Thirty
Fired from near point blank, the shot should never
have missed. The bullet punched a hole through the door glass, hummed as
it zipped past John Hartman's head, and buried itself in the woodwork of
the back wall with a nearly simultaneous whap.
Dazzled by the muzzle flash in the darkness, John
Hartman dived to the floor. He rolled to the wall and reached up to kill
the lights, convinced in those few seconds that he would never make it.
But the gunman was screaming by that time. John saw
Roy Rockingham rise into view and lose his grip on a chrome-plated pistol,
letting to fall away from him as if it had become something vile. The man
swung away and fled howling into the darkness.
David came running into the kitchen, pale and
wide-eyed with fear. John scooped the trembling boy into his arms. "He
missed by a mile. Don't let the noise scare you."
"But he didn't think he missed!" David cried,
his eyes wide with astonishment. "Mom tricked him!"
John was stunned by David's claim. "I don't
understand."
"Mom made him see things! She scared him away!"
John set the boy down, numbed with shock. David was
pale, but he managed a wane smile. "Mom says my horror movies come in
handy. She did good, didn't she?"
Wearing her green dress and looking as real and solid
as anytime he had seen her in the past, Joyce Blair appeared to view on
the lawn outside. She challenged him with an open, emotionless stare.
"David, wait here."
John stepped through the shattered patio door to
reach her. "What happened? What did you do?"
"Make your choice now, John. We are not as much to
blame for what has happened as you may think, but if we are forced to
attend to our own self-defense, we may not have the resources to help you
and David at a critical moment, not unless you can help us now."
John studied her grim expression feeling light-headed
with fear. The lethal crack of the pistol still reverberated in his
memory. "I don't understand the need for the façade. We know what you
are. Why do you persist in trying to be something you are not? David
knows his mother is dead."
"We are in need of a common identity," Joyce said.
"The choice has been made."
"You can't be Marlene."
"The choice cannot be undone."
"Why was it made to begin with?"
Joyce gazed at him for an uncomfortable moment. "It
was not an informed choice, but one that had to be made when we first
encountered David."
"David shouldn't be subjected to the stress. You
know he's sick."
"David has his mother back," Joyce said. "He is
using his computer again. He is reading."
"I object to the inevitable consequences. There are
going to be hidden costs. How can you expect me to trust you?"
"We are only asking in this moment that the mirror be
moved. It will be needed elsewhere at a later date. It is to your
advantage that you cooperate."
John gazed at the apparition, his expression
contorted with anguish. "Joyce, is it really you?"
She smiled faintly. "Yes, if you can believe me. I
don't fully understand everything that is happening, but that I can see
how wonderful it will be. Only through Marlene will any of us understand
why the mirror is here and what it wants from us."
"It's already stirred up more trouble than you can
handle. It's getting away from you."
"We can defend ourselves under any circumstance.
Moving the mirror will simply shift the focus of attention away from this
place."
John heard a car coming up the road from the
highway. Emergency lights cast a flickering light over the eerily quiet
landscape. "Gene Packerson," Joyce said. "Neighbors reported the
gunshot."
John went around the side of the house to meet the
man. Gene parked behind the Volvo and charged from the car at a dead
run. "I have a report of a gunshot fired."
John led the way to where Roy's abandoned pistol lay
in the grass. Gene eyed the shattered patio door, then lifted the gun by
the trigger guard with two fingers. He sniffed the barrel.
"Roy Rockingham?" Gene grimaced. "I was hoping this
wouldn't happen. Damn that meddling bastard."
"Roy?" John said
doubtfully. "On his own initiative?" Roy had never been that
dangerous. John had not entirely disrespected the man.
"Orville Kahl,” Gene said. “Roy wouldn't have pulled
a stunt like this on his own. I warned you this would happen."
Gene went inside the kitchen and picked at the
embedded slug in the back wall. "Close call."
"Roy won't get brownie points for close," John said.
"If Kahl set him up for murder and he flubbed it, he's in serious trouble."
Gene pulled a chair around and sat down. "You're
going to have to move into town where we can keep a closer eye on you and
the boy."
"I'd be an easier target in town."
"If this is Kahl's doing, he'll send professionals
next time around."
John's voice took on an edge. "I can handle
professionals."
Gene put his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes.
He slicked his hair back and stared wearily off into space. "What a
godforsaken mess. Are they really dead, John?"
The implied accusation caught John off balance. "Why
do you assume that I'd know? What the hell's happened now?"
"Ben said he saw Angel and a group of other people
talking with you over by that stand of trees on the slope. We didn't
really take you by surprise, did we? You must have known we'd have the
slope under surveillance."
The thought had crossed his mind. The morning of his
introduction to the mirror and its victims, he hadn't thought about it.
"If they're not dead," Gene said, "then we have a
conspiracy on our hands. And you would seem to be in the middle of it."
Gene was closer to the truth that he could have
imagined. "You're thinking the Kahl girl's been kidnapped," John said.
Gene looked up hopefully. "Is that it? Do you have
her?"
John gave a chuckle of grim amusement. "Gene, it's
not that simple. If I have the girl, where is she? Where are the
others? You've been through the valley, haven't you? You checked out the
cabin?"
"Yeah, I checked it out. Locked up tight and tucked
away so that nobody's likely to stumble across it. Nothing's been
disturbed."
A missing piece of a puzzle of his own came to mind.
"There was an accident on the road below the slope. What was that all
about?"
Gene eyed him in sudden anger. "According to the
registration, we're missing a middle-aged woman, Cynthia Gatenburg. I've
been told she ran away from a hospital fifty miles from here and is in
critical need of medical attention. I came out myself to check on it,
John. Would you believe I walked up from the road intending to inspect
that stand of trees out yonder? That's where Ben says he saw you talking
with our missing group. Not only did I forget what I had walked all that
way for, I don't even remember seeing any trees."
John had nothing to help alleviate Gene's confusion,
nothing but the truth, and that would only make matters infinitely worse.
"John, I can't take much more of this. I'm going to
have to call in the state for help. You're going to get caught in the
crossfire. I hate to see it happen."
"I'm not your guilty party, Gene."
"I know damned well you're not my guilty party, but
you know more than you're willing to share with me. I can't have that."
"I'm not hiding anything that would help you find
Jackie Kahl, or Joyce Blair, or any of the others. I don't have them. I
never laid a hand on any of them."
Gene gave his statement a careful moment of
contemplation. "Fine, but you're still holding back on me, and it's
beginning to seriously piss me off."
John took a deep breath, fighting the urge to go find
a whiskey bottle. "If I'm holding anything back," he said wearily, "it's
because we're having a bad dream, and neither of us are equipped to deal
with it."
Gene rose to his feet. "Yeah, well, I'm pretty good
with wake up calls, and my advice to you is to think long and hard about
cooperating with an old friend before your get yourself tangled up in the
judicial system I have to answer to."
With that, Gene rose and left the house, slamming the
empty frame of the patio door shut behind him and sending more broken
glass raining to the floor. He took Roy's handgun with him, still
dangling from the trigger guard by one finger.
John sighed in misery.
Joyce Blair's silent image reappeared. She stood
outside in the yard at a respectful distance.
"Why did you let Ben see you?" John said without
bothering to raise his voice, knowing she could hear despite the
distance. "Are you deliberately stirring up trouble?"
"We did not know Ben would see us. He
only did so because
of his rapport with you, and we thought his report to Gene would undermine
suspicions of your complicity in the disappearances."
John sensed the truth of the explanation. He had
always gotten along with Ben. He would have counted Ben as a close friend
had it not been for Ben's self-destructive alliance with his partner.
John refocused his thoughts. "I
hate to sound like a broken record, but why do you need David
and me to believe that you can be Marlene? Why don't you know that it
can't work?"
"The choice was made before the feasibility of that
selection could be evaluated. It's an automatic process. It's the means
by which the mirror confirms its understanding of the forms of life it
encounters. Structures of consciousness are more important to the
mirror than what your sciences would describe as physical parameters."
"The mirror can't be certain it understands us unless
we can be fooled into believing that Marlene has been returned to us from
the dead?"
Joyce gave a hesitant shrug and a perceptible nod.
"Then David understood from the beginning. It's all
a trick."
Joyce drew closer, but she stayed on the other side
of the shattered window. The image of her, though, was razor-sharp, more
intense than reality itself. "John, think of how far away the mirror must
have come. Think of the power and intelligence it must have taken to get
it here. You and David have been chosen to represent all of humanity, and
Marlene is the means by which something completely different from
ourselves will demonstrate that it knows us, heart, mind, and soul.
I speak as a human being when I say that."
"It can't work. If you're really Joyce Blair, you
know it can't work."
"We need to try."
John threw his arms out in exasperation. He turned
away and stopped dead.
David stood in the hallway door.
"Assuming you heard the
entire conversation, how much of it did you understand, son?"
"Most of it," David said. "You're right. It's not
really Mom."
John glanced back to see how Joyce would react.
"You take far too much for granted, John,” Joyce
said.
"What exactly is it that I take for granted?"
"You take for granted that you understand yourself
better than we do. You take for granted that the mirror has limitations
to its abilities. You take for granted you fully understand the
nature of reality."
"Everything has limits. Don't tell me that thing out
in the trees is some kind of a god. I won't buy it."
"John, if the mirror is the creation of a mind that
exceeds yours by a thousandfold, the only part of it relevant to you is
the part that can be understood by you. That part of it must be a human
component. Circumstance dictates that it must be Marlene."
"A dead woman. Why?"
"Because you have no emotional ties to strangers. It
has to be someone close to your heart, and it clearly cannot be somebody already a
part of your life. Our options were limited."
"You can't bring back the dead."
"Death is something you also very much take for
granted, death and your very narrow view of life. It's something we'll
have to work on."
