«Aimee, come back!»
She ran out through the mirrors, crying. Staring with blurred eyes, it was hard to find the way, but she found it. She stood blinking at the empty pier, started to run one way, then another, then still another, then stopped. Ralph came up behind her, talking, but it was like a voice heard behind a wall late at night, remote and foreign.
«Don't talk to me,» she said.
Someone came running up the pier. It was Mr. Kelly from the shooting gallery. «Hey, any you see a little guy just now? Little stiff swiped a pistol from my place, loaded, run off before I'd get a hand on him! You help me find him?»
And Kelly was gone, sprinting, turning his head to search between all the canvas sheds, on away under the hot blue and red and yellow strung bulbs.
Aimee rocked back and forth and took a step.
«Aimee, where you going?»
She looked at Ralph as if they had just turned a comer, strangers passing, and bumped into each other. «I guess,» she said, «I'm going to help search.»
«You won't be able to do nothing.»
«I got to try, anyway. Oh God, Ralph, this is all my fault! I shouldn't have phoned Billie Fine! I shouldn't've ordered a mirror and got you so mad you did this! It's
Swinging about slowly, her cheeks wet, she saw the quivery mirrors that stood in front of the Maze, Ralph's reflection was in one of them. She could not take her eyes away from the image; it held her in a cool and trembling fascination, with her mouth open.
«Aimee, what's wrong? What're you—»
He sensed where she was looking and twisted about to see what was going on. His eyes widened.
He scowled at the blazing mirror.
A horrid, ugly little man, two feet high, with a pale, squashed face under an ancient straw hat, scowled back at him. Ralph stood there glaring at himself, his hands at his sides.
Aimee walked slowly and then began to walk fast and then began to run. She ran down the empty pier and the wind blew warm and it blew large drops of hot rain out of the sky on her all the time she was running.
