingers closed around the handle of a large screwdriver — the same one he had used to fix the mirror to the sitting room wall. Grunting, struggling, he raised the screwdriver and jabbed it into the cat's body: once, twice, three times — blunt-edged metal into soft thrashing fur. The third time, the cat spat like a serpent and tore at him wildly, and so he stabbed it again. It uttered a long, harsh scream that was like nothing that Martin had ever heard in his life before.

The cat sprang off him, careened sideways against the wall, then flew at Wanda, tearing at her legs. Wanda screamed and fell. The cat instantly leaped onto her face and ripped at one side of it with an audible crackle of skin and muscle.

But Martin was up on his feet now. Coughing, stumbling, he seized hold of the cat by the scruff of its neck, and lifted it up and held it high, even though it was flailing and writhing like a maggot on a fishhook, and scrabbling furiously at his hand with its hind legs.

Martin rammed the cat's head against the wall, burying his thumb into its neck so that it cackled for air. Its eyes bulged -those flaring blue eyes - and it stretched its mouth open so wide in strangulated hatred that it dislocated its jaw.

Wanda cried out, 'No!' but Martin drew back his arm and then crunched the screwdriver straight through the cat's chest and pinned it to the wall.

He stepped back, staggered back. The cat didn't scream. It twisted and struggled and swung from side to side, staring at him, staring at him, as if it didn't mind dying, impaled on this screwdriver, provided it was sure that Martin would soon die, too.

Wanda began to sob hysterically. Martin said, 'Come on, come on, it's all over now. The cat went crazy, that's all. It just went crazy.'

He led her toward the door, back to the Capellis' apartment. He shielded her face as they passed the cat. It was still alive, bubbling blood from its stretched-open mouth, still staring, still trying to swing itself free.

They opened the door. Wanda leaned against the wall, white and shivering, her forehead and her upper lip beaded with perspiration, her hand pressed against her lacerated cheek. 'I'm sorry,' she said, 'I have to be sick,' and she went off to the bathroom. Martin stood light-headed in the hallway, swaying from side to side, and heard her regurgitate the chicken-and-stuffing frozen dinner that the Capellis had left her.

Emilio had heard the screaming and the banging around upstairs, and he was sitting up in his bed wide awake. 'Boy,' he said, impressed, when Martin came into his bedroom and switched on the light. 'What happened toj/oa?'

'I had a fight,' Martin told him. 'Listen — you'd better get back to sleep. Your grandparents will be home soon.'

'Who did you fight with?' Emilio wanted to know. 'Was it a ninja? Boy, I'll bet you got those cuts from a ninja throwing-star.'

'It was a cat, as a matter of fact,' Martin told him. He sat down on the end of Emilio's bed and dabbed at his face with his handkerchief. He was amazed by the amount of deep red blood that spattered all over it. 'Am I hurt that bad?' he asked Emilio, and stood up to look in his He-Man mirror.

His face was appalling; like a newsreel photograph of somebody who had just been blown up by a terrorist bomb. His eyes were puffy, his cheeks were swollen, his whole face was crisscrossed with deep scratches. His ears were torn, and his left earlobe was almost hanging off, and dangled when he moved his head.

'You'd better get to the hospital,' said Emilio sensibly. Martin saw this grotesque, bloodied face nod back at him. 'Yes,' he said. 'A-one idea.' He couldn't understand why it didn't hurt more than it did, or why he was able to walk around and talk so sensibly when he looked so terrible.

Wanda came into the room, still white, pressing a bloodstained pad of toilet tissue to her lacerated cheek. 'Oh, my God,' she said, and her eyes were filled with tears. 'I never knew a cat to do anything like that.'

Martin dabbed at his face with his handkerchief. 'I'm going down to the hospital, okay? I don't want to wind up like Van Gogh, with only one ear. Wanda - will you be all right?'

'I guess so,' she said. 'I'll call up my pop and tell him what's happened.'

Martin lifted the tissue away from her face and examined her scratches. They were deep, but quite clean, and he hoped for everyone's sake that they wouldn't scar. He didn't relish the idea of being sued by Wanda's parents.

'Come on, you'll be okay,' he told her, although he could feel her trembling through her jogging suit; that unstoppable shaking of the shocked, and the truly afraid.

He left the Capellis' apartment and went upstairs to get his car keys. When he reached the landing, he hesitated. Supposing the cat had worked itself free? Supposing he opened the front door and it came flying out at him, just as ferociously as it had before? He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, smearing his knuckles with blood and saliva. Then he cautiously reached out his hand and eased the door open.

The cat was hanging exactly where he had impaled it, its tail and its hind legs dangling, its front paws cocked, its flat anvil-shaped head lolling to one side. Dark rivulets of blood ran down the wall beneath it.

Martin tiptoed along the hallway until he was almost opposite it. Its eyes were closed, its mouth was silently snarling open. It didn't look at all like Lugosi. It was a big brindled torn, with a heavy shaggy body and vicious claws. It stank of cat's urine and some other unutterable sourness that Martin couldn't even begin to recognize.

'You miserable sonofabitch,' he told it between puffed-up lips. The cat had even managed to scratch his tongue.

He went into the sitting room. He tried the light switch again, and this time, unaccountably, it worked. He found his car keys gleaming under the desk. He made a point of not looking in the mirror. If everything in the mirror was the same as it was in here, then that was fine. If it wasn't, then he didn't want to know. Not now, not just yet. His ear was beginning to throb and his face felt as if it was already swollen up to three times its normal size.

He went back into the hallway. He wondered what he ought to do with the cat's body. He couldn't just leave it hanging there, but now that the adrenaline had all drained out of him, he found the thought of touching it almost too repulsive to think about.

But supposing Mr Capelli came looking for him, when he was down at the hospital, and found it? There wouldn't be any question about it then. Immediate eviction — futon, desk and typewriter straight out onto the street, no argument, so sue me.

In the kitchen drawer, Martin found a large green trash bag. He went back out to the hallway, rolled up the trash bag like a giant condom, and arranged it under the place where the cat was hanging. His idea was to yank out the screwdriver, whereupon the cat's body would drop neatly into the trash bag. He could then unroll the trash bag, twist-tie the top, and heave it out of his car in some dark and lonely stretch of the freeway.

He stood in front of the cat's body for a long time before he could summon up the courage to take hold of the screwdriver handle. What's the matter with you, wimp? It's only a cat, and a dead cat at that.

What's the matter? I'm scared shitless, that's what's the matter. I mean — where did it come from, this cat? The windows were locked, the door was locked, nobody else had a key. Where the hell did it come from, except out of the mirror?

Mr Capelli's right. That mirror's driving you bananas. Get rid of it, before something comes shimmering out of it that gets rid of you.

He grasped the screwdriver handle tightly and tugged. Nothing happened. The blade was jammed too tight. God almighty, he thought, / must have had the strength often men to dig this into the wall. But look at me now. Hundred-and-sixty-pound weakling.

He placed the flat of his left hand firmly against the plaster, readjusted his grip on the screwdriver handle with his right hand, and tugged again.

The result was instantaneous. The cat's eyes flared open, and it screamed at him. He screamed, too, just as loudly.

The cat dropped. Martin fell backward, jarring his back against the handle of his bedroom door. But as quickly as he could, he bundled the green plastic around the writhing animal and twisted the top of the bag tight.

'Oh God, please make it die,' he gibbered. 'Oh God, oh God, please make it die.'

But the cat twisted and turned and ripped furiously and noisily at the plastic with its claws, screaming with a cry like a tortured baby.

Martin picked up the screwdriver, but dropped it again. It rolled across the floor, out of his reach. The cat savaged a long rent in the plastic. He saw its hate-filled face, with its mouth still stretched wide. He saw its eyes burning.

Crying out with effort, he lifted up the bag and twisted it tighter to keep the cat imprisoned inside it. Then he swung it around his head, once, twice, like a hammer thrower, and smashed it as hard as he could against the wall - and then smashed it again, and again, and again.

When the animal seemed to have stopped struggling, he dropped the bag onto the floor, scooped up his screwdriver, and crunched the blade into the cat's body over and over again, so many times that he completely lost count. Then he knelt, back on his heels, gasping for breath. 'Oh, shit,' he panted. 'Oh, shit.'

He dragged the bag to the front door. It seemed impossibly heavy, just for a cat. But just as he was about to open up the door and heave the bag out, he heard voices. Italian voices, amplified with wine and indignation. The Capellis had arrived home.

'What's that? A cat? He doesn't have no cat! He's not allowed no cat! Terms of the lease! You need a doctor, you know that? Look, you're bleeding! What's your father going to say? Where's Martin? What do you mean, he's worse? What could be worse?'

Martin hesitated: then, with a rustling plasticky noise, he dragged the bag through to the kitchen, leaving calligraphic tracks of blood across the tiles. He took the lid off the big gray plastic trash bin and dropped the cat's body inside. He mopped up the floor with his squeegee mop. He felt like a murderer as he squeezed blood-streaked water into the sink. God, he thought, what was it like when you hacked up a human being?

How did you ever get rid of the blood? The blood swirled around the sink like the shower stall in Psycho.

Mr Capelli appeared at the door, flushed, sweating, smelling of brandy. 'Martin?' he shouted; then, when Martin turned around, 'My God! Look at you? What are you doing? My God!'

Martin leaned against the wall and gave Mr Capelli a twist of his mouth that was intended to be a smile. 'I'm okay, Mr Capelli, I'm fine. I was just looking for my car keys - you know, to drive myself down to the hospital.'

Mr Capelli frowned at him and then held out his hands. Martin reached out to take hold of them, but somehow they weren't really there, and everything was black, and none of this really mattered, anyway.

He fell flat on his face on the kitchen floor, and he was lucky not to break his nose. Mr Capelli dithered for a moment and then called down the stairs, 'Wanda! Call for an ambulance! Tell them pronto!'

He woke up and the first thing that he could hear was clicking. Clickety-click; clickety-clack; pause clickety-click; clickety-clack. He lifted his head, and there was Ramone, sitting cross-legged on one of those uncomfortable hospital chairs, furiously working at a Rubik's Magic. The blinds were closed, so that the room was very dim, although he could hear traffic and noise and all the sounds of a busy day. There were flowers everywhere, roses and orchids and huge apricot-colored daisies; and a blowfly was tapping against the window. He tried to speak, but his mouth felt as though it were fifty times the normal size, and he couldn't remember what you had to do to form words.

'Mamown . . .' he blurred. 'Mamown . . .'

Ramone turned his head and peered at him. 'Hey, man! You're still alive and kicking!' He put down his Rubik's Magic and came across to the bed. His black face loomed over Martin like a bulging-eyed fish looking out of an aquarium. 'We all thought you was definitely ready for the coma room - you know, where you don't wake up, so they cut your legs off and donate them to some rich South American rumba dancer with leg cancer.'

'Can you see my legs dancing the rumba?' croaked Martin.

Ramone took hold of his hand and squeezed it. 'Guess not, brother, but good to see you're alive. How do you feel?'

Martin tried to lift his head, but his scalp felt as if it had been sewn to the pillow. 'Sore,' he said. Then, 'Jesus.'

'Hey - Mr Caparooparelli told me all about that cat' said Ramone. 'That was weird, man, that was definitely far out.'

Martin asked, 'Could you pour me some water? I can hardly swallow.'

Ramone noisily poured him a large glass of Perrier. 'It's not surprising you feel like that. It's the anesthetic, always makes you feel like shit. Remember when I totaled that-Thunder-bird? I was under for four hours, came out feeling like shit.'

Martin drank, and then said, 'How long was I .. .?'

'Two and a half hours, man. They gave you thirty-eight stitches.'

'Jesus,' said Martin. He felt sore and swollen and inflated. He knew that he ought to be worried, too, and working on something or other - some TV script - but he was too drowsy to remember what it was.

'Mr Caparoopadoopa got rid of the cat,' said Ramone. 'Dropped it in the trash outside the supermarket. Let's just hope the good old Humane Society doesn't hunt him down.'

'The cat... came through the mirror ...' said Martin in a blurred voice. 'Must have. Must have. No other way. Doors locked, windows locked.'

'You truly think it came out of the mirror? Ramone asked him. He added, in the Mr T accent that both he and Martin could mimic, 'Now, you listen here, suckah, I've had enough of this jibbah-jabbuh.'

'But it's just like I said before,' Martin insisted. 'One for one. Tit for tat, cat for cat. Balance. Lugosi went into the mirror, and sooner or later some other poor cat had to come out.'

'But that kitty cat wasn't anything like Lugosi.'

'Doesn't matter,' Martin told him. 'The tennis ball and the rubber ball - they were just as - what do you call it? They were just as dissimilar.'

'Dissimilar, right,' agreed Ramone, 'dis-simil-ah,' and nodded; but then said, 'What happens now? I mean you killed that cat, right? Does that mean Lugosi was killed in the mir-rorland, or what? Is he still alive, or dead, or what?'

'That's just the question I've been asking,' said Martin. 'Not just about Lugosi, but Boofuls, too.'

Ramone picked up his Rubik's Magic and flicked it a few times. 'Oh, well, Boofuls, yeah. I haven't had the pleasure yet. If it is a pleasure.'

Martin drank a little more water. Then he managed to lift himself up onto his elbows. 'What time is it?'

'Three o'clock in the afternoon.'

'I have to get out of here.'

Ramone pushed him back onto the pillow. 'You sure as hell don't. You have to stay here one more night, compadre, for observation. That's what they said. It's a good thing you got medical insurance.'

'But the mirror.'

'What about the jive mirror?'

'Mr Capelli said he wanted it out. And not only that, he wanted it out by tonight. Supposing he does something lunatic, like smash it up or throw it on the dump? What's going to happen to Lugosi then? Or Boofuls, come to that?'

Ramone said, 'You don't have to worry yourself about that, man. I already took care of that. I told Mr Capacloopi that I was going to take the mirror off of your hands. I'm supposed to collect it later this afternoon and store it down at The Reel Thing.'

'Will you do that?' asked Martin with relief.

'Sure I'll do it. That's unless some cat-out-of-hell conies jumping out of it and tries the same kind of number on me that it did on you.''

Martin reached out his hand. 'You're a pal, Perez.'

'Well, you're all heart, Mart.'

Martin lay back and thought for a while, and then he said, 'Do you know something? What we need is a medium.'

'A medium what?' asked Ramone.

'I mean a medium medium. A clairvoyant. Somebody who can get in contact with the spirits.'

'Are you pulling my leg?'

'No,' Martin told him, 'I'm serious. It seems to me that this mirror is acting like some kind of gateway, do you know what I mean, between the real world and the spirit world. You can't tell me that Boofuls isn't a spirit, can you? And these mediums - they should be used to handling this kind of thing, shouldn't they? Like when they talk to the spirits, they create their own way through to the other side, right? I would have thought that any medium worth his money would jump at the chance of talking to the spirits the same way that Emilio talks to Boofuls. I mean to see the spirit as clearly as your hand in front of your face, that's something else.'

'Seeing your favourite cat being swallowed up is something else, too,' Ramone complained. ''And seeing your main man looking like he's just.come out of the ring with Ivan Drago. " You will lose,"' he said, imitating the Russian boxer in Rocky IV.

'Do you know anybody who's into that kind of thing?' said Martin.

Ramone shook his head. 'Not me. But I know somebody who might know. One of my customers is Elmore Sweet - you know, the pianist. Liberace without the restraint. His mother died about two or three years ago, but every time he comes in he tells me that he's been rapping with Momsy about this or that. I used to think he'd lost his marbles at first, but then Dorothy Dunkley told me that he gets in touch, you know, with seances and everything.'

'Good,' said Martin. 'So why don't you call him and ask him the name of his medium.'