Mirror Image (2 page)

Jonathan Frazer moved away from the huge mirror, looking at it in a new light. He sank down onto a badly made copy of a Chippendale and began to laugh gently. “I paid five hundred English pounds for it. So with the exchange rate and freight, approximately thirty-five hundred dollars.”

Tony shook his head. “It's a once in a lifetime bargain.”

“A piece of good fortune, indeed!”

Farren smiled. “Every dealer—whether he's dealing in books, stamps, coins, furniture, pictures or silver—turns up one special item in their lifetime.” He rested his hand against the glass, a damp palm print forming on the surface only to disappear almost immediately. “This could very well be your special item.”

Frazer checked his watch. He looked at the mirror one final time. Maybe he wouldn't sell it. Not yet anyway. With the economy tanking, this might be worth hanging onto. “I'll be at the store if you need me.” He looked at Tony. “Take special care of it for me.”

“I will. I'll start refurbishing it immediately. I'm quite looking forward to it,” he added, rubbing his right hand across the mirror again. “Just think: if this glass could talk. What has it seen?” he wondered aloud.

“You say that about every single item I bring in here.”

“Everything has a story,” Tony said to Jonathan's retreating back. “You know what I've always told you…”

“I know, I know. I'm not selling antiques—I'm selling stories.”

*   *   *

T
ONY FARREN WAS
born in the Sunset District of San Francisco. His parents, post-war sweethearts, settled there after World War II. At the age of eighteen, uneducated Farren was drafted to Vietnam. He served one year before returning to the US with no skills other than how to handle and fire—with extraordinary accuracy—an M60 machine gun. Farren had moved to Los Angeles in the hope of finding a new life for himself. He drifted from trade to trade—painting, glazing, building, carpentry, plumbing and electrical—learning enough to be competent in each, but eventually finding each job remarkably boring.

James Frazer was in the process of opening an antiques store in Hollywood and he needed a handyman, someone who could fix the leg of a chair, refinish a tabletop, touch up a painting.

During his interview Tony Farren lied; he told James Frazer he could do all these things and more. And there was no one more surprised than he was, when he actually discovered that he could. He improved his basic skills by studying, and his solutions to the problems presented to him on a daily basis, whilst unorthodox, usually worked. James Frazer claimed he was a genius; Tony put it down to the fact that he was finally doing something he enjoyed. Every day was different: one day he might be working on chairs or tables, the next re-wiring a crystal chandelier or mending the hinge on an antique armoire, and the day after faux finishing a night stand.

Tony Farren had spent over forty-five years in the business working alongside James Frazer, growing the company, eventually becoming one of its master craftsmen as well as a recognized authority on the history of eighteenth century antique furniture. Over the years, he had seen just about every type of antique and artifact … but he had never seen anything quite like it.

He walked slowly around the mirror—certainly the largest he had ever seen. It was a sheet of glass set into a plain wooden frame, with a solid wooden back fixed to the frame. Obviously the back would have to be removed before he started work.

Tony fished into his back pocket and removed a magnifying glass, then bent to examine one of the clips which secured the back to the frame. He hissed in annoyance: the heads of two of the screws were entirely destroyed, the grooves worn smooth. He moved onto the next screw and frowned; this too had been destroyed. Moving slowly from clip to clip—there were twelve in all, two screws to a clip—he discovered that the heads of all twenty-four screws had been worn completely smooth, the grooves hacked and torn away. He rubbed a callused palm against the wooden backing. It looked deliberate.

“Whoever put you on didn't want you coming off.”

However, the problem wasn't insurmountable. The trick was to cut new heads in the screws, make a groove deep enough to give him purchase for a screwdriver. There was always the danger that the screw would snap—and that would be a bitch, but he'd cross that bridge when he came to it.

Farren moved over to the long workbench. It was a chaos of tools and littered with half-completed projects. The workbench had been the despair of numerous assistants down through the years. While they searched frantically for tools, he had always been able to go exactly to the place he had last left it. He chose a small Black & Decker and fitted a circular abrading stone to it. Then he slipped a pair of tinted protective glasses over his own and pulled on a pair of gloves. And then, with infinite patience, he carefully cleaned the ragged metal off the heads of the crude screws. It took him the best part of an hour, starting with those he could easily reach and then climbing up onto a stepladder to complete the job. When he was finished, the heads gleamed silver, sparkling in the light. Returning to the bench, he replaced the Black & Decker with a diamond-tipped drill. He took a few moments to review what he was about to do and then, satisfied, knelt on the floor beside the mirror. This was the tricky bit.

“Don't try this at home kids,” he murmured, as he maneuvered the drill in a reasonably straight line down the center of the first screw. Sparks flew and the soft, musty air was tainted with the sharp tang of scorched metal. It took him about three tense minutes to cut the groove, but when he fitted the screwdriver head into the groove, it slotted neatly into place. He grunted in quiet satisfaction.

No problem.

Tony Farren had cut twenty-two of the twenty-four screws when the accident happened. He was tired; he'd been working for over an hour just cutting the grooves and his neck and shoulder muscles were bunched and his eyes felt gritty, nerves twitching in his eyelids. “God, I'm getting too old for this,” he muttered under his breath. He should have stopped for lunch over an hour ago, but far better to get this bit finished, grab a bite to eat and then proceed. He moved the ladder along to the last clip and climbed up with the drill clutched in his right hand. He had just about reached the top when the stepladder shifted. Farren yelped with fright and dropped the drill, scrabbling to catch the expensive piece of equipment, missing it, hearing it crack onto the concrete floor. He toppled forward, instinctively clutching at the top of the mirror for support. He immediately realized what he was doing and attempted to push himself back, terrified that he was going to push the mirror to the ground. The stepladder swayed with the violence of his movements, metal legs screeching on the floor. Tony Farren crashed to the ground, his head cracking against the solid floor, right hip popping with the sickening force, shards of metal from the shattered drill casing digging into his flesh. Luckily the heavy metal stepladder had pushed away from him as he fell and went clattering across the floor.

Tony didn't know how long he'd lain unconscious. Ten, fifteen minutes, maybe. The angle of the sun through the window had definitely shifted. When he came to, he defiantly resisted the urge to vomit. His protective glasses now rested at an awkward angle across his face. Pulling them off, he threw them to his side, relieved that his own glasses were still intact. He felt the back of his head, wincing as he touched a warm sticky liquid oozing from an open wound. Skull laceration, maybe a concussion, he guessed, but he'd been lucky. It could have been worse, much worse. He could have snapped his neck when he'd fallen.

Every movement was agony, and his entire body was a solid mass of anguish. Paradoxically—in spite of the pain, because of the pain?—he was losing feeling in his legs, but he guessed that was just the shock, or maybe there was internal bleeding.

“Stupidstupidstupid.” His voice was a strangled hiss of pain. Finally, when he decided he had come to terms with the hurt, he began the painful process of crawling across to the telephone on the wall above the workbench. All these years he had resisted getting a cell phone and now he wished he hadn't. How he was going to get the phone down was another matter, but one thing at a time. He knew Jonathan was at the store; he knew Celia—Mrs. Frazer—was still surfing in Hawaii and wouldn't be back for another few days, and Manny was staying with friends. If he could get to the phone he'd call Jonathan at the store. Fuck that! He would call the paramedics first.

Digging his fingernails into the scarred concrete floor, Farren pulled himself forward, moving awkwardly around the mirror, which was directly in front of him. Blood was pounding in his head, roaring in his skull, and he could feel it trickling warmly down the side of his face. His breathing was a loud rasp. When he got to the bench, he would …

Concentrate … one thing at a time …

He was going to have that engraved on his tomb: one thing at a time.

Right now he was concentrating on reaching the workbench. When he reached it he would rest.

Pressing his palms to the floor he pushed … and nothing happened. He couldn't feel his legs now. His shoulder muscles were aflame; his arched spine ached as he dug into his reserves, attempting to pull himself along the floor. With an almost superhuman effort he reached out, his fingertips lightly brushing against the wooden corner of the workbench. With one final effort he managed to grab a firm hold.

Something shifted.

Tony Farren turned. His left foot had become caught up in the ornate base of the mirror. He had been pulling the mirror with his every movement, and the flesh of his ankle was rubbed raw. He hadn't heard it because of the noise in his head, hadn't felt it because of the numbness in his legs. He sat up and attempted to extricate his leg using both hands, jerking it towards him.

The seven foot tall mirror shifted on the stand, the top swiveling, dipping downwards.

Tony Farren opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came. He knew what was going to happen. Trapped, unable to move, he could only watch in horror as the mirror shifted, turning on its stand. With a slow, almost ponderous movement, the entire four hundred and twenty pound weight toppled forward.

Farren managed to scream once before it crashed into him, snapping through his outstretched hands, impacting the bones deep into his body, cracking and then flattening the skull, crushing the ribs deep into the lungs and internal organs. Blood and gore spurted once—briefly—before the weight of the mirror pressed the corpse onto the ground.

*   *   *

I
T TOOK FOUR
firefighters to lift the mirror off the crushed remains of Tony Farren. There were two surprises in store for them: the mirror was intact despite the fall, and there was virtually no blood.

 

3

F
OREVER AND EVER.
Unchanged and unchanging.

And so it was.

The Otherworld landscape: a shadowland, gray and sere, black and white.

Not quite soundless. A whisper of wind, the hint of voices, a threnody of off-key music.

Forever and ever. Unchanged and unchanging.

Until now.

Color ran through the Otherworld. A flash of blood-red, bringing memories, awakening desires.

It experienced a quickening …

 

4

T
HE MAN
was, Dave Watts thought, one of the biggest and, without a doubt, the ugliest, motherfucker he had ever seen. Dave had been watching the man for the past few moments peering in through the auction room's large windows, shading his eyes with his hands to see into the darkened interior. Finally, he moved in off the sidewalk and stood in the doorway, effectively blocking it. He was not the sort of guy you'd want to meet in a brightly lit alley, Dave decided, never mind the other kind.

Dave Watts moved through the bewildering assortment of furniture he was presently listing in preparation for the usual weekly auction and stopped a few feet away from the large shadowed figure. “Morning, can I help you? Auction's not 'til Wednesday, and there's no viewing until Tuesday morning.”

The big man moved into the large circular room, ducking his head slightly to avoid the low beams. He was dressed entirely in black, the outfit vaguely clerical, except that he wore a black turtleneck sweater instead of a Roman collar.

Dave, who himself stood six foot and weighed a hundred and ninety-six pounds, found himself looking up at a man who topped him by at least four inches, and who had the body of a professional wrestler. The big man stopped in the center of the room, his head swiveling on a thick neck. He had a shock of snow-white hair, though his eyebrows were coal black, and much of his face was lined with a tracery of scars, which were especially evident along his cheekbones and forehead. His nose had once been broken and badly set and his chin was deeply cleft. When he finally turned to look at Dave, coal-black, stone-hard eyes stared unblinkingly at him.

“Can I help you?” Dave demanded more forcefully. As casually as possible he began to move over to a collection of umbrellas and walking sticks in an elephant's foot stand. There was a sword cane in one of them, though God alone knew which one. The auction rooms had been raided once, and on two previous occasions they had been approached and asked—no,
told—
to pay protection money. Despite repeated threats of burning they had refused to pay, and they had heard nothing further.

But the big ugly mother was an enforcer if ever there was one.

“You're auctioning a mirror,” the big man said finally, his voice a rasping whisper as if his throat had once been damaged, though still revealing traces of a refined Oxford accent.

“No … no … sir, we're not. Not this week anyway.”