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 on the 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 horn-rimmed 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 what 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 Theobald in.
‘You don’t mind if I just stand here a moment and
take in
the atmosphere?’ asked Homer Theobald.