Mirror

'I'll try.'

There was a longer pause. Ramone checked his Spiro Agnew wristwatch. 'Guess it's time I went back to the store. Kelly's okay, but she can be kind of remote. Also, she doesn't believe in responsibility. It's something to do with this sect she's gotten into. The Maharishi Nerdbrain or something.'

'Take care,' said Martin. 'And thanks for looking after the mirror for me.'

'It's not for you, my friend. It's for Lugosi. Wherever the poor bastard may be.'

Martin spent a bad night at the hospital. The nurse had given him a sedative to help him sleep, and for three or four hours he slept as heavily as a lumberjack: but all the time his mind was alive with the most vivid and terrifying nightmares. He saw Boofuls — or something he thought was Boofuls - right at the very end of a long tunnel of mirrors. Just an arm, just a leg, just a fleeting glimpse; and then an echo of laughter that sounded melodious at first, and then rang as harshly as a butcher's knife on a butcher's steel.

'Pickle-nearest-the-wind,' somebody whispered, so close and so distinct that he opened his eyes and looked around the room. 'Pickle-nearest-the-wind.'

Then he was running across a wide, well-mowed lawn, trying to catch up with a scampering boy dressed in lemon yellow. The day was bright. The boy was laughing. But then the boy disappeared behind a long row of cypress bushes; and a cloud dragged its gray skirts over the sun; and the laughter stopped. Martin walked along the row of cypress bushes, slowly at first. 'Boofuls?' he called. 'Boofuls?'

He started to jog, and then to run. 'Boofuls, where are you? Boofuls!'

'Pickle-nearest-the-wind,' somebody whispered, and then again, faster, like a train gathering momentum. 'Pickle-nearest-the-wind.'

He ran even harder. He was terrified now. Something burst out of the cypress bushes right behind him and came running after him, just as fast, faster. He turned wild-eyed to see what it was, and it was a small boy, dressed in lemon yellow, but his face was the gilded face of Pan, snarling at him.

He stumbled, fell, rolled over; and then he woke up in bed sweating and clutching the bed rails. The nightmare garden faded; the cypresses were folded up like dark green tents and hurried away; the gilded face gleamed with momentary wickedness and then vanished.

He switched on his bedside light. Outside his door, two nurses and an orderly were loudly discussing next week's Hospital Hootenanny. Sirens wailed down by the casualty department as the victims of the night's violence were hurried in. Tragedy didn't sleep; anger didn't sleep; junkies and hookers didn't sleep; and neither did knives.

He called for the nurse. Nurse Newton opened his door; a huge black woman with an irrepressible smile who reassured him more than all the other nurses put together. 'What is it now, Mr Willy-ams?'

'Do you think you could bring me a bottle of red wine? It's the only thing that gets me to sleep.'

'Red wine, Mr Willy-ams? That's against regulations. And besides, you're up to your ears in sedatives.'

'Nurse, I need some sleep.'

Nurse Newton came over, took his temperature, and felt his pulse. 'You're cold,' she remarked, frowning. 'How come you're so cold?'

'Nightmares,' he said.

'Nightmares? Now, why should a big grown-up man like you have nightmares?'

Martin said, 'God knows. I don't.'

'Well, what are they about, these nightmares?'

'You're going to think I'm bananas.'

Nurse Newton leaned over him and examined the dressings on his ear. 'I'm a nurse, Mr Willy-ams. I'm paid to take care of people, not to make judgments about their mental health. Mind you, I might think differently about you in my spare time.'

Martin winced as she turned his head to one side. 'Did you ever hear about a little boy called Boofuls?' he asked her. 'He was a child star, back in the thirties.'

Nurse Newton stared at him in surprise. 'Why, what makes you ask that?'

'I just wanted to know, that's all.'

'Well, of course I heard about Boofuls. Everybody knows about Boofuls here at the Sisters of Mercy.'

Martin tried to sit up, but Nurse Newton pushed him back down again. 'You stay put. You're not well enough to start hopping around.'

'But what's so special about the Sisters of Mercy? How come everybody here knows about Boofuls?'

Nurse Newton took out his thermometer and frowned at it.

'There's a kind of spooky story about him, that's why. They brought his grandmother here, the evening she killed him.'

'That's right. I mean - / know that, because I've been making a special study of Boofuls. But how come you know that, too?'

Nurse Newton smiled. 'It's because of the spooky story, that's why. They tell it to all the nurses and the interns. Usually at the Christmas party, you know, at midnight, when it's all dark and there's just candles.'

Martin said, 'I thought I knew everything about Boofuls that it was possible to know. But I never heard any stories connected with the Sisters of Mercy.'

Nurse Newton lifted her head and half closed her eyes, and said, 'What was that song? "Surrr . . . wannee Song! Suwannee Song! You can blow your flute and you can bangj/oar drum and you can march along!" That always used to make me cry when I was a child.'

Martin nodded. 'He was amazing, that little boy.' 'But spooky,' Nurse Newton added, lifting one finger. 'Can you tell me about it?' Martin asked her. She winked. 'You've been having nightmares about him. Do you think I should?'

'Nurse - listen - I'm the world's expert on Boofuls. If there's something about Boofuls that I don't know —!'

Nurse Newton shook the mercury back down her thermometer with three decisive flicks of her wrist. 'Well . ..' she confessed, 'don't tell any of the hospital administrators that I told you this. I might get myself into big trouble. The board don't want the paying patients getting hysterical; and, believe me, if you told this story to some of the banana trucks on this floor, they would. Get hysterical, I mean.'

She jotted a note on Martin's chart and then sniffed and shook her head. 'Besides,' she said, 'you shouldn't speak ill of the dead, that's what my mamma always used to tell me. Someone who's dead can't defend themselves.'

'Supposing I take you to dinner,' Martin coaxed her. Nurse Newton whacked the side of her thigh in hilarity. lYou - take me for dinner! With all those bandages on your face? Talk about the Invisible Man meets Winifred Atwell! Besides, I'd eat you for dinner!'

'Supposing I arrange for you to meet Mr T, in person,' said Martin much more subtly. 'I write for the A-Team. You could meet him in person. I don't know — lunch, dinner. Maybe a little dancing later.'

Nurse Newton stared at him narrowly. 'You could do that?' 'Of course I could do that! I've known him for years. Mr T and I, we're like this!' and he held up two intertwined fingers. 'You're not fooling?' 'Cross my heart and hope to die.'

'You shouldn't say that. Nobody should hope to die. But could you do that? Me and Mr T?'

Martin nodded. 'You and Mr T. Just say the word.' Nurse Newton glanced over her shoulder, almost as though she expected the hospital governors to be standing right behind her. 'Well,' she said quietly, 'I wasn't even born when this happened, don't you forget, so no smart remarks.' 'It was 1939,' said Martin. 'August 1939.' Nurse Newton nodded. 'Some of the older staff can still remember it. Dr Rice remembers it, he was an intern in those days; and Sister Boniface remembers it, too. Like I say, they used to tell us all about it at the Christmas party. I guess it was just a ghost story. But they used to sound so serious, you couldn't help believing it, you know? And they made us all promise not to say nothing to nobody, never. Maybe they were worried about libel or something.'

Martin said, 'I don't think you have to worry about libel. You can't libel the dead, and Boofuls has been dead for a very long time.'

The nurse shrugged. 'Hmh, that didn't seem to make too much difference. His being dead, I mean.' 'What do you mean by that?' asked Martin. 'Oh, come on, now,' said Nurse Newton. 'It's nothing but a story, really. Every hospital has its spooky stories. There's a lot of stress in hospitals. Lot of death, too.' 'Story or not, I'd like to hear it.'

Nurse Newton went over to the door, listened for a moment, and then closed it tight. She came tippy-toeing back over to the bed. 'It was just after Boofuls was found dead,' she whispered. 'The police had cut his grandmother down — you know she tried to hang herself? — and brought her here. They thought she was dead, and Dr Rice said they should have let her die, because her neck was broken, and her throat was so bruised and swollen that she could barely speak. But she was still alive; and I guess they thought they might have a million-in-one chance of saving her.'

She hesitated and smiled. 'Boofuls, of course — they took him straight to the mortuary. There was nothing else that anyone could do. Can you imagine trying to sew him all back together? Dr Rice said he was chopped up into two hundred and eleven separate pieces. The coroner had to count them all; and there were still bits of him they couldn't even find. Dr Rice said that it was a joke for months in the hospital commissary — anytime somebody found a bone in their pork chop, they'd pick it up on the end of their fork and say, "Hello, piece number two hundred and twelve!" Well, you know what doctors are. Doctors have the sickest sense of humor of anybody.'

'Boofuls' grandmother didn't say anything before she died?' asked Martin. 'I mean - the police say that she didn't, but maybe one of the nurses heard her.'

Nurse Newton shook her head. 'She died pretty soon after they brought her into the hospital; that's what Sister Boniface said, and she was sitting beside her when she died. I don't think she said anything at all, except she called out a couple of times for Boofuls.'

'So what's this spooky story?' asked Martin. 'Listen, mister — three nurses and two doctors all saw Boofuls walking around the hospital that night calling for his grandma. "Grandma! Grandma! Where are you?"'

'What do you mean — after he was supposed to be dead? After he was chopped up into two hundred eleven pieces?'

Nurse Newton nodded. 'That's what's so spooky. Isn't that spooky?'

Martin considered it. 'Yes,' he said. 'That's spooky. But didn't any of them report it? Didn't they tell the newspapers, or the police, or the hospital authorities?'

'Would you?' asked Nurse Newton.

Martin patted his bandages. 'No,' he admitted. 'I guess not.'

Nurse Newton leaned forward and plumped up Martin's pillows. 'Of course, what was spookiest of all was that every time one of the nurses or the doctors caught sight of him, they'd go after him - you know, imagining that he was a real boy — but every time they got to where he was at, they realized that he wasn't there at all. What they could see was just a reflection in one of the mirrors at the end of the corridors.'

This time, Martin sat bolt upright. 'They saw Boofuls in the mirrors?

'Hey, now, calm down,' Nurse Newton urged him. 'You don't want to go getting yourself so waxed up. You'll split your stitches.'

'They saw Boofuls in the mirrors - nowhere else?'

'Well, that's right, that's what Dr Rice says; and he was one of the doctors who saw it. But you're not supposed to know about this. It's just one of those little bits of hospital history, you know? Like, Ripley's Believe It or Not.'

Martin swung his legs out of bed. 'I have to talk to this Dr Rice. Can you find him for me?'

'Come on, honky, this is the middle of the night. Dr Rice is at home, getting his ugly-sleep. And you need yours, too. Now, you just get yourself back in that bed before I do you a physical injury they'll never be able to stitch together.'

Martin's heart was racing. 'Listen,' he said, Til get back into bed on one condition — that as soon as Dr Rice gets here in the morning, he comes in to see me. Now, is that a promise?'

'Mr Willy-ams, I can't promise anything like that.'

'Then so help me God, I'll scream. I'll scream so loud that the whole goddamned hospital will wake up.'

'My goodness, Felicity-Ann!' said Nurse Newton. 'Aren't you the fierce person? But all right, I'll go right down to Dr Rice's office now, and I'll leave him a message. He doesn't come in till eleven o'clock, he only does consultancy these days. But I'll do my best to get him up here right away.'

'Nurse Newton, you're an angel.'

Nurse Newton forced him back onto the pillow. 'I am not an angel, Mr Willy-ams. I am a nurse.'

Martin dozed for the rest of the night. His nightmares rushed through his head like a carousel that had broken away from its moorings; dark and urgent, wild and clamorous, the carnival rides of the mind.

He dreamed that he was running down a long sliding corridor; and at the very end of the corridor stood Boofuls, smiling and innocent. As he approached, however, Boofuls' head began to revolve on his neck, slowly at first, with a low grating noise, then faster and faster, until it began to spray out blood. A fine drizzle of gore.

Martin shouted out, and woke up; or thought he had woken up. He sat up in bed, listening. He could hear someone whispering outside the door of his hospital room. ' Pickle-di-pickle-di-pickle-di-pickle.'

He stayed where he was, listening, sweating. Then he climbed out of bed and glided toward the door with his hand outstretched. ' Pickle-nearest-the-wind,' giggled the voice outside in the corridor.

Slowly fearfully, he turned the handle and opened the door. There was nobody there; only the black, echoing corridor, only the distant whooping of sirens. Tragedy never sleeps, knives never sleep. 'Martin,' whispered the tiny wee voice. 'Come on, Martin, don't be afraid. Why are you afraid, Martin?'

He stepped out into the corridor. At the very far end, he saw Boofuls. Small and smiling, sweet as candy, sugar-dandy, but in some peculiar way more dwarflike and crunched up than he had appeared in the mirror in Martin's sitting room. Boofuls looked white; so white that his face could have been poured out of alabaster.

'Are you afraid, Martin?' he whispered. His voice and his lips didn't seem to synchronize, like a badly dubbed film. He stretched out his arms, a young messiah. ' You don't have to be afraid of anything.'

It was then that Martin realized that Boofuls wasn't standing on the floor at all, but was suspended halfway between the floor and the ceiling. Martin's hair prickled in fear, but something compelled him to start running toward Boofuls, to catch him, to prove at last that he was nothing more than a memory.

Boofuls laughed as Martin waded toward him through the treacle of his nightmare. A sweet, high laugh that echoed and reechoed until it sounded like thousands of pairs of clashing scissors. Martin reached the end of the corridor at last, and reached out to Boofuls to snatch him down from his invisible crucifix. But — with a cold and bruising collision — he came up against a sheet of frigid plate glass. Boofuls laughed at him. He was nothing more than an image in a mirror - a reflection of a boy who was long dead.

Martin struck out wildly, shouting and kicking and thrashing his arms. 'Boofuls! Boofuls! For God's sake, Boofuls!'

Dr Ewart Rice poured himself another cup of lemon tea. The late morning sunshine played softly through the rising steam and across the olive-green leather of his desk. There was such quiet in his office, and such tranquillity in his manner, that Martin felt almost as if he had found a sanctuary, and this was its priest.

'You're sure you won't have another cup?' Dr Rice asked him. He was a thin, drawn man, with a beak of a nose and furiously tangled white eyebrows. He wore a brown tweed suit, and a very clean soft shirt in tattersall check. There was the faintest lilt of Scottishness in his accent; a great precision in the way he pronounced his words.

'We tell the story for amusement, of course,' he explained, tapping his spoon on the side of his teacup. 'But I suppose, in a way, we also tell it as a ritual of faith. Because, it did happen, you know. We did see Boofuls, all five of us. We all decided that it would be worse than useless to tell the newspapers or the police. At the very least, we would have been laughed at. At the very worst, we might have ruined our careers. But it was real enough, don't you know, the first and last time that any of us had seen what you might describe as a ghost, and that was why we embroidered it into a hospital legend.'

He smiled. 'I suppose you could say that by keeping the story alive, we were exorcising the ghost. An annual ritual of bell, book and candle. Or, at the very least, a way of reassuring ourselves that we hadn't all gone mad.'

'You're not mad,' Martin told him.

Dr Rice sipped his tea and then set his cup down. 'You seem very certain about that.'

Martin nodded. 'I am. Because Tm not mad, and I've seen Boofuls, too.'

' You've seen him?' Dr Rice asked with care. 'I suppose by that you mean recently?'

Martin said, 'I've been a Boofuls fan ever since I was young. I'm a screenwriter now; I write for movies and television. I've written a musical based on his life — not that I've managed to sell it yet. In Hollywood, the name of Boofuls seems to carry a built-in smell of its own. The smell of failure, if you know what I mean.'

Dr Rice said, 'Aye,' and sipped more tea.

'This week, I bought the mirror that used to hang over Boofuls' fireplace,' Martin explained. 'Ever since then, I've had nothing but trouble.'

'And you say you've seen him?'

'In the mirror, yes. And that's why I wanted to talk to you.'

Dr Rice said, 'Yes, I can see why. It's all very disturbing. As a rule, I am not a believer in mysterious occurrences. I am a gynecologist; and once you have seen the mystery of human creation repeated over and over again in front of your eyes, then I am afraid that, by comparison, other mysteries tend to dwindle into insignificance.'

'I don't think there's anything insignificant about this mystery,' Martin told him, and explained about the two mismatched balls; and how Emilio had tried to step into the mirror; and what happened to Lugosi.

'I'm in the hospital because of that mirror,' said Martin. 'I've had thirty-eight stitches, and I could have been killed. That's not insignificant to me."

Dr Rice was silent for a long time, his soft, withered hands lying in his lap like fallen chestnut leaves. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and controlled, but that made his account of what had happened on the night that Mrs Alicia Crossley was brought to the Sisters of Mercy sound even more frightening.

'There was, of course, enormous excitement. The press were everywhere. The lobby was filled with reporters and photographers and cameramen from movie newsreels. I arrived at seven o'clock for my night duty, and I had to struggle to get into the building.'

He paused, and then he said, 'Mrs Crossley died around eight o'clock, I think. After that, there were a few hours of comparative quiet, because the press had all rushed off to file their stories for the morning editions. I was on the gynecological floor, that's floor five. There were two babies being delivered that night, so I was constantly to-ing and fro-ing between the two delivery rooms.'

'Is that when you saw Boofuls?' asked Martin.

Dr Rice said, 'Yes. It was a quarter of ten. I was walking along the corridor between what they used to call Delivery Room B and the main stairs when I saw a small boy standing at the end of the corridor, looking lost. I called out to him, but he didn't seem to hear me. He was crying, and saying "Grandma, where's grandma?" over and over.

'I went right up to him. I was as close to him as you and I are sitting now. Closer, maybe. I put my hand out, I could see what was right in front of my eyes, but somehow my brain wouldn't believe it. I put my hand out to touch him even though he was standing not outside but inside the mirror. The mirror was like a glass door, no more; or a window. It was completely impossible; it couldn't happen. It flew right in the face of everything I'd ever understood about science, about the world, about what can exist and what can't exist. And, believe me, this couldn't exist, but there it was, right in front of my eyes.

'The boy had stopped crying, and he had covered his face with his hands, and was playing peek-a-boo through his fingers. I shouted at him, "Can you hear me?" two or three times, and then at last he took his hands away from his face. I wish he hadn't.'

Martin sat back, waiting for Dr Rice to finish, knowing that it took extra courage for him to explain what he had seen.

'His face looked normal at first. A little pale, maybe, but in those days a lot of children used to suffer from anemia. But then suddenly something red and thin started to dangle from his nostril, then another, then another, until they were dropping out onto the floor. He opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue, and his whole tongue was wriggling with them. Meat worms, the kind that eat corpses. They were pouring out of him everywhere. I expect you can understand that I dropped my clipboard and my smart new stethoscope and ran outside. I was in a terrible state.'

'Do you think it was some kind of hallucination?' asked Martin. 'After all, everybody knew that Boofuls was dead; there was mass hysteria; and you were right there in the thick of it.'

Dr Rice smiled ruefully. 'Don't you think I've asked myself that same question a thousand times? Was it a hallucination? Was it a dream? Was it tiredness? But no, my friend, I'm afraid not. I saw Boofuls quite clearly. I was in perfectly sound health, well rested, no hangovers. I couldn't afford to drink in those days! The only conceivable explanation as far as I'm concerned was that he was really there. Or, at least, that his spirit was really there.'

'Do you believe in spirits?' asked Martin. 'Do you?' Dr Rice retaliated.

'I don't &believe in them, let's put it that way. Especially now that I've seen Boofuls.'

Dr Rice said, 'Altogether, five of us saw him. Well — I believe six, but one of the nurses refused to admit that she'd seen anything out of the ordinary. All five of us had similar experiences — that is, we all saw Boofuls weeping in a mirror — all at approximately the same time, about quarter of ten, but what makes the whole affair so fascinating is that we were all on different floors, and two out of the five who saw him I didn't even know.'

Martin cautiously touched his bandaged chin. 'So there could have been no - what would you call it? - group hysteria, something like that? I mean you didn't get together and discuss the Boofuls murder to the point where you all temporarily flipped?'

Dr Rice shook his head. 'There was no "flipping" that night, I can assure you. I had to drink three large Scotches one after the other, just to reassure myself that I wasn't completely losing my reason.'

'The other doctors and nurses — are they still here?'

'Only Sister Boniface. The rest, I regret, have passed on. Cirrhosis, cancer, auto accident; a fair cross section of modern fatalities.'

'Can I speak to Sister Boniface?'

'You may, if you wish; but her sighting was extremely brief. She had been sitting with Mrs Crossley before she died; and after her death she stayed to do the usual tidying up. She was covering Mrs Crossley's face with a sheet when she thought she heard a noise, just above her head. She looked up, and there was Boofuls - well, lying, as it were, on the ceiling. She screamed, and the police guard came in, and Boofuls vanished.'

Dr Rice picked up a gold mechanical pencil from his desk and began to turn it end over end. 'It disturbed her deeply, seeing Boofuls like that. Who would ever believe that she had seen a dead boy smiling at her from the ceiling? She went quite to pieces. Well — it was only our annual storytelling rituals that helped her to keep her feelings in perspective. She's a poor soul, Sister Boniface, and no mistake.'

Martin looked at Dr Rice narrowly. 'What do you think of all this?' he asked him bluntly. 'I mean, is it bullshit, or are we all going crazy, or what?'

Dr Rice gave him a tight smile. 'I saw what I saw, Mr Williams. You saw what you saw. To each, his own experience. Let us simply say that no one can take that experience away from us, no matter how unhinged they think we might be.'

He raised his head and looked at Martin benignly. 'Either we were all witnesses to an extraordinary manifestation — the power of love, perhaps, to extend beyond the moment of death — or else we are all quite mad.'

Martin sniffed, and found it painful. 'Welcome to the nuthouse, in other words.'

Sister Boniface was taking her lunch in the hospital gardens when they found her. She was sitting in the shade of an Engelmann oak, eating a vege-burger out of a polystyrene box.

She was so thin that she was almost transparent; with rimless spectacles; and a face that looked like Woody Alien if he had been seventy years old, and a nun. She blinked as Martin and Dr Rice approached, and closed her lunch box, as if she had been caught doing something indiscreet.

'Hello, Sister,' said Dr Rice. 'This is Martin Williams. Martin, this is Sister Boniface. Martin writes for television, Sister.'

'Yes?' Sister Boniface smiled. 'How do you do, Mr Williams? You're not writing one of those hospital series, are you? St Elsewhere? Something like that?'

Martin shook his head. 'You watch all of those things? Do you know something, I can never imagine nuns watching television.' 'We tend not to collectively,' said Sister Boniface. 'The wimples get in the way.'

'Humorist, too,' Dr Rice muttered out of the side of his mouth. 'You know what I mean?'

Sister Boniface said, with some precision, 'You came about Boofuls.'

Martin glanced at Dr Rice. 'How did you know about that?'

'Well, Mr Williams, all hospitals have their grapevines. I understand you had nightmares last night; Nurse Newton told me. Naturally, I asked her whether you were suffering from any particular anxieties—and, well, Nurse Newton is an excellent nurse, but not discreet.'

Martin was sweating. The midday sun was hot; and the salt from his perspiration irritated his stitches.

'I understand that you saw Boofuls in his grandmother's room, the night she died.'

Sister Boniface nodded, her starched wimple waving up and down like a snow-white sea gull. 'That is correct.' 'He was floating on the ceiling, right?' 'That is quite correct. He was floating on the ceiling.' Her voice was so equable that when she looked up at Martin and her eyes were filled with tears, he was taken by surprise. She put aside her vege-burger and reached out her hand and clutched the sleeve of his shirt. 'Oh, Mr Williams, that poor child! It still haunts me now!'

Dr Rice said, 'Mr Williams has seen Boofuls, too, Sister Boniface, just this week.'

'Then you believe?' asked Sister Boniface, her eyes widening.

'Well, of course I believe,' said Martin. 'I saw —'

Sister Boniface awkwardly climbed onto her knees on the pebble paving. 'Mr Williams, all these years, it's been such a trial! Whether to believe in it or not! A miracle, a vision, right in front of my eyes!'

Martin knelt down beside her and gently helped her up onto her feet again. Underneath her voluminous white robes, she felt as skeletal as a bird. 'Sister Boniface, I'm not sure that it's a miracle. I don't know what it is. I'm trying to find out. But I'm not at all sure that it's — well, I'm not at all sure that it comes from God.'

Sister Boniface reached out her long-fingered hand and gently touched Martin's cheek. 'You are a good man,' she said. 'I can feel it in you. But it had to be a miracle. What else? He was floating on the ceiling, smiling at me. As clear as daylight.'

'He didn't speak?' asked Martin.

'No, nothing,' said Sister Boniface. 'He was there for a second, then he was gone.'

'You screamed?'

'Of course I screamed! I was very frightened.'

'Well, sure, of course you were. What with Mrs Crossley's body and everything.'

Sister Boniface sat up straight. 'I am not frightened by death, Mr Williams. I am frightened only by the face of pure goodness; and by the face of pure evil.'

'How long did you stay with Mrs Crossley that evening?' Martin wanted to know.

Sister Boniface shrugged. 'They asked me to come into the room to help with the last rites. Mrs Crossley was a Catholic, you know. Afterward . . . well, I just stayed where I was, helping, until it was time for them to take her away.'

Martin slowly massaged the back of his neck. This was getting him nowhere at all. He had learned that Boofuls had appeared as a mirror-ghost on the night he was murdered; but he had learned nothing at all about why he had been killed; and how he had gotten into the mirror-world, or why he should have decided to reappear now.

'You've been very helpful,' he told Sister Boniface. 'I'm sorry if I brought it all back to you.'

Sister Boniface smiled distantly. 'You haven't brought it back to me, Mr Williams. I never forget it. I never stop thinking about it. Was I visited by God, do you think, or by the devil? I fear that I shall never know. Not in this life, anyway.' Martin hesitated for a moment, and then bent his head forward and kissed her hand. Her skin was dry and soft, like very fine tissue paper.

'There is one thing,' she said.

Martin looked up. Sister Boniface's eyes were unfocused, as if she were trying to distance herself from what she was going to say next.

'What is it?' he asked her.

'I was the only member of the hospital staff who stayed with Mrs Crossley from the moment she was brought into the hospital to the moment she died.' 'And?'

'She didn't speak,' said Sister Boniface. 'But she did regain consciousness for a very short time. She lay there, staring at the ceiling, gasping for breath. Then, when she and I were alone together for a short while, she beckoned me closer. She pointed toward her bracelet, which they had taken off when they first tried to resuscitate her, but which was still lying on the table beside the bed. It was a charm bracelet, with little gold figures of cats and moons and stars on it. But there was a key attached to it, too; quite an ordinary key. She gestured that I should take the key off the bracelet, and when I had done so, she pressed it into my hand, and closed my fingers over it.'

Sister Boniface reached under the folds of her habit and took out a small leather change purse. She opened it up, and reached inside, and produced a small steel key. 'This is the very key, Mr Williams.'

'I see . . . what does it unlock?'

'I have absolutely no idea. Mrs Crossley did nothing more than press it on me, insisting that I keep it. Her throat was almost completely closed, poor thing, and she could scarcely catch her breath, let alone speak. But it seemed as if the key were terribly important, because she kept staring at me and trying to nod, and catching at my sleeve.'

Martin said, 'May I?' and took the key out of Sister Boniface's hand. It was small and plain, with the number 531 punched on it. He turned it over. The manufacturer's name, Woods Key, was embossed on it, but that was all. There was no clue where it might have come from, or what door it might have fitted.

'Whatever secret this key was guarding, it probably vanished years ago,' said Dr Rice.

Martin said, 'It looks like a suitcase key. No — maybe it's a little too big for that. A locker room key, what do you think? Or the key to a cash box?'

'Could be anything,' said Dr Rice. 'Sister Boniface showed it to us before, and we tried it on every locker and cupboard we could find. We thought we might discover a hidden fortune, I suppose. Pretty fruitless exercise. All it proved was that it didn't fit any of the lockers in the hospital. I think Dr Weddell took it down to the bus depot one afternoon and tried locker number 531 there, but that was no use. It didn't fit the lockers at any of the local airports, either.'

'Well, it's probably a bank key or a hotel safe-deposit key,' said Martin. 'In which case we have about as much chance of finding it as a —' He was about to say 'cat in hell' but suddenly thought of that stinking brindled tomcat snatching at his eyes, and left his sentence unfinished. Despite the midday heat, he shivered, and felt uncomfortably cold.

Sister Boniface said, 'Mr Williams, why don't you keep that key? Perhaps you can find the lock it fits. You are the one who is closest to Boofuls now. Perhaps Boofuls will himself tell you.'

Dr Rice laid a hand on Martin's shoulder. 'Go on, take it,' he said. 'It'll make her feel happy.'

'Sure,' Martin agreed, and slipped the key into his pocket.

They walked back across the hospital courtyard. Martin turned around, shielding his eyes against the sunlight. Sister

in

Boniface had returned to her vege-burger and was placidly munching it.

'She's tormented, you see,' said Dr Rice. 'She can t decide if she's been blessed with a vision of heaven or cursed with a glimpse of hell.'

Martin took out the key. He felt, oddly, that he had always been meant to have it; in the same way that he had been meant to buy the mirror. He also felt that - one day soon - he was going to discover what lock it fitted, what secret it hid. The trouble was, he wasn't at all sure that he wanted to know.

CHAPTER FIVE

He drove back to his apartment late that afternoon to find a rusty blue and white pickup parked outside and Ramone arguing with Mr Capelli in the front yard.

'Hey, what's going on?' he asked, slamming his car door and crossing the sidewalk.

Mr Capelli immediately looked around. 'They let you out of hospital? Look at you! You look like the curse of the mummy's tomb!'

'Thanks, Mr Capelli, I feel better already. What's wrong here? Didn't Ramone pick up the mirror?'

'He says he can't,' Mr Capelli interjected before Ramone could open his mouth. 'He says it's too heavy, he can't lift it, and / can't help him, my doctor will do worse to me than that cat did to you.'

Ramone lit a cheroot and inhaled the smoke up his nostrils. 'This guy thinks I'm Arnold Schwarzeneggs-benedict or something.'

'Oh, come on, Ramone,' said Martin. 'The mirror's heavy but it's not that heavy. I moved it myself the other evening.'

'Well, maybe you did, but you must have been taking some kind of evening classes in You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. / can't shift it, and that's all there is to it, and if you want to call me Mr Weak 'n' weedy, well, there's nothing I can do about it, because, man, that mirror will not move.''

Mr Capelli tugged and twisted at the crocodile on his Lacoste T-shirt. It was a nervous habit, that was all. When he wasn't wearing a Lacoste T-shirt, he twisted his back hair around his finger. 'This fellow, he doesn't even try! You and me, Martin, didn't we carry that mirror inside the house, just you and me, and God knows what kind of a physical shape I'm in! I surprise myself I'm not dead!'

"3

'Plenty of people your age are,' Ramone retorted. 'And some of them ain't, and should be.'

'Come on, let's take a look,' said Martin. 'Ramone and I can probably manage it between us.'

'Thinks I'm Arnold Schwarzenfriedeggs,' Ramone grumbled as he followed Martin and Mr Capelli upstairs.

They reached Martin's apartment. The door was open, and they could hear singing. High, piping singing - Emilio. Martin stopped and listened, and felt a sudden surge of fear. 'I thought I told you not to let Emilio up here, for Christ's sake!' he barked at Mr Capelli, and he bounded up the last flight of steps three and four at a time.

'Sur . . . wannee Song! Suwannee Song!' Emilio was singing.

Martin burst into the room. The door shuddered. Emilio

was marching up and down in front of the mirror, his head

held high, his elbows swinging, his knees prancing like a young

circus horse.

' You can blow your flute and you can bang your drum and

you can march along!'

Martin turned toward the mirror. For one fraction of a fraction of an instant, he thought he glimpsed Boofuls, prancing up and down the mirrored sitting room. But then all he could see was Emilio's own reflection, brown eyes bright, dark hair

shining.

'Sur . . . wannee Song! Suwannee Song!'

'Emilio?' said Martin.

Emilio stopped marching and turned around. 'Hey, look at you!' he gasped. 'You look just like the mummy!'

'Thank you,' said Martin. 'But didn't I tell you not to come up here anymore?'

'He wanted to play, that's all,' Emilio protested.

'Hey, now - who wanted to play?' Mr Capelli demanded. 'There's nobody here, just you and us.'

'Well, Mickey Mouse, of course,' Emilio replied, wrinkling up his nose in sarcasm. Without hesitation, Mr Capelli pushed his way past Martin and slapped Emilio hard across the side

of the head.

'You don't talk like that to your elder-better! You dare! You want to grow up to be a deadbeat?'

"4

'The way he's going, I think he's probably going to grow up to be President,' remarked Ramone laconically.

'That's what I mean!' Mr Capelli retorted.

Emilio's eyes were wet with tears. He rubbed his head and said, 'I'm sorry Grandpa. But he was here. That boy, Boofuls. He learned me that song.'

Mr Capelli clutched Emilio close and affectionately scruffed his hair. 'Eh ... I'm sorry, too. It's my fault. Martin told me not to let you come up here. Eh, no crying, unh? I'm just your silly old grandpa.'

But Emilio struggled free from his grandpa's embrace and turned toward the mirror. 'He's gone,' he said sadly. 'You frightened him away.'

Mr Capelli chuckled and shook his head. 'Some imagination, hunh?' But he looked toward Martin, and Martin could see the anxiety in his eyes. Mr Capelli believed in things that lived in mirrors; and Mr Capelli was afraid of them.

'Now, then, let's get this mirror out of here, hey?' Mr Capelli suggested. 'You can take one end, Ramone; and you can take the other end, Martin; and lift; and then I can direct you down the stairs.'

Ramone said, 'I've got a better idea. You carry it downstairs on your own and we'll just sit here and watch you.'

Nonetheless, Ramone and Martin bent down on each side of the mirror and prepared to lift it up. Ramone had already taken out the screws and laid a blanket on the floor to protect the gilt frame, and so all they had to do was pick up the mirror and carry it down to the street.

'When I say three!' announced Mr Capelli.

He counted three, and they lifted. Or they tried to lift. But they couldn't budge the mirror even half an inch off the floor. It felt as if it had been nailed down.

'Come on, Ramone, let's try it again,' said Martin; and they grunted and heaved; but still the mirror refused to move.

Martin propped his elbow against the mirror and puffed out his cheeks in exhaustion. 'I don't understand this. I mean, this is ridiculous. If Mr Capelli and I could carry it up three flights of stairs and screw it up on the wall, then you'd think that you and I could lift it between us — I mean, easily.'

"5

'You're out of shape, that's all,' said Mr Capelli.

'Who's out of shape?' Ramone demanded. 'I play two hours of squash every afternoon, and I don't even get out of breath!'

'Sure, but what do you have to lift in squash? Just that little racket. That doesn't weigh nothing at all.'

Ramone lifted up his arms in resignation, then dropped them again, like one of the crows in Dumbo flapping its wings. lMe duels! What can you do with a man who thinks like this?'

'Come on, Ramone, let's give it another try,' Martin suggested.

'You don't get that mirror out of here, I'm going to call professional removers, and charge you what it costs, and throw you out, too!' Mr Capelli yelled at him.

'Come on, Ramone,' Martin urged him. 'He's getting into one of his Don Corleone moods.'

'Schwarzeneggburger,' Ramone growled under his breath.

They took hold of the mirror. Mr Capelli chanted, 'One-a, two-a, three-a -'

Without a word, both Martin and Ramone released their grip, and stood up, and stepped away. They looked into each other's eyes; and each of them knew that the other had shared his experience.

When they had tried to lift the mirror, a strong dark wave had gone through each of their minds, black and inhuman but undeniably alive, like centipede legs rippling, or the cilia of some soulless sea creature, cold, pressurized, an intelligence without emotion and without remorse and with no interest in anything at all but its own supremacy and its own survival.

For the first time, Martin felt that he had touched the very core of the mirror's existence, and it was more pitiless than anything he could have imagined.

Martin and Ramone stood facing each other, as stunned and subdued as if they had experienced an unexpected electric shock. But there was no question in either of their minds what that wave of feeling had been intended to tell them. They had been categorically ordered by whatever lived in the mirror to leave it where it was.

Mr Capelli was not so insensitive that he couldn't appreciate that something had gone badly wrong — that some feeling of

hostility had suddenly caused them to back away. 'What is it?' he demanded. 'Martin — what is it?' 'I don't know,' Martin told him. 'I'm sorry, Mr Capelli, I

don't know. But I'm not touching that mirror again, not just

now.'

'Well, what?' Mr Capelli shouted. 'What do you mean, you're not touching it again? Why? What's the reason? Why don't you touch it again?'

Ramone said plainly, 'This mirror, Mr Caparooparelli -this mirror wants to stay right here. This mirror does not plan to be moved. Not that we can move it. I mean, we're too weak, right? We can only lift squash rackets, and suchlike. We can only lift stuff that is seriously deficient in avoirdupois.'

Mr Capelli stood rigid, his hands by his sides, the blood draining from his face so that he looked quite waxy, and his head too big for his body.

'All right,' he said. 'You brought this mirror here, what are you going to do?'

'I don't know,' Martin confessed. 'If I could get rid of it, right now I believe that I would. Boofuls or not.'

'Boofuls,' said Mr Capelli, keeping his false teeth clenched close together. 'That's the problem, right? Boofuls. That woman, she killed that little boy, she chopped him into millions of pieces-'

'Two hundred eleven, I'm reliably informed,' put in Martin, but he wasn't joking.

Mr Capelli spat out of the side of his mouth. 'How many exactly, who cares? But his spirit is here! His ghost! You found him a home, and now he doesn't want to go! And so what do I have? I have a house that's haunted, that's what! A haunted house with a ghost!'

'Maybe we should go get ourselves a priest,' Ramone suggested.

'I thought you were looking for a medium,' Martin reminded him.

'A priest, yes!' Mr Capelli enthused. 'A priest!'

'We could get both,' said Ramone. 'A priest and a medium.'

'Oh, God, this is ridiculous,' Martin told him. 'I don't know what to do. Maybe the best thing we can do is do nothing. Just wait it out, see what the mirror wants.'

It was then that — without warning — the blue and white ball dropped off Martin's desk and bounced onto the woodblock floor — once, twice, three times. Then it rolled toward the mirror, almost as if the floor were tilting, like the deck of a ship. At the same time, the dirty gray tennis ball dropped off the desk in the mirror and came rolling to meet it.

'Something's happening, man,' warned Ramone. 'Something's happening. I can feel it.'

None of them knew what to do. But they could all feel the air in the sitting room warping almost; like ripples of heat rising from a hot blacktop; or the distortion of a highly polished sheet of thin steel. Their voices sounded strange, too — muffled and indistinct.

'It's pulling? said Martin. 'Can you feel that? It's pulling things toward it.'

They didn't notice Emilio at first. He had been standing two or three feet behind his grandfather, staring at the mirror wide-eyed. Gradually, however, he began to move forward, his arms by his sides; and as he passed them by he started to laugh, an extraordinary high pitched laugh just like Boofuls. At once, Martin turned around. 'Emilio?' he said. Then,

'Emilio!'

'Holy God!' Mr Capelli cried out.

Emilio was sliding toward the mirror without even moving his feet. He was being drawn toward it as if it were an irresistible magnet.

'Emilio!' Mr Capelli shouted, and tried to snatch him.

Emilio threw both his arms wide and tossed back his head, and his laugh was loud and metallic like garden shears. In the mirror, his reflection slid toward him just as irresistibly, but there was something in his reflected face that didn't match his real face. Something different, something whiter, something smaller-eyed, piggy, untrustworthy, something that jumped and smirked like a face from a long-forgotten movie.

'Ramone!' Martin yelled; and Ramone dodged, and feinted, and caught hold of Emilio's arm at the very moment that Emilio collided with the surface of the mirror. Emilio screamed: a hideous piercing scream that went through Martin's head like a chisel. He thrashed and clawed and kicked at Ramone, and it took all of Ramone's strength to hold him.

'Bastard!' Emilio screamed. 'Bastard!'

'Emilio, what are you doing! Emilio!' Mr Capelli quivered and tried to snatch Emilio's flailing arm. But Emilio screamed 'Bastard!' at him, too, and kicked him first in the stomach and then between the legs. Mr Capelli coughed, gasped, and dropped to the floor.

'Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!' Emilio screeched. He threw himself from side to side like a wild animal, hair flying, spit spraying.

Ramone shouted hoarsely, 'Martin! I can't hold him! Martin!' For one desperate moment it looked as if the mirror was going to drag both Emilio and Ramone into its brilliant shining surface. But then Martin grabbed hold of Ramone's collar and deliberately fell backward, using his whole weight to pull them over. The three of them collapsed against the desk and tumbled onto the floor next to Mr Capelli. Emilio knocked his head against the corner of the desk: Martin heard it crack. Then Emilio lay still with his face against the floorboards, suddenly white, his eyes still open but flickering with concussion, and just as suddenly as it had begun, the magnetism from the mirror died away.

'Madre mia,' said Ramone, heaving himself up onto his feet, his sneakers squeaking on the boards.

Martin grasped Emilio's T-shirt and dragged him toward him. 'Out, Ramone. We have to get him out.'

Mr Capelli was up on his knees now, coughing and coughing as if he were going to choke. Martin laid a hand on his shoulder and said, 'Mr Capelli? You all right, Mr Capelli? I have to get Emilio out of here.'

Mr Capelli coughed and nodded and coughed some more. Ramone helped Martin to pick Emilio up and carry him through the hallway and down to the Capellis' apartment. Emilio wasn't badly hurt. There was a swelling red bruise on the left side of his forehead, and his eyes wandered sightlessly, but he was beginning to regain consciousness. 'Boofuls,' he murmured. 'Where's Boofuls?'

'No more Boofuls,' Martin told him. 'Boofuls is gone for good.'

'Or just about to, if I have anything to do with it,' growled

Ramone.

Mrs Capelli came flapping out of her parlor. 'What now? All this noise! Did somebody fall over? Where is Constantine? Emilio! What's happened? Look at his head! Nothing but noise and trouble this past week! Oh, what a bruise! You men, you're like children! Nothing but thumping! Can't you do anything quietly? Now he's hurt! My poor Emilio! Come on now, bring him in here!'

'He'll be okay,' Martin told her. 'Just knocked his head on the side of the desk, that's all.'

'My poor boy! You men are all the same!' Once they had left Emilio with his grandmother, Martin and Ramone went back upstairs to see what they could do to help Mr Capelli. He had managed to pull himself upright, but he looked gray in the face, and he had to lean against the wall to help himself along.

'Come on, Mr Capelli, let's get you downstairs,' Martin told him.

Mr Capelli coughed and sniffed. 'That mirror — that mirror has the devil in it! What did I say, no good would come out of it! You get rid of that mirror, you get rid of it right now! Right now! No argument!'

'You may want that mirror out of your house, but I'm not at all sure that mirror wants to go,' said Ramone.

Mr Capelli clung heavily on Martin's arm. 'That mirror goes, right now! I don't care how! You get rid of it! You smash it into small pieces, if that's what it takes!'

'Breaking a mirror, that's serious bad luck,' Ramone cautioned him as they helped him to shuffle down the stairs, one stair at a time.

'A kick in the nuts from my five-year-old grandson, that's good luck?' hissed Mr Capelli.

'All right, Mr Capelli, we'll do what we can,' Martin soothed him. 'Let's just get you downstairs.'

Ramone peered at Martin and said pessimistically, 'Your bandages are all bloody. Looks like you burst some stitches.'

'That's all I need,' said Martin, wincing with effort as the taut bulk of Mr Capelli's belly forced him against the banister.

Mrs Capelli came out again and fussed over her husband just as much as she had fussed over Emilio. 'This house is a madhouse! Never again! Tenants, always the same!'

'It's all right, Mrs Capelli,' said Martin, 'everything's under control.'

'Under control!' Mr Capelli burst out. 'My grandson goes crazy! That's under control? Look at you! Blood, bandages! Everybody's hurt!'

Martin tried to give Mrs Capelli a reassuring smile and backed off onto the landing. Ramone followed him.

'The old man's right,' said Ramone as they climbed back up again to Martin's apartment. 'That mirror has to go. Somebody's going to get hurt, or worse, and I sure don't like to imagine what that "worse" might be. Come on, Martin, we almost lost that boy, same way we lost Lugosi.'

'But if we break the mirror, you're going to lose any chance you ever had of getting Lugosi back,' said Martin. He was frightened by the mirror; but he was still reluctant to get rid of it until he knew more about Boofuls, and why he was trapped, and why Boofuls' dying grandmother had given Sister Boniface that key.

But Ramone shook his head. 'Lugosi is probably dead, anyway. Think about it, man. I've accepted it already. I was hoping he had a chance, you know, but the more I think about it ... Man, he disappeared into glass, didn't he? Solid glass. You don't think he lived through that? I sure as hell don't. I'm going to light a candle for him, that's all, and say a little prayer. I don't think there's very much else I can do.'

Martin said, 'I'm sorry, Ramone.'

'Ah, forget it,' said Ramone dismissively.

They walked back into the sitting room; and their mirror reflections walked back into the sitting room, too. They stood staring at themselves for a very long time.

'He was right, you know,' Ramone remarked.

'Who was?'

'Mr Caparooparelli. You heard what he said. That mirror's bad news.'

Martin said, 'Boofuls is still inside it.' 'And that's your reason for not getting rid of it? Some kid who's been dead for fifty years is lurking around — where? Behind it? Inside it? Mirrors are flat. Mirrors don't have no insides.' 'But your cat's inside it.'

Ramone was angry. lMy cat is my business, okay? And nothing lives inside a mirror, right? A mirror is glass, and silver, and that's it. Reflections, nothing else. Optical illusions; no depth; nothing you can walk into. I mean — what's behind that mirror? Nothing! A solid wall, nothing! There's no Boofuls living there, man. There's nothing at all!' Martin said, 'Look.'

His voice was so cold, so prickly with alarm, that Ramone looked around without saying a word. There, in the mirror, sitting on Martin's reflected desk, was the blue and white ball. And there, on the floor, in both the mirror-room and the real room, was the dingy gray tennis ball.

But on Martin's desk in the real room, what looked like a new ball had appeared. A furry, bristling, gray and black ball. A living ball, with eyes that blinked. A ball which soundlessly opened and closed its mouth. A ball which wasn't a ball at all, but Lugosi's detached head - still panting for breath, but without a body, without ears, a grotesque living plaything.

Ramone approached the head in terror and disgust. Its yellow eyes were dimmed with a film of mucus, but they managed to follow him as he came nearer.

'What the hell is it?' whispered Ramone. The furry ball stretched open its mouth and silently cried.

' What the hell is it?' Ramone screamed out loud, almost hysterical.

Martin didn't know what to say. His stomach tightened, and he suddenly broke out into the cold sweat of rising nausea.

Ramone reached out for the ball-head with fingers that shook uncontrollably. The head opened its mouth, biting or crying, and Ramone instantly snatched his fingers away.

'Oh, God, I can't touch it,' he quaked. 'Oh, God, forgive me, Martin, I just can't touch it.'

Martin swallowed bile and approached the desk as near as he dared. The head opened its mouth yet again, and its eyes stared at him in agonized desperation.

'I don't know what to do!' shouted Ramone, hoarse with panic. 'He's hurting, Martin! I don't know what to do!' Martin said, 'Go out of the room.' 'What?'

'You heard me — go out of the room.' Ramone stared at him. 'What you going to do?' 'Just go!' Martin shouted.

Still shaking, Ramone retreated from the sitting room. Martin heard his sneakers squeaking along the hallway toward the kitchen, heard the kitchen door slide shut.

With a bitter-tasting mouth, Martin edged up to the desk and took hold of his typewriter. It was a heavy Olivetti electric. His father had given it to him when he sold his first teleplay: it was reconditioned, from the typing pool at the Security Pacific Bank. It hadn't ever worked too well: it kept skipping fs and m's. But all that Martin cared about right now was that it was the heaviest liftable object in the room.

He tugged out the electric cable, rolling out the page of screenplay he had been working on. The cat's head opened its mouth in another hideous yawn, its eyes trying to focus on him as he circled around the back of the desk and picked the typewriter up in both hands. He licked his lips. His heart was thumping like a skin drum. His blood rushed through his head and almost deafened him.

'Oh, God,' he whispered, and lifted the typewriter up above his head. If he caught Lugosi's head with one of the corners, he should be able to shatter his skull in one blow. It was crucial, however, that he didn't lose his nerve and pull the typewriter back at the very last moment.

Give yourself a count of three, he told himself. Then do it. The typewriter was so heavy that his arms were beginning to tremble. Do it! he ordered himself. One, two three, and do it!

At that second, though, the cat's head seemed to rear up from the desk and swivel around. Martin almost dropped the typewriter, then cradled it in his arms staring at the head in paralyzed horror.

It rose higher and higher, on a furry neck that seemed to pour right out of the surface of the desk like a snake, yard after yard of it, until it looped and coiled down the side of the drawers and onto the floor. It was more like a python than a cat, and its sleek strange head remained lifted up in front of him on its endless ribboning neck, staring at him with agony and venomous hostility.

There was a moment when Martin believed he was really going mad - when he could hardly grasp that he was standing here at all, clutching his typewriter, with his cat-apparition swaying in front of him, and still pouring out of his desk.

He was breathing through his mouth in harsh, staccato gasps, as if he had been running. Ha—ha—ha—ha!

Then the cat started to lean toward him, its teeth bared, and he knew that it was no joke, no dream, no optical illusion. He heaved the typewriter — but it missed and bounded noisily across the floor. Then he threw his jelly jar of pencils and ballpoints, and that caught Lugosi on the side of the neck; but all the cat did was to sway back and hiss at him in fury.

'Ramone!' he yelled. But whatever Ramone was doing, he didn't hear. He was probably standing in the kitchen with his fingers jammed into his ears, so that he wouldn't have to listen to Martin crushing Lugosi's head.

Martin edged around his desk and the cat snake began to flow around it after him, its head still balanced five or six feet in the air, at eye level, fixing him with its unblinking yellow stare. He hesitated, and the cat-snake hesitated. There was no sound in the room but his own tightened breathing and the whispering of the cat-snake's fur across the boarded floor, like a woman trailing a long mink scarf.

'Ramone,' Martin repeated, but so quietly that Ramone couldn't possibly have heard him.

He cautiously reached forward, keeping his eyes onAe cat-snake all the time, until his fingers touched the brass handle of his top drawer. The handle rattled, and the cat-snake flared its mouth open, its teeth dripping strings of glistening saliva, and its body began to slide toward him across the floor.

Now or never, he told himself. He yanked open the drawer, scattering the contents everywhere — pencils, erasers, rubber

bands, paper clips, typewriter ribbons, book matches, correction fluid, and, most important of all, correction-fluid thinner.

The small plastic bottle of thinner rolled across the room and under his sofa. Martin glanced quickly at the cat-snake and then scrambled for it. The bottle had rolled almost out of reach, right under the back of the sofa next to the woven basket which contained his yucca pot.

He lay flat on his stomach and stretched his arm under the sofa. His fingertips touched the very edge of the bottle. It rolled a half inch farther away. Straining his arm even more, his shoulder pressing painfully against the underside of the sofa's frame, he just managed to reach the bottle and delicately take hold of the cap between two fingertips, so that he could tease it nearer. 'Come on, suckah,' he said under his breath. He had just managed to flick it into the palm of his hand when he felt something indescribable slide around his right thigh. He screamed out loud and rolled over, and there was Lugosi, the cat who had metamorphosed into a snake, winding itself around his leg and forcing its sleek reptilian head under * his left arm and around the back of his neck.

Martin scrabbled behind him and snatched at the cat-snake's fur. Underneath the softness, there was a hard muscular hosepipe of a body. Martin managed to get a grip on it, grunting with effort, and then he rolled over twice on the floor like a child turning somersaults at nursery school, so that the cat-snake unwound from his back.

'Ramone!' Martin shouted. 'Ramone, for God's sake!' He managed to catch the cat-snake just below the jaw and clench it tight. It spat and fumed at him and twisted its head from one side to the other. It was unbelievably strong; and the tighter he gripped it, the stronger it seemed to grow - until he was using every ounce of strength just to keep its spitting jaws away from his face.

He rolled over again, and again, and this time he managed to wedge up his knee and pin the cat-snake against the floor. It thrashed and whipped and it writhed, fifteen or sixteen feet of it. In seconds, it would thrash its way free, and then God only knew what it was going to do.

With his teeth, Martin unscrewed the cap of the thinner fluid, and then held Lugosi's head flat against the floor while he squirted almost the whole contents straight into the cat-snake's eyes and mouth and all over its head, until its furry scalp was furrowed with pungent liquid.

The cat-snake twisted and turned in agony, and for the first time uttered more than a hiss: a low, guttural kkhakk-khhakk-khakkk which prickled the hair at the back of Martin's neck. He dropped the bottle of thinner and grasped the cat-snake's neck in both hands, squeezing and squeezing as tightly as he could.

The sitting room door opened: Ramone walked in. He was obviously expecting to see Martin clearing up the remains of Lugosi's smashed head. Instead, he was confronted with a flailing snake out of a nightmare.

'Lighter,' Martin shouted. 'Lighter — before it dries!'

Ramone was open-mouthed. 'Wha - dries? What dries? What are you talking about? What, man? What the hell is that? Oh, Christ!'

'Your lighter!' Martin repeated, practically shrieking at him now. 'Set light to its head! I've just sprayed it with thinner!'

Ramone, stunned, fumbled in his shirt pocket for his Zippo. He thumbed it clumsily, but it flared up, and he held it out to Martin at arm's length.

'Light it!' Martin shouted. 'Light it, for pete's sake!'

With jiggling, juggling hands, Ramone touched the flaming Zippo to the top of Lugosi's head. Immediately, the cat-snake's fur burst into flame, and its yellow eyes bulged with pain. A terrible convulsion went right through its body, a convulsion that Martin felt right down to his stomach: a shudder of fear and suffering and self-disgust. But all he could do was hold on tight, while the cat-snake wagged its fiery head from side to side. He knew for a certainty that if he released his grip, it would still go after him, and it would probably burn him to death, too.

The sitting room began to fill with the suffocating smell of burned fur and burned flesh. As Martin held the cat-snake up in front of him, like a torchbearer, the creature's head blazed and crackled, fur and skin and muscle. It was still staring at him as its yellow eyes milked over, its optic fluid cooked. Its mouth was still gasping that khakkk-khakkk-khakkk! as fire began to lick out of its throat and between its needle-sharp teeth, and the skin of its tongue frizzled and charred.

At last, it died, and Martin was left gripping a snake with a smoking head, its jawbones showing yellowish-brown through its incinerated cheeks, its mouth stretched wide in a hideous snarl.

Martin dropped it, and the head broke off and lay smoldering in a corner. The rest of the body shrank and dwindled and thickened, and even while Martin and Ramone watched it, it took on the shape of a normal tabby cat.

'Lugosi,' Ramone whispered. 'I just killed Lugosi. I wanted to save him, man, and I killed him.'

Martin walked stiffly to the window and opened it, so that some of the sour-smelling smoke could eddy out of the room. He retched once, then again, then pressed his fist against his mouth and managed to steady himself.

'That wasn't Lugosi,' he managed to say with a dry mouth.

'You think I don't know my own cat?' Ramone protested. 'Look at him!'

Martin took a deep breath. Below the window, next door, Maria Bocanegra was strutting out on a date with her bodybuilder boyfriend. Tight white skirt, dagger-sharp white stiletto heels that made her totter along with her hips swaying from side to side, tight white T-shirt through which her nubby Sno-Cone-protected nipples were startlingly obvious, even to those who didn't particularly want to see them.

God, thought Martin, normality.

They heard loud footsteps clattering up the stairs. An imperious banging on the apartment door. 'More noise!' shouted Mrs Capelli. 'What's that noise? And smoke? Is something burning? No fires allowed!'

'It's okay, Mrs Capelli, no problem. Just a cigarette butt, dropped on the couch.'

Martin sat unsteadily down at his desk, and dry-washed his face with his hands.

Ramone kept shaking his head and saying, 'I killed him, man! You told me to do it, and I did! I can't believe it! I killed him!'

'No,' said Martin. 'You didn't kill him. It wasn't your fault. But we've learned something - or at least, I think we have.'

'What? What? What have we learned?' grieved Ramone, his face wet with tears.

'Well, for beginners, we learned that if something comes out of that mirror, something else has to go in. And vice versa, get it? Kind of a trade. I mean it may be weird but it has a certain kind of logic to it, like Isaac Newton saying that for every action there has to be an equal and opposite reaction.'

'All right,' said Ramone suspiciously, keeping his eyes averted from Lugosi's body.

'There's something else, too,' said Martin. 'The way it looks now - what happened to Lugosi — whatever happens inside that mirror, it changes things. Look - it changed Lugosi into God knows what. A snake? A cat? Some kind of mirage? I don't know what it was, but it damn near killed me. So — can you imagine what would have happened if Emilio had gotten sucked in? What would have happened to him? A boy-snake? It doesn't even bear thinking about.'

Ramone said nothing, but jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and flared his nostrils, and paced up and down with his sneakers ferociously squeaking.

'I'd better get a trash bag,' said Martin.

'An eye for an eye,' Ramone remarked with vehemence. 'We kill the mirror-cat; the mirror kills my cat. But whatever it is, that's only some jive mirror, that's all. Nothing else. It's a piece of glass.'

Martin didn't say anything. He knew that Ramone had experienced just as acutely as he had the wave of darkness that had flowed out of the mirror. He knew that Ramone wouldn't attempt to move it or break it, no matter how bitter he felt about what had happened to Lugosi.

He also knew that, however much Ramone dismissed the mirror as 'a piece of glass', it was time for them to seek the help of people who knew about such things. A priest or a spiritualist. Someone who could tell them exactly what kind of souvenir Martin had bought for himself; and what influences were at work behind its shining surface; whether they were holy or whether they were evil; and what they could do to protect themselves against it.

He opened the door, and the smoke from Lugosi's charred head swirled and eddied in the draft.

Homer Theobald arrived that Sunday morning in a bright yellow Volkswagen Rabbit and parked it right in Mr Capelli's driveway. Mr and Mrs Capelli had taken Emilio to church — to pray for his immortal soul, and to keep him away from the mirror while Homer Theobald came to see it.

Martin let Homer in. Homer Theobald was plump and hairless like Uncle Fester in the Addams Family, with hornrimmed spectacles and a splashy red and green Waikiki shirt. He smiled like a visiting doctor and held out his plump, damp hand.

'Mr Williams? I'm Homer Theobald. Your friend Ramone Perez called me?'

'That's right, come on in. Ramone isn't here yet, but you can take a look at the mirror if you want to.'

'Well, yes,' Homer Theobald beamed. 'He told me it was something to do with a mirror. That's not unusual, you know? Mirrors reflect the soul, don't they, as well as the face?'

Martin led the way upstairs. Homer Theobald sniffed and said, 'Italian?'

'I'm sorry?'

'I was just wondering if you were Italian.'

'Oh, no. But my landlord is. First-generation.'

Homer Theobald giggled. 'I didn't divine that by psychic means, I'm afraid. It's just that I have a keen nose for aromas. I can smell bolognese sauce simmering.'

'Mrs Capelli's a wonderful cook,' Martin told him. 'Maybe we can settle your fee in pizzas.'

'Well,' giggled Homer Theobald, 'I'm not so sure about that. Did Ramone tell you that I do for Elmore Sweet? Well, and lots of other stars besides. Jocelyn Grice, Nahum Ferris, the Polo Sisters. We all like to keep in touch with our loved ones, don't we, the rich and the poor, the famous and the faces in the crowd?'

Martin stopped on the landing and Homer Theobald almost collided with him.

'You can really do that?' Martin asked. 'I mean — you can really get in touch?'

Homer Theobald's smile lost something of its scoutmaster brightness. 'I hope you're not questioning my psychic credentials, Mr Williams. I'm known throughout Southern California as the Maestro of Mediums. I once talked to Will Rogers.'

Martin said, 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest -'

'No, no, not at all,' said Homer Theobald, patting Martin's arm and immediately regaining his cheerfulness. 'Most people are skeptical at first, even though they want to believe. It's only natural. But once they realize that they can speak to their lost loved ones as easily as making a long-distance telephone call - well, that skepticism just melts away!'

Martin opened the door of his apartment and let Homer Theobold in.

'You don't mind if I just stand here a moment and take in the atmosphere?' asked Homer Theobald.

Martin shrugged. 'Go ahead. This is all new to me. I never came across anything psychic in my life. Not until this, anyway.'

Homer Theobald suddenly looked at him more acutely. 'Those cuts —' he said, indicating the bandages around Martin's neck and the dressings on his cheeks and ears. 'If you don't mind my asking you a personal question — did you sustain those cuts in an auto accident, or are they anything to do with this mirror business?'

'I don't think you'd believe me if I told you.'

'Mr Williams,' said Homer Theobald, suddenly testy, 'you may think that I do nothing more for my considerable income than kid movie stars that I'm talking to their dead relatives. I told you, most people think that at first. But the fact remains that I have a gift of sensitivity that extends beyond the normal range of human faculties.'

He reached out and he gently drew his fingertip along the stitches in Martin's chin. 'These injuries have some connection with the mirror, am I right? I sense that you're frightened. I sense that you feel out of your depth. You don't know how to handle what's happening to you. You don't know whether to laugh or scream. Well, that's right. The beyond is always alarming. In the beyond, the same physical rules don't apply. Objects fly; people change shape. I don't often tell my clients that. They wouldn't understand, most of them, if I told them that their beloved parents are appearing to me in the shape of intelligent turtles, or that their heads have been stretched until they're nine feet high. But you know, it stands to reason, in a way. Why should the world beyond obey any of the laws of our own world? It would be more bizarre if it did?

Martin nodded, and quoted, 'It may be quite different on beyond.'

Homer Theobald frowned. 'I beg your pardon?'

'I was quoting. From Alice Through the Looking Glass?

'Yes, well,' said Homer Theobald. 'There was always more to that book than meets the eye. The Victorians had a very finely developed sense of death and the world beyond.'

He lifted his head, and looked around the hallway, and listened. Then, without hesitation, he crossed to the wall where Martin had impaled the brindled tomcat, and touched it. At least, he was about to touch it, but he suddenly drew his hand back.

'Anything wrong?' asked Martin.

Homer Theobald turned to stare at him. 'Something very unpleasant has happened here.'

Martin nodded.

'Do you want to tell me about it?' asked Homer Theobald.

'Why don't we take a look at the mirror first?' Martin suggested. 'Then I can tell you the whole story from the beginning.'

'I just want to know one thing,' said Homer Theobald. 'Is there something in this mirror that isn't reflected in the outside world?'

'Yes,' said Martin.

'Is it a person? If it is, say yes, but don't tell me what his or her name is. I have to keep my mind clear, you see. Thinking of somebody's name is an immediate invitation for them to get inside my mind.'

'It's a person,' said Martin.

'Is it somebody you knew?'

'Somebody I know of; but not somebody I knew. He died a long time before I was born.'

'I see,' said Homer Theobald. He took out a clean handkerchief, unfolded it, and patted the perspiration from his bald head. 'So it's a man.'

'A boy, as matter of fact.'

'So he died an unnatural death?'

'Extremely unnatural, yes. He was murdered.'

Homer Theobald closed his eyes and thought for a while. Then he said, 'Cats.'

'Yes,' Martin agreed.

Without opening his eyes, Homer Theobald stretched out both arms and felt cautiously at the air all around him. 'There was a cat. There was more than one cat. But the first cat came to the back door and wouldn't go away. It sat there and sat there and the boy used to feed it. There was an argument. No, you can't feed the cat. That cat is unhealthy, you only have to smell it, it stinks. But I love it. Nobody can love a cat like that. I want it in the house. Certainly not, you can't have a filthy animal like that in this beautiful house, we'll all get fleas.'

Homer Theobald stopped talking as abruptly as he had started. He opened his eyes and he looked at Martin with the same kind of expression as an auto mechanic when he's about to tell you that your whole transmission's shot.

'I'm still in the hallway, right? I haven't even seen this mirror yet. It's in there, right, in that room, against the wall?'

'Yes,' said Martin.

Homer Theobald rubbed his forehead. 'I don't know what I'm going to be able to do for you here, Mr Williams. I truly don't. This isn't anything like I'm used to dealing with. It's spirits, yes. It's something trying to get in touch with us from beyond the moment of death. But if I can pick it up as clearly as this from the hallway .. .'

'What are you saying?' Martin asked him. 'You can't do anything about it, or what? All I want to do is get rid of it!'

'Mr Williams,' Homer Theobald appealed to him, 'what I'm trying to tell you is that I'm too frightened.'

Martin licked his scabby, split lips. 'You mean you won't even take a look at it?'

'No, sir.'

'Do you have any idea who it is? Whose spirit it is?'

'I have a pretty fair idea. Come on, Mr Williams, I've been living and working in Hollywood all my life. I know what goes on.'

'And what's that supposed to mean?'

Homer Theobald took a deep breath. 'Mr Williams, you bought yourself a whole load of trouble when you bought this mirror. You didn't do it on purpose, of course not. Most people could have bought it and hung it on their wall and never noticed a thing. But you yourself have latent psychic powers. Nothing amazing. Compared with mine, they're about as strong as a kid's flashlight compared with a klieg light. But you're intensely interested in the spirit which possesses this mirror — I say "possesses" for want of any better word. And your intense interest, coupled with your psychic powers, low-voltage as they are — well, they've obviously been enough to stir this spirit out of his stasis. It's not sleep, spirits don't sleep in the normal sense.'

Martin said, 'Why don't you take a look at it? I mean, just take a lookV

'No-o-o, sir,' said Homer Theobald. He was adamant.

'You're just going to turn around and walk out?' Martin demanded. 'You're going to leave me here, not just me, but the people downstairs, everybody who comes into contact with this thing — you're just going to leave us to be terrorized by this spirit for the rest of our lives? There's a kid threatened here, too. A boy of five. What do you want me to tell him?'

'Do you seriously think that I don't want to help?' Homer Theobald shouted back. 'Do you think I'd turn my back on you if there was anything else that I could do?'

'Well, that's what it looks like,' Martin challenged him.

'Listen, my friend,' said Homer Theobald, stubbing his finger against Martin's chest. 'I'm not a medium or a spiritualist or a psychic. I'm a sensitive. That means my mind is sensitive. What you have in this apartment is a raging beast, my friend. It's already tried to claw you to pieces, but only your face. If/go in there, it's going to claw my mind to pieces. I'm sorry, I understand your problem, but I don't wish to spend the rest of my life with the IQ_of a head of broccoli.'

'All right,' said Martin, 'if that's the way you feel.'

'I'm sorry J Homer Theobald repeated. He took a menthol cough drop out of the pocket of his shirt, unwrapped it, and popped it into his mouth. 'Talking to somebody's dead husband is one thing. Raging beasts from beyond is quite another. I'm not putting you on, Mr Williams, it's a raging beast. So what you're asking me to consider here is the same as putting my head into the mouth of a hungry lion which has a special taste for heads.'

'Can't we just talk about it?' asked Martin. 'I mean, you keep telling me this is a raging beast — what kind of raging beast? And all this stuff about the cats?'

Homer Theobald hesitated, noisily sucking his candy. 'All right,' he agreed at last. 'But not here. There's just too much vibration here.' He lifted his fingers to his temples and winced. 'You can't believe it. The voices.''

'You can actually hear voices in here?'

Homer Theobald shrugged. 'Let's say that "hear" isn't quite the right way of describing it. But, essentially, yes. I can hear voices.'

'The boy's voice?'

'Sure. And a woman's voice, too. An elderly woman. And somebody else.'

'Somebody else? Who? Is it a man or a woman?'

Homer Theobald grimaced. 'I don't know. It's hard to tell. It's kind of harsh, and shrill, and metallic; but it sounds like it's closed up somewhere, do you understand what I'm saying? As if it's muffled. Somebody talking in another room, or maybe inside a box.'

'Can you make out what it's saying?'

'I'm not too sure that I want to.'

'Could you please try?' Martin begged him.

Homer Theobald reluctantly took off his spectacles and closed his eyes. 'I'm warning you, though, your little-boy spirit may get itself real worked up and excited by this.'

'Please,' said Martin.

'It's the way this kid keeps carrying on about the cat. The cat is real important to him for some reason. But I've never had a pet before. You had those terrapins, what was wrong with those terrapins. You can't cuddle a terrapin, they're not the same and besides they all got away. Oh sure, they got away, they were crawling all over the kitchen, cook was standing on a stool. But I love Pickle, I love him.'

Martin grabbed hold of Homer Theobald's furry bare forearm. 'Mr Theobald!'

Homer Theobald blinked open his eyes. 'What's the matter? What's wrong?'

'Pickle, that's what you said.'

Homer Theobald nodded. 'That's right. The cat's name was Pickle.'

'None of the books ever mentioned him.'

'None of what books?'

'The books about —'

'Ah —ah!' Homer Theobald interrupted. 'Don't you mention his name! I've got a pretty good idea of who he is, but I don't want to start speaking any names in my mind, you understand? No mental pictures. The mind is a mirror, too, Mr Williams.'

'You'd better call me Martin if we're going to get this damned frightened together.'

'Well, I'm Homer, but most of my friends call me Theo. You know, on account of the hair loss. Theo Bald.'

Martin said, 'I'm sorry I interrupted you. It was just that the name Pickle came as a shock. Do you think you can pick up any more?'

'I don't know,' said Theo, but he was plainly not happy.

'Just the voice — you know, the shrill voice. The voice you said sounded like it was shut up in a box.'

'Well . .. okay. But I may get nothing. And I'm sure not staying around if it begins to wake up to the fact that I'm here, and that I'm listening in.'

'All right, I understand.'

Theo closed his eyes. 'The boy's still talking. He's a real chatterbox, that boy. When he was alive, he was real popular, real sweet. But there was something which he always kept hidden. Some important part of his personality which he never showed to anybody. He's still keeping it hidden, even now, and that's very strange indeed, because once people are dead they don't keep their personalities hidden anymore. They let themselves go. That's why they take on all kinds of weird shapes. They begin to look like they actually should. They drop the sheep's clothing, if you understand what I mean, and show you the wolf. Or vice versa, of course.'

He 'listened' harder. Clear buttons of perspiration popped up on his freckled scalp and on his upper lip. He began to mutter and mumble, a higgledy-piggledy rush of conversation, pleading, argument.

'I can't, Grannie, I told you I can't. You have to. You have to give thanks. I don't want to. I can't. Well, what do you think everybody's going to say about you if you don't go.'

Theo lifted one plump hand, his eyes still tightly shut. He was indicating to Martin that he was picking up the other voice, the shrill voice. 'Don't you go, she can't tell you what to do, don't you go, Pickle will fix her if she argues, don't you go, don't you go.

'I'm not going. You can't make me. Pickle will fix you if you make me. That cat, how dare you talk to me like that. That cat is going to go out and that's all there is to it. You're a hateful child. You're a disgrace to your poor mother. And you're damned for saying that, you're damned?

While Theo was hurriedly muttering all of this argument between Boofuls and his grandmother, the latch of the sitting room door, without warning, released itself, and the door swung slowly open. Because his eyes were closed, and because he was concentrating on the voices in his head, Theo didn't realize that a sharp geometric pattern of light was gradually illuminating him brighter and brighter.

'Theo -' Martin warned him, his heart racing. 'The door."

Theo opened his eyes and stared at the door in alarm. 'Did you open it?' he asked Martin.

Martin shook his head.

'Did you touch it at all?'

'I didn't go anywhere near it.'

Theo wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. 'I have to tell you, Martin, I don't know what's going on here, and I don't particularly want to know. I'll talk, yes, I'll tell you whatever I can. But I'm not staying here any longer, and I sure as hell am not going anywhere near that mirror of yours.'

'All right,' said Martin. 'Agreed. Let's go down to Butterfield's, I'll buy you a drink. You look like you could use it.'

Theo replaced his spectacles. As he did so, the sitting room door slammed so thunderously loudly that one of the panels was cracked.

'God, what was that?' Martin asked him.

Theo smiled grimly. 'That was your mirror, saying good riddance.'

Martin left a note on the door for Ramone, telling him that they had gone to Butterfield's. They drove there in Theo's Rabbit. Theo steered like a taxi driver, grinding the gears with every change, sweating, swearing under his breath, challenging every other car he encountered on the Strip, whether they were Porsches or Rolls Royces or Eldorados.

'I don't believe in being protean,' he remarked as he parked halfway up the curb outside Butterfield's. 'Sometimes it's refreshing to do something really badly.'

Butterfield's was on the south side of Sunset, with steps leading down through frondy palms and flowering shrubs to the table areas, where lean brown people in designer khaki sat under green and white umbrellas and talked about movies and other people's diets and themselves, but mostly themselves. There was plenty of fresh fruit and yogurt and Perrier water in evidence. Of all people, Morris Nathan was there, his wide backside bulging out on either side of a small white cast-iron chair. Alison was leaning against his shoulder, her face shaded by a dipping white hat, her eyes concealed by Mulberry sunglasses, her darkly suntanned breasts bulging out of a small white Fiorucci sun top. The Nabobs of Bulge, thought Martin.

'Martin!' called Morris, waving one fat arm. 'Join us!'

But Martin's need to talk to Theo was urgent: and, besides, Martin was sitting with Ahab Greene, an independent producer with wavy blond hair and protuberant eyes and white cowboy boots who always reeked of Armani after-shave, and Martin couldn't sit next to Ahab Greene for more than six and a half minutes without starting a blistering argument.

'Thanks!' he called back. 'But - you know — business!'

Morris peered suspiciously at Theo, wondering if he was another agent, but Alison whispered something in his ear and he was obviously reassured. Alison wasn't particularly bright, but she was one of those well-connected Hollywood girls who knew every modish astrologer and every up-to-the minute masseuse and every fashionable beautician; she had once been a manicurist, and she had probably come across Homer Theobald more than once. After all, Hollywood husbands were always dying, and Hollywood wives were always feeling a need to get in touch, if only to reassure their loved ones that their money was being well spent.

A pretty, disinterested waitress found them a table, and Martin ordered champagne. 'Champagne?' queried Theo, although he was obviously used to champagne.

'I feel like it,' said Martin. 'What the hell.'

Theo leaned his elbow on the table. 'Let me tell you something, Martin. When people die their spirits move on. There's no question about that. Like I said, the place they move on to - the beyond, if you want to call it that - it's totally different from the world we know here. It doesn't abide by the same rules. Morally, physiologically, or scientifically. I don't know. It's very hard to describe. You can't think of it in normal terms - left, right, top, bottom. But it's there. It's where people go when they die.'

Martin looked away for a while. In spite of everything that had happened in the past few days, he still found it difficult to believe in Theo's beyond. He still found it difficult to believe in Theo.

When he spoke, it was almost a complaint — an aggrieved and baffled student asking his lecturer to explain some inconceivable theory about space and time. 'But how can this place — how can this world beyond - how can it appear in a mirror? And not just appear, but send things jumping out? I mean, I haven't told you the half of it. I saw a child's ball in that mirror that wasn't there at all. And Ramone's cat was sucked right into it - literally sucked into the glass. And then there was Pickle, the cat who came out of the mirror - at least I believe that was Pickle - he came out of that mirror and I can prove it, because the door was locked and the windows were locked and there was no way that cat could have gotten into my sitting room. And he almost killed me — well, look at me. And then Ramone's cat came back out of the mirror and he was like some kind of snake, like a python, you know, or a boa constrictor, and we had to burn him to death, I mean literally burn him. And that's why we called you. But of course you can't help. Or won't.'

The girl poured out their champagne. It wasn't very good quality, but it was cold and fizzy, and that was all Martin wanted. 'Okay,' he told her, and she went prancing off.

Theo sipped his champagne and then said heavily, 'That happened, all of that stuff?'

Martin said, 'You don't believe me, do you?'

'Oh, I believe you,' said Theo. 'Martin - let me tell you this — mirrors are no joke. Mirrors never have been a joke, particularly for us sensitives. A mirror is, what? People think of them like pictures on the wall; but they're into pictures, they're more like cameras. Think about it. You look at your mirror with more intensity than anything else you look at in your whole life. People don't even look at their husbands and wives with the same intensity they do their mirror.'

'I don't understand,' Martin admitted; and he really didn't.

'Listen,' said Theo, 'you've heard of rooms that somehow retain the feelings of stressful or tragic events that happened in them, long after those events are over? Sometimes it happens not just to rooms, but to whole houses, like Amityville. Oh, they turned that into a series of horror flicks, but the house was truly afflicted as many houses are. Some people can sense it the moment they walk into a place, some people can't. Some people have an ear for music, others don't. Being sensitive to the world beyond isn't something you can study in night class.'

'What are you trying to say?' asked Martin. 'You're trying to tell me this mirror has kind of remembered what happened to Boofuls?'

Theo winced. 'I did ask you not to mention his name.'

'I'm sorry. But you must have guessed.'

'Oh, certainly. Who else could it have been? So you bought a mirror that belonged to Boofuls, did you, and you hung it on your wall? In psychic terms, that's a little like buying Adolf Eichmann's toothbrush and using it. Do you know where the mirror used to hang? What I'm trying to say is - is there any chance that it might have been a witness to what happened to him - that the mirror might have seen Boofuls die?'

Martin said, 'It was hanging over the fireplace in the main living room. That was where Boofuls was killed.'

Theo took a deep breath and sharply drummed his fingers on the table. 'That accounts for it. That's why you're having all this trouble. The mirror remembers Boofuls being killed. Now all of those feelings, all of that fear, all of that pain, all of that hatred, it's all coming back to you. It's like a delayed reflection, that's all. But it can seem real. It can take on real shape, and it can do real damage. That cat Pickles — for some reason it was obviously important to Boofuls. Boofuls loved it but his grandmother didn't want him to keep it. So the situation about the cat was all part of the stress.'

Martin set down his glass. 'I don't know. It seems to me that there's more to this than just reflections. People must have murdered other people in front of mirrors before. I mean, almost every house has a mirror someplace. But you don't hear about cats and monsters and God knows what jumping out of mirrors all the time, do you?'

Theo said, 'You asked me for an explanation. I gave it to you.'

'But what about the third voice you heard? That voice that was supposed to sound like somebody in a box or something?'

Theo was beginning to sweat. 'Don't you think it's hot out here? Maybe we should go inside.'

Martin reached into his shirt pocket and produced the key that Sister Boniface had given him. 'When you said box, I thought about this key, because this key was given to one of the nurses at the Sisters of Mercy Hospital by Mrs Crossley, Boofuls' grandmother, the night she killed him. And what I was wondering was -'

Theo stared at the key with bulging eyes. The sun reflected from it and-played a bright key pattern on his forehead.

'My God, put that away,' whispered Theo.

'But Theo - what I want to know is - since you're sensitive - maybe you could hold this key and tell me -'

'Put it away!' Theo ordered him, his voice so hoarse and penetrating that several people looked around.

'Theo. . .the nurse told me that Mrs Crossley couldn't speak, but the nurse was absolutely convinced that this key was very important. If you could just touch it, hold it, see if it gives off any kind of vibration. It could be the key to the whole darn thing.'

'Put - that- key -' Theo began; but then abruptly his nose fountained blood, all over his Waikiki shirt, all over his twill pants, spattering the tablecloth and turning his champagne cloudy pink. A girl at the next table screamed. Martin dropped the key and reached out for Theo at once.

'Theo! What's the matter? Theo!'

'Lung!' gasped Theo; and then vomited up a basinful of startling red blood that splashed all over Martin and all over the flagstones and dripped from the white-painted chair like glutinous paint.

'Ambulance!' Martin shouted. 'Somebody call an ambulance, for Christ's sake!'

Theo lurched sideways in his chair. Martin tried to keep him upright, but he was enormously heavy and off-balance and slimy with blood. At last, with the help of one of the waiters, Martin managed to lower him gently onto the ground.

'Is he dying, or what?' the waiter asked him, his eyes wide open with fright.

'Martin - are you okay?' shouted Morris. 'They've just called for the paramedics.'

Alison gave him an anxious little wave, too. Martin waved back to tell them they were doing all they could. Theo was lying with his face against the paving stones, a bubble of blood between his lips, his eyes filmy.

'Key ..." he whispered. He lifted his right hand and took hold of Martin's wrist, drawing him closer.

'Key.. .'

'What about it?' asked Martin. 'Listen, just rest. They've sent for an ambulance.'

'Key .. . acts like . . . lightning conductor .. .'

'What? What do you mean?'

'Mirror . .. doesn't want me to pry . . . punctured my lung. Located us ... you got it? ... moment you said ... Boofuls.'

Martin said, 'I'm sorry, Theo. I didn't have any idea.'

'Well. . . not your fault,' Theo grunted. 'I should have said no ... right from the very beginning . .. moment I felt that coldness . . . moment I felt that black.''

'I felt that, too,' Martin told him.

Theo coughed a gout of blood. In the distance, they could hear the ambulance siren whooping. 'Come on, Theo,' said Martin. 'You're going to make it... the paramedics are almost here.'

'Where's that. .. key?' asked Theo.

'I don't know. I guess I dropped it.'

'Find it... give it to me. Come on, quickly.'

'Theo — if it's that dangerous —'

Theo lifted his head. His mouth was so bloodstained he looked as if he had been cramming raspberries into it all morning. Sticky, red, peculiarly childish.

'If you don't give me that key, I'm never going to speak to you again.'

The threat was so absurd that Martin realized Theo was serious. He dabbled around in the spreading lake of blood, and there by the leg of Theo's dark-stained pants was the key. Theo reached out for it, and Martin pressed it reluctantly into his hand.

The ambulance had parked on Sunset, outside the entrance to Butterfield's; and the paramedics were already hurrying down the steps. Theo closed his eyes and for a moment Martin, kneeling in his rapidly cooling blood, was sure that he was dead. The paramedics came up to him and lifted the table aside and said, 'Okay, sir, give us some space, will you?'

Theo lifted one bloody arm. 'Martin . . .' he mouthed. 'Martin . ..'

Martin tried to get close to him, but one of the paramedics backhanded him away. 'Come on, friend, this man needs space.'

'Martin!' Theo choked. 'Martin!'

Martin pleaded with the paramedic, 'I have to get close. Listen, I have to hear what he's got to say.'

'You want to kill him, or what?' the paramedic demanded. 'This man has a punctured lung. Now, do us all a favor, and take a powder — and that's being polite.'

They were testing Theo's vital signs and unwrapping an oxygen mask. But before they could press the mask over Theo's face, he propped himself up on one elbow and bubbled, 'Martin! Martin, listen to me! The Hollywood Divine! The Hollywood Divine!'

'What?' asked Martin, baffled.

'Used to go there .. . when I was a boy . . . father took me .. . cocktail lounge .. . Here! take the key! The Hollywood Divine! Leopard-skin banquettes .. . gold-tinted mirrors . . . Here! Martin! The key!'

Theo waved the key; and impatiently, one of the paramedics passed it back to Martin. 'Guy's out of his tree,' the paramedic remarked, covering Theo's face with the oxygen mask.

Martin waited while the paramedics sent back Theo's vital signs to the hospital. Then he asked, 'Where are you going to take him?'

'Sisters of Mercy, that's the nearest.'

'All right,' said Martin, Til follow you.'

'No tailgating, that's all,' the paramedic told him as he rolled Theo's bloody body onto a stretcher.

'In a Rabbit?' said Martin bitterly.

CHAPTER SIX

Theo died at 3:46 that afternoon. Martin was sitting in the reception area when Sister Michael came rustling up in her white habit and white wimple to tell him that all their efforts to save him had been to no avail.

'Was he a close friend of yours, Mr Williams?' Sister Michael asked him, with a face like the Angel of Solicitude carved in wax.

Martin said, 'No, I met him for the first time today.'

'We did everything possible. But his lungs collapsed. You can talk to the doctors later, if you wish.'

Ramone appeared, wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans and looking unhappy. 'I called his house. Some boy answered. His boyfriend, I guess. Said he thought there was a sister in Indiana, anyway he's going to check through his address book and call her.'

'At least he's at peace now, in the Kingdom of Heaven,' said Sister Michael.

'What?' asked Ramone. Then, 'Sure - oh, yes.' He glanced at Martin and made a face. Martin had already told him about Theo's description of the world beyond, with its talking turtles and its people with stretched-out heads.

Sister Michael laid a cool pale hand on Martin's shoulder. 'If there's anything else that I can do, please don't hesitate to call me. When somebody passes on, we do recognize the need to comfort those who are left behind.'

'Yes, thank you,' said Martin.

Ramone sat down on one of the gray fabric couches and tightly crossed his arms. Up above his head, a painting of a gentle-faced Madonna smiled down at him, with an expression that forgave all human weakness. 'What do we do now?' Ramone wanted to know. 'If Homer Theobald couldn't help us - if he wound up getting wasted - then what hope do the rest of us have?' He leaned forward and asked, 'You really think it was the mirror that wasted him? All that way away?'

Martin shrugged. 'He seemed to think so. I showed him that key and he went white. I mean he was gibbering. I wish to God I hadn't now. He might still be alive.'

Ramone took out a cheroot, but the nun at the nurses' station silently pointed to the sign which said Nofumadores.

'How did she know I speak Spanish?' Ramone whispered, replacing the cheroot in its carton.

'She must've guessed. Or maybe she read / Viva Las Patillas! on the back of your T-shirt.'

Ramone said, 'Let's take a look at that key.'

Martin handed it to him. While he had been waiting to hear if Theo would survive, he had taken it to the hospital washroom and carefully rinsed Theo's blood off it. Ramone turned it over and over and then handed it back. 'It's just a plain ordinary key.'

'Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. I think we should go to the Hollywood Divine and find out, don't you? There's nothing to keep us here.'

'I don't even know if the Hollywood Divine is still standing,' said Ramone. 'They demolished most of that block last year.'

'AH we can do is take a look.'

Sister Michael intercepted them again as they walked toward the elevators. 'Mr Williams! Mr Perez! Did you want to view Mr Theobald before you left?'

Martin looked at Ramone, and Ramone bulged his eyes in an expression which unequivocally meant 'no way'.

'Thanks,' said Martin. 'But I think I'd just like to remember him the way he was.'

'How was that?' asked Ramone as they went down in the elevator to the hospital lobby.

'Alive,' Martin replied.

The Hollywood Divine Hotel had been erected in 1927 by Daniel T. Rolls, the wealthy second son of the Rolls hotel family of Pasadena. It stood two blocks north of the celebrated intersection of Hollywood and Vine, a fanciful creation in the neoclassical picture-palace style that had been popularized by Eve Leo.

In its heyday, the Hollywood Divine had been celebrated for its eccentric and arty clientele - the West Coast equivalent of the Algonquin in New York. But with the squalid death of its founder in 1938 (cocaine, bourbon, inhalation of vomit), it had quickly lost its cachet. Now it stood shabby and seedy and ready for demolition, its pale pink stone corroded by vehicle fumes, its marquee half collapsed, its marble steps stained with urine and measled with chewing gum.

'I could have sworn they knocked this place down already,' Ramone remarked as they parked outside in Martin's Mustang.

They were immediately approached by a thin-faced kid with a crimson punk hairstyle. 'Hey, friend, take care of your car?'

Martin reached into his shirt pocket and gave the kid two dollars. 'There's another three where that came from if the stereo stays where it is.'

'You got it,' the kid told him.

Three young hookers were standing outside the hotel, two black and one white, in skintight satin miniskirts and halter tops. They were all pretty: one of them was almost beautiful. She winked at Martin as he went up the steps and he couldn't help smiling back.

'Made yourself a friend?' asked Ramone.

They pushed their way through the bronze and glass doors of the Hollywood Divine and into the gloomy lobby. The carpet was rancid; so filthy and stained that it was impossible to tell what color it had originally been. There was a suffocating smell of marijuana and body odour and disinfectant. Six or seven scarecrows were sitting on the ripped-open leopard-skin seats where John Barrymore and Bette Davis had once sat, sharing bottles of muscatel from brown paper bags and sniffing in chorus.

The great chandelier hung from the lobby ceiling like the desiccated corpse of a giant spider, still dangling in its web.

Martin and Ramone approached the desk. The desk clerk was surprisingly young and clean: a young man in a shocking-pink shirt with blond crew-cut hair. It was only when he laid his thin arms on the marble counter that Martin saw the needle tracks.

'You people checking in?' he asked them. His eyes were as pale and as expressionless as two stones you find on the beach.

Martin shook his head. 'I was wondering if you still had safe-deposit boxes here.'

'Safe-deposit boxes?' The young man blinked.

'Yes, you know. Somewhere your guests can keep their valuables.'

'What, are you kidding? If any of our guests happen to have any valuables, they keep them on their persons. Besides, they don't usually stay for longer than a half hour.'

'But are the original boxes still here - the boxes that were put in when the hotel was built?'

'I don't think so,' the young man told him. 'Pretty much everything has gone. Somebody walked out with a goddamned bathtub last week. Can you imagine that? Nobody knows how he got it through the door.'

Martin gave a tight grimace and looked around him. One of the scarecrows was waving his arms and singing. 'Sur ... wannee song! Suwannee song! You c'n blow your flute 'n' you c'n bangy'r drum 'n' you c'n —

'Will you shut up?' one of his companions screeched at him. 'Will you shut up?'

Martin stared at the old scarecrow for a while. Then he turned back to the desk clerk and said, 'Who's that?'

'Who's what?' The young man may have looked quite presentable, but his brain was somewhere in another galaxy.

'That old bum singing. The one singing "Suwannee Song".'

The young man focused his eyes across the lobby. 'Oh, that's Fido. Well, everybody calls him Fido. He's been hanging out for just about a hundred years. I think he used to work here or something. He's always telling stories about how he walked in on Bill Haines, and Bill Haines was wearing nothing but a brassiere and a garter belt and a picture hat.'

Martin left the desk and walked across to the group of scarecrows. Fido was sitting right in the middle of them, on one of the leopard-skin banquettes. His face was puffy and flowered with gin blossoms. He wore a fifties-style suit with wide flappy lapels. It had once been fawn, but now it was greasy gray. Martin couldn't approach too close. The collective stench of these down-and-outs was overwhelming.

'Fido?' he asked.

Fido looked up at him blearily. 'That's me, your honor.'

'They tell me you used to work here,' said Martin.

There was a chorus of groans and raspberries from Fido's companions. 'Don't ask him!' one of them begged in a voice reedy with phlegm. 'Do us a favor, will you, friend? Don't ask him!'

'Was the gemmun addressing your Fido demanded with all the indignation of an Oliver Hardy.

'He worked here, he worked here, now go!' the other scarecrow appealed.

Martin said to Fido. 'Maybe we can talk in private? I wouldn't like to antagonize your friends.'

'Friends? Call this riffraff friends? These just happen to be items of flotsam who have eddied their way into the same backwater.'

'Oh, can it, Fido,' groaned another scarecrow. 'You make my ears want to scream.'

Fido teetered his way out of the assembly of winos around the banquette and accompanied Martin and Ramone to the far side of the lobby, beside the gilded fountain that had long ago dried up, and whose shell-shaped bowl was now crammed with cigarette butts and empty bottles and used needles.

Ramone wrinkled up his nose as Fido lurched a little too close to him. 'You won't get arrested for taking a shower, did you know that?'

Martin said, 'Ssh,' and waved Ramone to keep quiet. He didn't want to upset Fido before he'd had the chance to talk to him.

'Is it true you worked here?' he asked.

'What's it worth?' Fido wanted to know.

Martin held up a ten-dollar bill. Fido sniffed, and took it, and snapped it between his fingers to make sure that it was genuine. 'All right, then,' he said. 'I worked here.'

'Were you here in 1939?'

Fido nodded, his white prickly chin making a crackling sound against the collar of his grubby shirt. 'Sure, 1939. I was promoted to bell captain that year. March 1939.'

'Did you ever see Boofuls here?'

'Boofuls?' asked Fido suspiciously. 'Why'd you ask that?'

'I'm just interested, that's all. I'm writing a book about his life.'

'Well,' sniffed Fido, 'he didn't have too much of a life, did he? But he sure had a memorable death.'

'Did you see him?'

'Of course I saw him. He was here all the time, him and that Redd woman. Every month; and all kinds of others, too. Famous actors, you'd know them all. Famous directors, too.'

Martin frowned. 'You mean Boofuls used to meet a whole lot of other actors and directors here, every month?'

'That's right. It was a joke. Nobody was supposed to know. Big secret, don't tell the press, that kind of thing. And to tell you the truth, I don't think the press ever did find out. But we knew, all of the staff. You couldn't help recognizing somebody like Clark Gable, now, could you? And there was George Cukor and Lionel Atwill and dozens of others. All the big names from 1939, they came here. Maybe not every month, but pretty well.'

Ramone warned, 'You'd better not be putting us on, Mr Fido.'

'Why should I put you on?' Fido challenged him. 'It's true, it happened. Every month, here at the Hollywood Divine, in the Leicester Suite.'

'And Boofuls was always here?' Martin asked him.

Fido nodded. 'They wouldn't start without Boofuls.'

'Wouldn't start what?' said Ramone.

Fido puffed out his blotchy cheeks. 'Don't ask me, how should I know? It was all supposed to be secret, right? We laid them on a spread before they started - chicken, lobster, stuff like that — and then we had to lock the doors and leave them to it — whatever it was they were doing. But believe me, they were all famous. You'd have known them all. Errol Flynn, he used to come. Joan Crawford. Wilfred Buckland, the art director. Fifty or sixty of them, every month, sometimes more.'

Martin said, 'You're sure about this?'

'Sure I'm sure. I was the bell captain.'

'Well, how long did these get-togethers go on for?'

'Two, three in the morning, sometimes longer.'

'And Boofuls stayed there all that time?'

'I used to see him leaving, four o'clock in the morning sometimes. That Redd woman used to cover him up with a cloak and a hood, but you couldn't mistake him.'

Martin said, 'He was only eight years old, what was he doing staying up all night?'

Fido coughed and then noisily cleared his throat. '/ don't know what the hell he was doing, staying up all night. We used to listen at the door sometimes, but we could never hear nothing. Sometimes music. But they used to have girls in as well. Not exactly hookers but what you might call starlets.'

Martin looked at Ramone, but all Ramone could do was shake his head. 'Don't ask me, man, I never heard of anything like this. Either this guy's shooting us a line, or else his brain's gone, or else we just came across the biggest Hollywood mystery that ever was.'

'Listen,' Martin told Fido, 'when you were working here, where did they keep the safe-deposit boxes? Can you remember that?'

'Certainly I can remember,' said Fido. 'What's it worth?'

Reluctantly, Martin handed Fido another ten-dollar bill. He snapped it, the same way he had snapped the first one. Then he sniffed and said, 'They used to keep the safe-deposit boxes in back of the manager's office, through the archway behind the desk. But if you're looking for them, I can save you some trouble, because they ain't there now. Round about 1951, when the Hollywood Divine really started losing money, there was some kind of plan to refurbish it, you know, and they shifted a whole lot of stuff down to the basement. The only trouble was, the plan fell through, lack of money, zoning problems, something like that, and everything that was shifted down to the basement just stayed there.'

'So that's where the safe-deposit boxes are now?'

'You've got it, your honor. Not to mention two thousand square feet of moldy carpet, and enough velvet drapes to make Little Lord Fauntleroy pants for every down-and-out in Greater LA.'

Ramone gave a sharp, unamused laugh. Fido shrugged and gave a goofy grin, baring abscessed gums and brown, tartar-clogged teeth.

'One more thing . ..' put in Martin. 'Who's this Redd woman you keep talking about? I thought that Boofuls was looked after by his grandmother.'

Fido said, 'I never knew too much about her. But she was the one who booked the suite, that's how we got to know her name. R-E-D-D, Redd, that was it, but it could have been a what's-it's-name, you know, pursue-dough-name.'

'Do you have any idea what her relationship to Boofuls was?'

Fido shook his head. 'No idea. She just rushed him in before it began and rushed him out again when it was over.'

'Did you get to see her face? What she looked like?'

'Well . .. briefly. It's a long time ago now. But she was pale, you know what I mean, the sort of pale that looks like somebody's been ill, or shut up for a long time without going out in the sunshine. Pretty, in a way, but kind of sharp pretty. Sharp nose, sharp chin, sharp eyes. Classy, too. Definitely classy. But sharp.'

'What did she used to wear?'

'Always the same, black evening cloak, red dress underneath. Never saw what style it was. She was in and out of here so darned quick.'

Martin was mystified by all this. He had never heard of any other woman escorting Boofuls besides his grandmother; and he had certainly never heard of monthly get-togethers of movie stars at the Hollywood Divine Hotel, with Boofuls apparently presiding.

'I hope for your sake this is on the level,' he told Fido.

Fido saluted with a hand that was gray with grease. 'You never came across a servant so true, your honor.'

For twenty more dollars, the vacant-eyed desk clerk took

Martin and Ramone up to what had once been the Leicester Suite. They climbed the wide marble stairs to the mezzanine floor and crossed an echoing landing that smelled of Sterno. The desk clerk led them up to two wide carved doors — some of their panels broken now and nailed up with sheets of ply — and unlocked them with keys from a huge jangling ring.

'We have to keep this place locked, every junkie in town was using it as a shooting gallery. We used to drag out two or three stiffs every single morning, OD'd on crack.'

Inside, by the light of half a dozen bare bulbs, they cautiously explored a hotel suite that must once have been magnificent. Because it was on the mezzanine floor, its rooms were half as high again as any other rooms in the hotel. Its walls gleamed with gold and silver wallpaper, and there were gilded Renaissance moldings on its murky ceilings and around the doors.

The desk clerk led them through an inner lobby, and then through more double doors to a cavernous room that must have been the lounge. There was a grand gilded fireplace and a gilded chandelier, but all the furniture and the carpets had been taken out. The floor was littered with old yellowed newspapers and rat droppings; and in the far corner there stood, unaccountably, a green and white garden swing-seat.

Their footsteps scuffed and echoed. Ramone, with his hands in his pockets, said, 'You can't believe that Clark Gable was ever here, can you?'

'What was he doing here, that's what I want to know,' said Martin. 'What was Boofuls doing here?'

'Orgies, maybe?' suggested Ramone. He walked around the swing-seat and then pushed it. It creaked backward and forward, backward and forward, squueaakkk-squikkkk, squeeeaakk— squikkkk.

Martin said, 'A small boy holding orgies? It doesn't make sense.'

'Well, don't ask me, man,' said Ramone. He sniffed. 'This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.'

The desk clerk asked, 'You done now? There's nothing else to see.'

'Yes,' said Martin, 'I guess we're done. Can you take us down to the cellars?'

They left the Leicester Suite and the double doors were locked behind them. The desk clerk took them downstairs to the lobby and then along a narrow corridor to the kitchens and the service areas. The kitchens were filthy: strewn with rubbish and deserted. The grease-encrusted oven doors hung open. It was difficult for Martin to believe that the Hollywood Divine's celebrated homard orientate had once been prepared here, as well as the famous fiery pudding of red cherries and Grand Marnier created especially for Gloria Swanson.

The desk clerk unlocked the cellar doors. 'There's a light switch down on the left. You can look all you want; I have to get back to the desk. Just tell me when you're through.'

Together, Martin and Ramone groped their way down the first flight of wide concrete steps. Martin found the light switch and flicked it; a row of fluorescent tubes illuminated a wide vaulted cellar stacked to the ceiling with chairs, tables, folding beds, mattresses, chalkboards, lampshades, statuettes, signs saying Exit and No Smoking, boxes, crates, and rolled-up carpets.

Martin began carefully to climb through this collected detritus of the Hollywood Divine's history, his arms stretched out to keep his balance. He trod on a cardboard box full of brass lamp sockets, and they showered onto the floor like Aladdin's treasure.

'Any sign of those safe-deposit boxes?' Ramone asked him.

'I don't know. There's a whole lot of stuff covered by sheets, right at the back. I'm going to take a look now.'

Martin clambered across stacks of rollaway beds to reach the far side of the cellar, where it was darker and the air was suffocatingly still. Something tall and angular was concealed by a stained gray sheet; something as tall as a man with one arm outstretched. Martin tugged at the sheet, but it was caught.

'What's that?' called Ramone, clambering after him across the beds. He pushed one foot through the springs of a rollaway bed, and there was a loud gddoinngg noise, followed by a sharp exclamation of 'Goddamn it!'

Martin pulled at the sheet again, and this time it tore wide open. He shouted out in fright, and trod backward, and almost lost his balance. Out of the ripped sheet a shining black face was staring at him, a face with white eyes and reddened lips.

Ramone came forward and tore off the rest of the sheet. 'Heyy . . .' He grinned. 'Not bad. She shouldn't've scared you.'

It was a 1935 statue of an African dancer, probably made out of plaster. She was wearing ostrich feathers in her hair and a grass skirt and carrying a zebra-skin shield. 'Very bodacious ta-tas,' Ramone remarked, peering inside the sheet.

They climbed farther along the length of the wall and, at last, jammed into one of the corners, they came across the safe-deposit boxes. There were four banks of them, lying on their backs on the floor, and almost completely buried under dozens of folding wooden chairs.

'At least nobody could stroll out with these,' said Ramone.

It took them more than ten minutes simply to move all the chairs off the top of the safe-deposit boxes. Martin rubbed dust and grime from the topmost bank of boxes i-ioo. That meant that they would have to lift the entire bank of boxes out of the way in order to get to number 531 somewhere underneath.

They each took hold of one end of the boxes and tried to lift them up. They were impossibly heavy. 'We're going to rupture ourselves, shifting these,' said Martin. 'Maybe we'd better slide them instead.'

Grunting, cursing, they managed to slide the top bank of boxes off to one side; then tilt it so that it dropped upright onto the floor.

'What do you bet the numbers we want are right at the bottom of the stack?' said Ramone.

He peered at the labels of the next bank of safe-deposit boxes and then rubbed one or two of them with the heel of his hand. 'Numbers 500 through 600, thank the Lord.'

Martin climbed up onto the boxes and ran his fingers down the labels until he found 531.

Til give you a thousand to one the key don't fit,' said Ramone. 'Nobody with your luck is going to find the right box first time.'

'Theo said the Hollywood Divine,' Martin told him. 'And, believe me, Theo was really psychic. Well, sensitive, that's what he said.'

'I guess anybody would be sensitive working for Elmore Sweet,' Ramone commented.

Martin took out the key that Sister Boniface had given him and fitted it into the lock of the safe-deposit box. As he did so, he was certain that he heard somebody whistling, somewhere upstairs in the derelict hotel. He hesitated, and listened, and then he heard it again. It was an odd little melody from Sunshine Serenade. Boofuls sang it at the very end of the movie, when he believed (mistakenly, of course) that he had lost his mother.

Apples are sweeter than lemons

Lemons are sweeter than limes

But there's nothing so sweet as the mem'ry of you

And the sadness of happier times

The song was unusual because it had been written by George Garratt rather than Boofuls' regular team of writers; and because - after Garratt had argued with L. B. Mayer over 'artistic differences' — the whole sequence had been cut out of the prints that had been sent out on general release. Martin knew the song because it was still included in the video of Sunshine Serenade that his friend Gerry had sent him from the M-G-M archives, but who else would have known it?

Fido, possibly, if he had ever heard Boofuls singing it. Or George Garratt, except that in 1958 George Garratt had washed down two bottles of chloral hydrate pills with a fifth of Polish vodka and been found to be DO A at Laurel Canyon Hospital. Or — if his image in Martin's mirror had been more than just an image, and if there was any truth at all in what Nurse Newton had said about him — Boofuls himself.

'That didn't seem to make too much difference — him being dead.'

Ramone said, 'What's wrong, man? You look like you seen a ghost.'

Martin strained his ears, but the whistling had died away, faint and echoing, somewhere upstairs in the gloomy corridors of the Hollywood Divine Hotel.

'Did you hear something?' he asked Ramone.

Ramone shook his head.

'I don't know ... I thought I heard somebody whistling.'

Ramone sniffed. 'Probably the wind, mi amigo. Or the plumbing.'

All the same, Martin was sure that he had heard that plaintive, unremembered song. 'The Sadness of Happier Times', words and music by George Garratt, vocal rendition by Walter Lemuel Crossley, known all over the world as Boofuls.

Martin tried to turn the key in the lock of the safe-deposit box. It was stiff and rusted, but he gradually managed to budge it. 'There! It's the right key, I'm sure of it! It's just so darn hard to turn it!'

'Just don't break it, that's all,' Ramone cautioned him, 'otherwise you're never going to get this suckah open.'

The levers grated together; and then quite suddenly the key turned all the way around, and Martin was able to lift open the door. The door of the safe-deposit box was quite small — only nine inches by four — but the inside was nearly two feet deep. Now that it was resting on its back, Martin would have to put his hand inside it like a lucky dip. He peered into it cautiously. Ever since that brindled cat Pickle had come flying out at him from the darkness underneath his desk, he had felt cautious about sticking his head in where it wasn't wanted, and also where it was wanted.

Ramone tried to look inside, too, and they bumped heads.

'Looks like it's empty,' said Ramone; not without relief.

'Well, I won't be able to tell until I put my hand in,' Martin replied.

'You're going to put your hand in? Supposing there's something in there?'

Martin lifted his head and looked at him. 'Something in there? Something like what?'

'Well, I don't know, man, supposing it's a trap. Supposing that nun that gave you the key wasn't a real nun, supposing she was just another one of these hallucinations — well, it could have happened, you can't deny it could have happened — and supposing she knows there's some kind of booby trap inside here, just waiting for somebody like you to stick his hot little hand right into it. I mean, supposing it's something as bad as that cat? I mean, do you like your hand, or what?'

'Ramone —' Martin interrupted him. 'The likelihood of there being anything inside this box is pretty damn remote, wouldn't you say? Quite apart from the high probability that whatever was in here was probably collected by its rightful owner fifty years ago, the hotel management wouldn't have simply dragged these boxes down here and dumped them without going through them first. People used to keep money and diamonds and passports in these boxes, my'friend. I can't believe that anything like that would have gotten left behind, can you?'

Ramone said, 'Money and diamonds and passports don't bite your fingers off. I'm talking about that supernatural stuff.'

Martin hesitated for a moment. He didn't like to admit it, but it had occurred to him, too, that something vicious from the world beyond might be nestling in the bottom of this safe-deposit box; or even something vicious from the here and now. Hadn't he read that scorpions can survive for fifty years without food or water?

At length, however, he carefully dipped his bare hand into the darkness of the open box, feeling all around the sides as he did so. Bare metal, nothing so far. He ventured further. All the time, Ramone was watching him intently, chewing at his lip. 'You feel anything, man? Is there anything there?'

Martin was about to take his hand out when his fingers skimmed something that felt like soft tissue paper. 'Hold on,' he said. 'There's something here.'

He patted the bottom of the safe-deposit box and felt a package of some sort, in very fine crinkled paper.

'It's not a booby trap, is it?' Ramone asked him.

'No, no. I don't think so. It's a package. I can't work out what's in it. Something hard, by the feel of it; no — more than one, maybe three or four. They're hard and they're curved. There's something crunchy, too. Maybe it's straw, or wood shavings. Hold on — if I can squeeze my other hand in, I can lift it out.'

With intense concentration, Martin pushed his other hand into the safe-deposit box until he could take hold of the package on both sides. It was very loosely wrapped together, and he was worried that if he lifted it up with one hand, the contents — whatever they were — would tumble out.

'Steady, man,' said Ramone as he slowly raised the package out of the safe-deposit box and laid it carefully down.

Martin reached back inside the box, but there was nothing else there. 'This is it,' he said. 'The sole contents.'

The package was a loose assembly of thin black tissue paper, tied with a thin greasy braid of something that could have been human hair. Where the hair was knotted, it was sealed with black wax, on which somebody had imprinted the crest from a signet ring or a brass seal. Martin gently shook the package, and inside he could feel a number of heavy curved objects, about four or five inches long, and a wad of crisp padding.

'Let's take it under the light and open it up,' Martin suggested.

Ramone's eyes widened. 'Supposing the mirror doesn't want us to? Supposing it tries to fix us the way it fixed Homer Theobald? You want to die with your lungs coming out of your mouth, because sure as hell I don't.'

'I always thought you were the great Huevo Duro? Martin teased him.

'Huevo Duro,' Ramone repeated with contempt. It was Spanish for hard-boiled egg.

Martin gently carried the package over to one of the scores of tables that had been stored in the Hollywood Divine's cellar. He cleared off the dust and the rat droppings, and then he laid the package down. 'Do you have a knife?' he asked Ramone. Without saying a word, Ramone unenthusiastically produced a switchblade and flicked it open.

'Huevo Duro,' he muttered.

Handling the knife with extreme care, Martin sawed through the braided hair which seemed to be all that was keeping this messily tied package together. Then he folded back each leaf of the black tissue paper until he revealed what

IS8

was inside. As soon as the package was open, Ramone crossed himself and whispered, 'Madre mia.'

Lying on the black paper were four claws — thick and horny and black. They were like no other claws that Martin had seen before. They weren't lion claws, because lion claws are narrow and hooked at the end. They weren't eagle talons — they were far too large. Martin reached out and picked one up between finger and thumb, and asked, 'What in hell kind of a creature did these come from?'

'Believe me, I'm sure glad the rest of it ain't here,' Ramone told him. 'Come on, man, that stuff is bad news. I mean really bad news.'

Martin laid down the claw and picked up the wad of padding. It was black and shiny, not unlike horsehair. In fact it was hair of some kind, and it was attached to a small soft leathery patch that looked like a torn piece of dried-up scalp. It felt extremely old, almost mummified, and it felt extremely nasty.

'What do you think it could be?' Martin asked.

'Well, I don't know,' said Ramone, 'but I hate it.' He peered at it more closely, and then he said, 'You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of voodoo. You know, witch doctors, that kind of thing. And those disgusting African statues all covered in skin and bits of fabric and you don't know for sure where any of it's been, you know?'

Martin juggled the heavy claws in the palm of his hand. 'I don't know. What on earth was Boofuls' grandmother doing with the key to this stuff?'

'Maybe she wasn't,' Ramone suggested. 'It's been fifty years, right? Maybe this stuff belongs to somebody else altogether.'

'You don't think that, do you?' Martin replied. 'Not after what's been happening with the mirror? This all ties up somehow.'

Ramone peeled back the tissue paper a little farther. 'Hey, look — you missed something.'

In one corner of the package, there was a small screwed-up piece of black tissue. Martin opened it up and found another key, identical to the key with which he had opened the safe-deposit box. He held it up and examined it closely.

'I wonder what this opens?' he asked.

He turned it over. There was the same manufacturer's name on it, Woods, and it looked as if it probably opened another of the boxes. But this time there was no number on it.

'If we had all night, we could try opening every box here,' Ramone suggested.

But at that moment, the desk clerk reappeared, wending his way through the furniture. 'I got to lock up now. Did you find what you were looking for?'

'More or less,' said Martin.

The desk clerk frowned at the black-tissue package. 'That's not dope or anything?'

Martin shook his head. 'Sorry to disappoint you. This is just relics; and not particularly valuable relics at that. You know what I mean, sentimental value only.'

The desk clerk sniffed dryly; the thumping sniff of the habitual cokehead. 'Sure, sentimental value only. Now I got to lock up.'

Dr Ewart Rice stood in his dressing room in his undershirt and his formal black pants, his suspenders hanging down like a recently released catapult. He was shaving, and humming to himself. The early evening sun shone warmly through the white percale blind that he had drawn down over the window, and reflected in the hot water in the washbasin, so that a spindly light fairy danced on the wall in front of him.

He and Mrs Rice had been invited to dinner that evening by one of his pleasantest friends, Bill Asscher, the movie producer. The Asschers' dinners could always be counted on for superb food, hilarious conversation, pretty girls, and generous martinis. Mrs Rice always said that he made a fool of himself when he went to the Asschers' dinners, but Dr Rice always replied that if a man couldn't make a fool of himself by the time he was sixty years old, then he was a fool.

He rinsed his razor in the washbasin and reached for his hand towel. From the bedroom next door, he heard Mrs Rice

160

calling, 'Aren't you ready yet, Ewart? If we have to go, we might as well go on time. Then we can leave on time!'

'Won't be a moment!' Dr Rice called back.

He examined himself closely in the mirror. He never let it show, not to other people, but he was really quite vain. He liked to look absolutely immaculate: immaculately groomed, immaculately shaved. As far as he was concerned, the thought of going out in public with sleep in the corner of his eye or hair growing out of his nostrils was anathema.

He turned his face from one side to the other. Sixty, but still handsome in a Celtic way. Perhaps that left-hand sideburn could do with a trim. He couldn't stand the thought of a pretty girl sitting next to him at dinner covertly glancing at his left-hand sideburn and thinking, What raggedy sideburns this old coot has. Dr Rice's vanity was vanity of top Wesselton quality, in that he could imagine himself inside the minds of everybody he met, and of course in his imagination they were all thinking about him and nothing else.

Dr Rice opened the drawer next to the washbasin and took out his sharp hairdressing scissors - professional scissors, not on sale to the public. He leaned toward the mirror again, holding up the scissors in his right hand, tugging the skin of his cheek with the fingertips of the left hand, taking a last appraising look.

He blinked. His eyes seemed to blur. He blinked again, but his face in the mirror was still blurry. He wiped the glass with a dry facecloth, thinking it must have steamed up, but his face remained just as indistinct.

'Agnes!' he called, thinking that the maid had tried to clean his mirror with wax polish. 'Agnes, this mirror, I can't see a thing!'

'I'm just putting on my eyelashes,' Mrs Rice replied.

Dr Rice looked back at the mirror; and then he shivered, the way people do in a sudden icy draft. Staring at him out of the reflected bathroom was not his own face, but the face of a child, a blond-haired, bland-faced child, with pinprick eyes and an expression of bright childish malice.

Almost paralysed with fright, Dr Rice widened his eyes and tried to outstare the image in the mirror. If he stared at it hard enough, it would go away. Ghosts and spirits can never stand up to scrutiny in broad daylight.

But outside the window, the evening sun began to die, and the dressing room suddenly grew darker, as if it were a cage that had been draped in black baize. And the pale child's face remained, staring back at Dr Rice fierce and unabashed, almost gleeful.

'Pickle-nearest-the-wind,' the child mouthed. 'Pickle-nearest-the-wind. '

'Go away,' said Dr Rice in a hoarse whisper. 'Go away, do you hear me? Go away!'

'Did you say something, dear?' his wife called out.

'Go away, go away, go away,' Dr Rice intoned.

'You told tales,' the child replied. 'Tell-tale-tit, your tongue shall be split, and every cat and dog in town shall have a little bit.'

'Go away,' Dr Rice begged him.

But now the child's eyes opened wider, and his smile grew broader and merrier, and Dr Rice found himself raising his right hand up to the side of his face, his right hand in which he was holding his sharp professional scissors.

'No,' he pleaded.

The child smiled. 'Tell-tale-tit.'

'I didn't mean to tell. He asked me. I didn't think I was doing anything wrong.'

' You told, you told, you told.'

'I didn't mean to!' Dr Rice wept. 'Please, my God, I didn't mean to. He asked me about you, that's all. I didn't think you were still -'

'You didn't think I was still alive? You didn't think I was still here? Then you are foolish, aren't you? Just as foolish as your wife says you are. Because I have been here since time began and I shall always be here, long after you are ashes!'

Mrs Rice said, 'Ewart? Is anything wrong? You really do sound most peculiar.'

But Dr Rice, when he opened his mouth, found that he was unable to speak. His throat felt as if it were being gripped in a steel claw; he couldn't do anything but gag for air. His left hand scrabbled against the counter beside the washbasin, knocking over his Gucci razor stand and his bottles of after-shave and his porcelain dish of Chanel soap. His right hand turned toward his face, his thumb and fingers slowly and inexorably prized apart by some uncontrollable tightening of his muscles, so that the pointed blades of the scissors opened, too.

As he gargled for air, his mouth stretched open and his tongue protruded, mauve from lack of oxygen, fat with effort, glistening and wagging.

' Tell-tale-tit, your tongue shall be split, and every cat and dog in town shall have a little bit!'

Dr Rice cut into his own tongue with the hairdressing scissors. There was a terrible crunch of flesh that he could feel right down to the roots of his tongue, right down to the pit of his stomach. His throat muscles contracted in an attempt to scream, but the grip on his neck remained, and there was nothing he could do but choke and struggle.

Blood gushed down the front of his undershirt as if he were pulling on a bright red sweater, and splattered into his shaving water. But the child in the mirror hadn't finished with him yet. His trembling hand opened up the blades of the scissors again, and enclosed his tongue from the side this time, so close to his lips that he cut his mouth as well. He could feel the sharpness of the scissors on the top and bottom of his tongue, and his eyes bulged in hysterical terror.

If I've split my tongue, that can be sewn up and healed. But oh, God, if I cut it right off—

The boy's face was sparkling with delight. 'You told, you told, you toldr

'Gggnnggghh,' pleaded Dr Rice.

'You told, and you shouldn't, and now you have to pay!'

Dr Rice's right hand went into a taut slow-motion convulsion and closed the grips of the scissors. He cut right through to the first split, and half of his tongue dropped into his washbasin. Then, shuddering all over, he raised his left hand and gripped the remaining half of his tongue by its tip and scissored that off, too.

Then he stood in front of the mirror, staring at it in shock, his lips closed, but a thin, dark, glutinous cascade of blood poured down his chin. Everything was bloody: his face and his hair and his clothes and his dressing room. He looked like a circus clown who had gone beserk with his pot of scarlet makeup.

Mrs Rice came into the dressing room, her hair stiffly lacquered, buttoning up the cuff of her shiny blue evening dress as she came. 'Ewart, what on earth are you playing at? We've only got fifteen minutes before we -'

Her husband stared at her pitifully out of a mask of blood. She stood with her hand over her mouth, staring back at him, and she didn't know what to do.

The man came flip-flapping on monkish leather sandals along the sidewalk, his spectacles reflecting the streetlights, his pipe clenched comfortably between his teeth. His Standard poodle trotted beside him on a long leash.

'Just as far as the bushes at the end of the development,' he informed his poodle. 'Then you can do your ah-ahs and we can turn around and head for home.'

He passed the front door of the Rice house. 'That poor Dr Rice. God alone knows what happened to him. Taken away like that, in an ambulance. God alone knows.'

It was then that the poodle stopped and stiffened and started to growl, way down deep in its throat.

'What's the matter, Redford? What is it, boy?"

The poodle continued to growl. The Rices' neighbor peered through the shadows at the side of the Rice residence; and there was a window open and a white blind flapping.

The neighbor hesitated. He wasn't too keen to go and investigate, since he knew that Dr Rice was still in the hospital and Mrs Rice was with him, and that the house was empty. There had been three armed burglaries already that month in the Hollywood Reservoir district; and in one of them, a friend of his had been shot in the shoulder. All the same, he waited, frowning, to see if there was any sign of a burglar in the house, and he slipped his poodle off the leash.

'Heel, Redford.'

There was a lengthy pause. All the man could hear were the endless orchestrations of the cicadas and the distant muttering of traffic on the freeways. The poodle whined and snuffled.

Suddenly, the white blind at the side of the house snapped up, with a heart-stopping clatter, and a large dark shape bounded out of the window and ran across the lawn.

The poodle rushed silently after it and caught up with it just behind a large flowering shrub. The neighbor ran forward, then abruptly stopped and told himself'Whoa!' when he heard the ferocity of the snarling in the shadows. He reached into his coat pocket and took out his flashlight, and cautiously probed the darkness with its thin beam.

He didn't understand what he saw; but it still made his stomach feel as if it were gradually filling up with ice water. A hefty brindled tomcat was crouched in the bush, savagely gnawing at a piece of blue-gray meat. His own poodle was standing beside the cat, and he was chewing something, too. A shredded piece of it was hanging from one side of his jaw.

'Redford!' the neighbor screamed at his dog. And then, to the cat, he screamed, 'Shoo! Get the hell out of it! Shoo!'

The cat stayed where it was, staring at him with eyes that gleamed frighteningly blue in the light of his flashlight. The poodle, too, refused to come to heel.

'Redford, you son of a bitch!' the neighbor screeched, and lifted the leash to smack his poodle across the nose.

But the cat spat at him so evilly, and Redford growled with such mutinous ferocity, that the man backed away, and shrugged, and said, 'Okay, forget it. Forget it. You want to squat in a bush and eat squirrels, see if I care. Just don't expect any Gravy Train tomorrow, that's all.'

Detective Ernest Oeste of the Hollywood police was sent back to the Rice residence at eleven-thirty that evening in order to retrieve two pieces of Dr Rice's tongue which had been overlooked by paramedics when they first answered his wife's emergency call.

There was no question of the pieces being sewn back into place. The damage to Dr Rice's tongue was far too extensive. But they were needed as evidence that Dr Rice had (almost unbelievably) inflicted his injuries upon himself.

'He loved to talk, why should he do such a thing?' Mrs Rice had wept.

Detective Oeste had to report after a lengthy search that Dr Rice's tongue had apparently been taken and eaten by a rat or a cat.

Detective Oeste's immediate superior, Sergeant Frederick Quinn, sat for a very long time in front of his report sheet before typing, 'Cat got his tongue'. Almost immediately, he deleted it, and typed, 'Evidence removed by predatory animals'.

'Can you believe this case?' he asked the world.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Martin returned to Franklin Avenue that Sunday night exhausted; and a little drunk, too. Ramone had taken him to his favorite restaurant and bar, Una Porcion, on Santa Monica, three blocks west of the Palm. They had drunk three bottles of Lopez de Heredia and eaten countless tapas - cheese, squid, spicy sausage, sardines, meatballs.

Ramone had said, as they drove home along Santa Monica with the warm gasoline-fumy breeze blowing in their faces, 'Sometimes you have to make a deliberate effort to forget things, you know that? Otherwise you'd end up crazy. I forgot Lugosi already. He never happened. He was nothing but a figment of my imagination. When you forget, there's no pain. And who needs pain?'

'I'm trying to forget that my stomach is having a protest march,' Martin replied.

'What's the matter, you don't like Spanish food?'

'Each individual piece is okay, but somehow they don't seem to cohabit in my stomach very well. I can hear the sausages arguing with the squid. What are you doing here, eight-legs, this stomach isn't big enough for the two of us.'

Ramone had slapped him on the shoulder. 'Heyy, come on, you're going to be all right. What you need is a nice big glass of Fundador.'

'Ramone,' Martin had insisted. 'I'm going to take you home.'

He had dropped Ramone off; gripped his hand for a second as a thank-you; and then headed back toward his apartment. He parked awkwardly, his rear wheels well away from the curb, but he decided that whatever was good enough for Hunter was good enough for him. He switched off the car stereo, cutting off Simply Red in midfalsetto, and vaulted out of the car without opening the door.

He had only just pushed his key into the lock, however, when the landing lights were switched on, and by the time he had stepped into the hall, Mr Capelli appeared at the head of the stairs, in his lurid gold bathrobe and his monogrammed slippers. 'Martin? Martin? Is that you? I've been calling all over!'

'Oh, hello, Mr Capelli. How are you doing? Did you have to wear that robe? I'm feeling a little nauseous.'

'Is Emilio with you?' Mr Capelli demanded, ignoring his gibe.

'Emilio? Of course not. I've been out with Ramone.'

Mr Capelli came halfway down the stairs, and then stopped, holding the railing, looking gray-faced and serious. 'Emilio is gone, Martin. Disappeared.

'What do you mean, gone?' asked Martin, trying to keep a steady eye on Mr Capelli in spite of three bottles of Spanish rose. Then, 'Gone? Gone where?'

'How should I know? One minute he was playing on the stairs with his toy cars; then his grandmother called him in for his bath; and he was gone.'

'He didn't go upstairs, did he? He didn't go up to my apartment?'

'How should I know? I don't know where he went!'

Martin clasped Mr Capelli's shoulder and gave him a reassuring squeeze. 'Don't worry, Mr Capelli, we'll find him. Everything's going to be fine.'

'But where is he? He never wandered off before.'

'Listen, really, he's going to be fine.'

'We called the police,' said Mr Capelli. 'We called the police straightaway.'

'And what did they say?'

'Well, they said they were going to put out a bulletin, what else could they do? But still no word.'

Martin said, 'Please — if you hear anything — don't forget to tell me, okay?'

'I tell you, I tell you.' Mr Capelli was deeply distressed. First to lose his daughter; then to lose his daughter's only child.

Martin climbed the stairs to his apartment. He had locked the door before he went out, but Mr Capelli had a drawerful of spare keys, and it was quite possible that Emilio had found one and let himself in. He prayed not. But he had a terrible feeling that the playmate in the mirror had proved irresistible and that Emilio had come upstairs to see him. He opened the door and went inside. He listened. No voices, no singing. Silence. He waited for a little while, and then he walked along the hallway and opened the sitting-room door.

The room was empty. Only the sofa, only the desk, only the mirror, with its chilly, uncompromising surface. Martin stepped slowly in, his shoes sounding loudly on the bare boards, his heart silently racing. Pickle-di-pickle-di-pickle-di-pickle.

He approached the mirror, reached out his hand, and touched it. It was cold, unyielding.

'Emilio?' he called quietly.

There was no reply. Only the sound of nighttime traffic on Highland; only the drone of an airplane headed toward Bur-bank. Only the wind, tapping at the Venetian blinds like Blind Pew groping his way toward the Admiral Benbow.

'Emilio?'

Again, no answer. Martin stood for a long time in front of the mirror, quivering cold, wondering what the hell he was going to do. Because what could he do if Emilio had actually disappeared into the mirror, looking for Boofuls? How could he find him? How could he get him out? And what, finally, could he tell Mr and Mrs Capelli? That his obsession with Boofuls had lost them their only grandchild? How could he possibly compensate them for that?

He felt a chill in his body that was worse than the chill of death. It was the chill of total helplessness; of total loss.

Mr Capelli came into the room and stood staring at him.

'You called out Emilio,' he said.

'I, uh -'

'You called out Emilio. Why did you do that?'

Mr Capelli, I have to be honest.'

'Honest, yes,' said Mr Capelli. 'Be honest. Be honest and tell me what you really think, that your mirror has taken Emilio. Your mirror has taken my grandson!'

Martin rubbed his aching head. 'Mr Capelli, I have no way of telling. You saw what happened before - you saw the way he was almost sucked into it. Well, I locked the door when I left the apartment this morning, but it's possible, isn't it, that Emilio might have found one of your spare keys? And if he did that. . .'

He paused. He didn't really know what to say.

Mr Capelli shuffled forward in his slippers and peered into the mirror. All he could see, however, was his own gray face and Martin's empty sitting room.

'If the mirror has taken him,' he said in a thick voice, without looking around, 'what can we do? How can we get him back?'

'I have no idea,' Martin admitted.

Mr Capelli kept on staring at his own reflection. 'There isn't anybody who knows about these things? You talked about finding a priest. Maybe a priest would know. My own priest, Father Lucas.'

Martin swallowed. 'I had somebody here this morning . .. a kind of a medium called Homer Theobald. I'm afraid he wouldn't go near it.'

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

'Well, he said it was - powerful, dangerous, I don't know.'

'And he wouldn't help?'

Martin shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

'Did you talk to the priest?' Martin asked him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy grinned. 'Hello, Martin.'

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

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

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

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

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

'You're a dead boy,' Martin whispered. Boofuls laughed. 'Do I look dead? Do I feel dead? Here -take my hand and tell me that I'm dead.'

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

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

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

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

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

'The boy you were playing with. The little Italian boy.'

'Oh, him,'' said Boofuls. 'He's all right.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'So where is he now, exactly?'

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

'It's nearly three o'clock in the morning.'

'Well,' said Boofuls, 'it's different in there.'

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

Boofuls frowned and looked away.

'I asked you a question,' Martin shouted at him.

T

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

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

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

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

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

'You mustn't call me Walter. Nobody's allowed to call me Walter.'

'That's your name, though, isn't it?'

'That was his name.'

'Your father's name, you mean?'

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

'Do you know who he was? Did you ever meet him?'

'I'm not allowed to talk about my father.'

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

'You can't get Emilio back.'

Martin felt a small sick feeling in the bottom of his stomach; and it wasn't only caused by last night's Spanish wine. When he thought about Lugosi's grisly transmogrification into a cat-snake, the prospects of getting Emilio back from beyond the mirror seemed desperately remote. Or even if they could get him back, it seemed highly unlikely that he would be the same normal five-year-old boy that he had been before.

It seemed to Martin that the mirror changed the shapes of living creatures so that they took on the physical appearance of what they really were. Lugosi, like most cats, had been sinuous and coldhearted and carnivorously minded. That was why he had taken on the shape of a snake.

Maybe he was wrong, but Martin strongly suspected that the world beyond the mirror was just like the world of the dead, the way that Theo had described it to him. Maybe it was the very same world. Maybe the mirror was a window that looked into heaven; or purgatory; or straight into hell.

The strongest piece of evidence was Boofuls, the living, breathing, long-dead Boofuls.

Martin said, a little unsteadily, 'Okay ... let's take this one step at a time. First of all, what's beyond that mirror?'

Boofuls turned to the mirror and frowned. 'Hollywood,' he said.

'But not this Hollywood?'

'No,' Boofuls agreed. 'Hollywood the other way around.'

'Let me ask you this: where do you live in Hollywood?'

'Sixteen sixty-five Stone Canyon Drive, Bel Air. The house is called Espejo.'

'Is your grandmother still alive?'

Boofuls shook his head. 'She hung herself.'

'But she didn't hang herself until she'd killed you. So how come you're still alive and she's not?'

'Because I didn't want her to be.'

'But that's not up to you, is it? Deciding whether people live or die?'

Boofuls said nothing in reply to that question, but stared at Martin intently with those piggy little eyes. Martin could see now just what the M-G-M makeup department had done to give him that wide, dreaming look. Boofuls was pretty, in a way, but if Martin had been Jacob Levitz, he certainly wouldn't have looked at him twice when he auditioned for Whistlin' Dixie.

Perhaps Boofuls had been fresher looking in 1935, thought Martin, with a sudden dash of black humor. After all, in those days, he hadn't been dead for fifty years.

Martin slowly rubbed the palms of his hands together.

'Okay,' he said, 'if your grandmother's dead, who takes care of

you?'

'Miss Redd takes care of me. Miss Redd always took care of

me.'

Martin sat back. 'I never heard of Miss Redd.'

Boofuls shrugged, as if to say that wasn't his fault. 'Would

you like some orange juice?' Martin asked him. 'Anything to

eat?'

Boofuls brightened up. 'Do you have Ralston's?' Martin said, Tm sorry. How about Count Chokula?' Boofuls looked disappointed. 'I'm collecting Ralston box tops,

for the Tom Mix Straight-Shooters ring.'

'The Tom Mix Straight-Shooters ring? That's a radio premium, isn't it. Or wasn't it? They haven't given away stuff like

that on the radio since —'

He stared at Boofuls in horrified fascination. He suddenly

realized that he wasn't simply talking to a living ghost, he was

talking to a ghost who still lived in 1939.

Boofuls sat at the kitchen table with a large bowl of Count Chokula and a glass of milk. Martin had made himself another cup of strong coffee. It was four o'clock in the morning, and his head felt as if it were slowly being closed in a car door. Outside the kitchen window, the sky was gradually beginning to lighten; false dawn, the hour of false promises.

Martin sat opposite Boofuls, straddling one of the kitchen chairs. He tried to discover what kind of life Boofuls lived in 'Hollywood the Other Way Around'. He found it almost impossible to imagine an entire city in complete reverse. Yet of course he glimpsed it every day of the week, every hour of the day. Hollywood the Other Way Around appeared in store windows, barbershop mirrors, polished automobiles, shiny cutlery - everywhere and anywhere he came across a reflecting surface.

It was the idea of walking around inside those reflecting surfaces that he found so difficult to grasp. But Boofuls, with his mouth full of chocolate cereal, said, 'Why? You do it all the time. You can see yourself there.'

'Well, sure,' said Martin, 'but that's not actually me, is it, that's Me the Other Way Around. A left-handed me, a me who parts his hair on the opposite side, a me with a mole on my right cheek instead of my left.'

Boofuls smiled at him. Martin wasn't too keen on his smiles. They had a sly coldness to them that he couldn't quite pin down. Boofuls said. 'That you in the mirror is more like you than you are.'

'And what's that supposed to mean?'

'Look in any mirror, Martin, and you'll see the truth.'

It wasn't only Boofuls' smile that Martin found disturbing, It was the way he talked. Sometimes he was quite childish, only using eight-year-old words, and eight-year-old ideas. But occasionally the mask of childhood would slip slightly, and he would say something that was too calculating and too philosophical for a boy of his supposed age. Although, what was his age? He was ageless; he was dead. He was nothing more than a glamorous memory that had stepped out of a mirror.

'Tell me something else,' said Martin after a while. 'If I lay a mirror flat on the ground and look down into it, the world looks upside down, as well as the other way around. Everybody's clinging onto the ground by the soles of their feet. How do you guys cope with that?'

Boofuls finished his milk and wiped his mouth with his hand. 'It's different, that's all.'

Til say,' Martin remarked.

Boofuls propped his chin on his hands and stared at Martin with supreme confidence. 'The thing is, Martin, she didn't kill the real me. That's why she hanged herself. When she was doing it, she suddenly realized that she wasn't killing the real me.'

Martin thought about that. Then he said, 'All right, if she didn't kill the real you, which one of you was the real you? The Boofuls in this Hollywood or the Boofuls in Hollywood the Other Way Around?'

Boofuls smiled. 'Which one of you is the real you, Martin? If I were to kill this you, who would be left? What would be left?'

'I really don't know, to tell you the truth,' Martin admitted.

'Well, you'd know if it happened. You'd know.''

'All right,' Martin agreed, 'she didn't murder the real you. But what happened then, after the you who wasn't you got himself chopped up into two hundred eleven pieces?'

'There was nothing I could do but go away,' said Boofuls. 'Everybody thought I was dead. They closed down Sweet Chariot and everybody was paid off. Have you seen any rushes from Sweet Chariot?

Martin shook his head. 'I've seen everything else you've done. I've even seen your screen tests for Flowers From Tuscaloosa. They were pretty dire, weren't they?' 'I had the grippe. I still got the part.' 'Well, sure you did. There was nobody else. There was only one Boofuls. Well — is only one Boofuls.'

The hot coffee had steamed up Martin's glasses. He took them off and polished them with the pulled-out tail of his shirt. Boofuls watched him for a little while and then said, 'We could finish that picture, couldn't we?'

Martin peered at him. He was shortsighted, and without his glasses Boofuls' face appeared white and fuzzy, with dark circles around his eyes. Almost — for a moment — like a skull. 'What do you mean we could finish the picture?' 'Well, imagine it,' said Boofuls, licking his lips with the tip of his tongue. 'Screenwriter discovers boy who can sing and dance and act just like Boofuls, just like Boofuls, and plans to finish Boofuls' last unfinished picture.'

'But I don't plan to finish Boofuls' last unfinished picture. I plan to present a musical of my own called Boofuls!'

Boofuls was silent for a long time. He traced a pattern on the Formica tabletop with his finger. At last he said, 'I want to finish Sweet Chariot.'

'Well. . . it's a possibility, I suppose,' said Martin. 'But it's going to be pretty difficult finding backing. I had enough grief trying to sell my own musical. And the whole idea of Sweet Chariot is pretty much out of date these days. A boy turning into an angel? Everybody's done it - Warren Beatty, Michael Landon ... all that Heaven Can Wait stuff. George Burns even played God.'

'George Burns is still alive?' asked Boofuls in surprise. 'Well,' said Martin, 'some people like to think so.'

'I want to finish Sweet Chariot,' Boofuls repeated. His eyes widened in sudden ferocity. 'It's important!'

'Come on, you're talking about a twenty-five-million-dollar production here. I don't think many producers are going to risk that kind of money on a remake of a 1939 musical.'

'But it's a Boofuls musical,' Boofuls insisted.

'Ho, ho, ho, don't tell me that,' replied Martin. 'In this town, there are half a dozen names that stink, and as far as I can make out, Boofuls is the Least Desirable Aroma of the Year.'

Boofuls slowly shook his head. His eyes had a tiny, faraway look, as if he were peering down the wrong end of a telescope. 'You're wrong, Martin. Things are going to change. Boofuls is going to be famous again. Boofuls is going to be loved!'

Martin stood up and collected Boofuls' bowl and glass. 'All I can say to that is, convince me.'

'I will. I promise.'

'Meanwhile,' said Martin, 'I have something a whole lot more serious to talk about. I want to get Emilio back.'

'I told you. You can't get him back.'

'Does that mean ever?'

Boofuls was silent. Martin leaned forward across the table and snapped. 'Does that mean ever? Or what?'

'There is a way,' said Boofuls.

'Oh, really? And what way is that?'

Boofuls glanced up and smiled, and looked away again. 'We could make a deal. If you help me to finish Sweet Chariot, if you take care of me, then when it's finished, you can get Emilio back.'

'Why not before?' Martin demanded.

'Because I won't,' said Boofuls.

'What the hell do you mean you won't?'

'I won't, that's all. I can, but I won't. That's the deal.'

Martin banged the kitchen table with his fist. 'Listen to me, you beady-eyed sprout! There's an old couple downstairs and Emilio is all they've got in the whole entire world! Either you get Emilio back or you don't get squat from me, com-prende?'

'I won't,' Boofuls repeated.

'What do you want me to do?' Martin challenged him. 'Put you over my knee and spank you?'

'You mustn't shout at me,' Boofuls replied. 'If you shout at me, it brings on my fits.'

'I want Emilio back,' Martin told him in a soft, low, threatening voice.

'I want to finish Sweet Chariot?

Martin tried to stare Boofuls out; but there was something about the little boy's eyes that made him feel unnerved; almost vertiginous; as if he were about to fall into a cold and echoing elevator shaft forever.

He backed away. Boofuls didn't take his eyes away from him once.

'I don't lift one finger until I get Emilio back,' Martin told him, but much less convincingly than before.

'But - if you do get Emilio back - how will I be sure that you will still help me to make Sweet Chariot?' Boofuls asked him.

'You don't know. You'll have to trust me.'

'I don't trust anybody.'

Martin finished his cup of coffee. 'Maybe it's time you started.'

At seven-thirty that morning, Martin tugged up the Venetian blinds and greeted the bright California sunshine. Boofuls was sitting at the desk, solemnly doodling with Martin's black Conte pen: clouds and faces and disembodied smiles.

Martin turned around and looked at him. He was a real boy, right enough, flesh and blood, freckles and buck teeth. His legs were lightly tanned, and there was a grazing of white skin on his knee where he must have fallen. Martin crossed the sitting room and watched him drawing for a while, and Boofuls even smelled like a boy - biscuity and hot. Without even thinking about it, Martin ruffled his curls.

Boofuls immediately knocked his hand away. 'Don't do that. Nobody's allowed to do that.'

'All right, I'm sorry.' Martin smiled. 'I guess I wasn't treating you quite like a big movie star.'

'I am a big movie star,' Boofuls said petulantly.

'You were a big movie star,' Martin reminded him.

Boofuls didn't bother to reply to that; but by the look on his face Martin could tell just how contemptuous he felt about it. Martin knew plenty of grown-up movie stars, and their total egotism never came as any surprise. It was as much a part of the job they did as a steady hand is to a carpenter. But it was a shock to meet such consummate vanity in a child of eight - even a child of eight who had walked into his life in wildly unnatural circumstances. Somehow Martin had always liked to believe that prepubescent children had a natural cynicism, a gift for self-squelching, which made such vanity impossible.

Not this kid, however. As far as Martin could tell, Boofuls had no interest in anybody but himself. Martin could already begin to understand why he had won such rapid and rapturous success — what star quality it was that Jacob Levitz had seen in him that first day he had auditioned for Whistlin' Dixie. A good movie star is interested in nothing but what other people think about him; and a brilliant movie star is obsessed by what other people think about him.

Martin said, 'We're going to have to think about what we're going to do with you. You can't suddenly appear out of nowhere at all and expect to continue living your life as if nothing had happened. If you're going to stay this side of the mirror, you're going to need education, social security . .. And how are you going to get those? Your birth certificate shows you were born in 1931 and yet you're only eight years old.'

Boofuls stared at him. 'All I want is new clothes. Then we can start making the picture.'

'What's so important about this damned picture?'

But Boofuls wouldn't answer. He sat on Martin's chair swinging his legs and doodling: clouds as high as clifftops and strange seductive smiles.

Just then, there was a knock at Martin's apartment door. Boofuls glanced up, and there was a look of cold curiosity in his eyes, but Martin said, 'Stay here, okay? I don't want anybody finding out that you're here yet.' He went to answer the door. It was Mr Capelli, in a blue Jack Nicklaus T-shirt and blue-and-white-checkered seersucker golfing pants. He had dark damson-colored circles under his eyes, and he was a little out of breath from climbing the stairs. 'Hey, Martin, I didn't wake you?' 'No, I was up already. Come on in.'

'I called the police about ten minutes ago,' said Mr Capelli. 'They told me no news.'

Martin closed the door. 'How's Mrs Capelli taking it?' 'Terrible, how do you think? I had to give her Tranxene last night.'

'You want some coffee?' Martin asked him. 'Sure, why not?'

'Have you eaten anything? I've got a couple of raspberry Danishes in the freezer.'

Mr Capelli gave him an odd look. 'Is something wrong?' 'Wrong?' said Martin in feigned surprise. 'What do you mean wrong?'

'You're fussing,' said Mr Capelli. 'I don't know, you're all flibberty.'

Martin shrugged. 'I'm a little tired, that's all. I didn't sleep too good, worrying about Emilio.'

He ushered Mr Capelli into the kitchen, glancing quickly toward the sitting room to make sure that Boofuls hadn't decided to make an appearance. Mr Capelli said, 'I called Father Lucas, too. He's coming around at nine o'clock.'

Martin spooned Folger's Mountain Blend into the percolator. 'Oh, yes, Father Lucas. I'd forgotten about him.'

'I don't know how serious he took it,' Mr Capelli replied, dragging out one of Martin's kitchen stools and perching his wide backside on it. 'When I told him we were having trouble with a mirror, you know, the way it nearly sucked in Emilio and all that stuff - well, he sounded a little distracted. You know what I mean by distracted? Like he was thinking about his breakfast instead, or maybe what he was going to preach in church next week.'

'Sure,' said Martin. 'I know what you mean by distracted.' 'He's a good priest, though,' Mr Capelli remarked. 'Kind of old-fashioned, you know, traditional. But I like him. He baptized Emilio; he buried my daughter.'

The water in the percolator began to jump and pop. Martin took down two ceramic mugs and set them on the table. As he did so, Boofuls appeared in the open doorway, behind Mr Capelli's back. The look on his face was unreadable. Martin couldn't tell if he was angry or bored or amused. His eyes flared in tiny pinpricks of blue light, as if they could cut through steel.

'Some of these young priests, they seem to take a pleasure in challenging the old ways. You know what I mean by challenging? They say, why shouldn't a priest marry? Why shouldn't people use a contraceptive? What's so special about the Latin mass?'

Mr Capelli looked up at Martin's face.

'Hey,' he said. 'What's wrong? You look like you just remembered it was your mother's birthday yesterday.'

Slowly, frowning, Mr Capelli twisted around on his stool so that he was facing the door. He saw Boofuls standing there, silent and small, with that eerie expression on his face that wasn't smiling and wasn't scowling and wasn't anything at all but triumph, sheer, cold triumph.

Mr Capelli was silent for one long second, and then he shouted out ' Yah!' in terror, and jumped off from his stool, which toppled noisily over backward onto the kitchen floor. He stood with his back pressed against the cupboards, both hands raised, too shocked and frightened even to cross himself. When he managed to shout out a few desperate guttural words, his Italian accent was so dense that Martin could scarcely understand what he was saying.

'Whosa dis? Whosa dis boy? Donta tellmi. Martin donta tellmi!'

Boofuls remained silent: still triumphant, but placid. Mr Capelli edged away from him, right around to the far side of the kitchen, and stood staring at him in horror.

Martin said, 'It's Boofuls. He came out of the mirror.'

'He came out of the mirror, he tells me. Holy God and All His Angels. Ho Lee God!'

Martin laid a hand on Mr Capelli's shoulder. 'I was hoping he wouldn't come in. I didn't want to frighten you.'

'He didn't want to frighten me!' Mr Capelli repeated.

Boofuls came gliding forward into the kitchen. He held out his hand. 'You mustn't be frightened,' he told Mr Capelli. 'There's nothing to be frightened of at all.'

Mr Capelli crossed himself five times in succession, his hand flurrying wildly. 'You're a dead person! You stay back!'

Boofuls smiled gently. 'Do I look dead?' he asked.

Mr Capelli was shaking. 'Don't you touch me, you stay back. You're a dead person.'

But Martin came forward and laid his hand on Mr Capelli's shoulder and said, 'Mr Capelli, he should be dead, by rights. But he isn't. You can see that he isn't. And I don't think that he's going to do anything to hurt us.'

'Nothing to hurt us, eh? So where's Emilio? Emilio went into the mirror, and this boy came out, is that it?'

Martin was about to explain that, yes, there was a chance that Emilio might have gone into the mirror, but that Boofuls was certainly going to help to get him back. But Boofuls forestalled him by saying in that piping voice of his, 'You're quite right, sir. Emilio is in the mirror. He went to play with some of my chums.'

This was more than Mr Capelli could take. His face turned ashy blue, and Martin had to drag over a chair for him so that he could sit down. He sat with his hand pressed over his heart, breathing deeply. Boofuls stood beside him, still smiling.

'Emilio's quite safe, sir,' he told Mr Capelli.

'Safe?' said Mr Capelli harshly, in between breaths. 'Who cares about safe? I want him back.'

Til get him back,' said Boofuls.

'Well, then, go on then, what are you waiting for?' Mr Capelli demanded.

But Boofuls shook his pretty little head. 'All in good time, sir. All in good time.'

Mr Capelli reared up; and Martin had to grab hold of his shoulders to make him sit down again. 'What's this, "all in good time"? You go in there, and you go get my grandson for me, and if he isn't here in five minutes, five minutes, I'm going to give you the hiding of your life whether you're a dead person or not, do you get me?'

Boofuls stared at Mr Capelli in surprise, and then lowered his head and covered his face with his hands.

Mr Capelli said with less confidence. 'What're you doing? You go get Emilio, do you hear me?'

Boofuls' face remained concealed. Martin stepped toward him, but he sidestepped away, without lowering his hands. For a moment, Martin had the disturbing feeling that if he tried to prize Boofuls' hands away, he would uncover not the pretty pale features of Boofuls, but the gilded sardonic face of Pan. He hesitated, glanced back at Mr Capelli, then shrugged. He didn't know what he ought to do.

It was then that Mr Capelli saw the tears that were squeezing out between Boofuls' fingers. The boy's shoulders were trembling; and it was clear that he was deeply upset. Mr Capelli frowned and reached one hand forward.

'Listen, young man . ..'

'It's Boofuls, Mr Capelli,' said Martin. 'It really is. And that's what he likes to be called.'

Mr Capelli cleared his throat. 'Well, here, listen, Boofuls. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yell like that. But the truth is, I'm real worried about Emilio. I don't like that mirror at all, and I don't want him wandering around in there, it's not healthy, do you know what I mean by healthy?'

Boofuls hands remained closed over his face. Mr Capelli looked anxious now and shifted his chair a little closer. Boofuls, in response, stepped back another pace.

'Listen to me,' said Mr Capelli, 'I'm a grandfather. I love children. I don't know where you've come from, I don't know how you can be dead but still walking around and talking, but I'm willing to accept that maybe I don't understand absolutely everything in this universe. I don't understand accumulated earnings tax, does that make me a bad person? But I love Emilio. Emilio is all I've got. And even if he's safe wherever he is, I need to have him back.'

Boofuls at last lowered his hands. His face was stained with tears. He looked utterly bereft and miserable.

'Oh, Mr Capelli,' he said, 'I'm so unhappy.'

'Hey, come on,' said Mr Capelli, and held out his arms. Boofuls hesitated for a moment and then came up to Mr Capelli and hugged him as if he were his own grandfather.

'Do you know something, you're right,' said Mr Capelli, beginning to smile. 'You don't look dead at all. You sure don't feel dead. I don't know how it happened, but you're a live boy!'

Martin watched all this with caution. There was no doubt at all that Boofuls was a most appealing child, yet he couldn't rid himself of that feeling he always had when he watched a Boofuls musical: that here was a grown-up man, a cunning grown-up man, masquerading as a small boy. Boofuls was just a little too clever; just a little too calculating. Seeing him win over Mr Capelli was almost like watching a skillfully written scene in a movie, specifically aimed at tugging at the audience's heartstrings.

'Oh, aunt,' Freddie Bartholomew had wept in David Cop-perfield, 'I'm so unhappy.' And Boofuls had used the same line in exactly the same way. A last desperate tug at a grandfather's heartstrings. David Copperfield had been released in 1935, so Boofuls could easily have seen it.

'Mr Capelli -' warned Martin.

But Mr Capelli said, 'Shush now, Martin. I'm a grandfather. Besides, what have we got here? A famous movie star.'

'Mr Capelli -' Martin repeated, but there was little that he could do. Boofuls shot him a quick hostile look that Mr Capelli didn't see: a look which meant you stay out of this, or you'll never see Emilia again.

'Emilio's safe, sir,' he told Mr Capelli, wiping his tears with the back of his hand. 'There are plenty of people who are going to take care of him. But the moment Emilio comes back, then I have to go back into the mirror, I have to.'

'But inside the mirror,' said Mr Capelli, 'that's where you really live, right? You don't truly belong in this world anymore.'

Boofuls swallowed miserably, and tears began to fill up his eyes again. 'I don't live there, sir, nobody lives there. It's a kind of a place where you go if you can't get to heaven.'

'Purgatory,' put in Martin.

'Well, some people call it that,' said Boofuls. 'But you can get to heaven if you fulfill your life's work, the work that God intended you to do.'

'And making Sweet Chariot, that was the work that God intended you to do?'

Boofuls nodded. 'If I can make that picture, then I can rest.'

'What's this Sweet Chariot? Mr Capelli wanted to know.

Martin said nothing for a moment, watching Boofuls. Then he poured out coffee, and passed a cup to Mr Capelli, and explained, 'It was Boofuls' last picture, wasn't it, Boofuls, before his grandmother murdered him. Or thought she'd murdered him. It was about a street urchin who becomes an angel, and who flies around doing good deeds in order to meet with the Almighty's approval. A musical; something of a tearjerker, believe me.'

Boofuls clung to Mr Capelli's neck. 'I never finished the picture, I never managed to finish it, and if I don't finish the picture I'm going to have to stay in the mirror forever and ever, and never get out.'

Martin sipped his coffee. 'You see what he's asking, Mr Capelli? He's asking if you'll allow Emilio to stay in the mirror so that he can make his picture and fulfill his life's destiny and go to meet his Maker.'

Boofuls sobbed, 'I know it's an awful lot to ask you, sir. I know it is. And I know how much Emilio means to you. But please, I beg of you. Otherwise I can never sleep for all eternity. And I'm so tired, sir. So terribly, terribly, tired.'

Tears welled up in Mr Capelli's eyes, too, and he patted Boofuls' narrow back. 'I don't know what to say,' he replied thickly. 'I don't know what to say. How can a man and a grandfather turn away somebody like this, some little boy who needs his help?'

'Mr Capelli,' said Martin, 'doesn't Emilio have any kind of say in this?'

'Well, sure he does,' agreed Mr Capelli. 'But if Boofuls is telling us the truth, then Emilio wanted to go play in the mirror. He wanted to.'

'Couldn't we ask Emilio for ourselves?' Martin suggested.

'Can we do that?' Mr Capelli asked Boofuls.

Boofuls nodded. 'We can ask him, yes. But you mustn't try to get him out of the mirror. Until I'm ready, it could be very dangerous. He could die.'

'Let's just go and see him, shall we?' said Martin.

They went through to the sitting room. The sunlight was very bright in here, and Mr Capelli shielded his eyes with his hand. The mirror seemed larger than it had before: larger and clearer. Anybody who hadn't known that there was a mirror there might have been forgiven for thinking that it was nothing more than a gilded archway through to another identical

room.

As they approached the mirror, Martin saw with a prickle of surprise that he and Mr Capelli were accompanied not by a reflection of Boofuls, but by a reflection of Emilio. The two boys stood in perfectly matching positions, and if one of them nodded his head, then the other one nodded, too.

'Emilio . . .' whispered Mr Capelli. Then, rushing up to the mirror, 'Emilio!'

But of course all that Mr Capelli managed to do was to press himself against his own reflection. Emilio stood behind Mr Capelli's reflection, just as Boofuls was standing behind him in the real room. Mr Capelli hesitated and then stepped back again, so that he could see Emilio more clearly.

'Emilio?' asked Martin. 'Are you okay?'

Emilio was wearing a Star Trek T-shirt and red shorts and scruffy red and white trainers. He looked a little pale and tired, but otherwise well. The lick of black hair which usually fell across the left side of his forehead fell across the right side instead, and his wristwatch was on his right wrist. His face had an oddly asymmetrical appearance, simply because Martin was used to seeing it the other way around.

Emilio called, 'I'm fine, I'm okay. I'm having fun.'

'Who's taking care of you?' Mr Capelli asked him. Emilio held hands with the reflected Mr Capelli, and Boofuls held hands with the real Mr Capelli. Both of them smiled.

' You're looking after me, of course,' said Emilio.

'Me?' asked Mr Capelli, mystified.

'You and Grandma. 'You're in here, too. So's Martin; so's everybody. It's just like home.'

Mr Capelli pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. He couldn't understand this at all. 'All I want to know is, are you okay? Me and Grandma, we're taking care of you okay? Feeding you good? Nobody's hurting you, nothing like that? Nobody's telling you that you have to stay there?'