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
told
!’
‘
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 berserk 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 street-lights, 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.
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 Porción, on Santa Monica, three blocks west of the Palm. They had drunk three bottles of López 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 rosé. 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 Burbank. 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.’