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He could have been wealthier if he had written all the dumb teleplays that Morris had wanted him to write. But he had been able to make his own decisions about things like that. This ball was something else altogether. A ball that existed only as a reflection in a mirror, and not in reality?
    ‘Shit,’ he repeated, and switched off the light again and shuffled off to the bedroom. He dropped his red flannel bathrobe and climbed naked onto his futon. He was about to switch off his bedside light when a thought occurred to him. He padded back to the sitting room and closed the door. If there was anything funny about that mirror, he didn’t want it coming out and jumping on him in the middle of the night.
    Irrational, yes, but he was tired and a little drunk and it was well past midnight.
    He dragged the covers well up to his neck, even though he was too hot, and closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.
    He was awakened by what sounded like a child laughing. He lifted his head from the pillow and thought,
Goddamned Emilio, why do kids always have to wake up at the crack of dawn
? But then he heard the laughter again, and it didn’t sound as if it were coming from downstairs at all. It sounded as if it were coming from his own sitting room.
    He sat up straight, holding his breath, listening. There it was again. A small boy, laughing out loud; but with a curious echo to his voice, as if he were laughing in a large empty room. Martin checked his clock radio. It wasn’t the crack of dawn at all: it was only 3:17 in the morning.
    He switched on his light, wincing at the brightness of it. He found his bathrobe and tugged it on, inside out, so that he had to hold it together instead of tying it. Then he went to the sitting room door and listened.
    He listened for almost a minute. Then he asked himself:
What are you afraid of, wimp? It’s your own apartment, your own sitting room, and all you can hear is a child
.
    He licked his lips, and then he opened the sitting room door. Immediately, he reached out for the light switch and turned on the main light. Immediately, he looked toward the mirror.
    There was nobody there, no boy laughing. Only himself, frowsy and pale, in his inside-out bathrobe. Only the desk and the typewriter and the bookshelf and the pictures of Boofuls.
    He approached the mirror slowly. One thing was different. One thing that he could never
prove
was different, not even to himself. The blue and white ball had gone.
    He looked toward the reflected door, half open, and the peep of the passageway outside.
It’s very like our own passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond
.
    How different? thought Martin with a dry mouth. How different? Because if a ball had come bouncing into the reflected room, there must have been
somebody there to throw it; and if it had disappeared, then somebody must have walked into that reflected room when he was asleep and picked it up
.
    ‘Oh God.’ He swallowed. ‘Oh, God, don’t let it be Boofuls.’

Two
     
    HENRY POLOWSKI, THE gatekeeper at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, swore that when Boofuls was driven out of the studio that night in August 1939, he pressed his face to the rear window of his limousine and just for one terrible second he looked like a skull. Bone-white, with hollow eye sockets and naked teeth. Henry had shouted out loud.
    ‘You can laugh all you want, but it was a genuine premonition,’ Henry told the reporters who had been crowded all night around the Hollywood police headquarters. ‘I saw it, and if you don’t believe it, then that’s your problem, not mine.’
    ‘Didn’t you tell anybody what you saw?’ Henry was asked by Lydia Haskins of the
Los Angeles Times
. ‘If you really saw it, and you really believed it to be a genuine premonition, why didn’t you make any attempt to warn somebody?’
    ‘What would
you
have done?’ Henry retaliated. ‘My partner heard me shout and asked me what was wrong, and I said Boofuls just