Mirror by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online

twenty minutes he had an appointment with June Lassiter at 20th Century-Fox. He knew June well enough to wave at her across the crowded bar of the Cock ’n’ Bull, and to be assured of a wave back; but he didn’t know how sympathetic she was going to be to the idea of a big-budget musical. Especially a big-budget musical about Boofuls.
    Still, he thought, gathering up his screenplay and sliding it carefully into his Reel Thing tote bag, nobody ever got anywhere in Hollywood by sitting at home and wishing.
    He took one last look at the mirror before he left. It reflected nothing but the sitting room and himself and the morning sunlight. He was beginning to think that he must have hallucinated that ball. Maybe he would go talk to his friend Marion Gidley about it. She was into self-hypnosis and self-induced hallucinations and all that kind of stuff.
    As he closed the door of his apartment behind him, he came across Emilio playing on the landing with a Transformer robot. ‘How’re you doing, Emilio?’ he asked him.
    Emilio looked up with big Hershey-colored eyes. ‘Hi, Martin. Doing good.’
    ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’
    ‘Datson 280 sports car, turns into an evil robot, look.’
    With a complicated fury of clicking and elbow twisting, Emilio turned the sports car into a robot with a pin head and spindly legs. Martin hunkered down and inspected it. ‘Pretty radical, hunh? I wish my car would turn into a robot.’
    ‘Your car’s junk.’
    ‘Who said that?’
    ‘My grandpa, he said your car’s junk, and he wishes you wouldn’t park it right outside the house, people are gonna think it belongs to him.’
    ‘My car’s better than that hearse that
he
drives.’
    ‘My grandpa’s car turns into a robot.’
    ‘Oh, yeah?’
    ‘It does, too, turn into a robot. He told me.’
    Martin affectionately scruffed Emilio’s hair, which Emilio hated, and got up to leave. He was halfway down the next flight of stairs, however, when he thought of something. ‘You don’t happen to own a ball, do you?’ he asked Emilio through the banister rails.
    ‘Grandpa gave me a baseball.’
    ‘No, no – I mean one of those bouncing plastic balls, blue and white.’
    Emilio wrinkled up his nose and shook his head, as if the idea that he would own a bouncing blue and white ball was utterly contemptible. ‘No way, José.’
    Martin reached through the banister and tried to scruff his hair again, but Emilio ducked away. ‘Don’t keep
doing
that!’ he protested. ‘What do you think I am, some kind of gerbil?’
    Martin laughed, and went off to keep his appointment at Fox.
    June Lassiter was very calm and together and California-friendly; a woman’s woman with frizzed-up black hair and pale, immaculate, hypo-allergenic makeup that had been created without causing any pain to animals. She wore a flowing white suit and a scarf around her neck that had been handprinted on raw silk by Hopi Indians. She took Martin to the Fox commissary and bought him a huge spinach salad and a carafe of domestic Chablis that was almost too cold to drink.
    ‘You’re raising ghosts, that’s the trouble,’ she drawled. Martin had a large mouthful of spinach, and all he could do was look at her thin wrist lying on the table with its faded tan and its huge loose gold bangle, and munch, and nod.
    June said, ‘Boofuls is one of those code words in Hollywood that immediately make people’s brains go blank; you know, like Charles Manson.’
    ‘People have tackled difficult Hollywood topics before. Look at
Mommie Dearest
.’
    ‘Oh, sure,’ June agreed. ‘But in
Mommie Dearest
, Joan Crawford eventually redeemed herself, and all the terrible things that she was supposed to have done to her children were rationalized and forgiven. She was a drunken carping bitch but she was a star, and in Hollywood that excuses everything. How can you do that with Boofuls? The boy was chopped up by his crazed grandmother and that was the end of the story. No