Blind Panic by Graham Masterton

don’t like this divination one little bit, I can tell you.”
    “Okay,” said Jasmine. “Whatever you want.”
    She stepped back toward the mirror, but as she did so, her shoes crunched on something on the floor. She looked down and saw that she had trodden on a huge cockroach, which was lying on its back, half crushed with its antennae waving. Three or four more cockroaches were running across the floor close by, and within seconds more and more of them appeared. They were pouring out of a narrow crack between the skirting-board and the floor, dark brown and shiny, and as they poured out they made a rustling, rattling noise.
    “This ain’t possible!” Auntie Ammy exclaimed in horror. She lifted the baby higher in her arms and retreated across the living room, toward the balcony. “What’s in that lookin’ mirror, that may be a sign of somethin’ real that’s really goin’ to occur, but that’s not really real! That’s no more real than what you might see in a crystal ball!”
    Jasmine was performing a frenzied flamenco, stamping on as many cockroaches as she could. But the insects kept on gushing out of the crack beneath the skirting board, and soon they had covered almost half the living room floor and were swarming all over Jasmine’s shoes and up her calves.
    “The lookin’ mirror!” Auntie Ammy cried out. “Turn the lookin’ mirror to the wall!”
    Crunching her way back across the room, Jasmine took hold of the mirror and tried to lift it away from the wall so that she could turn it around. It was unbelievably heavy, and she could manage to lift it only three or four inches. And insideit, she saw the figure suddenly begin to flicker, like a character in a speeded-up movie. As it flickered it began to move toward her in quick, threatening jerks.
    She was more than spooked now; she was terrified. She let go of the mirror and it banged back flat against the wall. The nail that was holding it gave way, and it dropped onto the floor and smashed. Cowrie shells and triangles of broken glass were scattered all around Jasmine’s feet.
    “My lookin’ mirror!” wailed Auntie Ammy. “My precious, precious lookin’ mirror!”
    But Jasmine was too busy scanning the floor. The swarm of cockroaches had vanished as if they had never existed. Even the dead ones that she had squashed beneath her feet had disappeared.
    “They’re gone,” she said. “I can’t believe it. They’re all gone.”
    “ Wah-wahs ,” said the baby, wriggling his fingers at her as if he were trying to imitate a cockroach.
    Jasmine came over and took him out of Auntie Ammy’s arms. “No, sweet thing. No more wah-wahs. The wah-wahs have taken a powder, thank God.”
    Auntie Ammy placed a cushion on the floor and knelt down on it so she could pick up the remains of her mirror.
    “I don’t know what my grandfather would say if he could see his lookin’ mirror now. He always made me promise to keep it safe, because it would keep me safe—that’s what he said. He said it would help him to rest easy in heaven, knowin’ that this lookin’ mirror was always here to protect me.”
    “I’m sorry, Auntie Ammy. I truly am.”
    “No, Jazz. It wasn’t not your fault. Whoever it was, that divination we saw, he was copiously powerful, I can tell you, and maybe the lookin’ mirror protected me in the only way it could, which was to fall and to break so that there was no way for that divination to come through to us.”
    “You think it really could have?”
    Auntie Ammy gripped the side of the couch and eased herself back onto her feet. “I’ve heard of that happenin’ before,but only once or twice. Once was a woman in Mexico whose husband had been lost at sea, and one night before she went to bed she saw him in her lookin’ mirror just crossin’ past her bedroom door. When she woke up the next morning his wedding band was restin’ on the nightstand beside her and there was wet footprints all the way across her