Mirror (14 page)

‘Your cat was crying; I thought it might be hungry.’

Martin glanced up toward the door of his apartment. ‘My cat?’ he said in a hollow voice.

‘It’s been crying for hours; ever since you left, almost.’

Martin took a breath. Thank God for that, Lugosi must have reappeared. At least Ramone and he could be friends again. ‘Come on,’ he told Wanda, and took the saucer from her, and led the way upstairs. ‘You couldn’t have gotten in, anyway, the door’s locked.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Lugosi?’ he called.

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

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

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

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

‘That’s right. Why don’t you try calling him?’

‘Okay,’ said Wanda. ‘Lugosi! Lugosi! Here, pussy-pussy-pussy! Come on, Lugosi!’

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

‘Here, Lugosi!’ called Wanda. ‘Here, pussy-pussy!’

It was then that Martin heard the faint
thump-thump-thump
of a furry tail on the floor, and the low death-rattle sound of a cat purring.

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

Thump, thump, thump. Prrrrrr-prrrrrr-prrrrrr
.

‘Lugosi?’ he asked, and his voice was clogged with phlegm.

Two eyes opened in the darkness. Two eyes that burned incandescent blue, like the flames of welding torches.

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

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

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

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

‘Aaahh!’ he heard himself shouting. ‘Wanda, help me! Wanda!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You’d better get to the hospital,’ said Emilio sensibly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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