“What you want is not the first of our discussions,” the Mirrormaster said. “What I want is. And what I want is this, simply said, Mr. Rawson: to be left alone by the likes of you. I don’t give a twit for your blackmail. I am not the least concerned about the case that you’ve managed to fabricate against me. What does interest me ... is that it must have cost you for lies almost what I charge for mirrors.”
Rawson nodded. “I pay for the best.”
“And that kind of payment, Mr. Rawson, is what I need for the purpose of disappearing. Understand: it is going to cost you unreasonably, whatever you want done.”
Again, Rawson nodded happily, and his head bobbed back at him from 1,114 different angles.
“Moreover, said the Mirrormaster, “since this, in fact, will be the last job I take, I do dearly hope you can make it something of a challenge.” He gestured palms up toward Rawson, as if to have something cold and oozing dropped into his hands. “Now, what can I do for you?”
“I had in mind, o-yes—something for the bedroom,” Rawson said.
The Mirrormaster said flatly, “Oh.”
“Something ... something different ... something joobie.”
The Mirrormaster slumped. “In that case, Mr. Rawson, be it known that you have forced me out of retirement to perform the equivalent of playing with my toes. Something for the bedroom. Pfah!”
Rawson click-clacked across the mirrored floor to lean against the desk, with his California plum nose thrust into the face of the Mirrormaster, and his earrings dancing a ballet for silk sheets and fake fur. “So tell me what you can do for me,” he said.
The Mirrormaster snorted again. “Anything.” He pushed Rawson back. “I can make you look two feet taller and muscled as if you were carved out of ivory. I can put shapes on her to give you thoughts even you would be ashamed of. Again, pfah! You can’t believe what old stuff this is to me.”
But Rawson pressed in. “And you could make her float like a sea nymph out of the sea?”
The Mirrormaster nodded and bit off his thumb nail.
“And you could make six of her, and three of me, and two of us both?”
The Mirrormaster coughed and spat.
“And you could make her seem nothing but soft, questing lips?”
“All of those,” the Mirrormaster said, “in one afternoon. Easy installation. Name the day.”
The corners of Rawson’s mouth bent up slowly then, like something crawling out from under his mustache. “Then if you can do all that, glass man.” he said, “maybe you can do the thing I want done.”
To which J. Tipton Witt sighed a breath of cold oatmeal and rain. “What I have always hated about this particular facet of my work, Mr. Rawson,” he said, “is that it gives me no choice but to find out, in sordid detail, your idea of a good time in bed.”
“Well-o ...” Rawson glanced back and forth and up and down, and his own look of sudden distrust ricocheted back at him. “We are alone?” he asked.
“We are.”
Slowly, Rawson loosened another of the zippered pockets. He withdrew from it a badly-taken photograph, which he placed in front of the glass man.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Rawson said.
The Mirrormaster did not answer immediately. But his face changed in ways that might have been imperceptible except in such a place of mirrors and light. The black-dot pupils of the Mirrormaster’s eyes, already small, narrowed as if to blind him to the sight of the photograph.
He turned the photo face-down with a hand that might not have been seen to tremble, except for the unsteady glimmer of mirrored light against so many rings.
Rawson flipped the picture—snap/slap!—again, to confront the Mirrormaster. “Her name was Lela,” Rawson said. “As femies go, I miss her terribly. Lovely, don’t you think? Even after ...”
“I don’t want to know.” The Mirrormaster’s voice cracked. It broke like crystal. “How you did ... to her ...”
Rawson edged in closer. “Call it, on my part, a fascination with gadgetry.”
The Mirrormaster flinched back in his chair, wheezing at the smell of joobie-joobie seeds on Rawson’s breath. He snapped the crystal button on the Sec-robot, and said, “Mr. Rawson will be leaving now.” And to Rawson: “Tragically, there are limits to what I can do with glass. I cannot build a prison of glass that would hold you.”
Rawson clubbed an arm across the desk, smashing the machine. “Neg-o, I’m staying, and you are going to listen to me, glass man.” He smiled then—a smile of bloodied teeth from where the seeds had cut into the gums.
“I want her returned to me, glass man,” Rawson said. “Not alive again. I didn’t like her all that much alive. But I want the image of her—there in the mirrors, in the glass, beckoning to me. I want the reflection of me, the reflection of her, intertwined. You see ... I wasn’t finished with her.”
The Mirrormaster stood. He turned as if to look away from Birdie Rawson, but the mirrors allowed no such avoidance. “I am ... finished with you,” the Mirrormaster said.
Rawson persisted, “You said you wanted a challenge.”
“Yes, but ...” And, for a moment, again, the face of the Mirrormaster shifted—tightened ever so subtly, to an expression that could have been read as fear, or surprise, or contempt. But not disinterest.
“Can you do it?” Rawson pressured.
“I can ... tinker with reflections, Mr. Rawson. What you ask, is to conjure a ghost.”
“So the answer to my question—the one-word answer from the last of the glass men—is a big phoo!” Rawson said.
“I didn’t say that,” the Mirrormaster countered. “What I mean is, it hasn’t been tried.”
“So, I tell you,” Rawson said: “Try. Dare. Plunge. Be, not the follower, but the artist.”
J. Tipton Witt ruffled his silvery curls like the idea itself was a bug in his hair. “And if I don’t? ...”
“I will go out and tell the world what a fake you are, and it will have the ring of truth to it, glass man.”
“And if I do? ...”
“Then, I will see to it that you become rich, revered—and rid of me. I will put all three in writing to your complete satisfaction.”
Silence filled the room like mirrors.
The Mirrormaster again contemplated the woman’s photograph.
“I can see in her eyes. She died hating you,” the Mirrormaster said. “So will I.”
But he took from the desk drawer a long, silver-colored pencil and a pad of paper, and began drawing arrows and angles and little dotted lines criss-crossing this way and that, and muttering to himself about “angle of incidence” and “angle of deviation.”
“By ‘deviation,’ ” Rawson said, “I hope you mean nothing personal.”
“Get out,” the Mirrormaster ordered.
“Joobie! O-yes, I will be anxious to hear from you.” Rawson said, and his boots, departing, rattled applause for the work so auspiciously begun.
It was a week later that J. Tipton Witt motioned a crew of workmen into Birdie Rawson’s bedroom, and the door closed.
After awhile, the workmen left, but the Mirrormaster stayed inside, and the door closed again.
Rawson rapped and called, “When can I see?” But all he heard from the other side was the sound of shattering glass.
And when the door finally did edge open, casting a flicker of brilliance into the hallway, the Mirrormaster squeezed through in the smallest space he could. He slammed and locked the door shut behind him. His eyes were cobwebbed with red; his mouth ticked and trembled.
“Yes? ...” Rawson rushed him. “Is it done? Is she there? I have certain ... plans ... I am eager to put in motion.”
Bits of Birdie Rawson reflected off the beads of sweat that streamed from the Mirrormaster’s brow.
“Something ... not her,” the Mirrormaster said. “What I made in there, in the glass ... I don’t know where it came from. I can’t describe it, you wouldn’t want it, and I’m leaving,” the Mirrormaster said, t
rying to edge past Rawson.
Rawson’s black-gloved seal hands clasped the old man’s throat before J. Tipton Witt could take another step away. “Neg-o, you don’t, glass man. I paid you plenty. What you’re telling me is that it needs more work, and I’m telling you more work is what it’s going to get,” and he shoved the Mirrormaster, hard, against the door.
J. Tipton Witt saw Rawson’s fingers clenching and unclenching and smelled the joobie-joobie sweetness on Rawson’s breath stronger than ever, and he unlocked the door and eased back inside.
Rawson went about his business the rest of the day, ignoring the screams and the shattering sounds.
And when the door opened again, there was J. Tipton Witt, shaking and tattered, arms and face criss-crossed with delicate, bleeding cuts, and all the same—very much the Mirrormaster. “I have done it,” he said. “You can see for yourself.”
Rawson jumped for the door, but J. Tipton Witt stopped him with an outstretched hand. “The thing is,” J. Tipton Witt said, “I still don’t know how. I still don’t like it. I’m still leaving. And my advice to you, Mr. Rawson, is to do the same.”
Rawson pushed him aside and went in.
Rawson’s voice drifted out of the room then like soft clouds and soap suds. “Ohh-h-h-h. O-my. It is her, glass man. And so many of her. And so many angles, and she is beckoning to me, glass man. Ahhh! ...”
The Mirrormaster did not follow, did not watch, only called into the room. “And does she float like a sea nymph out of the sea?”
“O-yes!”
“And are there six of her, and three of you, and two of you both?”
“Even more, and even better.”
“And does she seem nothing but soft, questing lips?”
“Questing ...”
“And what of her touch, Mr. Rawson? What of that?”
The answer was silence.
The Mirrormaster closed the door. He walked to the end of the hallway, almost there before the door clicked open behind him.
The voice that stopped him was not Rawson’s. It was the whisper of slowly splintering glass, taking the shape of a single word.
He turned toward the sound.
The word repeated—“Mirrormaster”—out of lips that bore the glint of ice.
Turning, the Mirrormaster saw himself reflected in the silvered glass of Lela’s eyes. She touched him, gently, on the cheek. He felt the nail cut, knowing it would leave a scar as fine and white as a length of thread.
“I could only reflect what was there of you,” the Mirrormaster said. “Hatred ...”
She smiled at him, lips glistening. “But, oh, won’t you say that I’m lovely?”
She twirled for him, naked, and almost transparent.
“Lovely,” the Mirrormaster agreed.
“Then, come.” She took his hand. It bled within her grasp. “See the rest of what you’ve done.”
She led the way back to the bedroom, softly pushing the door open.
The room stood silent, empty, and yet filled with those gaping-mouthed screams that came out of the mirrors.
“You see, Mirrormaster?” Lela said. “You could, after all, build a prison of glass that would hold him.”
“A prison ...”
“But not a lonely one.” Lela touched a glass-edged nail to the tip of her tongue—a thousand nails, a thousand tongues. A thousand Lelas, intertwined, reflected from the mirrored floor under the mirrored ceiling adjoining the mirrored walls.
She smiled a radiant, lovely smile, a smile of the coldest white.
The Mirrormaster grasped a workman’s hammer from the floor. He struck the wall blindly, ignoring the sting of slivered glass. And again, and again: the impact of a thousand gleaming hammers in the hands of a thousand silver-haired madmen.
The glass cracked; it shattered; it fell.
And every broken, bloodied shard of it, every large, every small, every sharp-edged reflection—all of them, Birdie Rawson—kept on screaming.
BIRD IN A WROUGHT IRON CAGE by John Alfred Taylor
One of the fun things about editing this series is that there’s no predicting where a good horror story will turn up. Case in point: “Bird in a Wrought Iron Cage” was winner in a local arts group Halloween ghost story competition, and their little booklet probably didn’t even make the Somerset best-seller list.
John Alfred Taylor, however, has had other stories more widely circulated. He has appeared in both The Year’s Best Horror Stories and The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories, with stories in Twilight Zone Magazine, Weirdbook, Galaxy, Galileo, and elsewhere. Born in Springfield, Missouri on September 12, 1931, Taylor holds a B.A. from the University of Missouri and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Currently he teaches English at Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. His recently completed novel, The Black Ark, is receiving close consideration from a major publisher.
I remember I laughed when Father told me about the hand. Though when he shouted, his face mottled red and white, I realized he wasn’t joking.
It was another side to Dad. I had always thought him the essence of normality; brutally practical, a sworn enemy of fantasy, and now he was raving. Still waters run deep, I told myself, the cuckoo nests in any head.
How would Moorcock Sheet and Tube survive it?
But then he showed me the family heirloom, as Grandfather had shown him, and I knew Dad was his usual unimaginative self; the sight of it was better than any argument or description.
He opened up the musty buffalo-hide trunk with its green-stained brass fittings and pulled out the cage inside. For a second, I thought it held a huge brown spider, until I saw the fingernails like broken roots. Then it crawled to the corner of the cage and picked up a pen.
It liked the new ball-points. WELCOME FREDERICK IV. WE ARE GLAD TO SEE YOU. WILL YOU GIVE US WHAT WE WANT?
I didn’t know what that meant, and when I did, I wasn’t eager, but after Dad explained, I got out my penknife and sterilized it with my lighter. The cut didn’t hurt as much as I expected, and only a few drops were necessary—“for the form,” Dad said, but I don’t think he understood any better than I did. I held my forearm carefully over the notebook, and afterward the hand wrote under it, smearing the page, FREDERICK IV HIS BLOOD.
So I too gained the knowledge of the hand, of the advice that had pyramided the family fortune for three generations, that had guided Great-Grandfather through his speculations in railways and iron, that had warned Grandfather six weeks before Black Friday, that in 1937 gave Father a detailed month-by-month chronology of World War II and its investment opportunities.
It was about time, since I had been Executive Vice President almost a year, and Dad was already thinking of retiring himself to Chairman of the Board. And the hand and I had a very cozy relationship. At first I would take it a new notebook every morning, tie a string through the spiral binding, and let it down through the cage bars as per instructions.
Because I once tried to do it my way, without the string, and the hand had thrown itself up to turn over in midair and claw open the ball of my third finger. I had a tetanus booster immediately and never took the risk again.
But I asked it all sorts of questions, not just business questions, though I asked more of those than Dad did—after all it was the hand and I who planned the company’s diversification. All sorts of questions—I wanted to know where the hand came from, what it wanted.
“What are you?” I would ask. “Where did my greatgrandfather find you?” The hand would pick up the pen, shuffle and slide across the page, and all it would leave would be HAHAHA or WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW.
I asked Father if he knew anything about the hand, but all he knew was that we’d always had the hand, and what Great-Grandfather said was all there was. So I went back and read the bleached brown script of Great-Grandfather’s diary, and learned what I already knew: Great-Grandfather had paid somebody else to substitute for him in the Civil War, and made his first fortune out
of quartermaster contracts, and gone west afterward. But he says next to nothing about the hand or where he got it. Though he seemed to have more to do with the Indians than your average businessman.
I never did learn anything but WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW and HAHAHA.
Dad involved himself less and less with the company, and finally, one day in June, 1966, he called me on the intercom and asked me to join him. I gave our special knock and he let me in. We’ve always kept Grandfather’s office as he left it; the gaudily painted safe no burglar would look at twice was open, the buffalo-hide trunk on top of it with the cage that held the hand on the desk.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“It’s time,” he said in a gray voice, and I noticed he looked gray too; his face was damp and pale and his lips bluish.
“Time for what?” I said, and he gestured toward the cage.
The hand was capering back and forth beside the notebook, where it had scrawled JUNE 19 8:11 PM YOU WILL DIE OF A CORONARY. PLAN ACCORDINGLY.
“It can’t know,” I said, then noticed Father was trying to keep himself from trembling.
“It knows,” he said. “It told my father—your grandfather—when he was going to die to the minute. I said the same thing you did, and he told me I was wrong. Then proved it. Pour me a drink. Bourbon.” So I went over and poured him a drink from Grandfather’s tantalus.
And Father died of a coronary at 8:11 on June 19.
We had planned accordingly despite my skepticism, and Moorcock Industries went on without a tremor.
By that time I was asking the hand “Will I have a son?” For years Jessica and I had tried. YOU WILL HAVE NEITHER SON NOR DAUGHTER wrote the hand. The doctors said it was Jessica, so I made other arrangements. Every mistress knew exactly how much it was worth to bear my child—at the end I was willing to divorce Jessica—but none ever conceived.
And last week it said I would die today. But I’m proving it doesn’t know everything. I’ve built a fire in Grandfather’s fireplace, a good hot fire. Now I’m opening the safe, opening the buffalo-hide trunk.
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