And then, of course, there’s the question of authenticity—”
“Authenticity!” Mr. Carlin chuckled, a dry sound, as if bones had stirred in a cupboard below the stairs. “It’s been examined by experts, Mr. Spangler.”
“So was the Lemlier Stradivarius.”
“So true,” Mr. Carlin said with a sigh. “But no Stradivarius ever had quite the ... the unsettling effect of the Delver glass.”
“Yes, quite,” Spangler said in his softly contemptuous voice. He understood now that there would be no stopping Carlin; he had a mind which was perfectly in tune with the age. “Quite.”
They climbed the third and fourth flights in silence. As they drew closer to the roof of the rambling structure, it became oppressively hot in the dark upper galleries. With the heat came a creeping stench that Spangler knew well, for he had spent all his adult life working in it—a smell of long-dead flies in shadowy corners, of wet rot and creeping wood lice behind the plaster. The smell of age. It was a smell common only to museums and mausoleums. He imagined much the same smell might arise from the grave of a virginal young girl, forty years dead.
Up here the relics were piled helter-skelter in true junk-shop profusion; Mr. Carlin led Spangler through a maze of statuary, frame-splintered portraits, pompous gold-plated birdcages, the dismembered skeleton of an ancient tandem bicycle. He led him to the far wall where a stepladder had been set up beneath a trapdoor in the ceiling. A dusty padlock hung from the trap.
Off to the left, an imitation Adonis stared at them pitilessly with blank pupilless eyes. One arm was outstretched, and a yellow sign hung on the wrist which read: ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE.
Mr. Carlin produced a key ring from his jacket pocket, selected a key, and mounted the stepladder. He paused on the third rung, his bald head gleaming faintly in the shadows. “I don’t like that mirror,” he said. “I never did. I’m afraid to look into it. I’m afraid I might look into it one day and see ... what the rest of them saw.”
“They saw nothing but themselves,” Spangler said.
Mr. Carlin began to speak, stopped, shook his head, and fumbled above him, craning his neck to fit the key properly into the lock. “Should be replaced,” he muttered. “It’s—damn!” The lock sprung suddenly and swung out of the hasp. Mr. Carlin made a fumbling grab for it and almost fell off the ladder. Spangler caught it deftly and looked up at him. He was clinging shakily to the top of the stepladder, face white in the brown semidarkness.
“You are nervous about it, aren’t you?” Spangler said in a mildly wondering tone.
Mr. Carlin said nothing. He seemed paralyzed.
“Come down,” Spangler said. “Please. Before you fall.” Carlin descended the ladder slowly, clinging to each rung like a man tottering over a bottomless chasm. When his feet touched the floor he began to babble, as if the floor contained some current that had turned him on, like an electric light.
“A quarter of a million,” he said. “A quarter of a million dollars’ worth of insurance to take that ... thing from down there to up here. That goddam thing. They had to rig a special block and tackle to get it into the gable storeroom up there. And I was hoping—almost praying—that someone’s fingers would be slippery ... that the rope would be the wrong test ... that the thing would fall and be shattered into a million pieces—”
“Facts,” Spangler said. “Facts, Carlin. Not cheap paperback novels, not cheap tabloid stories or equally cheap horror movies. Facts. Number one: John DeIver was an English craftsman of Norman descent who made mirrors in what we call the Elizabethan period of England’s history. He lived and died uneventfully. No pentacles scrawled on the floor for the housekeeper to rub out, no sulfur-smelling documents with a splotch of blood on the dotted line. Number two: His mirrors have become collector’s items due principally to fine craftsmanship and to the fact that a form of crystal was used that has a mildly magnifying and distorting effect upon the eye of the beholder—a rather distinctive trademark. Number three: Only five DeIvers remain in existence to our present knowledge—two of them in America. They are priceless. Number four: This DeIver and one other that was destroyed in the London Blitz have gained a rather spurious reputation due largely to falsehood, exaggeration, and coincidence—”
“Fact number five,” Mr. Carlin said. “You’re a supercilious bastard, aren’t you?”