“I called him yesterday to remind him I’d be coming by at ten this morning to pick him up,” she said. “He sounded fine, said he couldn’t wait to get the bloody thing off.”
Babs looked up from her plate. She had a keen ear for curse words. “Buddy fing,” she muttered, laying it down in her memory bank for future use.
“But when I called on him this morning, after dropping Babs off at Mrs. Pimentel’s, he came to the door in his pajamas. He said he had no idea we were going to get his cast removed, swore up and down I’d never called him. I waited in the living room while he went to get dressed. He has these little notes all over the place. And right by the phone there was one reminding him I’d be taking him to the hospital this morning.
“The cab had already arrived by the time he reappeared. He’d done up the buttons on his shirt all wrong, and he was wearing his old gardening shoes, because ‘someone had hidden his good shoes somewhere.’ I helped him rebutton his shirt; we grabbed his coat from the hall, and off we went.
“While we were waiting to see the doctor, he kept wandering off down the hall. He seemed fretful, preoccupied by something. But once we finally got in, he was all charm with the X-ray technician and the young resident that cut off the cast. Completely lucid—like you’d switched on a light in a dark room.
“The doctor took a look at the X-rays, examined his leg, and was happy with how it had healed. She gave him a walking cast to wear for a while, but he could take it off to bathe and when he went to bed. She told him to take it easy and not put any undue stress on the leg.
“On the way back he talked about how free he felt without ‘that great hulking thing’ on his leg. But as we neared home again he grew quiet, and there was this vagueness in his eyes when he looked at me. Twice, he called me Eleanor.
“I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’m worried. I think this whole upset with the fall and the head injury took more of a toll on him than we thought. I hope that now that the cast’s off, things will start to return to normal, and he’ll be all right. In the meantime, it’s probably best to keep bringing his dinner to him, Simon. At least then we’ll know he’s eating properly, and we can keep an eye on him.”
Simon nodded. He too had noticed a change in Mr. Hawkins over the past week. He seemed distracted much of the time. Most nights, he didn’t finish his dinner—which wasn’t at all like him. And work on the book had come to a standstill.
* * *
That evening, Simon ran into Vera as she was leaving. She came out the front door as he was coming up the porch stairs with the old man’s dinner. It was as if she’d been waiting for him.
“Goodbye, Mr. Hawkins,” she called over her shoulder and drew the door closed behind her.
“He’s not himself,” she said in a low voice. “I thought he’d be happy to have that cast off. But something’s troubling him. I’ve never seen him this way. Has anything happened recently?”
“Nothing. Well, there was a letter that came.”
“What kind of letter?”
“An airmail letter. From London, he said. He didn’t talk to me about it.”
“Well, something’s sure set him off. He’s talking crazy. Say, you haven’t seen any strangers around the house, have you? He’s taken this notion into his head that there are prowlers on his property. He made me go around today and make sure all the downstairs windows were locked.” She shook her head and started off down the stairs.
Mr. Hawkins was standing over by the dining room table when Simon came into the room with the tray. He was rifling through the papers on the table, looking for something. These days, he seemed to be constantly searching for things he’d tucked away in some strange place or other.
He looked at Simon blankly a moment, then saw the tray and, leaning on his cane, limped over to his chair in his new cast and sat down. He was wearing the clothes he’d worn to the hospital that morning, right down to his old gardening shoes.
“Switch that fool thing on for me, will you, Simon?” he said as he lifted the cover from his dinner plate.
With the newscaster droning on in the background and the dinner underway, things fell into their regular pattern. For the first time in days, Mr. Hawkins had jotted a couple of things down on his notepad, and sent Simon in search of them.
The strangeness that had come over the old man had cast its pall over all. As Simon hurried along the hall to the bedroom, the familiar creak of floorboards unnerved him. And the shadowy reflection that gaped back at him from the vanity mirror so startled him that he gasped.
He found the sweater he’d been sent for in the dresser, and was just taking down the dusty old book on Egyptian magic from the top shelf in the library when the voice came snaking up the stairs.
“Have you found them, Davey?”
It was not the first time in recent days that the old man had called him by his granddad’s name.
“Yes, I’m just coming.”
“While you’re up there, would you check that the windows in the study are locked? Be sure the catches are snug. I worry with that tree so close to the house. There are prowlers about.”
There he was, ‘talking crazy’ as Vera would say. But there was something more than craziness in his tone—something that sounded unmistakably like fear.
Simon’s double ran to meet him as he hurried down the hall to the study. Setting down the things he’d fetched on the desk, he went to check the windows. The wind was up, and a branch from the old tree was rapping against the glass like a bony finger.
All the windows were locked but one—the one that was often left open to air the room. Over time, the sill had swollen from being exposed to the rain and damp, and the window wouldn’t close tight enough now for the lock to catch. He managed to wrestle the edge of it into place, but the slightest jolt would dislodge it. He glanced down into the yard. Again, there was no sign of the dog he’d seen that day. He’d all but convinced himself he’d imagined the whole thing.
Mr. Hawkins was back at the dining room table when Simon came into the living room. “Did you check those windows?”
“Yeah, they’re all locked.”
The book let out a puff of dust as he laid it on the table. There was a large stylized eye tooled in gold on the cover, like the one he’d seen inscribed on the mirror. At another time he might have asked him about it, but the old man had already opened the book and was busily searching the index for something.
Simon went to fetch the tray from the TV table. As he bent to pick it up, his eye was drawn to the mirror. The surface was in turmoil. Shadows swirled around the rim, and the surface churned. As it settled, a scene opened in the mirror.
He saw a figure running in the moonlight, clutching a mirror close to his chest—a mirror like this one, but dimmed and dark. Suddenly, at the center of it, an eye opened, as if someone had walked up out of the dark at the heart of the mirror and pressed their eye to a hole. It rested there a moment unseen by the running man. And then the rounded dome of a skull rose up from the surface of the mirror, pushing against the runner’s arm, and a shadowy form flowed out and fell to the ground at his feet. Eyes wide with terror, he dropped the mirror and tore off into the night.
The tray fell with a clatter to the table. The old man looked up.
“What did you see there?”
“Nothing,” lied Simon. But there was nothing now. The scene had vanished, and the mirror was as it had been before. He felt dizzy, as if he’d been spun on the roundabout. He said a quick goodbye and made for the door with the tray.
* * *
Several nights over the next couple of weeks, the old man called the house, complaining of prowlers on his property. Simon watched from his bedroom window as Dad trekked across the street with a flashlight to inspect the old man’s yard.
He watched the beam of light pan slowly over the dark yard, plumbing the shadows, saw Dad
trudge wearily up the porch steps when he was done to rap on Mr. Hawkins’ door and talk with him a minute, and then make his way back across the street, the flashlight hanging slack by his side.
“Nothing again,” he said one night as Simon stood listening at the top of the stairs. “There’s no one there, Jen. Those prowlers are all in his mind. But he’s sure there’s something out there. I can see it in his eyes.”
“Oh, dear,” said Mom. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. But if this goes on much longer, we’ll have to do something.”
7
The living room was the same old sickly green it had been when Granddad lived in the house. After several months of sleeping downstairs and waking to it every morning, Mom had had enough.
But now—with the floors covered in drop cloths as the painters set to work, and the furniture from the front room crammed into the hall so tight you had to squeeze past sideways to get to the kitchen, and Babs wailing because nothing was where it was “uppost” to be, and the new carpet lying propped against the porch rail outside because it had arrived a week earlier than it should have—she was going out of her mind. Simon took one look at her frazzled expression and offered to take Babs to the park.
It was the end of October. Fall had settled in, and there was a chill in the air. As he bent down to zip up Babs’ sweater he glanced across at the Hawkins house. There was a bike up on the porch, padlocked to the railing. Mr. Hawkins had a visitor. Simon wondered who it could be.
There wasn’t a soul in sight at the park. They shuffled through the slick leaves toward the swings. It had rained in the night, and the ruts were puddled under the swings. As he pushed Babs slowly back and forth, an upside-down Babs swung past in the puddle under her, their toes nearly touching.
He kept glancing across to the far side of the park, hoping Abbey might appear. Suddenly he heard her voice, and saw her tromping across the wet grass, pulling Max behind her in the little wagon he’d seen on the porch.
“I had a feeling you might be here,” she said. “You okay, Simon? You look a little tired. Where were you yesterday?”
“I was home sick.”
“You’re sick a lot.”
“Yeah. Some weird flu or something. Fever, chills, fatigue. I keep thinking it’s over, and then suddenly it’s back again.” He thought back to the first time he was home with it. The day Mr. Hawkins fell from the ladder.
He wanted to tell Abbey about what he’d seen in the mirror the other day. But he couldn’t think of a way of saying it that didn’t make him sound crazy. If he’d known how long it would be before he’d see her again, he might have tried a little harder.
Babs and Max tried out every swing. They went on the slide countless times, with Abbey stationed at the bottom of the stairs as they climbed up, and Simon at the foot of the slide to catch them as they came down, before they landed in the puddle. At last, they were all tired and it was time to head home. Abbey gave Babs a little hug as she said goodbye, then turned and gave him one, too. He watched her shuffle off through the leaves, pulling Max behind her in the wagon.
As he was heading back home with Babs, a woman in a blue bicycle helmet cycled by on the bike he’d seen on the Hawkins porch. Their eyes met, and she bobbed her head in greeting.
The smell of paint hit him like a brick as he came through the door. He retreated upstairs. While Babs was down for her nap, he stretched out on his bed with the book of old colored prints he’d borrowed from Mr. Hawkins. One was of a square-rigged sailing ship on a raging sea in a storm. He imagined how frightened you’d be on a foundering ship in the middle of the ocean, no land in sight.
He could barely keep his eyes open. He laid his head down on the open book and dropped into a dead sleep. He found himself out on the open sea in a small boat, battered by waves as high as the house. Another passenger was in the boat with him, a shrouded woman with eyes like the eye in the mirror. She sat still as stone in the prow of the little boat as it plummeted down massive canyons of water.
When he woke up, the painters were packing up to leave. Dad had come home from work early and offered them a few extra bucks to help him haul the new carpet in off the porch and put the furniture back in place. It looked like someone else’s room now, with their furniture sitting bewildered in its midst.
The smell of the fresh paint and the new carpet made him feel queasy. He was glad when it came time to take dinner across to Mr. Hawkins, so he could escape it awhile. He brought the book back with him. The page with the ship at sea was a little damp where he’d drooled on it in his sleep.
He found Mr. Hawkins sitting at a clearing in the clutter of books and papers that covered the dining room table. Pen in hand, he was bent over some official-looking document. A small wooden box full of papers lay open beside him. A chair had been drawn up next to his, and two empty teacups sat on the table. Mr. Hawkins had shaved and changed. He seemed more like his old self than he had in weeks. Simon wondered if it had anything to do with the visitor to the house that day.
“I brought back your book,” he said as he put the tray down on the TV table. It was the second time he’d borrowed it.
The old man pushed aside the papers and capped his pen. “You really like these old Currier and Ives prints, don’t you?” he said. “These were the poor man’s paintings, back in those days. People would buy them to hang on their walls.” The loose, gummed prints fluttered like flags as he fanned through the pages. He set the open book down on the table in front of him.
He had shed his walking cast and was eager to show Simon how he could walk across the room to his armchair without his cane.
“Just a couple of books from the study on the list today,” he said. He tore the top page from his notepad and handed it to Simon. “And you could take this back up. It goes in the bottom drawer of the desk in the study.” He packed a few papers into the box, closed the lid, and handed it to him.
Simon breathed a sigh of relief as he headed off upstairs. The mirrors had the bright, eager look they got when Vera dusted them. They snatched at his reflection as he hurried past.
It was warm in the sun-drenched study. When he bent to put the box back in the bottom drawer, it seemed as if the floor did a slow tilt beneath him. He felt suddenly faint. He sat down on the desk chair and waited for it to pass. There was a weird chemical taste at the back of his mouth, as if he’d been chewing carpeting and chugging it down with paint. He went to open the window, hoping the cool air might clear his head. Something tucked against the bushes at the back of the yard caught his eye. It was the dog he’d seen before. It sat in exactly the same place, in the very same stance, staring up at him.
Maybe it wasn’t a dog at all, he thought. Maybe it was just one of the bushes, and it was only the distance and the play of light and shade that had turned it into a dog. Even now, he noticed a faint fluttering of the form as the breeze ruffled the leaves of the bushes around it. He began looking for the books he’d been sent for. But even as he did, a plan took shape in his mind.
* * *
When he left the house that night, he paused at the foot of the porch steps and took a quick peek back over his shoulder. He set the tray down on the edge of the steps and slipped quietly to the side of the house. Reaching his hand up through the hole in the gate, he felt for the latch and let himself into the yard.
He followed the same path he’d watched Dad take when he was searching for prowlers. He prayed the dog would have no more substance than they had. All the same, as he stole along the narrow walk he grabbed an old garden hoe he found leaning against the side of the house to arm himself against the ghost.
He tramped through the rank grass toward the rear of the yard along the trail his dad had blazed. The roses waved their long spiked branches like wands over his head. The grass had lapped up over the line of bricks that once edged the flowerbeds, so that it was hard to tell now
where grass ended and flowerbed began.
Brandishing the hoe in both hands, he approached the bushes that ran across the back of the yard. They launched themselves high and wild, weaving their straggly branches together, so that the fence behind was all but hidden by them.
His hands gripped the hoe so hard they hurt. He wondered how quickly he could tear back through the overgrown grass to the safety of the street should the dog appear. He plumbed the shadows behind the bushes, but there was nothing there. He reached out cautiously with the hoe and lifted the low sweeping branches under a couple of the bushes. Still there was nothing.
Glancing back at the study windows, he gauged as well as he could where it was he’d seen the dog sitting. The grass behind him lay trodden flat where he’d walked. Yet at the spot near the bushes, where the dog had been, it stood erect and undisturbed. He reached out and parted it with the hoe to see if anything might support what he’d seen—prints in the soil, a tuft of fur. But there was nothing.
Here the bushes were particularly thick. Some varieties were more vigorous than others. One smaller bush with dark umber leaves had been so blocked out by the larger bushes that grew to either side of it that it had launched its branches out low over the grass.
Maybe this was what he’d seen from the study window—this narrow wedge of dark between the larger bushes. A flutter of wind had woken it to life, and imagination had opened a pair of chill eyes in the illusion. He reached out with the hoe to poke the bush—and heard a sound that made his blood run cold.
It was a growl, the low, threatening growl of a dog that had been disturbed. He stepped back slowly, peering into the shadows. There was not a sign of movement. Nothing. It was just the groan of branches grating against one another when he disturbed them with the hoe, he told himself.
The Egyptian Mirror Page 4