Mirror Image (17 page)

 

32

A
CROSS THE
city, in the empty smoke-and-meat-stinking guesthouse, moonlight washed across the mirror, seeming to cling to the surface, swirling along its greasy face, creating patterns, shapes, images.

And faces.

Wide-eyed, open-mouthed, the face of Robert Beaumont peered from the mirror, soundlessly screaming. The image seemed to rush from the distance to explode against the glass. Within its open mouth, a smaller face appeared, distorted by fear and pain, barely distinguishable as the face of Diane Williams, and within her open mouth a smaller face again, that of Tony Farren, eyes like stones, mouth agape threatening to split his face in two. Within his open mouth there was movement, coiling smoke-like figures.

Then faces appeared again and again, writhing in a lunar dance as the moonlight flowed down the mirror. When the glass was completely bathed in silver light, turning its surface brilliant and opaque, the shadow faces vanished and were replaced by the Image. Pressing itself against the glass, it peered out into the night, eyes and mouth wide with hunger.

Soon.

Soon.

Soon.

 

33

J
ONATHAN FRAZER
came suddenly, startlingly awake, arms flailing, surfacing from a dream in which he had been drowning, unable to breathe. In his semi-conscious state he realized that he still couldn't breathe. There was pressure on his throat.

When he opened his eyes he looked into the implacable scarred face of a white-haired madman.

“I can kill you.” The eyes—black as coal, glittering like polished stones, with only the barest thread of white visible—bored into him. “Remember that,” the big man hissed, “I can kill you. And I will—without a second thought.” Abruptly the pressure was gone from Frazer's throat and he slipped from the chair to the floor, gasping, hacking for breath.

“Silence!” the man snapped. He walked away from Frazer and went to stand by the bed, looking down at the sleeping Emmanuelle. A muscle twitched at the corner of his eye, and when he turned back to Frazer there was something approaching pity in his eyes. “It is always the innocent who suffer,” he muttered.

“Who … who are you?” Frazer croaked, massaging his injured throat. The man was even bigger than he remembered, taller, broader, and the scars that crisscrossed his face were even more pronounced. “What do you want?” he asked.

“The mirror,” the scarred man said shortly. He bent to look at the sleeping Celia Frazer and nodded slightly. When he glanced up a smile had twisted the corners of his lips, thinning them to lines. “If you'd given it to me when I'd first asked for it, your young woman would still be alive, another man would not have lost his life and this tragedy would not have happened.” He turned to look at Manny again.

“But she's going to be alright!” Frazer said quickly, briefly forgetting his fear of the big man as he came to his daughter's bedside.

“No.” He shook his head sadly looking down. “At first she will seem to be fine. She will act as she normally acted, but then, if you watch closely, you will notice changes.”

The two men faced one another across the hospital bed. “What sort of changes?”

“I don't know. It affects different people differently. It brings out something in their characters.”

“What does?”

“The mirror,” the big man whispered and walked away from the bed. He stopped with his hand on the handle of the door. “You should have given it to me when you had the chance, Jonathan Frazer. Now it is too late.”

“Who are you?” Frazer asked again, his words abruptly slurred, his tongue thick in his head.

“We'll talk next time,” the big man said, opening the door and walking out of the room.

“Wait!” Frazer raced to the door and jerked it open.

The two police officers surged to their feet.

“Can we help you sir?”

“That man. The one who just came out…” He glanced up and down the corridor, but it was deserted. “Where did he go? Why didn't you stop him?”

The two men looked at one another. “No one came out of the room, Mr. Frazer.”

“No! He came out a moment ago. The man, the big man, with the scarred face, white hair…” He looked at them both, seeing the disbelief in their eyes replaced by anger.

“No one went into your room and no one came out.”

He touched his throat. “He grabbed me here, there must be some marks…” He tilted his head back for inspection.

One of the men dutifully looked at Jonathan Frazer's throat. “There's no mark on your throat, sir.”

“Perhaps you were dreaming,” another suggested, not unkindly.

Frazer looked from man to man, suddenly feeling chilled. There
had
been someone in the room with him, he had felt the man's fingers around his throat, smelt the strange spicy muskiness that clung to him, seen his scarred and torn flesh. There had been someone there. “No marks,” he muttered, touching his throat again.

“No sir.”

He turned away, aware of the police officers' eyes on his back. “Maybe it was a dream,” he whispered.

“A nightmare,” one of the officers agreed.

 

34

E
DMUND TALBOTT
lay naked on the thin mattress in his room, his hands by his side, breathing easily. To the casual observer he was sleeping peacefully, though if that same observer had looked closer, they would have seen that the man's broad chest was barely moving and that behind his slitted eyelids his eyes were moving frantically. Although the room was hot, muggy with the stale smells from the outside street, his flesh was cold to the touch, bathed in an icy perspiration.

Edmund Talbott suddenly opened his eyes and began to breathe again, great gasping breaths, filling his lungs with the warm air. He started to shiver and when he swung his legs out of the bed he had to wait while the room stopped its crazy spinning. Reaching for the towel that was draped into the sink, he rubbed it briskly across his body, drying himself.

He had only mastered the skill of astral projection with the greatest of difficulties. Although the ability to shift the spirit out of one's physical body was inherent in most people, and occurred naturally while the body slept, controlling the spirit, directing it to a specific location, required great skill and concentration. Now Edmund Talbott used it to track those associated with the mirror, but never the mirror itself. Perhaps the astral body was the soul—he didn't know, he wasn't qualified to even think about it—but he wasn't going to risk it by going anywhere near the glass.

Visiting Jonathan Frazer had been dangerous, making contact with him, actually impinging on the sleeping man's consciousness, had been an even greater risk. The man's association with the mirror, his prolonged exposure to it, and especially Emmanuelle's contact with it at the time of a violent death—when it had been feeding—meant that they had been tainted. He wasn't sure how far the mirror's influence extended. He used to think one had to be very close for it to have any effect, but now … now he didn't know the extent of its power or influence. He was aware though that it was gathering its forces, flexing its muscles.

He had been shocked when he had first entered the perpetually gray, usually formless astral world. Snaking lines of power, tainted with electric colors, principally reds and deep purples, were clearly visible flowing across the landscape. Fully conscious of the danger, he had followed the twisting, coiling lines across the astral equivalent of Los Angeles, until he had seen the swirling gray whirlpool that marked the presence of the mirror in the physical world.

The customary silence of that desolate landscape had been breached too: a thin high keening emanated from the midst of the whirlpool. In the gritty dusk, he had been able to make out figures trapped in the maelstrom, faces, shapes, the newest souls closest to the surface, the souls it had taken previously now lost deep in its twisting core.

And he knew then that the haunted mirror had awoken from its century old slumber.

To survive, to remain sentient, it needed souls and blood. The killings had only just begun.

 

35

I
T WAS
close to midnight before Margaret Haaren reached home. She was exhausted, the adrenaline rush of the attack on her men and the emotionally draining process of informing wives and families, the mentally demanding procedure of gathering and preparing reports while the events were still fresh, had all conspired to completely sap her vitality.

And tomorrow promised more of the same.

Her tiny apartment was stale and dry, close after the heat of the day. Without bothering to turn on the light, she draped her jacket over the back of the chair and kicked off her shoes. She padded through the front room and into the kitchen. In the darkness, the answering machine light blinked red. She thumbed the play button as she reached for a glass and the bottle of scotch.

“Hi, Aunt Margaret, it's Helen. Just to let you know that my plane gets in at twelve-thirty tomorrow. There's no need to meet me, I'll get a cab. Can't wait to see you. Happy early Thanksgiving!”

Margaret Haaren closed her eyes in dismay. She had completely forgotten that her niece was due in this week for a few days vacation over the long Thanksgiving weekend. She had started coming eight years ago, when she was ten, and over the years it had become something of a ritual. Thankfully, as she had grown older, they had already covered most of the tourist sights: Disneyland, Universal City, Six Flags, Walk of Fame, and now at the age of eighteen her passion was shopping for clothes especially on Rodeo Drive. To be truthful, Margaret Haaren enjoyed the company … well, most of the time anyway. However, at least this year the girl was eighteen, so she shouldn't be too much of a burden. Anyway, she could explain that she was under pressure at work. Helen would understand; her father was a detective, too. The tradition of police work was strong in her family: her father and his brother, and her two older brothers had all entered the force. When she'd left school, there really hadn't been anything else she'd even thought about doing.

There were days—like this one—when she wished she'd done something else.

She was forty-eight years old, unmarried, unattached, unpursued by male companions, and likely to remain so at this stage. She had the disadvantage of being a successful professional woman and a police officer. A lethal combination in any man's eyes and, while there were many relationships made within the force with like-minded souls who understood the pressures and were aware of the difficulties of police work, the fact that she was a senior female detective precluded that.

She took a large swig of scotch, appreciating its smoky, earthy flavor and then debated whether she'd have a bath or take a shower. The shower won out simply because it was easier to stand under the water and let it do all the work.

She walked back out of the kitchen, through the front room, into the hall and turned into the bedroom. She could have afforded to rent a bigger, better apartment, but what was the point, she reasoned. Even if she bought herself a house, she'd never use it—and an empty house was simply an open invitation for burglars. Once it became known that she was a police officer and out all day, she could almost guarantee that it would be turned over with monotonous regularity. In the condominium complex she allowed people to think she was a simple filing clerk in the local sheriff's department and because she was a woman, they believed it. It also meant that they didn't make a point of being nice to her, thinking that one day they might need her or that she might be able to do them a favor, like fixing a speeding ticket.

Without turning the light on, Margaret Haaren stood before the half-closed vertical blinds and stared out onto the noisy side street. Police sirens wailed in the distance and she wondered if she knew any of the officers on duty. West Hollywood had seen a surge in violent crimes in the last year and Haaren was certainly privy to all the locations within her area where they'd taken place. Even in the quiet safety of her apartment she never felt she was off-duty.

Finally, closing the blinds, she undressed and padded naked into the bathroom. She climbed straight into the shower, turned the water on as hot as she could bear and then simply allowed it to flow across her shoulders and down her back. She consciously refused to even think about the day's events, they would still be there in the morning, the same questions looking for answers.

She stood there for about five minutes until the water abruptly turned icy cold, sending her leaping from the shower with a muted scream. That was always happening! If someone upstairs turned on their hot tap, it “stole” the hot water from her! Dancing on the bathroom linoleum floor—why didn't she get tile—she toweled herself dry standing before the square mirror above the sink. Maybe it was time to have something done about the hair, she decided, it was looking a little on the butch side, and a little color in it wouldn't go amiss, there were far too many gray hairs there for comfort. Tucking the towel in around her heavy breasts she stepped closer to the vanity mirror and began to apply cold cream to her face. She knew her nickname in the force was Mata Hari—it came from Margaret Haaren, and because Haaren was Dutch. Her parents had met close to the end of the Second World War, her father had been in the Dutch resistance, her mother had been his American contact; they had spoken together via radio for three years before they actually met. Margaret Haaren wasn't sure if she approved of the nickname or not: Mata Hari although reputedly beautiful, had apparently been quite plain. And of course had been shot as a spy!

She blinked: her image in the glass was becoming fogged. She ran her hand down the moist glass …

The mirror image appeared for a second: a woman's face, pretty, with strong rounded cheekbones, full lips over yellowish teeth, black, impenetrable eyes and thick black hair.