Mirror (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three

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

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

He felt the terrible fear of being small and defenseless.

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

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

‘Emilio?’ he called. Then, louder, ‘Emilio?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emilio whispered, ‘We could do it now.’

And Boofuls nodded, and Emilio nodded.

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

‘One! Two!
Three!
’ said Boofuls.

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

‘
Emilio!
’ he bellowed. ‘
Emilio, no!
’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I wanted to go,’ Emilio sobbed.

‘You wanted to
go
? Go where?’

‘Through the mirror, I wanted to go.’

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

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

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

‘Is that what he said?’

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

‘His old man? You mean his father?’

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

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

‘Unh-hunh.’

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

Emilio wiped his tears with his sleeve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emilio said wistfully, ‘I wish I could see it.’

‘It is not so hot, believe me.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘You mean like the same kid in the picture in your bedroom?’

‘The very same kid.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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