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restringing. He checked the bathroom, then the kitchen. Apart from himself, the apartment was deserted.
    ‘Hallucination,’ he told himself. ‘Maybe I’m falling apart.’
    He returned to the sitting room and picked up his glass of wine. He froze with the glass almost touching his lips.
In the mirror, the blue and white ball was still there, lying on the floor where it had first bounced
.
    Martin stared at it and then quickly looked back into the real sitting room. No ball. Yet there it was in the mirror perfectly clear, as plain as milk.
    Martin walked carefully across the room. Watching himself in the mirror, he reached down and tried to pick the ball up, but in the real room there was nothing there, and in the mirror room his hand appeared simply to pass right through the ball, as if it had no substance at all.
    He scooped at it two or three times and waved his hand from side to side exactly where the ball should have been. Still nothing. But the really odd part about it was that as he watched his hand intently, it seemed as if it were not the ball that was insubstantial, but his own fingers – as if the ball were real and that reflection of himself in the mirror were a ghost.
    He went right up close to the mirror and touched its surface. There was nothing unusual about it. It was simply cold glass. But the ball remained there, whether it was a hallucination or a trick of the light, or whatever. He sat in his chair and watched it and it refused to disappear.
    After half an hour, he got up and went to the bathroom to shower. The ball was still there when he returned. He finished the wine, watching it all the time. He was going to have a hangover in the morning, but right now he didn’t much care.
    ‘What the hell
are
you?’ he asked the ball.
    He pressed his cheek against the left side of the mirror and tried to peer into his own reflected hallway, to see if it was somehow different.
Looking-Glass House
, he thought to himself, and all those unsettling childhood feelings came back to him. If you could walk through the door in the mirror, would the hallway be the same? Was there another different world in there, not just back to front but disturbingly different?
    In his bookshelf, he had a dog-eared copy of
Alice Through the Looking-Glass
which Jane had bought him when they were first dating. He took it out and opened it up and quickly located the half-remembered words.
    Alice was looking into the mirror over her sitting room fireplace, wondering about the room she could see on the other side of the glass.
    It’s just the same as our drawing-room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair – all but the bit just behind the fire-place. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit! I want so much to know whether they’ve a fire in the winter: you never can tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room, too – but that may only be pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way: I know that, because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold one up in the other room. But now we come to the passage. You can see just a little peep of the passage in Looking-Glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond
.
    Martin closed the book. The ball was still there. He stood looking at it for a long time, not moving. Then he went across to his desk and switched off the light, so that the sitting room was completely dark. He paused, and then he switched it back on again. The ball in the mirror hadn’t moved.
    ‘Shit,’ he said; and for the very first time in his life he felt that something was happening to him which he couldn’t control.
    He could have gotten Jane back if he had really wanted to – at least, he believed that he could.