Mirror by Graham Masterton

know I can’t, Emilio, because he’s imaginary.’ He tapped Emilio’s forehead with his fingertip quite hard. ‘He exists only in there.’
    ‘No,’ Emilio protested. ‘He’s real. But you can’t shake his hand because he’s in the mirror.’
    Martin straightened himself up. Emilio was looking up at him, his grubby little face serious, his eyes wide, his fists clenched.
    ‘Emilio,’ he said, ‘has it occurred to that one-byte brain of yours that the real boy in the mirror might be you? A reflection of you? Or was your face so filthy that you didn’t recognize yourself? Maybe you thought it was Paul Robeson.’
    Emilio was getting cross again. ‘He’s real! He’s real! But he’s only in the mirror! I’m in the mirror, and he’s in the mirror. But I’m in the room, and he’s not in the room!’
    Martin thought of the blue and white ball, and how it had come bouncing into the mirror. He thought of how he had gone back to look at it again and found that it had vanished.
It’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond
.
    A slow cold feeling crawled down his back, like a snail making its way down a frozen drainpipe.
    ‘This boy … did he look anything like you?’ he asked Emilio.
    Emilio wiped his hand over his face as if he were attempting to erase his own features and come up with some other face: placid, blank, with eyes like Little Orphan Annie.
    ‘He looked like …’ and he tried to explain, but he couldn’t, even with mime. ‘He looked like …’ and then he suddenly rushed through to the bedroom and pointed to the poster of Boofuls pinned to the wall.
    ‘He looked like that?’ Martin asked him, with a deeper feeling of dread.
    ‘He’s a real boy,’ Emilio repeated. ‘He’s a
real
boy!’
    Martin laid his hands on Emilio’s shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. ‘Emilio, he
was
a real boy, but he’s been dead for nearly fifty years.’
    Emilio frowned.
    ‘I don’t know what you saw in that mirror,’ Martin told him, ‘but it wasn’t a real boy. It was just your imagination. Do you understand what I mean? It was just like … I don’t know, your mind was playing a trick on you.’
    ‘I saw him,’ Emilio whispered. ‘I
talked
to him.’
    Martin couldn’t think what else to say. He stood up and rubbed his hands on the legs of his pants, the way pitchers do. ‘I don’t know, Emilio, man. It sounds pretty screwy to me.’
    At that moment there was a cautious knock at the apartment door, and Emilio’s grandmother came in. She was carrying a glass oven dish with a checkered cloth draped over the top of it.
    Martin had always liked Mrs Capelli. She was the grandmother that everybody should have had: cheerful, philosophical, always baking. She had white hair braided into elaborate plaits and a face as plain and honest as a breadboard. She wore black; she always wore black. She was mourning for her dead sister. Before that, she had been mourning for her dead brother. When she and Mr Capelli went out shopping in their long black Lincoln together, they looked as if they were going to a funeral.
    ‘I brought you lasagne,’ she said.
    Martin accepted the dish with a nod of his head. ‘I’m trying to diet. But thanks.’
    ‘Well, you can share it with the boy.’ Mrs Capelli glanced around the apartment as if she expected to see someone else.
    ‘The boy?’ asked Martin.
    ‘Emilio told me you had a boy staying here. He was playing with him all morning. He’s your nephew you spoke to me about?’
    Martin exchanged an uncomfortable look with Emilio. If he said that there was no boy, then Emilio would get a hard time for lying. On the other hand –
    But, no. He needed Emilio’s confidence right now. If there
was
something odd in the mirror, if there
was
some kind of manifestation, then so far young Emilio was the only person who had seen it. Emilio might be the only contact with it, like a medium. After all, he was a