Mirror

' You said you never wanted to see my face again, Morris, never ever! Well, now your wish has come true! And you said you never wanted to hear my name again, Morris, and you shall have that wish, too!'

Morris stood up and switched off the projector. 'Did you ever hear such garbage?' he asked Alison. 'Two hundred dollars I paid for that! I'll strangle that Benny Ito, with my bare hands!'

Alison finished her drink.

'How about another?' Morris suggested. 'Then we'll go to bed. I finished that contract for MTM.'

He went across to the liquor cabinet, turned his back to Alison, and poured out whiskey.

'Are we going to the premiere tomorrow?' Alison asked him. 'I bought this beautiful gold dress today at Alluci's.'

Morris reached out for two cocktail stirrers. 'Spending my profits again, hunh?'

'Oh, it's beautiful,' said Alison. Til try it on for you when we go upstairs. It has a very low front, very daring, but a fantastic bow on one hip, and it's kind of split down the same side, all the way to the hem. It's very sexy but it's very chic.'

Morris turned around, a drink in each hand. 'Everybody's going to be looking at you, hunh?'

'Oh, Morry, you know it's all for you.'

'No point in doing it for me,' said Morris; and for the first time Alison caught the odd, tight tone in his voice. She turned and looked at him and at first she couldn't understand what he had done, but as he shuffled nearer with the two drinks, grimacing as he came, she suddenly realized in utter horror that Boofuls' mocking prediction had come true, and that Morris had fulfilled it.

A sharp cocktail stirrer protruded out of each of Morris' eyeballs. He had prodded one directly into the iris of each eye, as far as it would go, blinding himself instantly. Now he was groping his way toward Alison with thin glutinous runnels of optic fluid dripping down each cheek.

Alison screamed. A high-pitched genuine theatrical scream. 'Morry! Oh, God, Morry! What have you done! Morry, your eyes!'

Morris hesitated, stumbled, and dropped both glasses of whiskey. One of them rolled on the carpet, the other caught the edge of the coffee table and smashed.

'It was the only thing I could do,' he said in bewilderment. 'It was the only thing I could do.'

Alison stood up, but she was so appalled that she couldn't go near him. 'Morry,' she wept, 'take them out, Morry. Please, Morry, take them out! I'll call for the ambulance, please, Morry, Please!'

Morris groped forward, trying to follow the sound of her voice. 'Alison, honey, I -' But then he stopped and turned his head around, as if he were listening to something. And at that moment, the projector clicked and whirred into life once again, all by itself, frightening Alison so much that she screamed and screamed and this time she couldn't stop.

Boofuls' face appeared on the screen yet again, that white, expressionless face, and his voice whispered from the speakers. 'You have one of your wishes, Morris. You will never see me again. What do you say, Morris? What do you say? Don't you ever say thank you when somebody gives you what you want?'

Morris bent his head slightly forward and took hold of the sticks that protruded from his eyes. Shuddering, gasping, he drew them out, and when he did so a large clear glob of fluid swelled out of the punctured holes that he had made in each iris. Alison's screaming quietened to a high endless whimpering, but she couldn't take her eyes away from him, she couldn't move, she couldn't do anything to help him.

And all the time the high, childish teasing of Boofuls continued to pipe from the movie speakers, and Boofuls' bright face continued to stare at them out of the screen.' You couldn't be nice, Morris, you couldn't be nice! You couldn't be sugar and spice. Now you'll get it, whatever you want, blind as a bat and deaf as a post!'

'Shut up! Shut up! For God's sake, shut up!' Alison screamed, and rushed across to the movie screen and tugged at it and tore at it until it came rumbling down from the ceiling. Then she turned to the speakers, and lifted them up one after the other, and smashed them against the coffee table.

The projector, however, continued to run, and Boofuls' flattened-out face appeared on the back of the white-leather couch, silently mouthing the same words over and over. Alison hysterically threw herself at the couch and tried to drag the image of Boofuls off the leather with her fingernails.

Morris meanwhile had sunk slowly to his knees onto the white carpet. Between the finger and thumb of each hand, he held up the two cocktail stirrers.

'Alison, honey, I couldn't do anything else. There wasn't any choice, honey-pie.'

Alison threw back her head and sobbed, one harsh, strangulated sob after the other. 'Oh God, Morry, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?'

But Morris couldn't hear her. Morris' head was filled with the lisping monotonous voice of Boofuls, like an old silk dress being dragged across a floor, saying, ' You never wanted to see me, Morris; you never wanted to hear me. I can give you your wish, Morris! I can give you your wish!'

Morris slowly raised the two cocktail stirrers and blindly prodded them against his cheeks until he found his ears. Then he inserted the points deep in each ear, so that he could feel them pricking painfully against his eardrums.

Alison had stopped sobbing and was messily wiping the tears from her face with her hands. 'Oh God, Morry,' she told him. 'I'm sorry. I couldn't stand to see you that way. I'd better go call for an ambulance.'

She turned, and there he was, kneeling on the floor with his hands up to his ears, and a cocktail stirrer in each hand. His injured eyes were closed, so that he looked almost normal, and there was an expression on his face of curious calm.

'Morry?' she questioned him. Then she saw the cocktail stirrers. 'Morry!'

With a small suppressed gasp, Morris pushed the points of the sticks straight through his eardrums, puncturing both of them at once. He stayed quite still for a moment, holding his breath, and then gave each stick an extra twist, so that his tympanic membranes would be completely torn open.

Alison, trembling, picked up the cordless telephone and dialled 911. 'Mr Nathan's house,' she whispered. 'That's right, Mulholland Drive. Please, quickly.'

Then she put down the phone and went over to Morris and knelt down in front of him.

'Oh, Morry,' she said, and held him tightly in her arms, her deaf and blinded husband, and rocked him, and swore to herself that if she never did anything else in her life, ever again, she would have her revenge on Boofuls.

The morning of the premiere of Sweet Chariot, the Los Angeles basin was filled with thick sepia smog. Because of its elevation on the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills, however, Franklin Avenue was clear of pollution, and when Martin looked out of his kitchen window he felt as if he were staring out over some strange and murky Sargasso Sea.

He drank two cups of hot black coffee, ate a little muesli sprinkled with wheat germ, and then dressed in a white T-shirt and khaki slacks and went downstairs to see if Mr Capelli would like to take a walk down to Hollywood Boulevard.

'A walk?' said Mr Capelli. 'You mean that thing when you put one foot in front of the other and don't stop till you get home again?'

They walked arm in arm, not saying much, but friends, brothers in crisis. They went downhill on La Brea; and then east on Hollywood Boulevard as far as Mann's Chinese Theater, where half a dozen workmen were dressing the marquee for tonight's opening. A huge 3-D billboard had been erected with a fifty-foot acrylic painting of Boofuls, flying through the clouds with a sweet smile of innocence. That scene came from the very end of the picture, when God decides that the young street Arab has done enough good deeds to redeem himself, and accepts His errant son into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Martin and Mr Capelli stood in front of the theater for a long while, watching the electricians connecting the klieg lights. Mr Capelli said, 'You know something, I saw the Kliegl brothers once, when I was a kid. They were arguing in the street about something really technical, like carbon arcs or something. And one of them said to the other — well, I don't know which one it was, John or Anton — but he said, "If it wasn't for me, movies wouldn't even exist." And the other one said, "Maybe that would have been a blessing.'"

Martin smiled. 'You actually saw that?'

Mr Capelli nodded. 'That was a long time ago. Maybe things were more innocent then.'

Martin said, 'I don't think things have ever been innocent, Mr Capelli.'

Mr Capelli squeezed Martin's arm. 'I guess you're right, Martin. I wish you weren't.'

They went into Maxie's for a cup of coffee. They said very little; but then they didn't need to. They were both thinking about Emilio.

When they returned to Franklin Avenue (both perspiring, because the morning was growing hot now), they saw a pale blue Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible parked outside. The license plate was 10 PC.

'That's Morris Nathan's car,' said Martin in surprise. 'I thought Morris wasn't speaking to me - not after I went round to the Fox lot and tried to tell Boofuls what a bastard he was.'

'Just so long as he doesn't keep that heap of imported junk cluttering up my driveway,' Mr Capelli complained.

'Mr Capelli, that's a Rolls-Royce Corniche!'

'Listen, Martin, one day you'll learn. All automobiles are a heap of junk. What are they, plastic, chromium, foam rubber, bits and pieces. This one is a heap of imported junk, that's all.'

'Eut you love your Lincoln.'

'Sure I love my Lincoln. Do you know why? I always kid Emilio it turns itself into a robot, you know, like Transporters.'

'Transformers,' Martin corrected him; but kindly.

'Sure, that's right, Transformers. He loves it. He keeps telling me, Grandpa, I saw it happen, I saw it change. The wheels turned into hands and the hood turned into a hat and the trunk opened up and two legs came out, and who knows what?' There were tears in Mr Capelli's eyes. 'Martin, he's just a little boy. I love him so much. Can't we get him out of there?' ^

Martin said soberly, 'Boofuls did promise. So did Miss Redd.'

Mr Capelli shook his head. 'Those people,' he said. 'Those people.'

When they entered the house, however, they were surprised to find not Morris but Alison, sitting on the stairs in a tight white cotton suntop and a wide 1950s skirt and strappy high-heeled sandals, waiting for them.

As soon as she caught sight of Martin, she came up and flung her arms around him and burst into tears.

'Hey,' said Martin. 'Hey, what's happened? Alison? What's happened?'

'It's Morry,' she wept. 'Oh, Martin, it's Morry.'

Mr Capelli laid a hand on her shoulder. 'Hey, now, don't get upset. Look at you, you're all upset! And look at me, I'm all upset, too!'

Martin asked Alison, 'What's happened? Alison! Is Morry okay?'

Alison choked out, 'He's blind, Martin. He's blind! And he did it himself, with two cocktail stirrers, just like that! And then he stuck them in his ears and made himself deaf!'

'What?' said Martin. 'Are you kidding me, or what? Morris 4 blinded himself? He deafened himself? Alison — he works in the movies!'

'Is that all you care about?' Alison screamed. 'He's my husband! I love him! He gives me everything! And now he's blind and he can't ever see me again, and he's deaf and he can't ever hear me again!'

Martin held Alison close. Mr Capelli, despondent, sat down on the stairs. 'I don't know, what the hell. You sometimes wonder if it's worth living.'

Martin said, 'Come on upstairs. There's another bottle of Chablis in the fridge. The very least we can do is get drunk.'

Alison drank two large glasses of cold Chablis one after the other and then told Martin and Mr Capelli everything that had happened last night, the way that Morris had pierced his eyes and ears. 'I couldn't do anything to help him,' she said; and the tears ran freely down her face. 'I broke the screen, I broke the speakers, but it didn't make any difference.' i Martin said, 'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Whatever arguments I ever had with Morris.' Alison wiped her eyes with a crumpled tissue. 'Morry never did anything worse than speak his mind. Nobody deserves to be blind and deaf, just because they spoke their mind. You know, Morry was always speaking his mind, and he was rude sometimes, but he never deserved that.'

'But you really believe that Lejeune did it?' Martin asked her.

Alison nodded. 'I wouldn't have come here otherwise. It was his face, it was his voice. And you remember what he said to Morry, when he was auditioning at Fox? When they had that argument? You never want to see my face again, you never want to hear my name. Well, that's just what he said on the movie. Exactly that - like he was talking to Morry face-to-face.'

Martin said, 'I'm sorry, Alison. I'm really sorry. But there's nothing I can do. I tried to get to Lejeune, but they wouldn't let me.'

Not long afterward, Ramone appeared. He stood in the doorway with his thumbs hooked through the belt loops of his jeans, looking like Carlos Santana on his weekend off. Martin told him, 'There's nothing. There's no news.'

'Maybe you should switch on the television,' Ramone suggested. 'They're showing an hour-long program, "The Making of Sweet Chariot", just about now, Channel Four.'

'I don't want to watch that,' said Mr Capelli. 'Maybe I'll get some pizza.'

'Pepperoni, deep-dish, with extra chilis, mushrooms, onions, and sweet corn,' said Ramone, easing himself onto the couch.

Mr Capelli stared at him in astonishment, but Martin gave him a nod to tell him that Ramone never took anybody for granted. 'I'll have whatever,' he told Mr Capelli.

Alison said, 'I'll pass. I'm sorry. I don't feel very hungry.'

For some reason, all four of them turned toward the mirror, where the gold-painted face of Pan grinned at them in silent triumph. They looked like a group portrait printed on sun-faded paper; an evanescent photograph of four people who had been brought together by pain and friendship and circumstance, and who would soon have to face the most harrowing experience of their entire lives.

As if to mock them, the mirror seemed to darken and dim, until they could hardly see their faces in it at all.

Mr Capelli watched the mirror for a moment, and then angrily and with great determination went off to buy some pizzas.

Just before six o'clock that evening, Martin said, 'Come on, I can't stand waiting around here any longer. Let's go down to Mann's and see the damn thing for ourselves.'

'You go,' said Mr Capelli. Til wait here. Just in case - you know — Emilio gets to come out of the mirror.'

Til stay, too,' said Alison. 'You don't mind if I stay?'

'Sure, go ahead,' Martin told her.

At that moment, however, Ramone said, 'Look, on the television, there it is!'

It was a CB S report by Nancy Bergen, transmitted live from Hollywood Boulevard. In the background they could see the crowds of fans already assembling — even though the first stars weren't expected to start arriving for at least an hour — and the huge triumphant marquee picture of Boofuls.

Nancy Bergen was saying, '— motion-picture event of the decade — unknown child star discovered by June Lassiter at 20th Century-Fox — extraordinary natural talent for song-and-dance — won him the lead role in a thirty-five-million-dollar remake of a musical that was actually never made in the first place - or at least never completed - Sweet Chariot -'

Martin put in, 'Notice how she hasn't mentioned Boofuls, not once. He's still bad karma in Hollywood, always will be.'

Ramone said, 'Bad karma? He'll be catmeat if I ever get my hands on him.'

Nancy Bergen went on, '- such confidence in Sweet Chariot's success that they are holding simultaneous premieres throughout the United States and Europe - which means that in London they're holding their first screening in time for an early breakfast, and in New York it's going to be a one-o'clock-in-the-morning affair - so sought after have the premiere tickets been, however, that —'

'You want some more wine?' Alison asked Ramone.

'Oh, sure, thanks, just a half glass,' Ramone told her.

'— thousand people will see Sweet Chariot simultaneously —'

'How many did she say?' Martin asked.

'What?' said Ramone.

'How many people did she say would be seeing Sweet Chariot tonight?'

Ramone shrugged. 'I don't know, man. I didn't hear. Must be quite a few thousand.'

Martin quickly pressed the remote and flicked the television from station to station, but none of the other channels were carrying reports about Sweet Chariot.

Martin told Mr Capelli, 'Give me the phone book.'

'Sure,' said Mr Capelli, 'but what's the problem?'

Flicking quickly through the pages, Martin found the number of CBS Television News. 'I thought I heard Nancy Bergen say a particular number, that's all. It rang a bell.'

He picked up the phone and dialed CBS. The switchboard took endless minutes to answer, and then endless more minutes to connect him with the news desk.

'Chuck Pressler,' announced a laconic voice.

'Oh, hi, sorry to bother you,' said Martin. 'I was watching Nancy Bergen's report on the Sweet Chariot premiere. She mentioned how many thousands of people were going to be watching the first screening simultaneously. Do you have that figure there? I missed it.'

There was some shuffling around, and then the laconic voice said, 'I don't have that information here, right now. Nancy's going to be back later tonight, around eleven o'clock. You could try calling her then. Or tomorrow morning maybe.'

Martin put down the phone and dialed 20th Century-Fox. This time there was no answer at all. 'Damn it,' he said. 'Come on, Ramone, let's get down there and ask Nancy Bergen for ourselves.'

They left Mr Capelli and Alison at the apartment and jogged down La Brea in the sweltering evening heat. When they reached the intersection with Hollywood Boulevard, they found that it was already crowded with thousands of fans and sightseers, and that there were police trestles all around the Chinese Theater. Inch by inch, sweating, alternately elbowing and apologizing, they forced their way through to the front of the lines, as close as they could to the CBS outside-broadcast truck. It took them almost ten minutes to get there, and when they did they found two cops standing right between them and the CBS crew.

Martin glimpsed Nancy Bergen, with her brushed blond hair and her shiny cerise evening dress, and shouted out, 'Ms Bergen! Ms Bergen!'

The girl standing next to him, scowled and said, 'That was right in my goddamned ear, you freak.'

Martin ignored her, and cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled, 'Ms Bergen! Over here!'

At last, catching the sound of her name amid the bustle, Nancy Bergen turned around and frowned toward the crowd. Several of them waved, and she smiled and waved back. The noise around the theater was already tremendous: talking and laughing and shuffling of feet, and even when Martin bellowed, 'Ms Bergen!' one more time, she turned away because she obviously hadn't heard him.

Martin checked his watch. There were fewer than eleven minutes to go before the premiere. The first guests were already arriving, and there was a long line of shining limousines all the way up Hollywood Boulevard. With a cheer from the crowd, the klieg lights were switched on and stalked around the night sky on brilliant stilts.

Ramone said, 'Why is this so important, man? I'm getting my feet jumped on here.'

'Listen,' Martin told him, 'I want you to create a diversion so that I can get under the police trestle and across to the television truck.'

'Create a diversion? How the hell do I create a diversion?'

'Well, go farther down the line there and try to push your way through.'

'Oh, that's great, and get myself arrested?'

'Pretend you're sick, then. Pretend you're just about to have a heart attack.'

'That's right, and get myself carried off to the hospital.'

'Well, think of something, for God's sake. I have to talk to Nancy Bergen, and I have to talk to her now!'

Ramone rubbed sweat from the back of his neck and nodded, 'Okay. But you'd better have a damned awesome reason for doing this, amigo.'

'Have faith, will you?' Martin told him.

Ramone jostled his way through the spectators who were crowding the police trestles until he was twenty or thirty feet away. He bobbed his head up and down a few times and then turned toward Martin and made a circle between finger and thumb, Watch this, buddy. Then he suddenly started flailing his arms and shouting out,' Thief! Thief! You stole my wallet! Thief!'

Everybody around him backed away. Either he was crazy and he was going to attack them, or else he wasn't crazy and somebody was going to be accused of taking his wallet, and either alternative was about as attractive as catching AIDS.

At first, the two police officers didn't see him, they were too busy standing in camera shot and trying to look groomed and tough, but then two or three girls stumbled and fell because of the commotion that Ramone was causing, and they hurried down the police line to see what was happening. Martin immediately ducked under the trestle, dodged around the back of the CBS truck, and approached Nancy Bergen from behind. She was listening to her producer talking to her over her earphone, and saying, 'Yes, Parley; okay, Parley; but they won't be arriving for at least five minutes.'

As soon as she had finished, Martin tapped her politely on the shoulder.

'Ms Bergen?'

She stared at him blankly. That hostile don't-bother-me stare that he had seen on so many faces of so many TV personalities when the grubby public came a little too close.

'Listen, you don't know me, Ms Bergen, my name's Martin Williams.'

'You're right,' she said, marching back toward the television truck. 'I don't know you.'

'Ms Bergen, I'm a screenwriter, I wrote most of the Sweet Chariot screenplay. Actually, I updated it from the original. They probably haven't given me credit on the screen, but —'

'- but now you're angry as all hell and you're going to sue. Well, believe me, Mr Wilson, it happens all the time, and if I were you I'd save your money. The only people who make money out of law are lawyers. I've been there, I know.'

'Ms Bergen, I'm not complaining about that. But there's a whole lot more to this production than meets the eye.'

Nancy Bergen's red-haired personal assistant came up with a glass of Perrier water, a clipboard, and a lit cigarette in an aluminum-foil ashtray. Nancy swallowed two mouthfuls of water, propped the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, and began to scribble notes on the clipboard. 'Do you have something to tell me, Mr Wilson? Otherwise I'm going to have to say hasta luego, you know?'

'Do you mind if I ask you a question first?'

Nancy Bergen continued to scribble, ignoring him.

Martin said, 'You mentioned that x-thousand people were going to be watching this premiere simultaneously all over the world.'

Nancy Bergen stopped scribbling, handed the clipboard back to her assistant, dropped her cigarette back in its ashtray, blew out smoke, and said, 'One hundred forty-four thousand, why?'

Martin took a deep breath. 'I'm going to sound like some kind of religious nut when I tell you this.'

'Then don't tell me. Hank, do you have that radio mike ready?'

'It's ready, Nance,' said a thin, shaven-headed man in a sweaty T-shirt.

But Martin said, 'One hundred forty-four thousand, that's the exact number in the Book of Revelation, the exact number of innocents who follow the Lamb — the exact number of people who have to be sacrificed so that Satan can come alive again.'

Nancy Bergen beckoned one of the CBS sound men. 'Harvey, will you escort Mr Wilson back to the barriers for me?'

Martin insisted, 'Ms Bergen, I don't think you understand what I'm saying here. That boy Pip Young isn't Pip Young at all.'

'Mr Wilson, I already know that. His real name is something Lejeune. Now, please, I'm going tonto here as it is.'

'Ms Bergen, Pip Young is Boofuls! The real Boofuls! The jeal murdered Boofuls, come back to life!'

A big blond man with biceps like Virginia hams and a sweatband around his forehead laid his hand on Martin's shoulder and whistled through ruined nasal cavities, 'Come on, man, let's be friendly here, hunh?'

'Boofuls was possessed!' Martin shouted. 'That was why his grandmother killed him! Boofuls was possessed by Satan! But he escaped! He went into the mirror! But now he's back and everyone who sees this movie is going to die! Ms Bergen! Listen! One hundred forty-four thousand innocent people are going to die!'

Nancy Bergen was already out of earshot, preparing her first star interview. A gleaming black Fleetwood had just pulled into the curb, and the door was opened so that Geral-dine Grosset could step out onto the sidewalk in a clinging white dress splashed with diamante. The crowds roared and whistled and screamed, and the klieg lights crisscrossed the evening sky as if it were wartime.

Martin struggled and kicked, but the big blond man twisted his arm around behind his back and hop-skip-jumped him back to the barrier. 'Ms Bergen!' Martin screamed at the top of his voice. 'He's bringing back Satan, Ms Bergen! He's bringing him back tonightT

Several of the crowd turned to stare at Martin pityingly. The big blond man lifted him clear over the police trestle, said, 'Pardon me, lady,' to a woman who was pressed up against the barrier close by, and set Martin down onto the ground.

'Now, you listen, friend, you stay there, otherwise I swear to God you will never walk again.'

Martin was sweating and shaking and all fired up. All the same, he nodded and said, 'Okay, okay,' and rubbed his twisted wrist, and tried to look as if he had been effectively warned off. The big blond man returned to the CBS truck, glancing fiercely back at Martin from time to time, but all Martin did was smile and nod, okay, already, I'm behaving.

Ramone came pushing his way back through the crowd to join him. 'Well?' he demanded. 'Did you get what you wanted?'

Martin took hold of his arm. 'It's true, it's one hundred forty-four thousand.'

'You've lost me, man.'

'That's why they're holding all of these premieres all at once, all over the world. That's why they've never showed the movie to anybody before. There's something in the movie - I don't know, something in the way it's made, something in the screenplay, some subliminal message, maybe. All of those people who see it tonight are going to be killed.'

'You're putting me on. One hundred forty-four thousand? What the hell for?'

'Because tonight is the night, trust me. Tonight is the night that is prophesied in the Revelation. The night that Satan comes back to life, the real dragon, for real, and if you and I don't do anything about it the sun isn't going to come up again tomorrow, nor ever.'

Ramone stared at him. For the first time, Martin could see that his friend didn't believe him. And for the first time he could hear the sound of his own voice and he sounded as if he were raving.

All around them, the screaming and the applauding of the crowd sounded like a thunderous landslide as a sapphire-white limousine appeared, bringing Pip Young, a.k.a. Lejeune, a.k.a. Boofuls.

'Ramone,' said Martin, 'you and I have been friends for a very long time.'

Ramone nodded. He looked exhausted, battered, almost sad.

'Believe me, Ramone, you've seen the mirror for yourself. These terrible things haven't been happening for nothing. They've been happening for a reason, Ramone, and the reason is it's time. It's time for Satan to come back to earth, it's time for the dragon. It's all in the Bible, in the Revelation, but what it says in the Revelation is that Satan's going to come back and then be defeated for good. That's why he's used Boofuls. Boofuls has made damn sure that he doesn't get defeated. He's going to come back if we let him and this time he intends to stay.'

Ramone lowered his head. 'I don't know, man. I used to believe in Satan when I was a little kid.'

Boofuls emerged from his limousine and stood alone for a moment on the crimson-carpeted sidewalk. He was wearing a white suit with silver-sequined lapels, and his hair was shining and curly. Close behind him came Miss Redd, pale-faced, with scarlet lips, in her sweeping black cape.

As Boofuls walked up toward the theater entrance, the crowd let out an extraordinary moan of delight, and two girls in glittery cocktail-waitress costumes came tottering up on stiletto heels to present him with cellophane-covered bouquets. Boofuls accepted the flowers gravely, then passed them back to Miss Redd, who in turn passed them back to the chauffeur.

Martin tugged at Ramone's sleeve. 'Right now, I don't care whether you believe in him or not. I want you to help me, that's all. / believe in it, and that'll be good enough for the two of us.'

'So what are you planning on doing?'

'I don't have any idea. But the first thing we have to do is get ourselves into this premiere, and see what Boofuls is planning to do.'

Ramone said, 'You and me, in sweaty old T-shirts, we're going to get into the most glamoroso premiere of the decade?'

Martin looked down at himself. 'I guess you're right. Damn it. Maybe we can sneak into the back.'

'Do you see those cops?' said Ramone. 'How the hell are we going to get past those cops?'

'Mandrake gestures hypnotically,' replied Martin bitterly. 'Instantly, our heroes are clad in immaculate tuxedos.'

'Hold up just one moment,' Ramone told him. He dug into his back pants pocket and produced his keys. 'I believe our problems are ov-ah.'

He grasped Martin's arm and together they struggled back out of the crowd. It took them almost five minutes to reach the opposite side of Hollywood Boulevard, but once they were clear of the police lines they were able to dodge and shuffle their way along quite quickly. They reached Ramone's store, The Reel Thing, and Ramone unlocked the front door, switched off the burglar alarm, and let them in.

'What's on your mind?' Martin wanted to know.

Ramone took him across to the side of the store, where there were rails of old movie costumes. Right in front, with a label on it, was the painter's smock that Spring Byington had worn in You Can't Take It With You. Ramone, however, was rummaging around at the far end of the rails, and after a few moments he triumphantly came out with two immaculate tuxedos.

'If you're the same size as William Powell, this'll fit,' he told Martin.

'You're as crazy as I am,' said Martin.

'I don't think so. Now, listen, I have shirts, too, and neckties, and evening pumps. Go into the back and wash up and I'll have it all laid out for you, better than a valet.'

Martin went through to the back of the store, splashed his face with cold water, and combed his hair. By the time he returned, Ramone was already half dressed. 'Believe me,' said Ramone, 'you and me are going to look like a couple of swells.'

Within ten minutes, they were leaving the store, dressed this time in tuxedos. Martin's vest was far too tight, and so he had ripped it up the back. Ramone's pants flapped around his ankles. But in the crowds and the excitement, they hoped that nobody would notice.

'God help us,' said Martin.

'He will,' Ramone reassured him. 'He will.'

Their timing was almost perfect. They managed to push their way through to the front of the crowds just as the last official limousine was pulling away, and the police were dragging a trestle to one side. Martin elbowed his way around the edge of the trestle, and slipped behind two policemen into the roped-off area reserved for celebrities and guests. Bud Zabetti from Columbia Pictures noticed him and waved, obviously unaware that he had no invitation, and that was enough of a credential for a beady-eyed security guard to turn away satisfied and let Martin and Ramone shoulder their way into the throng of people in the theater lobby.

The lobby was hot and crowded and smelled strongly of Giorgio. Martin gradually eased his way through the crowds, nodding and smiling to people he knew. At last he approached the magic circle: June Lassiter, in a striking but somewhat extraordinary directional evening dress, more like a turquoise kite than a dress; Lester Kroll, all wavy gray hair and protruding upper teeth, and heavy gold rings on his fingers that had been given to him by various boyfriends; Geraldine Grosset, always smaller than she looked on the screen, tiny in fact, in a black gown with a gold spray over one shoulder; some starlet who was showing her naked body through a gauzy white dress; Miss Redd; and in the epicenter of this small tornado of Hollywood influence, Boofuls himself, with noticeably staring eyes, gleeful, pale, sucking in every moment of adoration as if he needed it to stay alive.

Martin came right up to him and stood beside him and said nothing; but at last Boofuls turned and saw him. He registered a split second's surprise, then looked away.

'You're not actually supposed to be here,' he said. Martin was appalled at the way Boofuls looked. For the first time, he really looked dead, like a boy who had been killed and then resurrected. There was paint and powder on his face, as if he had been prepared by an unskilled mortician for viewing by his relatives.

'You could have sent me an invitation,' Martin told him. 'After all, I wrote sixty percent of the dialogue.'

Boofuls smiled to Esther Shapiro. 'It'll be out on VCR before you know it. Then you can watch it all you want.'

Miss Redd touched Martin's hand with her own hand, as cold as chilled chicken. 'I think Pip would prefer it if you left now, Mr Williams.'

Martin ignored her, and leaned toward Boofuls and said, 'It's tonight, Boofuls, isn't it? It's tonight.'

For the first time Boofuls looked up at him directly. His eyes were rimmed with red. 'I don't know what you're talking about, Martin. Go on, now. Go home. You'd be better off watching this on television.'

'Tonight's the big night, when you and Miss Redd plan to kill off one hundred and forty-four thousand innocent people, all at once, so that you-know-who can come back.'

'You're mad,' said Miss Redd in a low, harsh voice that was more like a man's than a woman's.

'We'll see,' Martin retorted. 'But let me tell you something, Boofuls. Mad or not, I'm going to do to you what your grandmother did; and that is to chop you up into more bits than anybody will ever be able to put together again. And this time there won't be any mirrors around to save your soul.'

'Martin,' said Boofuls. 'I'm trying to save you. I'm trying to do you a favor.'

'I don't want any favors from you. I just want this madness called off, that is all. One hundred forty-four thousand people, Boofuls. Think of the slaughter. Think of the grief. And what have they ever done to you?'

Boofuls took two or three deep breaths, feverish, unhealthy, like a child in a sickroom. 'I'll tell you what they did to me, Martin. They brought down my father; they brought him down; and my father has lived a life of exile and agony ever since.'

'Maybe he deserved it,' Martin replied.

'Oh no,' said Boofuls, vehemently shaking his head. 'Nobody deserves a punishment like that. Nobody deserves an exile that never ends. In the end, everybody deserves forgiveness, no matter how great their misdemeanor.'

'And this is the answer, to sacrifice all these people?'

'Martin,' June Lassiter interrupted, 'are you monopolizing our star? Come on, Pip, we have to get upstairs to our seats.'

But Boofuls beckoned Martin closer, and touched his shoulder, and whispered, 'And I looked, and behold an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades mas following with him. And authority was given to them over the fourth of the earth. To kill with sword and famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth.'

Martin in spite of himself, shuddered. 'Boofuls,' he said, although he was quite aware how pathetically ineffectual he sounded. 'Boofuls, for Christ's sake, don't do it.'

Boofuls laughed. 'I liked you, Martin, from the moment I first saw you. I think I always will. But go home, now. There is nothing else that you can do. And don't ever ask me anything, for Christ's sake.'

'I can bring the mirror down here and damn well force you back into it.'

'You'll never be able to lift it. You know that.'

I'll try, God help me.'

For a fleeting moment, Martin thought he saw Boofuls flinch, as if the prospect of Martin trying to move the mirror somehow disturbed him.

'Leave the mirror where it is,' Boofuls told him. 'If anything happens to it, then Emilio will die. Do you want Emilio to die?'

Miss Redd now swept herself protectively in between them. 'Enough,' she said, staring at Martin with glittering eyes.

Martin tried to step around her, but she seized hold of his left hand and dug fingernails into it. The pain was sharp and intense; just like being scratched by a cat's claws. Martin whipped his hand away and it was bleeding.

'Is anything wrong here?' asked Lester Kroll, benevolently tilting his way over. He smelled strongly of whiskey. 'It's time we took our seats, isn't it? Come on, Pip, you young pipsqueak.'

June Lassiter came up to Martin and said, 'I don't know how you managed to inveigle yourself in here, Martin, and I don't think I want to find out. But since you're here, and since you wrote so much of the picture, and since poor Morris is in such a bad way . .. well, you can have a couple of seats at the back.'

'You're a princess, June,' said Martin, trying to tug his vest straight.

'Think nothing of it,' June told him. 'You're a good writer; and now you've gotten Boofuls out of your system, maybe you'll turn out to be a great writer. Tell me one thing, though.'

'Anything.'

'Where the hell did you get that tuxedo? It looks like it came off the city dump.'

Martin looked down at his drooping elephant's-ear lapels. 'You wouldn't believe me even if I told you.'

After a few minutes, Martin and Ramone were beckoned through the crowds by Kathy Lupanek and shown to two seats at the very back of the theater. The auditorium was already packed, and there was an endless cascade of excited conversation, as well as the usual coughing and shuffling and waving and women calling out, 'Aaron, darling\ I didn't know you were here!'

'Long time since I sat in the back row,' Ramone remarked. 'And I never sat in the back row with a guy before!'

At last, the theater lights dimmed; and a single spotlight fell onto the stage in front of the drapes. There was a roll of recorded drums, and then Boofuls appeared, in the white suit that he would be wearing toward the end of the film, when he was pleading with God to let him be an angel. The audience roared and cheered, and one after another they got out of their seats to give Boofuls a standing ovation. 'And - Jesus — they haven't even seen the movie yet!' marveled Ramone.

'The power of publicity,' Martin remarked, standing up so that he could get a better look at Boofuls, but not clapping.

Boofuls raised his arms and eventually the clapping spattered away to nothing and everybody sat down. He paused for a short while, not smiling, but bright-eyed, and then he said, 'You don't know how happy you've made me. I hope only that I can make you just as happy in return.'

The audience applauded him some more. Again, he gently silenced them.

'Once upon a time,' he said, and his piping voice sounded weirdly echoing and distorted through the loudspeakers, as if he were talking down a storm drain. 'Once upon a time there was a boy; and that boy was a legend in his own short lifetime. Once upon a time there was a musical; and that musical was never finished.

'The story of that boy and that unfinished musical is too tragic for us to think about tonight. Instead, let us celebrate another boy, and a musical that has been finished. A boy, and a musical, which all of us who worked on Sweet Chariot have grown to believe will change the world.'

A large woman in a tight black dress who was sitting just in front of Martin leaned over to her red-faced companion and whispered, 'Cocky little so-and-so, isn't he? Just like Vernon was telling us. Do you know he wouldn't even let the producer see the whole picture. And they went through seven editors. Seven!'

'Ssh, Velma, he's magic,' her companion replied.

'Magic, my ass,' Velma retorted.

Boofuls left the stage and went to sit between June Lassiter

and Miss Redd. The audience cheered him so vociferously that he had to stand on his seat and wave to them. At last the drapes swept back, and the audience fell silent, but there was a low murmuring of excitement all around.

Then the first chords of music sounded; and New York appeared on the screen; and the audience settled down.

Martin stared at the screen for over an hour without moving or saying a word. He was completely hypnotized. The music was so ravishing; the dances were so dazzling; the photography was unlike anything he had ever seen before. And right from the moment when he first appeared on the screen, Boofuls wrung his emotions in a way which Martin wouldn't have believed possible.

Martin hated this boy; he absolutely detested him. Yet when he was kneeling on the sidewalk trying to save the life of a dying friend, Martin found that his eyes filled up with tears and his throat choked up. He looked around the theater and saw everybody was weeping, everybody, including Ramone, and that some women were so upset that they were hiding their faces in their hands.

When the musical reached the moment when Boofuls has to choose between staying with his mother and becoming an angel, and sings a song while his mother goes about her daily chores, unable to see him, the grief in the audience became almost uncontrollable. Martin found himself smearing tears away from his eyes with his hand; and several people were sobbing in genuine grief.

'Mother . . . how can I leave you Even when the angels are calling? Mother . . . how can I turn away Into the rain that will always and always befalling?'

Martin turned from Ramone to wipe his eyes. But, as he did so, to his bewilderment, he caught sight of Boofuls and Miss Redd hurrying hand in hand toward the theater's side exit. And when he saw that, the melodramatic spell that Sweet Chariot had been casting over him was immediately and unexpectedly broken. He said, 'Ramone! Ramone!' and Ramone looked at him tearfully. 'Ramone, something's going down here, something bad.'

'Man, this movie makes me feel so goddamn sad,' Ramone said chokily.

'No,' said Martin. 'It's more than that. It's like mass hysteria.'

He looked around at the weeping, distraught audience. Their wet cheeks glistened in the half darkness. Some of them were covering their faces with their hands and sobbing as if they were totally distraught.

At last Martin began to understand why Boofuls had allowed hardly anybody to see the completed picture, and why he had insisted on its being premiered simultaneously throughout the world. It wasn't just a brilliant and captivating musical. It was a hymn to human tragedy. In a particularly subtle and convincing way, it dramatized not hope and faith and human optimism, like most musicals, but utter despair. It highlighted the inevitability of death and the uselessness of life. The only way to true fulfillment was never to be born at all.

Martin also began to understand why Mrs Alicia Crossley had felt it necessary to slaughter Boofuls before he had been able to finish the original version of Sweet Chariot. In some extraordinary mesmerizing way, Sweet Chariot was capable of drawing its audiences into a whirlpool of helpless emotion, like drowning moths being sucked down a drain, and Martin began to be desperately afraid of what was going to happen next.

'Come on,' he told Ramone. 'Let's get the hell out of here.'

'I want to see the end,' Ramone protested.

'Out!' Martin snapped at him, and grabbed hold of his sleeve.

Ramone struggled and argued, but then one of the ushers shone a torch at him and said, 'Out of there, please, sir. You're disturbing other folks' enjoyment.'

At last, still grumbling, Ramone allowed himself to be escorted out to the lobby.

'That movie is like some kind of drug, almost,' Martin told him. 'Can't you feel what it's done to your emotions? It's washed you and spun you and hung you out to dry! God knows what's going to happen to the rest of that audience.'

Ramone took two or three deep breaths, then stared at Martin as if he had never seen him before. 'That was terrible,' he said, and he sounded genuinely shaken. 'I feel like I have a hangover. Man, I felt so miserable?

'That, I think, is the whole idea,' said Martin. 'But Boofuls and that lady friend of his weren't going to stick around and get miserable with the rest of us.'

'They left?'

'A couple of minutes ago.'

'So where do you think they went?'

Martin said, 'I have a very good idea. But first I want to go home. I have a feeling that it's time we went looking for Emilio.'

They were only halfway across the lobby when they heard a high, agonized screaming sound: so high at first that it didn't sound human. They stopped and stared at each other; then they turned back toward the movie-theater doors. There was another scream; and then another; and then a terrifying howl and a noise like wooden buckets being knocked together.

One of the ushers, white-faced, said, 'Is that the sound track, or what?'

But then Martin went up to the swing doors and tried to push them open and there was a heavy collision of bodies on the other side, and more screaming, and he couldn't push them more than an inch or two.

'Man - what the hell's happening?' gasped Ramone.

A cop came running through the lobby, followed by two more. Martin said, 'I can't get the doors open, it seems like there's a whole lot of people pushing against them on the other side.'

The cops pushed with him, but there was a dead weight behind the doors which they couldn't budge. The screaming inside the theater grew louder, and there was more thumping and scrabbling and knocking.

'Upstairs!' shouted one of the cops. 'Jack — you take the side!'

The first cop bounded up the stairs to the theater balcony. Martin and Ramone followed him, panting with fear and effort. The noise inside the building was almost unbearable. It sounded like hell itself. There were no intelligible cries for help: only a muffled, brutish moaning, and endless screaming, and that terrible hollow knocking. The cop reached the doors to the balcony and instinctively drew his gun. Then he kicked the doors open and dodged to one side. Well - for Christ's sake, who knew what mayhem was going on in there. A fire, a riot, a sniper. It could be anything. Already Martin could hear police sirens warbling in the street outside.

There was a second's pause. Then the cop yelled out, 'Freeze! Police!' But it was only fear that had made him shout. The woman who suddenly appeared in the open doorway was no threat to anybody.

Martin whispered, 'Oh, God. He's done it.'

Ramone crossed himself and shook his head, but couldn't speak.

The woman was blond, and might have been pretty when she first arrived at the premiere. But now it was impossible to tell. Her face was smashed as if it had been hit with a hammer. Her hair was stuck up with blood like a cockatoo's crest; one of her eyes was gone. Her white jawbone protruded through the raw flesh of her cheek, a mush of broken bone, and Martin could even see a gold tooth. She had been wearing a green silk evening dress and a white mink stole. The dress had been torn down to her waist at the front, baring her breasts, and the mink stole was nothing more than a bloodstained rope.

She swayed for a moment and made a crunching, bleating noise for somebody to help her; but as she staggered forward, Martin saw that her right arm had been torn off at the elbow, literally torn off, leaving a dangling loop of bloody muscle, and that the woman was bleeding to death right in front of them. She collapsed and slid down the side of the door, leaving a wide smear of blood.

'Ambulance!' the cop shouted out. 'For God's sake, get an ambulance!'

'Ramone,' said Martin tensely; and stepped past the fallen woman while the cop yanked off her bloodstained panty hose so he could improvise a tourniquet. The woman's smashed-up face was pressed close to the carpet. She didn't even murmur. Martin felt bile surge up inside his throat, but he had to swallow it down.

Ramone peered into the darkness of the theater. The screaming and the moaning had subsided a little now; but they could still hear tearing noises, and there was still an occasional drawn-out shriek of agony.

'You don't have to go in there,' Ramone told Martin, serious-faced.

'Yes, I do,' said Martin. 'I started all this. I let Boofuls loose.'

'Man, it wasn't your doing,' Ramone replied. 'There was Satan in that mirror and Satan would have found a way of getting out of there one day, no matter who bought it. If anybody let him out, Emilio did.'

Martin hesitated, and swallowed once more, and then said, 'I still have to go see what's happened.'

The cop shouted, 'Medics! Where the hell are those medics?' and then to Martin, 'You can't go in there, mister. I don't want any more casualties than we got already.'

Martin ignored him and stepped through the half-open doors into the semidarkness of the theater balcony. Followed closely by Ramone, he walked along the back row of seats and then stood looking down at the whole interior of the theater.

The movie had finished, the screen was silvery blank, and the theater was suddenly silent. A battlefield after a battle. Hundreds of people were strewn across the seats, and almost all of them were dead. The smell of flesh and blood and opened-up human bodies was so sweet and hot and pungent that Martin had to press his hand over his nose and mouth.

Gradually, the theater lights brightened, and police and paramedics appeared at the various entrances around the auditorium. They stood, like Martin and Ramone, in silence. There was nothing else they could do. Mann's Chinese Theater had been full to capacity this evening with nearly one thousand five hundred of Hollywood's glitterati, and now they were all torn to pieces.

'I wouldn't have believed it,' Ramone whispered. 'If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it.'

Martin cast his eyes around the theater. A director from 20th Century-Fox Television with whom he had once had lunch at the Fine Affair lay sprawled just in front of him, his mouth wide open, his shirtfront crimson with blood. His head was a mass of blood and bruises. His wife lay beside him, almost naked, her hair torn from her scalp, one of her legs twisted underneath her.

A world-famous cinematographer, who two years ago had won an Oscar for his vivid scenes of death and destruction in Vietnam, stood half propped, armless, like a grisly Venus de Milo, against a tangle of bodies.

In every aisle, bodies in evening dress lay heaped, and blood soaked in dark tides into the carpet. The stench was intolerable — bile and blood and partially digested dinners. And everywhere, in every direction, there were heaps of jewelry, furs, silk, and glistening heaps of soft intestines. A massacre, in black-tie.

'What did they dor Ramone asked hoarsely. 'What happened to them?'

'They clawed themselves to pieces, that's all,' said Martin. His voice in the huge auditorium sounded small and flat. 'They went mad with grief. Mad with despair. Mad with whatever, I don't know. You saw how upset they were, all that crying. They've been trampling on each other, strangling each other, tearing each other's arms off. And all that knocking, they were hitting their heads against the seats and the walls.'

Ramone said, 'I can't take any more of this, man. I never ever seen one dead person before, except for my grandmother. I can't take any more.'

It was then, however, that the movie screen flickered and came to life. A faint faded image of Boofuls, triumphant. Martin turned to face it and stared at it as if Boofuls were speaking to him personally.

And he said this: 'And He was asking him, " What is your name?" And he said to Him, "My name is Legion, for we are many." Now there was a big herd of swine feeding there on the mountainside. And they entreated Him, saying, "Send us into the swine that we may enter them." And coming out, the unclean spirits entered the swine; and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea, about two thousand of them; and they were drowned in the sea.'

Boofuls slowly smiled; and then laughed; that high-pitched laugh that to Martin was now so familiar. Then his face faded from the screen and he was gone.

They jogged all the way back to Franklin Avenue, stripping off their tuxedos and their vests at the corner of La Brea, and throwing them into the dust. They said nothing. They were too shocked, too breathless, and they knew that if they didn't hurry they could be too late. Lightning danced in the distance, over the San Gabriel Mountains; and thunder bellowed all across the Los Angeles basin, as if madmen were shouting at each other from different rooms of an echoing old house.

When they reached Martin's house they found Mr Capelli waiting for them at the front door. 'I heard on television, some kind of disaster. Everybody killed. I thought maybe you got killed, too, and then what was I going to do?'

Martin tugged the front of his shirt out of his waistband and bent forward so that he could wipe the sweat from his face on it. 'I guess we were lucky. But first, listen, we have to get Emilio back.'

Mr Capelli clutched his arm. 'You can't! What are you doing? You heard what Boofuls said. He could die if we try to get him out.'

'Believe me,' said Martin, 'if we don't try to get him out, he's going to have to stay there forever. I don't think that Boofuls ever had the slightest intention of letting him out.'

'But he said, if we tried to get Emilio out, he could die!'

'Unh-hunh, suddenly, I don't think so,' said Martin. He felt shocked and off-balance; but at the same time he felt a strong certainty that he understood now what Boofuls was up to; and how Boofuls had deceived them all. Boofuls was utterly unscrupulous, because he was the son of evil incarnate, and not a single word that Boofuls had ever told them had been anything but self-serving trickery. He had prevented them from rescuing Emilio partly by real occult power and partly by bluff. At least, that was what Martin now believed.

And even if Boofuls had been telling the truth - even if Emilio really would be in mortal danger if they tried to rescue him out of the mirror - what in the end was the life of one small boy, when one hundred forty-four thousand had already been massacred?

They went upstairs to Martin's apartment. Through the open door on Mr Capelli's landing they could hear Tom Brokaw saying, '- a worldwide disaster - latest counts indicate that as many as one hundred thousand people may have died — not only here but in London, Paris, Stockholm, Bonn, and Madrid -'

Martin reached the top of the stairs and opened the door of his apartment. Mr Capelli lifted up one hand as if he were waving to him from a great distance. 'Martin - he's just a boy, think about that.'

Martin said, 'That's why we have to get him back, Mr Capelli. He's just a boy, yes. But he's an innocent boy. He's the boy that Boofuls traded places with so that he could organize all of this killing. Boofuls is the son of the devil, Mr Capelli; the actual son of Satan. But you remember what Father Quinlan said: 'Only the child can destroy the parent.' And do you know what that means to me? It means that Emilio is capable of wasting the devil. In fact, he could be the only person who can.'

'I just want him back,' said Mr Capelli with considerable dignity, his back as straight as if he were wearing a corset.

'Mr Capelli,' said Martin, 'we'll do our best.'

He opened his apartment door and went inside, with Ramone following. Alison was in the bathroom, and she called out, 'Martin? Is that you?'

'In here,' Martin called back.

Ramone breathed out and said, 'Man, those people ... all those dead people . . . that had to be worse than Hiroshima or something.' He sat down on the sofa and held his head in his hands. 'Man, that was the worst thing I ever saw.'

'Are you okay?' Martin asked him.

'What do you think?' Ramone retorted. 'Okay? How can I be okay? I'm going to have nightmares about that for the rest of my life.'

Martin went across to the windowsill and opened the bottle of red wine. He poured Ramone a generous glassful, and then one for himself. Then he sat on the edge of the desk staring at the mirror at the opposite end of the room.

'That's one son of a bitch,' Ramone remarked, staring at the mirror, too.

'But not unbeatable,' Martin told him.

'Oh, no?' said Ramone. 'We can't move it, we can't break it, we can't do nothing except sit here like the Two Stooges and wait for it to ruin our lives.'

'We can go into it,' said Martin with determination. 'We can go into it, and we can get Emilio back. And then, by God, we can use Emilio to get rid of Boofuls once and for all.'

'You're really going to try?' asked Ramone.

'Yes,' said Martin, although he was almost frightened to hear himself say the words out loud, 'I'm really going to try.'

He stood up, and at that moment Alison came into the room, white-faced. 'Martin? Ramone? Thank goodness you're all right! We were watching the premiere on television and when they said that everybody was getting killed -!'

Martin held her in his arms for a moment. 'It's okay; we're fine. Well, fine isn't the word for it, but we're still alive.'

'What happened'? They were saying on the news that everybody just went crazy.'

Martin nodded. 'That's just about what happened, yes. But I have the feeling that something even worse is about to happen. It's pretty hard to explain, but Emilio is the key to it. We have to get Emilio back.'

Alison slowly turned and stared at the mirror. 'When you say something worse -?'

'I mean much worse. Like the sun never coming up, ever. Not in our lifetime, anyway.'

'And we have to get Emilio out?'

'That's right. We have to go into the mirror, if we can, and find out where he is, and bring him home.'

Alison hesitated for a moment, but then she said, 'Let me come with you.'

'Hey, come on, you're loco,' said Ramone.

'But I have some psychic sensitivity, don't I? I mean, not very much. But maybe it could help.'

Martin shook his head. 'I can't let you take the risk.'

'Then what are you going to do? Go on your own?'

'I don't know,' said Martin. 'I guess I am.' He reached out and touched the surface of the mirror. It was cold, hard, as impenetrable as real glass; but he had the feeling that if he closed his eyes and simply walked right through it that it would dissolve, just as the looking-glass in Alice had dissolved.

'Well, I think two heads are better than one,' Alison argued, 'especially when it comes to anything occult.'

'For instance?' asked Ramone.

'For instance, if you manage to get into the mirror, how are you going to get out again? Have you thought about that? Emilio can't get out. How will you be able to?'

Martin said, 'Trust to luck, I guess.'

'Oh, yes, and be trapped in the mirror forever, just the way that Boofuls was?'

'Well, do you have any bright suggestions?' asked Martin.

'I don't know. It may not be foolproof, but you could use a rope when you go into the mirror, just like they did when they went through the spirit-world in Poltergeist, because let's face it, that mirror is a spirit-world, right? And if you have a rope, somebody on this side can haul you back onto this side of the mirror if you get into any kind of trouble.'

'Well . . . that kind of sounds like some kind of sense,' Ramone admitted. 'Nutty, but sense.'

'Oh, sure,' said Martin, who was still uneasy about the idea of taking Alison with him into the mirror. 'And where do we find enough rope?'

'No problem,' said Ramone. 'I have about a thousand feet of nylon diving rope in the back of my store. I can go get it, easy.'

Martin thought for a while and then nodded. He couldn't think of any other way to guarantee their safe return to the real world. 'Okay, then. If you can go get the rope.'

'You'll be just like divers,' said Ramone. Til stay here, holding on to the other end of the rope, and if you get into any kind of trouble, you can tug on it, and I can haul you in.'

Ramone went off to find his diving rope. Meanwhile Martin poured Alison a glass of wine. 'Maybe I should change into something more practical,' she said. She was still wearing her tight white elasticated suntop and a wide igsos-style skirt. 'Do you have a jogging suit I could borrow, something like that?'

Martin took her into the bedroom and rummaged through his closet until he found her a loose gray sweatshirt with a pull-cord neck and pair of white cotton shorts that had shrunk the last time he washed them.

She crossed her arms and tugged off her suntop, baring the largest breasts that Martin had ever seen. They bounced independently, as if they had a life of their own. Then she stepped out of her skirt; under which she wore a plain white thong. Martin watched her as she buttoned up his shorts and slipped on his sweatshirt, and knew exactly what it was that Morris had seen in her. The tragic part about it was, Morris would never see her again.

'Something's happening, isn't it?' asked Alison as she brushed her hair in front of the mirror. 'Something really serious?'

Martin swallowed wine. 'Yes. I guess you could call it Armageddon.'

'That's the end of the world, isn't it?'

'Just about. It could be worse than the end of the world.'

'Worse?' frowned Alison.

Martin shrugged. 'Somebody once defined Armageddon as all the most distressing things that you can imagine happening to you, all at once, forever. To me, that sounds worse than the end of the world.'

Outside, the sky crackled with fibers of lightning, and there was a smell of burned oxygen on the wind. Dogs began to bark, all over the neighborhood, and cats yowled and howled as if they were in heat. Down on Hollywood Boulevard, the klieg lights had been doused, but the ambulance lights still flashed and the sirens still wailed, and the desperate shouting of medics and firemen echoed from one side of the street to the other. Martin turned away from the window and tried not to think about the heaps of mutilated dead he had seen in Mann's Theater.

Martin switched on the television. There was a special report from London, showing fleets of ambulances outside the

Empire, Leicester Square, ferrying bodies to hospitals. Sandy Gall the newscaster was saying,'— already laying blame on the highly emotional content of the film. Dr Kenneth Palmer of the Institute of Social Studies drew parallels with the mass suicide in Jonestown of the followers of religious fanatic James Jones; and of incidents in Africa in the i88os when whole tribes battered themselves to death in the belief that it was the only way for them to get to heaven. The Home Secretary, however —'

'Look at that,' said Martin. 'One hundred forty-four thousand people have killed themselves, all at the same time, all watching the same movie, and the news media are trying to rationalize it already. If you ask me, being rational is going to be the death of the human race. It's about time we started believing in the inexplicable. Or maybe it's already too late.'

It took Ramone almost twenty minutes to come back with the rope. He was sweating and out of breath. 'It's like a riot down there. Thousands of ambulances, thousands of police cars, TV trucks, you name it. And thousands of sightseers, too. People who get a kick out of seeing their fellow citizens lying dead.'

A police helicopter flew low overhead, followed by another, and then by a deep, reverberating grumble of thunder. 'I think we'd better hurry,' said Martin. 'We may not have too much time left. In fact, we may be too late already.'

They tied one end of the rope around the steel window frame opposite the mirror. 'I just hope this damn window holds,' Martin remarked. 'I don't want to yank on the rope when I'm in mirrorland and end up with a six-foot window in my lap.'

While Martin and Ramone prepared the rope, Alison stood in front of the mirror and called softly and coaxingly to Emilio. If she could persuade him actually to come into the sitting room, that would make their bizarre task a hundred times easier. But the door of the reflected room remained closed, and no Emilio peeped through it, and there was nobody in the mirror except themselves — Martin, Ramone and Alison.

At last, Ramone was satisfied that the rope would hold. 'Believe me, an elephant couldn't pull this free.'

'Thanks a lot,' Alison retorted with a nervous laugh. 'I've been trying to lose weight.'

Martin and Alison looped the rope around their waists, as if they were mountain climbers. 'Just remember,' Ramone reminded them, tugging at the knots to make sure they were firm, 'any trouble and I'll pull you back. All you have to do is yank on the rope.'

Martin took a deep breath and glanced toward the mirror. 'All this is supposing we can get into the mirror in the first place.'

'Faith, man,' said Ramone, laying a hand on his shoulder. 'Everything in this whole wide world requires faith.'

Martin nodded. He reached out and grasped Alison's hand. 'Let's do it,' he said, and together they stepped toward their own reflections in the mirror.

They waited. They felt none of the irresistible suction that had pulled Lugosi into the mirror, and which had almost taken Emilio and Martin and Ramone all at once. Martin looked at Alison and said, 'I hope to God we're not making fools of ourselves.'

'Faith,' Ramone exhorted them.

'What good will that do?' asked Alison.

'I don't know, but why don't you close your eyes and kind of imagine you can walk through the mirror. Then, when I count to three, take a step forward and just keep on walking.'

Martin gripped Alison's hand tight and closed his eyes. He tried to remember the words in Through the Looking-Glass: 'And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.'

'Are you okay?' he asked Alison without opening his eyes.

'I'm fine,' said Alison.

'I'm leaning forward,' said Martin. 'I'm going to press my forehead against the glass. You try doing the same.'

The glass felt flat and cold against his forehead and pressed his spectacles against the bridge of his nose. But he tried to use its coldness to imagine mist, instead of glass. It's possible, he told himself, you've seen it happen for yourself. A ball can bounce in and out of mirrorland. A cat can jump through.

Even a boy can walk into a reflected room and out again. If all that can happen, you can step through, too.

Lewis Carroll had done it - 'it seems to me now like a nightmare . . . the land beyond the looking-glass, in which each man takes on his true form.' It's possible, it's been done, I've seen it done, and now I'm going to do it.

He thought he heard Ramone saying, 'One .. .' But then Ramone's voice slurred and twisted, and Martin was being wrenched forward, toward the mirror, headfirst, so violently and so suddenly that he lost his grip on Alison's hand.

He tried to reach her, he tried to cry out, but it was impossible. He was being pulled forward so strongly that he couldn't do anything at all but squeeze his eyes tight shut and contract his muscles and pray that he wasn't going to be pressed to death.

He knew, however, that he was being pulled through the mirror into the reflected room beyond.

It was the strangest experience. One moment he felt as if he were being stretched out, impossibly thin. Then he felt as if he were being compressed, impossibly squat. And all the time he could feel the mirror's surface drawing him in, as if it were mercury - a deep liquid chill that swallowed first his head and then his body and then gradually enveloped his legs.

He believed for one whole second that he was dead; that the mirror had killed him. But then he opened his eyes and he was standing in his own sitting room with Alison beside him. The only difference was that he was now facing the window, instead of the mirror. And when he turned round, to look at the mirror, there was no reflection either of him or of Alison. Only Ramone now existed both in reality and as a reflection.

'Madre mia, you did it,' Ramone exclaimed. 'You walked right through the mirror. You walked right through it, just like it was a door.'

Martin looked down at the rope that was attached to his waist. Instead of appearing through the mirror behind him, it was now fastened to the reflected window in front of him. 'Is the rope following us?' he asked, turning around to face the real Ramone.

'The rope's just fine. Why don't you try walking forward a little, let's see if it pays out from here.'

Martin took two or three steps across the unfamiliar, back-to-front sitting room, and Ramone called out, 'That's okay, that's terrific. The rope is following you into the glass.'

Alison took hold of Martin's hand. 'I can't believe this is happening, this is just too strange for words.'

Martin went across to his desk and picked up a copy of jornal. The headline read, alinoT aIlo.H JohfirfD }33w2, and underneath, the entire text was in reverse. He looked at Alison and saw that she was a mirror image of herself; that her hair was parted on the opposite side, and that her wristwatch had changed from her left wrist to her right. He checked his own watch. The second hand was sweeping around the dial counterclockwise.

'We don't have too long, if this thunder and lightning is anything to go by,' Martin told Alison. It was thundering just as violently in the mirror-world as it was in the real world. 'Let's go see if Emilio's downstairs.'

He turned to Ramone and called, 'Ten minutes! Give us ten minutes! Then tug on the rope a little, just to remind us!'

'You got it!' Ramone shouted back.

Martin crossed the sitting room and opened the door, with Alison following closely behind him. It was odd to open the door the other way round, with the hinges on the right side instead of the left. The corridor that led to the front door of his apartment looked the same, however. Martin even noticed the small rectangular mark in the plaster where he had dug in his screwdriver to kill the cat. Exactly the same, except that it was on the opposite wall.

He glanced into the kitchen. Everything appeared to be identical to the real world, apart from the lettering on the spice jars - oriBgaiO ,mfiiojifiM ,3mi(rfT jiaqqal ,jlfi2 - and the newspaper lying on the table, iwsT i^\^«k zoA. 'So far so good, as they say in the adventure stories,' he told Alison. More thunder shook the evening air; and somewhere they heard the rattle of shingles falling from a roof.

Still trailing the rope, Martin and Alison went to the front door of Martin's apartment and opened it up. The stairway was gloomy, but it didn't look any different from the stairway in the real world. Except - Martin lifted his head and sniffed. There was something different about it. There was no smell. No garlic, no herbs, no subtropical mustiness. In fact, no smell at all.

'What's the matter?' asked Alison, coming up close behind him and touching his shoulder.

Martin shook his head. 'Nothing, not yet. But there's no smell. Normally this place smells like La Barbera's.'

Alison sniffed, too. 'I guess it's because we're inside the mirror. Have you ever pressed your nose to a mirror? Cold, no smell.'

Cautiously, they made their way down the stairs. Their rope zizzed on the top stair as it paid out behind them; their only connection with the real world. They reached the landing and stood outside the Capellis' front door. The card next to the bell read ilbqfiD, in sloping handwriting.

'Okay, I'm going to ring the bell and see if Emilio's in here,' said Martin. 'But there's one thing you have to know. People in the mirror-world may sometimes look weird. You know, really grotesque. That's because they take on their real shape - their physical looks and their personalities combined. At least, that's what Father Quinlan said; and Lewis Carroll, too.'

Alison nodded mutely. Martin pressed the doorbell.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ramone sat on the sofa, gripping the rope in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. He didn't feel at all happy, watching the rope disappear a little at a time over the gilded frame of the mirror and into nothing at all. He could see his reflection, holding the rope, and his reflection didn't look happy, either.

He jiggled his foot and whistled 'Samba Negra'. Outside the house, the thunder still collided, and spasmodic bursts of dazzling lightning pierced the Venetian blinds. He heard more sirens, down toward Hollywood Boulevard. There was a smell of Apocalypse in the air, an end-of-the-world atmosphere, ozone and fear and freshly spilled blood.

Ramone stood up, still holding the rope, and went across to the windowsill to pour himself another glass of red wine. He parted the slats of the Venetian blind, and down in the street he saw a woman running, not jogging, but really running, as if all the devils of hell were after her. A flash of lightning illuminated her face and it was grim and white, like one of those Japanese Noh masks.

Disturbed, Ramone closed the slats again and turned back toward the mirror.

To his surprise, Martin was standing in the room, right in front of the mirror, smiling at him.

'Martin! For Christ's sake! You trying to give me a heart attack or something?'

Martin said nothing, but approached him slowly, rubbing his hands together, still smiling.

'What happened?' asked Ramone. 'Where's Alison? Did something go wrong? You took your rope off.'

Martin said, 'Nothing's wrong. Everything's fine.'

'Did you find Emilio?'

'Emilio? Oh, no. No, not yet. But I guess we will, given time.'

Ramone peered at Martin closely. 'Man, are you all right? You sound really strange.'

Martin smiled. 'Strange?'

Ramone glanced over his shoulder toward the mirror. 'Are you sure everything's okay? What's Alison doing? Did you leave her in there, or what?'

Martin put his arm around Ramone's shoulders. 'The thing is, Ramone, we found out a couple of things while we were inside the mirror. We found out that you can live your life according to a whole lot of different values. You can live it meekly, you know, doing what you're told all the time, loving your neighbor, paying your taxes; or you can live it to the full.'

Ramone was completely bewildered. 'Man, I thought you were looking for Emilio.'

'Well, we were,' Martin admitted. 'But - what - he's only a boy, after all. And what's one boy, in the great glorious scheme of things?'

Ramone turned his head in an effort to free himself from Martin's embrace. It was then that he saw Martin's wrist-watch, on his right wrist, with a second hand that went around counterclockwise. He jerked around to stare into Martin's face, and he suddenly understood that Martin's hair was parted on the opposite side, and that the mole on his right cheek had somehow switched sides.

'Man, you're not —' he choked out.

But then Martin's eyes flared blue, incandescent blue, and his arm gripped Ramone tightly around the neck, so fiercely that Ramone heard something snap, a bone or a vein or a muscle.

'Get off me!' he screamed. 'Get off me!'

Martin hugged him closer and closer, still grinning, his eyes flaring so brightly that Ramone had to squeeze his own eyes shut.

He struggled blindly; and it was probably just as well that he didn't see Martin's mouth stretch wider and wider, and his jaw suddenly gape. Inch by inch, something protruded out of Martin's mouth. Not his tongue, but the slimy top of another head, pinky gray and wrinkled, which gradually forced its way out from between his teeth, rolling back his lips, compressing his nose and eyes and forehead into a grotesque little caricature of himself, like a Chinese monkey.

The head which emerged from Martin's mouth was another version of Martin, smaller and less well formed, but its pale eyes burned fiercely blue, and its mouth was filled with sharp savage teeth, dripping with glutinous saliva.

Ramone, fighting, kicking, opened his eyes. He stared for one terrified second, and then he let out a bellow of desperation.

Martin's second head stretched its mouth open with a sickening gagging noise and bit into Ramone's face. The lower teeth buried themselves in his open mouth; the upper teeth crunched into his eyebrows. The creature's jaws had a grip like a steel hunting trap; and when Ramone tried to force his hands into its mouth to prise it loose, its teeth were so sharp that his fingers were cut right down to the bare bone.

In a final convulsive effort to break free, Ramone twisted his body first one way and then the other. He couldn't see what effect this had - the creature's gaping mouth completely covered his eyes - but this twisting did nothing but drag the head further and further out of Martin's mouth, on a long slippery pinkish neck that seemed to disgorge forever.

Ramone dropped to the floor, rolling wildly from side to side, but the snakelike head refused to release its grip. Instead, it began to ripple all the way along the length of its neck as if its muscles were building up strength for one last terrible bite.

Ramone thumped on the wood-block floor, like a wrestler pleading for mercy. One thump — two, three — and then the creature's neck bulged once, in a hideous muscular spasm, and its teeth crunched through flesh and bone, right into Ramone's sinus cavities, biting his tongue through at the root, chopping his optic nerves; and then tugging backward, taking the whole of his face with it.

The creature began almost immediately to slither back into Martin's open mouth. Within six seconds, only the top of its head showed. Within seven, Martin's mouth had closed and returned to its normal size.

Within fifteen seconds — by the time Mr Capelli had puffed his way up the stairs to find out what all the thumping and the thrashing was about - Martin had disappeared.

Mr Capelli knelt slowly down beside Ramone's savaged body. There was extraordinarily little blood; but the bite in his face was so terrible that Mr Capelli could do nothing at all but cross himself, and cross himself again, and then turn to stare at the mirror.

Martin rang the doorbell again. At last, they heard footsteps and a muffled voice called out, 'Who is it?'

'It's me, Martin, from upstairs. I was wondering if Emilio was home.'

There was a pause, and then bolts were slid back, and the door was opened. At first it was difficult to see who was standing inside. The hallway was very dark and there didn't seem to be any lights anywhere. Martin was aware of something huge and nodding and draped in black. It looked almost like a large parrot cage covered with a black cloth.

'Emilio went out,' the muffled voice told him.

It was then that the lightning flickered again, and Martin realized with a thrill of dread what he was looking at. It was Mrs Capelli, wearing a black mantilla on her head. But her head was huge, a cartoon head; like the drawings of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. Her face was enormous and waxy-colored; the face of a long-suffering Italian matriarch. Her mantilla was decorated with thousands of jet beads; and she was draped with jet necklaces and pinned with jet brooches; a mother in mourning for the old country, and for lost innocence, and for long-buried relatives.

This nodding huge-headed monster was Mrs Capelli amplified five-hundredfold. Her physical appearance exaggerated by her inner self.

Martin heard Alison gasp just behind him. But he was determined to find Emilio. He was determined to destroy Boofuls. And even though his voice was shaking, he managed to ask, 'Do you know — do you know where he went?'

Mrs Capelli shook her huge birdcage head. Her jet jewelry dattered.

'It's important,' Martin insisted. 'I really have to find him.'

Mrs Capelli stood silently for a moment and then turned back into her apartment. However, she left the door open, as if Martin should wait for a reply. Martin stepped gingerly into the apartment after her, following the huge swaying bulk of her mantilla.

She went into her parlor, across the patterned carpet. As she passed in front of the mirror on top of the chest of drawers, she changed, without warning - her huge swaying head dissolving like a conjuring trick back to its usual size, her mantilla swallowed up like smoke. It was only when she reached the far corner of the parlor, out of sight of the mirror, that her head expanded, and her black-bedecked mantilla returned.

Martin reached back and grasped Alison's hand. 'You see that? When she walks in front of a mirror, she's normal.'

Alison said. 'Yes, you're right. I get it now. Anybody looking into the mirror from the real world — they wouldn't see anything strange.'

They followed Mrs Capelli to the kitchen. It was there that they saw another apparition, even stranger. A bloated white-faced man - more like a huge jellyish egg than a human being — sitting at the kitchen table.

Martin was reminded of Humpty-Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass: 'The egg got larger and larger, and more and more human. When she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and a mouth.'

There was no nursery-rhyme amusement in this creature, however. Illuminated only by intermittent flickers of lightning, he was soft and bulging, with black, glittering eyes, and he breathed harshly and softly, as if his lungs were clogged. He turned and stared at Martin with suspicion and contempt.

'Whaddya wan'?' he demanded in a thick stage-Italian accent.

'Mr Capelli?' said Martin. Tm looking for Emilio.'

'Why for?' Mr Capelli wanted to know. 'He's-a play someplace.'

'Mr Capelli, it's crucial. I have to find him.'

'Do I know you?' the egg-shaped creature wheezed. Something approaching recognition glittered in one of the eyes which swam on his featureless face.

'Martin, Mr Capelli. Martin Williams. Emilio and I have always been friends.'

'Martin Williams?'

'That's right, Mr Capelli, Martin Williams. I live upstairs.'

'Ah . ..' said Mr Capelli. He thought for a moment, his eyes opening and closing like mollusks. Then he coughed, cleared his throat, and flapped one pale flipperlike hand toward the door. 'He went to the market. Maybe with one of his friends. To buy coffee and candy. Now, leave me alone.'

Mrs Capelli stood silently in the corner, watching them with a face as huge as a white upholstered chair. Martin said nothing, but took hold of Alison's arm and piloted her back out of the apartment. He closed the door behind him and stood on the landing trembling, taking deep breaths, one hand against the wall to steady himself.

'Do we really have to go outside?' Alison asked him.

Martin said. 'There's no alternative.'

'But if the Capellis look like that -'

'There's no alternative, we have to find Emilio.'

Paying out their rope behind them, they went downstairs to the front of the building. The sky was inky black now; the wind was up; and the palms were rustling and rattling. 'The market's this way,' said Martin. 'I think we're going to have to get rid of this rope. Maybe I'll tug it a couple of times, just to let Ramone know that we're okay.'

He yanked at the rope twice and waited; but there was no answering pull from Ramone. Martin hesitated for a moment, wondering if he ought to go back and tell Ramone that they were venturing out without the rope, but then a deafening barrage of thunder changed his mind. This was the night that Satan was coming. There was no time to spare.

Quickly, they untied the knots around their belts, leaving the rope lying coiled on Mr Capelli's driveway. Then they hurried along Franklin Avenue toward the market, crossing La Brea and heading toward Highland. Martin found himself wildly disoriented, because the glittering lights of Los Angeles were on his left side now, instead of his right, and traffic was driving on the wrong side of the street. Neither of them looked too closely, but the drivers and passengers of some of the passing cars appeared to be peculiarly deformed, hunched figures in silently rolling vehicles.

The wind blew stronger. They felt rain on their faces. Across the street, a tall man with a head like a sheep hurried home with armfuls of groceries. His yellow eyes gleamed at them furtively, then turned away.

The market was right on the intersection of Franklin and Highland, its windows brightly lit. Martin began to jog as they approached, and Alison jogged to keep up with him. Even before Martin had crossed the street, he had glimpsed Emilio at one of the checkout counters, waiting to pay. That dark, tousled head; that small, pale face.

'There!' Martin exclaimed in relief. 'Look, there he is!'

Emilio wasn't difficult to pick out. He was the only person in the market who wasn't distorted. The cashier behind the register had a long rodentlike face with the skin texture of a withered carrot, and was tapping at the keys of the cash register with a long claw. Right behind Emilio waited a woman with a tiny head and a vastly swollen body, her small face nothing but a tight cluster of scarlet spots. As Martin and Alison reached the window and looked around the market, they saw nightmarish creatures moving up and down the aisles, some of them crawling like spiders, others with huge nodding heads like Mrs Capelli, others who were more like dogs. They were seeing firsthand the world that Lewis Carroll had written about in Through the Looking-Glass — the world which he had been able to describe only in a children's fantasy, because of its unbelievable horror. It was the world in which people appeared as they really are; and that was more than the Victorian imagination would have been able to accept.

As the creatures in the market passed the curved security mirrors at the far corners of the aisles, their appearance momentarily changed, and they took on a semblance of their everyday selves, except that their faces were swollen by the distortion of the mirrors, and their bodies and legs were shrunken like dwarves.

'Oh, my God,' murmured Alison. 'It's like some terrible kind of zoo.'

But Martin was set on getting hold of Emilio. He banged on the window; and banged again; and at last Emilio looked up and saw him. The little boy's face — at first despondent -broke into a wide smile. Martin beckoned him frantically to leave the market and come on outside.

Emilio dropped all of his groceries and came running out of the store and into the street. Martin opened his arms for him, and they hugged each other tight.

'You came!' sobbed Emilio. 'I didn't think you ever would! I thought I was stuck here forever and ever!'

Martin wiped Emilio's tears away, and affectionately ruffled his hair, and then stood up. 'It's time to go back,' he said. 'I don't think anything bad is going to happen to you if you step back through the mirror. But we have something important to do. Something dangerous.'

Emilio trotted along beside him as they made their way back toward the Capellis' house.

'Will you do it?' Martin asked him. 'You're the only one who can.'

Til try,' Emilio panted.

The wind was howling so strongly by the time they reached the house that they could scarcely walk against it. Sheets of newspaper tangled around their ankles and dry palm leaves whipped at their faces. The streets were almost deserted; but Martin could hear the howling of the fire sirens over the wind, and the distant shouting of a huge crowd, like a distant ocean lashing against the shore.

Martin picked up the loose end of the rope that they had left lying in Mr Capelli's driveway and wound it over his elbow as they went back into the house. Emilio tugged at Martin's sleeve and said, 'I don't have to go back to them, do I?' — meaning the mirror-Capellis. Alison put her arm around him and smiled. 'No way, Jose. You're staying with us.'

They climbed the stairs, with Martin still winding in the rope. The door marked ilbqsD was slightly ajar, and the sound of extraordinary garbled opera music was coming out of it, like a record being played backward. Alison ushered Emilio quickly past the door, although Emilio couldn't keep his eyes off it. God only knew what grotesque memories he would retain of what had happened there; of what distorted monstrosities he had seen; man in all his glory.

Martin had almost reached the head of the stairs when his own apartment door opened. He stopped, his heart bumping. Alison said fearfully, 'Who is it?'

The door hesitated, then opened a little wider. 'Who is that?' called Martin.

His question was answered almost at once. Out of the door came Martin himself, followed by Alison. Their own reflections, identical in every way, but somehow invested with an independent life of their own. They stood at the head of the stairs side by side and looked down at Martin and smiled benignly.

Martin felt a terror unequaled by almost anything he had experienced in the days since he had first opened his eyes and seen Boofuls standing over him. If he had encountered Boofuls at the head of the stairs, or Miss Redd, or that vicious cat Pickle, then he probably could have coped. But to come face-to-face with himself, smiling so blandly, that was more than his nervous system could cope with. 'Oh, God,' he whispered. 'Oh, God, that's the end of it.'

Alison stood white-faced, paralyzed with fear. 'What's wrong, Alison?' taunted her mirror image. 'Don't tell me that you, of all people, are afraid to look at yourself?'

Martin's mirror image smiled, and took the hand of Alison's mirror image as if they had been secret friends for years. 'What a daring fellow you are, Martin! Into the world of mirrors, just to save your five-year-old friend.'

Martin's mirror image came down two or three stairs, until he was standing directly in front of him. 'You always had big ideas, didn't you? Little man, big ideas. Well, I guess that we can forgive you. Every man's entitled to dream. And your best dream was Boofuls. Boofuls!, a musical by Martin Williams. Look what it led to! It changed the world, didn't it?' Martin hoarsely said, 'Get out of my way.' 'Oh, come on, now, Martin, you're talking to yourself. The only person in your way is you?

Martin felt the blood drain out of his head. His mouth was dry, and he was close to collapse. But something told him that his mirror image was speaking the truth. The only person standing in his way was him. His vanity, his ambition, his carelessness, his bad tempers. Indirectly, he had caused the deaths of all those one hundred forty-four thousand innocent people.

In the Bible, James had said, 'For if any man is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was.'

Now, however, Martin knew what kind of person he was; and he knew that it wasn't this smug, smiling character who was standing in front of him now.

'Get out of my way,' he repeated. He felt his strength returning. He felt his confidence surging back. 'Get out of my goddamned way!!'

Instantly, as fast as a cobra, Martin's mirror image threw back its head and stretched open its mouth. Out from its lips poured the slippery pink head with snapping teeth, its eyes blazing bright blue. Martin dodged, ducked back, but the creature's neck swayed around and its teeth snagged at his shoulder, tearing his shirt and furrowing his skin.

Alison screamed; and Alison's mirror image screamed, too, not in fright but in shrill triumph. But Martin scrambled back down the stairs, missing his footing and tumbling down four or five of them at once. And as the snapping head came after him, he looped the rope around its neck and yanked it viciously tight.

The head choked and gargled, its eyes bulging. At the head of the stairs, Martin's mirror image gargled, too, and fell onto its knees. Whatever this vicious head was, it was deeply connected to the innards of Martin's mirror image, and if he could manage to strangle it, he could strangle his mirror image, too.

Martin pulled the rope tighter and tighter. The blazing blue eyes began to dim and to milk over. Saliva ran from the sides of the creature's lips; then bloody saliva; then blood. The head shrank and shriveled, almost like a collapsing penis, and then dropped against the stairs. Martin's mirror image came after it, head over heels; and the hideous body lay jammed against the side of the landing.

'Now,' said Martin to Alison's mirror image, looping the rope again and mounting the stairs, 'how about you?'

But Alison's mirror image drew back her lips and hissed at them and then ran down the stairs, pushing all three of them aside, and disappeared into the street.

Alison hugged Martin tight. 'You did it. You're beautiful! You did it.'

'Come on,' Martin urged her. 'I'm just hoping to God that we're not too late.'

They went into Martin's mirror-apartment, closing the door behind them. Then, with each of them holding one of Emilio's hands, they approached the mirror.

'Ramone's not there,' Martin frowned. 'Look - the rope's there. But no Ramone.'

'Let's just get ourselves back,' Alison begged him.

Hand in hand, they closed their eyes and pressed their foreheads against the cold glass of the mirror. / can do it, thought Martin. / can step through glass. All I have to do is take one step forward, and I'll be there, back in the real world.

He felt that sensation of being drawn out thin; and then compressed. His ears sang, and his heart thumped; and for one long, long moment he believed that he was dead. I'm dead, he told himself; and then he opened his eyes and he was standing with Emilio and Alison, back in his real sitting room.

'We made it,' he said. 'And, look, what did I tell you, Emilio's fine. Boofuls was bluffing us all along.'

Alison looked around, worried. 'No sign of Ramone. He didn't seem like the kind of guy who would get up and leave us, just like that.'

'Maybe Mr Capelli knows,' Martin suggested.

Emilio piped up, 'Where's Grandpa? Where's Grandpa? Is Grandpa here?'

Martin bent down and picked Emilio up in his arms, and together they went down to Mr Capelli's apartment. They rang the doorbell, and Martin could feel Emilio tense up. Without saying a word, he pointed to the name card on the door. Capelli, not ilbqeD.

Mr Capelli opened the door almost at once. He was about to say something — but then he saw Martin and Alison, and best of all, Emilio.

He couldn't speak. He clutched Emilio close to him, and the tears ran down his cheeks. Martin and Alison waited, and all Martin could say was, 'He's fine, Mr Capelli. He'll have one or two nightmares, I guess. But he's fine.'

Mr Capelli finally put Emilio down, but still held him close. 'I have bad news,' he said. 'Your friend Ramone.'

Martin felt cold. 'What happened? Did he have to leave?'

Mr Capelli said, 'No, I'm sorry. It was very bad, very dreadful. I heard him banging the floor upstairs, I went up as quick as I could.'

'And?'

'Something from the mirror, I suppose,' said Mr Capelli. 'His face — all of his face. It was chopped away, like bitten, you know. I could hardly bear to look. I think he must have died straight away. The ambulance came to take him; the police will come later. They are so busy with all of those poor people who died at the Chinese Theater.'

'Bitten?' said Martin; and all he could think of was the chilling pink head which had poured out of the mouth of his own mirror image, with razor-sharp teeth.

'It was very dreadful,' said Mr Capelli. 'I'm sorry. It was very bad.'

Martin covered his eyes with his hand. For a moment, he felt close to crying. But no tears wanted to come. Not yet, anyway. First of all, he had to deal with Boofuls.

'Mr Capelli,' he said, 'I'm going to ask you a favor.'

'What favor?' asked Mr Capelli, with his arm tightly around Emilio.

'I want you to let Emilio come with us; just one last time.'

Mr Capelli slowly shook his head. 'I may be old, my friend, but I'm certainly not stupid. This boy has been through enough.'

High above the house, thunder cracked; so violently that plaster sifted down from the ceiling.

'Mr Capelli, if Emilio doesn't come with us now, believe me, the sun may never rise again.'

It took Martin almost ten minutes to change Mr Capelli's mind. Meanwhile, the storm outside rose even more violently. Two palms were uprooted, with a noise like tearing hair, and fell across the street; and the water in Maria Bocanegra's swimming pool frothed and splashed. The wind began to pick up so much speed that it screamed through the telephone wires: a high, tortured scream like desperate souls. Lightning branched everywhere, striking the twin towers of Century City and the Bonaventure Hotel downtown.

'Martin,' Mr Capelli argued, 'he's all I have. Suppose something should go wrong?'

'Mr Capelli,' Martin insisted, 'this world is all any of us have. I don't want to risk Emilio's life any more than you do. But the way I see it, we don't have any choice.'

'A curse on you for buying that mirror,' said Mr Capelli bitterly.

'Yes,' said Martin. 'A curse on me.'

Mr Capelli sat with his hands clasped together for a very long time, thinking. At last he said, 'You can take him. All right? I agree. You can take him. But you guard him with your own life. Your own life, remember. And one thing more. You break that mirror before you go. You smash it.'

Martin said cautiously, 'I'm not so sure that's a good idea.'

'Smash it,' said Mr Capelli. 'Otherwise, you can't take Emilio nowhere. Do you think I'm going to sit here, while you're gone, and any kind of monster could come jumping out? I saw what happened to your friend Ramone. You should count your lucky stars you didn't see it. Half his face, chomped!'

'Mr Capelli -' said Martin; but Mr Capelli was adamant.

'You smash that mirror. Otherwise, forget it. It's brought too much trouble already. And besides, I don't ever want Emilio going back there. Or even to think about going back there.'

Tired, shocked, still sick with grief for Ramone, Martin eventually nodded. Til smash the mirror, okay? Will that make you happy?'

'Not happy; but better.'

Alison waited with Mr Capelli while Martin went back upstairs to his apartment. Halfway up the stairs, he stopped, and leaned against the wall, and covered his eyes with his hand. God, give me the strength to carry this through. God, help me. He waited for a short while, to allow himself to recover, and then he climbed the last few stairs.

He opened the door of the sitting room and there was the mirror, with its gilded face of Pan, still there, still mocking him. The room felt very cold. It was like stepping into a meat market. It was so cold that the surface of the mirror was misted, almost opaque. But Martin ignored the mirror and closed the sitting room door behind him and walked across to his desk. He opened the drawer where he kept his tools and took out a hammer.

'This is it, you bastard,' he said out loud. 'And Mrs Harper had better forget about her second instalment.'

With one sweep of his hand, he wiped the clouded surface of the mirror and then swung back the hammer.

And stopped, frozen.

Because he wasn't there. There was no reflection of him swinging back the hammer. The room in the mirror was empty.

He stepped up to the mirror, his heart beating in long, slow bumps. He touched it. Then he understood what he had done. He had killed his own reflection. He could never appear in a mirror again.

He stood still. He felt an extraordinary sense of loss, like the boy Daniel who stole the sacred harp and lost his shadow.

Then he heard Alison calling, 'Martin?' and he swung back his arm and hit the mirror dead-center.

The glass smashed explosively. Huge shards dropped from the frame and clattered onto the floor. And the face of Pan on top of the frame roared out loud, scaring Martin so much that he jumped back two or three paces and almost fell over the sofa.

'God protect me,' he whispered, and stepped back up to the mirror again and hammered the face right off the frame, onto the floor. He beat it and beat it until it was nothing more than a smashed-up heap of gilt and plaster.

He stood up, breathing heavily. Now it was time to go for Boofuls. And now he needed a weapon with which to kill him.

A sword blessed by the angel Michael, Father Quinlan had told him. But where the hell was he going to find a sword? And even if he did, how was he going to get it blessed?

He was about to turn away when a flicker of lightning illuminated the room and flashed from a long shard of mirror glass. It was nearly four feet long, and slightly curved like the blade of a saber. Martin knelt down and carefully picked it up. He tested the edge with his finger and immediately cut himself, so that blood welled up and ran down his wrist. This would do. This would be his holy sword.

He rummaged in his drawer until he found a roll of insulating tape. Then he wound it around and around the end of the mirror-sword to make a safe handle. At last he lifted it up and swung it around. It made a thrilling whistle as it swept through the air. Boofuls was going to regret that he had ever stepped out of that mirror.

He held the sword by the blade, the way that he had seen knights hold their swords in storybooks, and he closed his eyes.

'God, bless this weapon, if You can. Or at least give me the strength and the intelligence to use it well. Thank You.'

Then, with the blood that ran from his cut finger, he smeared onto the mirror-sword's blade the letters V-O-R-P-A-L.

He walked downstairs. Alison and Emilio and Mr Capelli were waiting for him on the landing. 'It's broken,' he told Mr Capelli, and he lifted up the mirror sword.

'What in the name of God are you going to do with that?' Mr Capelli demanded.

'Make amends, I hope,' said Martin. Then, 'Come on, Emilio, let's go find that playmate of yours.'

He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxomefoe he sought —

They drove in Martin's Mustang across to Vine Street. Alison held the sword while Martin drove: Emilio sat in the back. The wind was still fuming across Los Angeles, and lightning was crackling from one side of the valley to the other, like the roots of giant electrified trees. There was hardly anybody else around. A few cars crept along the freeway, but it seemed as if most people had decided to stay home. A wild, dark night, thunderous with impending doom.

They reached the Hollywood Divine hotel. Martin parked on the opposite side of the street and they all climbed out of the car. Half a dozen hookers still strutted up and down outside, but otherwise the sidewalk was deserted.

'Hey, young boy,' one of the hookers called to Emilio, 'want me to pop your cherry?'

Martin pushed his way into the hotel lobby, with Emilio and Alison following. The usual collection of drunks and scarecrows were still there, but the young desk clerk was nowhere around. The lobby was gloomy and sour and smelled of urine and burned copper. Martin paused and listened, and he could hear a faint rumbling somewhere in the building, more of a deep vibration than a noise, and the sound of voices, chanting.

'Upstairs,' he said. 'The Leicester Suite.'

Alison said, 'Martin, I'm frightened. This is it, isn't it? I mean, this is really «>?'

'Come on,' Martin reassured her. 'At least we've got God and all His angels on our side.'

'I wish I could believe that.'

'Martin -' she said.

He looked at her. He had a feeling that he knew what she was going to say.

'Not now,' he told her gently. 'Let's get this done first.'

They climbed the marble stairs until they reached the mezzanine. On the far side of the landing, the double doors of the Leicester Suite were wide open; and from inside a fitful flickering of pale light illuminated the paneling and the drapes. The vibration was even stronger now, even deeper. Martin hefted the mirror-sword from one hand to the other and then said, 'Here we go.'

They walked into the Leicester Suite. Three or four men in tuxedos was standing by the inner doors, but nobody made any attempt to stop them; or even to look at them. They were all staring in awe at the horrific spectacle which filled the high-ceilinged room.

When Martin stepped into the room and looked up at it, he almost felt like dropping to his knees. It was one thing to be told of Satan in storybooks. It was quite another to find himself standing in front of the Great Beast itself.

The room was dark, lit only by two wavering candelabra. Kneeling on the floor with their heads bowed were fifty or sixty of some of the most famous actors and actresses and directors and producers in Hollywood. Even in the darkness, Martin recognized Shany McKay and Derek Lorento and Harris Carlin and Petra Fell. Even Morris Nathan was here, at the very end of the front row, his head bandaged, leaning on the arm of his old friend Douglas Perry. It was like a Who's Who of Hollywood, all in one room.

At the very front of the kneeling celebrities, with his back to them, stood Boofuls, quite naked, his arms outstretched. His back was narrow and white-skinned, his blond curls flew upward as if he were standing in a fierce wind. Beside him, in her swooping black cape, stood Miss Redd, her hands pressed together in prayer.

In the shadows at the very far end of the cavernous room, Martin saw something stirring. Something huge, and leathery, and inhuman. He heard its claws shuffling on the marble floor, he heard its dry dragon wings rustling. It was the color of death: yellowy gray, its skin crazed with wrinkles. Its skull was wedge-shaped, with curled horns like an aging ram, and its eyes were narrow and dull and infinitely evil.

It stood three times as tall as a man, its head swaying slowly from one side to the other, surveying without emotion those who had been vain enough and proud enough and weak enough to raise it at last from its endless sleep.

'Is it real?' whispered Alison. 'It can't be real.'

Martin swallowed. 'It's real,' he said, and then swallowed again.

'It's the devil,' murmured Emilio.

'And there's Morry,' said Alison in disbelief. 'Right at the front — there's Morry!'

Martin tried to restrain her, but Alison hurried forward and took hold of Morris' arm and shook it. 'Douglas,' she said, 'why is Morry here? He should be back in the hospital!'

Martin came after her. 'Alison, for God's sake!' But Miss Redd had already turned round and seen them, and she touched Boofuls with her long clawlike hand, and Boofuls turned around, too.

Deaf and blind, Morris turned his bandaged head. Douglas Perry said brusquely, 'I asked Lejeune, and he promised that Morry would be given his sight and his hearing back if I brought him here.'

'From him?' Alison almost shrieked. 'From the devil?'

It was then that Boofuls walked up to them - naked, smiling, beatific. 'Hello, Martin. So you came to pay homage?'

'I came to give you what you damn well deserve,' Martin told him.

'Too late.' Boofuls smiled. 'I have brought back my father from his exile, and he lives. You and Alison and young Emilio can provide him with his first feast.'

Behind him, the immense dragon-creature arched back its withered neck and let out a harsh gargling sound.

Boofuls said, 'He is back now, to rule his rightful domain. All praise. And all praise to those who found his scattered body, piece by piece, and brought it here, so that I could breathe life back into it. These actors and directors spent millions of dollars finding the last few pieces of my father's body ... some were found in Europe, others were found in Arabia. And then all that was needed was the great sacrifice - one hundred forty-four thousand innocents, whose souls gave my father new life.'

Martin lifted the mirror-sword. 'I'm going to do now what your grandmother should have done, all those years ago. So if you've got some prayers to say, you'd better say them.'

Boofuls laughed. 'Do you think that you, of all people, can ward off the realm of endless night? The sun will refuse to rise tomorrow, my friend, and it will never rise again, and the world will die in chaos and darkness and storm and cold. The time was promised in the Bible, my friend, and the time is now!'

Behind Boofuls, the bulk of Satan suddenly and thunderously spread his wings and opened his jaws in a screech of triumphant fury. Dust and decayed fabric were stirred up into a whirlwind, and the devil clawed his way toward Martin with its eyes staring and his teeth bared. Boofuls lifted both arms,

and stepped aside, and sang out, 'A feast for my father, that's what you'll be!'

Martin was so frightened that he could hardly think how to make his arms move. But he managed to lift the mirror-sword and swing it around and around so that it whistled cleanly through the dust and the murk, and gleamed like a helicopter blade above his head.

Satan lunged his head forward, and the tip of one of his horns caught Martin in the chest. Martin heard two ribs crack and felt a sharp, agonizing pain. Satan's head swayed around again and grazed against his shoulder. For a split second, he had a close-up of that watery, evil eye, and gingery fur that was thick with maggots; and when he breathed in he breathed the nauseating stench of excrement and dead meat.

Satan was playing with him, enjoying his fear, relishing his pain. Martin rolled aside and shouted out, 'Bastard!' and took a swing with his mirror-sword at Satan's neck. But Satan rolled his head away, with fumes pouring from his nostrils, and Martin lost his balance, stumbled, and dropped the mirror-sword on the floor.

'A feast for my father!' screamed Boofuls, dancing up and down. 'A feast for my father!'

Martin felt one broken rib grate against the other. He tried to turn himself over and pick himself up, but Satan's wing was already flapping over him like a circus tent in a storm, and Satan's reptilian head was already diving toward him with its fangs agape.

'Oh, God, help me!' he yelled.

And it was then that Emilio ducked quickly under Satan's brushing wing and picked up the sword marked VORPAL. The glass blade was almost as tall as he was; but he grasped the insulating-tape handle in both hands and ran three or four paces forward, and just as Satan turned his head sideways to grip Martin with his teeth, Emilio jabbed it straight into the devil's eye.

It was so sharp that it slid all the way in, and its point came gleaming out of the back of the devil's withered neck.

Martin had his eyes shut. He didn't see the sword run in. But he heard Miss Redd scream; and he heard Boofuls shouting in dismay; and then he opened his eyes again and saw Satan rearing up, up, up, leathery trunk on leathery pelvis, wings stretched taut in agony, dust and maggots showering down from his shaken fur.

There was a moment of deafening silence. Everybody in the room rose from their knees and stepped backward in awe.'The dragon that was Satan stood immensely high, his head arched back, the mirror-sword glittering out of that one eye. Remember that only the child can destroy the parent.

Then the dragon collapsed. He literally fell apart, limb from limb, claw from finger, bone from bone. His skull dropped from his neck and rolled across the floor with a hollow sound like an empty barrel. His wings folded and dropped. Within a few minutes, there was nothing left of his leathery eminence but all the fragments that had been so painstakingly and expensively collected over so many years by the vainglorious Satan worshippers of Hollywood. A pall of stinking dust hung over him for a while, but gradually sifted and settled.

Boofuls stood quite still, with his eyes wide open.

'What have you done?' he said. 'What have you done!!'

Without a word, Martin limped over to the devil's skull, placed his foot against it, and tugged out the mirror-sword. Then he turned back to Boofuls and faced him, the sword lifted over his right shoulder, ready to strike.

'The son of Satan,' he whispered.

Boofuls said nothing, but continued to stare at him, wide-eyed. Miss Redd, a little farther away, weakly mouthed the word 'no'.

Martin swung the mirror-sword with all his strength. It flashed through the air and sliced Boofuls' head clean off his neck. The bloody blond head bounced across the floor. The small naked body stood in front of Martin for a moment, its neck pumping out squiggles of blood, and then it fell stiffly sideways, as if it were a tailor's dummy, and dropped to the floor.

Shaking, half berserk, Martin advanced on Miss Redd.

'You will never kill me with that,' she spat at him, backing away. 'I am quite different.'

'I know that,' said Martin. He tossed the mirror-sword aside, and it dropped to the floor and smashed into half a dozen pieces. 'But Father Quinlan told me to read my Alice carefully, and that's just what I did.'

Martin stepped forward and gripped hold of Miss Redd's cape. She shook the Red Queen backwards and forwards with all her might. He shook her violently, until she screamed. But he kept on shaking her and shaking her, so that her head was hurled from side to side, her whole body was jerked around. The Red Queen made no resistance whatever: only her face grew very small, and her eyes got large and green: and still, as Alice went on shaking her, she kept on growing shorter - and softer -and rounder — and -

Martin was holding nothing but an empty black cape. He dropped it, exhausted, just in time to see a brindled cat dodging off into the darkness of the Leicester Suite, and jumping up onto the drapes, and disappearing.

'That was Pickle!' said Emilio in astonishment. 'Martin — that was Pickle!'

Martin looked at his bloodstained hands; then at Alison; then at the decayed ruins of the angel whom God had banished from heaven forever. 'Yes, Emilio,' he said. 'That was Pickle.'

Together, Martin and Alison and Emilio turned away and walked through the silent assembly of actors and directors. Morris blindly called out, 'Alison!' but Alison ignored him and took hold of Martin's hand. Martin in turn took hold of Emilio's hand.

'Alison!' called Morris one last time; and that was the last word that echoed in the Hollywood Divine.

They buried Ramone next to his mother at Forest Lawn. Afterward, Martin took them to lunch at Butterfield's. Alison and Emilio, Mr and Mrs Capelli. They were all too hot, dressed as they were in black.

Alison looked at Martin for a long time. Then she said, 'I'm going away tomorrow.'

'Oh, yes?' Martin had been hoping they could spend the weekend together.

'Acapulco, just for a couple of weeks.'

'Hey, Acapulco, that's nice,' said Mr Capelli.

'By yourself?' asked Martin, trying to sound offhand.

'Well,' admitted Alison. 'There's this guy I met.. . he's an independent producer. He has this house in Laurel Canyon. I mean you wouldn't believe it! Nine bedrooms, two pools!'

Martin nodded. 'Quite a guy, by the sound of it.'

Alison reached over and squeezed his hand. 'You're not upset?'

'Upset? Why should I be upset?'

But then Emilio came around the table and laid his hand on Martin's shoulder and said, 'It's okay, Martin. You can play with me.'

They demolished the Hollywood Divine on the last day of November that year. As the wrecking crew brought down the great domed roof of the Leicester Suite, a brindled cat was watching from across the street, its eyes narrowed against the sunlight and the dust.

The cat was still watching as a passing derelict sifted through the rubble that had spilled into the street, attracted by something bright.

The derelict picked up a squarish fragment of mirror, turned it this way and that, and frowned into it. Then he buffed it up on his sleeve and dropped it into his pocket.

He shuffled southward on Vine Street, with the cat patiently following him.