Manny Leiber?s office.
I turned to see the mirror that hid the now invisible door.
Half drunk with exhaustion, I stared at myself in that cold glass.
And suddenly it was?
Nineteen twenty-six. The opera singer in her dressing room and a voice behind the mirror urging, teaching, prompting, desiring her to step through the glass, a terrible Alice? dissolved in images, melting to descend to the underworld, led by the man in the dark cloak and white mask to a gondola that drifted on dark canal waters to a buried palace and a bed shaped like a coffin.
The phantom?s mirror.
The phantom?s passage from the land of the dead.
And now?
His chair, his desk, his office.
But not the phantom. The Beast.
I knocked the chair aside.
The Beast? coming to see Manny Leiber?
I stumbled and backed off.
Manny, I thought. He who never truly gave, but took, orders. A shadow, not a substance. A sideshow, not a main attraction.
Run a studio!? No. Be a phone line over which voices passed? Yes. A messenger boy. An errand boy fetching champagne and cigarettes, sure! But sit in that chair? He had never sat there. Because? ?
Crumley shoved Henry.
?Move!?
?What?? I said, numbly.
?Someone?s gonna bust through that mirror, any minute!?
?Mirror!?? I cried.
I reached out.
?No!? said Crumley.
?What?s he up to?? asked Henry.
?Looking back,? I said.
I swung the mirror door wide.
I stared down the long tunnel, astounded at how far we had run, from country to country, mystery to mystery, along twenty years to now, Halloween to Halloween. The tunnel sank through commissaries of tinned films to reliquaries for the nameless. Could I have run all that way without Crumley and Henry to flail away shadows as my breath banged the walls?
I listened.
Far off, did doors open and slam? Was a dark army or a simple Beast in pursuit? Soon, would a death gun discharge skulls, blow the tunnel, ram me back from the mirror? Would?
?God damn!? said Crumley. ?Idiot!
He knocked my hand down. The mirror shut.
I grabbed the phone and dialed.
?Constance!? I yelled. ?Green Town.?
Constance yelled back.
?What?d she say?? Crumley peered into my face. ?Never mind,? he added, ?because??
The mirror shook. We ran.
55
The studio was as dark and empty as the graveyard over the wall.
The two cities looked at each other across the night air and played similar deaths. We were the only warm things moving in the streets. Somewhere, perhaps, Fritz was running night films of Galilee and charcoal beds and evocative Christs and footprints blowing away on the dawn wind. Somewhere, Maggie Botwin was crouched over her telescope viewing the bowels of China. Somewhere, the Beast was ravening to follow, or lying low.
?Take it easy!? said Crumley.
?We?re not being followed,? said Henry. ?Listen! the blind man says. Where we going??
?To my grandparents?.?
?Well, now that sounds nice,? said Henry.
Hustling along, we whispered:
