by Dean Koontz
“It wasn’t as dumb as scum,” Naomi said. “It was literature. You were a second-grader then, you didn’t understand. It was too sophisticated for a second-grader.”
“It was pages and pages and pages of barf,” Minnie insisted, putting aside the first screw. “I thought I’d never want to hear a story again.”
“We could just hang a blanket over this thing.”
“And you’d all the time be lifting it to peek at the mirror.”
“I would not,” Naomi said. “I have plenty of self-control. I am disciplined.”
“You’ll all the time be lifting it to peek, and sooner or later the mirror man will be there, and you’ll start yammering at him about whether he’s a prince, and he’ll suck you into the mirror, and you’ll be over there with the dead people forever.”
Naomi let out a long-suffering sigh. “Honestly, dear Mouse, you are going to have to go into fraidy-cat rehab.”
“Don’t call me Mouse,” Minette said, putting aside the second screw. She got to her feet and went to work on the next pair.
Naomi said, “What are Mom and Daddy going to say when they find out the mirror’s missing?”
“They’re going to say, ‘Where’s the mirror?’ ”
“And what are we going to say?”
“I’m thinking about that,” Minnie said.
“You better be thinking about that.”
Extracting the third screw, Minnie said, “Why don’t you put your gigantic eleven-year-old brain to work on it?”
“Don’t be sarcastic. Sarcasm doesn’t become you.”
“Anyway, maybe they’ll never know we took the mirror down.”
“How could they not know? They have eyes.”
“Who cleans our room?” Minnie asked.
“What do you mean who cleans our room? We clean our room. We’re supposed to learn personal responsibility. Personally, I’ve learned enough personal responsibility to last a lifetime, so someone else could clean my room for a while, but that’s never going to happen.”
Putting the fourth screw with the first three, Minnie said, “After Mrs. Nash washes and irons our clothes, who brings them up here and puts them away? Who makes our beds every day?”
“We do. What’s your point? Oh. You mean, if we keep the closet door shut, then it’ll be a century before they realize the mirror’s gone.”
“Or at least a couple months,” Minnie said as she placed the stepstool in front of the mirror. “When I take out the next screw, the mirror’s gonna slip. Hold it tight for me.” She climbed onto the stool. “Hold it tight.”
Holding the mirror, staring into it, Naomi said, “What are we going to do with it when we take it down?”
“We’re gonna carry it along the hall to the storage room where Mom and Daddy keep all that junk, and we’ll put it behind some of the junk so nobody won’t even see it.”
“Or we could save a lot of work and instead put it mirror-side down under your bed.”
“I don’t want the mirror man under my bed,” Minnie said. “And I don’t want him under your bed, ’cause you’ll crawl under there to talk to him, and he’ll come out of the mirror into our room. We’ll be toast. One screw left. You holding it with both hands?”
“Yes, yes. Hurry up.”
“Be careful it doesn’t fall and break. If it breaks, maybe that lets him out of the mirror.”
The sixth screw came loose, Naomi didn’t let the mirror fall, Minnie put the stepstool away, and together they lowered the long pane of glass onto the bedroom carpet.
As Minnie closed the closet door, Naomi stood over the face-up looking glass, peering down into the reflected ceiling, intrigued by her face seen from this unusual angle.
The mirror dimpled like water dimpled when you dropped a pebble into it. Concentric circles spread outward across the silver surface.
“Bullcrap!” Naomi exclaimed, which was something her grandmother rarely said when the word chestnuts wasn’t emphatic enough. “Minnie, look at this!”
Gazing down at the mirror, Minnie watched two, three, five new dimples and sets of concentric rings form, as if the glass were a pool and rain were falling into it.
“Not good,” Minnie said, and went to the play table where her lunch sandwich waited on a plate with a sprig of sweet green grapes.
“You can’t just go away and eat,” Naomi protested. “Big weird stuff is happening here.”
Minnie returned with the sprig. She plucked one of the grapes, held it over the mirror, hesitated, and dropped it.
The plump green fruit plopped through the mirror as it would have sunk through the surface of a pond, and disappeared.
22
IN HIS BEDROOM CLOSET, ZACH PULLED ON THE ROPE THAT opened the overhead trapdoor, and the ladder unfolded to his feet.
Since finding the ladder in this position the previous night, he’d thought through the possibilities, and he’d decided that the answer to the mystery was entirely mechanical, as he first suspected. A settling house shifted the trap mechanism slightly, and now from time to time it might drop open and the ladder unfold because its own weight could cause it to release spontaneously.
He didn’t need to ask his dad to help him search the service mezzanine between the second and third floors because there wasn’t anyone in the stupid mezzanine to find. The previous night, his nerves had been fried because of the freaking dream in which the big hands had tried to tear off his face and gouge out his eyes, those fingertips as big as soup spoons. He was a little disappointed in himself that he’d been rattled by a moronic dream. A few times over the years, he’d dreamed of being able to fly like a bird, soaring above everyone, above the city, but he’d never taken a dumb-ass leap off a roof to see if he could actually go lighter-than-air, and he never would, because dreams were just dreams.
Now he was going to search the service mezzanine not because a bad guy was lurking around up there, scheming and cackling like some Phantom of the Opera wannabe, but just for the principle of it, to prove to himself that he wasn’t a chickenhearted, gritless jellyfish. He had a flashlight and a whacking big meat fork with a bone handle, and he was ready to explore.
After he’d gotten a sandwich and some fruit from Mrs. Nash and had brought his lunch to his room, he’d waited until he knew that she and Mr. Nash would be in the dayroom, having their lunch, before he returned to the kitchen to sneak a knife. He opened the wrong drawer, one containing meat forks and skewers and serving utensils, and just then he heard Mrs. Nash coming—saying, “It’s no trouble at all, I’ll get it, dear”—so Zach grabbed a killer fork and closed the drawer and split before she saw him. The stupid thing wasn’t a knife, but it had four- or five-inch tines with wickedly sharp points, so even if it wasn’t anything a marine would be issued in combat, it wasn’t a total weenie weapon, either.
Holding the handle of the fork in his teeth with the tines to one side, as if he were an idiot pirate looking for a turkey dinner to carve up, the flashlight in his left hand, he climbed the ladder. At the top, he sat on the frame of the trap opening and switched on the strings of work lights that looped throughout the mezzanine.
This space had a finished floor, particleboard with a laminated Formica surface, so you could either scoot around easy on your butt or knees, or you could shuffle around in a crouch. The ceiling height was five feet, and Zach stood five feet six, probably going to be six feet like his dad, so he had to prowl the place in a stoop.
In addition to the garlands of work lamps and his flashlight, there were screened ventilation cutouts in the walls, to prevent dangerous mold from growing in here—and to allow squirrels to chew their way in now and then if they felt like it. The daylight didn’t exactly pour in through the screens, just more or less dribbled. The flashlight peeled open the darkness wherever the other lamps didn’t reach, but the movement of it also caused shadows to slide and twist and flutter at the periphery of your vision so you felt something was stalking you out there at the edge of things.
>
The mezzanine contained more machinery and ducting and pipes and valves and conduits than the engine room of a freaking spaceship. A maze, that’s what it was, full of softly humming systems and clicking relays and the rushing-air sound of pressurized natural gas burning in the furnaces. The air smelled of dust, hot-iron gas rings, and aging preventative insecticide sprayed in the corners by the pest-control guy with the cockroach-feeler mustache.
Holding the flashlight in one hand and the fork in the other, Zach was maybe in the middle of the maze when the work lamps blinked off and when he heard the distinctive sound of the trapdoor thumping shut between the mezzanine and his closet. The night before, when his nerves were fried and when he imagined all kinds of things that might happen if he climbed up here to conduct a search, this was not one of the scenarios that occurred to him.
His flashlight died. The beam faded, faded, faded, and then went out altogether.
Zach wasn’t such a complete bonehead that he believed the loss of both sources of light at the same time must be a coincidence. This was mortal trouble, sure enough, and in mortal trouble you needed to stay calm and think. You didn’t survive freaking Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima, or the horrors of old Belleau Wood, by screaming for help and running blindly this way and that.
The service mezzanine might be a maze, okay, but every maze had an exit, and he remained pretty sure of his position relative to the trapdoor. The ventilation cutouts didn’t reveal anything, but the faint glow of them at points around the perimeter served as markers to further guide him. Tiny red, green, yellow, and blue indicator LEDs on the furnaces and the humidifiers would also help him find his way back to the trapdoor.
His biggest concern, bigger than the darkness and bigger than the twisty nature of the return route to safety, was that someone must be in the mezzanine with him. Simple gravity might drop open an out-of-plumb, out-of-balance trapdoor, but gravity couldn’t in a million years pull it up and close it again. And gravity didn’t have fingers to switch off the work lamps.
If some foaming-at-the-mouth maniac had decided to live secretly in the mezzanine, quieter and nuttier than squirrels, he couldn’t be a benign maniac.
Zach continued to grip the dead flashlight tightly in his left hand because it might serve as a secondary weapon, a club with which he might be able to bash an adversary even as he forked him. In the heat of battle, you sometimes ran out of ammunition and your bayonet snapped, and then you had to fight with makeshift weapons. Of course, he’d never possessed a gun with ammunition or a bayonet; he started with makeshift weapons, but the principle still applied.
For a while, Zach stood motionless, waiting for the enemy to reveal his position. The only sounds were the low background noises of the furnaces and the other equipment. The longer he listened, the more those ticks, clicks, and hisses sounded like insects conspiring with one another, as if he were in some kind of godawful hive.
He told himself that the assumption of mortal danger might not be correct, that some joker might be playing games with him. Naomi was capable of trying to frighten him. She might have climbed into the mezzanine to switch off the lights, descended, and put up the ladder. The brother-sister competition to make each other appear to be a geek or an idiot tended to wax and wane, and it had waxed lately, but their pranks were mostly good-humored. This didn’t feel the least bit good-humored. This felt threatening. Besides, if the culprit was Naomi, she would not have been able to contain herself more than ten seconds after closing the trapdoor, she would be down there in his closet, laughing her stupid head off right now, in full loon mode, and he would hear her.
Inaction began to seem like a loser’s strategy. Maybe this crawlspace guy was a supertuned stealth machine, highly trained in the ancient Asian secrets of silent motion, like a ninja assassin or something. The light-footed bastard might be on the move, closing on his clueless target, yet as hushed as a dandelion puffball drifting on a breeze.
Zach knew a lot about the military strategy that had won many famous battles in numerous wars, but applying military strategy to a one-on-one creep-and-kill in a dark crawlspace quickly turned out to be difficult, maybe even impossible.
To his chagrin, Zach felt his heart beating harder, faster. By the second it became increasingly difficult to maintain the stillness necessary to listen for his adversary. He grew convinced that someone approached him from behind, now from ahead, now from the left, the right. If he remained where he stood, he was essentially dead on his feet, a corpse waiting to happen.
Lightless flashlight and two-pronged fork held in front of him, crouching lower to avoid ceiling-suspended ducts and pipes, he turned and began to inch back the way he’d come. Something brushed the top of his head, but he knew it wasn’t anything alive, and he bumped into a sheet-metal panel on a furnace, which pealed hollowly like the fake thunder of stage-show sound effects. The flashlight knocked against a wood post. The floor creaked underfoot. The steel tines of the fork stuttered against another metal surface. The harder he tried to be quiet, the noisier he became.
Zach’s heart boomed, the loudest noise he made, at least to his own ears, although his breathing wasn’t exactly hushed. He was virtually snorting. At the same time that he grew ever more frantic to escape the darkness, he became increasingly mortified by his poor self-control, and he fought against descent into flat-out panic.
Blindly, he felt his way between something and something else, intuitively turned right, into a pitch-black pocket of the maze where not even an LED indicator light relieved the gloom, and the cool air abruptly plunged twenty degrees, maybe thirty, pricking shivers from him. He froze, not as a consequence of the cold air but because he sensed that someone crouched immediately in front of him, that he’d come face-to-face with his unknown adversary. Although he couldn’t see anyone in this blackout, he knew a man loomed, a man big and strong and not in the least afraid of him.
No. Get real. Stay cool. Just his imagination running wild. There was nothing in front of him but more darkness, which he could prove easy enough by thrusting fiercely at the void with the fork. The two long tines sank into someone, into a freaking wall of meat. No one cried out, no one grunted in pain, and Zach wanted to believe he’d stabbed something inanimate.
That hope was instantly dispelled when a hand, as slick and cold as a dead fish, closed around his wrist, engulfed his wrist, as big as the hand that tried to tear his face off in the dream. He couldn’t pull free. He sensed the man seizing the shank of the fork, wrenching the tines out of himself. Zach held desperately to the handle. If he lost control of the weapon, he’d be stabbed with it—relentlessly stabbed, gouged, torn.
Inches from Zach’s face came a cruel voice speaking in a low hoarse whisper: “I know you, boy, I know you now.”
Zach’s cry for help couldn’t press past his lips, but instead fell like a stone into the well of his throat, seeming to block his airway, so he could neither exhale nor inhale.
To Zach’s surprise, the brute knocked him backward, the fork still in his fist, and he fell on his back as the iciness instantly melted from the air. The work lamps brightened, as did the beam from the flashlight still clutched in his left hand, and shadows flew away to farther corners.
Gasping, he sat up, alone in the light, alive and alone, the fork thrust forward defensively in his right hand. The shank of the weapon was bent at a severe angle from the handle, and the two long steel prongs were twined together as if they were ribbons.
23
THE SECOND GREEN GRAPE DROPPED FROM MINNIE’S FINGERS and passed without a sound through the surface of the mirror. Concentric waves lapped outward from the point of impact, but the grape did not bobble to the surface as it would have done in water.
Spooked but also exhilarated, Naomi said, “Pig fat! Minnie, we have to show Mom and Daddy, they’ve gotta see this, there’s somewhere else inside the mirror, this is like the biggest big news ever, this is so huge.” Pig fat was an expression of her own invention, so she wouldn’t al
ways have to rely on her grandmother’s chestnuts and bullcrap. “It’s not such dumb scum now, is it, huh, is it, when it’s real in front of your face?”
As Naomi started toward the door, Minnie said, “Wait,” in that way she sometimes had that was older than eight.
Returning to the mirror, standing over it, Naomi said, “What?”
“We’ll see.”
In addition to the wavelets made by the grapes, rings of ripples appeared continuously from end to end of the mirror, like raindrops briefly and gently cratering the surface of a pond. Now that phantom-rain activity declined … ceased. The silver surface became calm.
Minnie plucked a third grape from the sprig, held it between thumb and forefinger, hesitated until Naomi began to fidget with impatience, and at last dropped it. The plump fruit hit the mirror, bounced, raised no ripples, rolled across the hard surface, and came to a stop against the frame.
“What happened?” Naomi demanded.
“Nothing happened.”
“Wow, brilliant, I see nothing happened, I’ve got two eyes. Why didn’t something happen, where did the magic go?”
“You said show Mom and Daddy, and it doesn’t want them to see.”
“What doesn’t want them to see?”
“It.”
“It what?”
“The it-what in the mirror, which could be just about anything, except I don’t think it’s your lah-dee-dah fairy-tale prince.”
Deciding to let the lah-dee-dah pass without a withering retort, Naomi said, “Why doesn’t it want them to see the magic?”
Minnie took a slow step back from the mirror and shook her head. “Because the magic isn’t magic, it’s something else, and it’s really, really bad. If Mom and Daddy see, they’ll take the mirror away from us, and the mirror doesn’t want to be taken away from us.”
“The mirror wants to stay with us? Why?”
“Maybe it wants to eat us,” Minnie said.
“That’s so big-baby silly. Mirrors don’t eat people.”