Mirror by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page B

when I was out, you went into my room?’
    Emilio refused to do anything but pout.
    ‘Listen, Emilio, if you went into my room I won’t be mad at you. Come on, it’s your grandfather’s house, you can go where you want.’
    Emilio slowly and sulkily twisted his wrist away.
    Martin glanced up toward his sitting room window. It was blank, as usual, with the sky reflecting off the glass.
    ‘You won’t talk?’ he said to Emilio. ‘In that case, I’d better go see for myself.’
    He got up from the steps and bounded quickly upstairs, three steps at a time, until he reached the landing just outside his front door. There was a small plastic name tag on it saying
M Williams
. Underneath,
J Berrywell
had been scratched out. Even when they were living together, Jane had insisted on keeping her maiden name.
    He hesitated.
A real boy
. For some irrational reason, he felt a prickle of genuine alarm. There were no boys in his apartment, of course, real or unreal. Emilio had simply invented an imaginary playmate. He was just the age for it, after all, and he had no friends of his own age, not on this block. But all the same, Martin found the idea of it unexpectedly unsettling, as if his apartment had been intruded upon by something he didn’t understand.
    He opened the front door. He hardly ever locked it, because there was nothing worth stealing, except for his typewriter, and he had been hoping for years that somebody would take that, so that he could buy a new one with the insurance money.
    The apartment was silent. The midafternoon sunlight fell across the wood-block floor in a dazzling diagonal. From the bedroom, the pale face of Boofuls watched him as he trod softly along the corridor to the sitting room door.
    He paused. He called, ‘Hello?’ But there was no reply.
    What did you expect
? he asked himself.
A whole chorus of Walt Disney ghosts to come charging out of the closets chorusing ‘Fooled you, Martin!
’?
    He eased the sitting room door wide open. Then he peered around it. In the mirror, his own face peered back. There was nobody else in the room. No boy; not even a
sign
of a boy, like an abandoned blue and white ball.
    ‘Kids,’ he said under his breath, meaning Emilio in particular.
    It took him only a couple of moments to look around the rest of the apartment. There were no boys hiding in the closets among his clothes; there were no boys crouching under the bed. But as he went through to the kitchen to find himself a fresh bottle of wine, he was sure for an instant he could hear somebody giggling.
    He hesitated and listened, but there was nothing. He stepped out of the kitchen into the hallway, holding the bottle of wine in his hand, and there was Emilio with his hands in the pockets of his shorts. Martin looked at him without saying anything.
    ‘Can I play with him?’ asked Emilio.
    ‘Can you play with whom, Emilio?’ Martin replied, deliberately pedantic.
    Emilio swung one shoulder toward the sitting room. ‘The boy, of course.’
    Martin said, ‘Emilio, my little lunatic, there is no boy.’
    ‘There is, too, a boy.’
    ‘Well, that’s right, and your grandfather’s car turns into a robot.’
    ‘I’ve seen it! He showed me!’
    ‘All right,’ cooed Martin. ‘All right, don’t lose your cool. Let’s just say that I’m one of these real skeptical adults you see on children’s television – you know the kind of adult I mean. The kind of adult who can’t understand what the hell Flipper is trying to say to him, and takes a swipe at Lassie when she’s trying to drag him off to the abandoned mine by the trouser leg.’
    Emilio didn’t understand a word of what Martin was saying; but it made Martin feel better, and it stopped Emilio’s fretting.
    ‘If there really is a boy,’ said Martin gently, ‘all you have to do is introduce him to me. Let me shake the boy by the hand, and say good afternoon, boy. Then I’ll believe you.’
    ‘You can’t shake his hand,’ Emilio retorted.
    ‘I