“He must have seen me looking at it, because he stopped, and he stood right next to it and asked me if I wanted to see what was there. He didn’t touch it, though. I—a lot of things are fuzzy, but I know he never touched it. What happened next…it was all me. I stared at it for a long time, I don’t even know how long, and then I made up my mind and reached for it. I think I was half convinced it would turn out to be fake, you know? Like in the cartoons where there’s a painted door or tunnel or whatever, and the person trying to be tricked goes right through it and the person trying to do the tricking doesn’t. I touched the knob and I turned it, and the door opened right away. I didn’t even have to touch it. And instead of—instead of stairs to a basement, or a closet, which are the only two things that should have fit in that space, there was a long windowless hallway. It was lit by electric lamps every…maybe ten feet or so, and the walls were papered over in this swirling green pattern. The carpet was the same color as the door, maybe a little faded, and there was a thick black rug running down the middle of it that curved ever so slightly to the left in the distance as the hallway did. On the walls were mirrors, or what I thought were mirrors anyway, but…well, some of them were, but most of them were pictures of the hallway at a bunch of weird angles.
“I don’t remember stepping through the door. I really and truly don’t. One minute I was staring at this hallway, the next minute I heard the door close behind me with a click. I spun around, but all that was there was this huge mirror, no handle on that side. I was staring at my own reflection, but it was…”
Max stared at the tape recorder for a couple of seconds. Just before Daffy prompted him, he said in a low voice, “I had a nightmare once, when I was fourteen, that I was turning into my dad. That part of the movie was kind of accurate, except that the trigger wasn’t laughing like him in front of Roxanne, it was because we’d just had a big party, I don’t even remember why, and every single person had made a comment about how much like my dad I was. In the dream, I remember staring at myself in the mirror, modeling some new outfit, and then the colors shifted, and my face got longer and stretched out until I looked exactly like my dad. That was what I was afraid of, not becoming someone uncool or whatever, but losing myself. When I looked in that mirror…it was like that in reverse. While I watched, every single thing I have connecting me to my dad—the teeth, the ears, the shape of the head, even my hands—shifted and warped and…distorted until the person looking out at me had no connection to George Goof whatsoever. It honestly scared me worse than anything else had so far.
“I pulled out my phone. My mind was a little muddy, but I think I wanted to open the camera app and just…check and make sure the mirror was weird. Like a funhouse, you know? Except I was definitely not having fun, but…you know, I don’t think anybody actually enjoys those places. Anyway, when I opened it up, the screen was just another picture of that hallway. I couldn’t even find any buttons, or any of my apps, or anything like that. I sort of connected to the thought I’d had before, about the painted doors and all that, and I rationalized that you never see the Road Runner come back through the tunnel after it’s painted on, so I was the trickee and the bird with the bone beak was the tricker. I started walking. I couldn’t really do anything else.
“I don’t know how long I walked through there. It didn’t make any sense. The hallway curved imperceptibly to the left, but there were all these hallways going off at right angles. I kind of avoided them at first, because I figured a straight line was the way to go, but I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I finally tried one. It was…the same sort of thing. Mirrors and paintings that reflected everything around them, but when I turned to go back—I must have got turned around, somehow, because I was in a different corridor, with more branching halls going off to the right. And the colors kept…shifting. Like the animator couldn’t keep track of what colors they had been using before and couldn’t look at previous cells for whatever reason, like they’d scrapped the sets and redone the scenery from memory and didn’t remember they hadn’t used blue or purple or red or whatever last time. The rugs kept changing, too. Maybe if I’d been in more cartoons…but I hadn’t and I wasn’t used to it and it made me feel like I couldn’t trust my eyes.
“It felt like I was wandering for days, but…I never got tired. I never got hungry. I slumped down in despair a few times, but I don’t think I actually slept. I was close to giving up when…I saw a figure. It was stood way off in the distance, and it looked almost birdlike, but when I got closer I saw it was anything but. Its body was thin and limp, and when it moved, it—you’ve seen those animation tests for characters that move like rubber? That’s how it was moving. And it was coming towards me fast. All of the pictures on the wall now showed this thing, but all of them distorted it kind of differently. In all of them, though, you could clearly make out the beak as the same, bulbous and sharp and made of old bone.
“I looked around in desperation, trying to find a way out. The thing was getting closer, and then I heard that weird, unsettling laughter again. It was just on the edge of familiarity, but it was warped and distorted and seemed like it was coming out of all of the mirrors at once. And then I saw it—one mirrored frame that didn’t have this creature in it. It seemed like a desperate shot, but it also seemed like my only hope, so I threw myself at the frame.
“And just like that, I was out. Busy street. Bright daylight. And the accents—I realized I was in America, somehow. Someone asked me if I was okay, and I looked up, and it was a Toon. I was in Toon Town. I…I didn’t know what else to do, so I asked if they knew where Dad was. They looked at me funny, but told me where to go. He’s between gigs, they said, and the speedway closed down three years ago, but he’d be at home. So I went.” Max made a small, choked sound. “And he didn’t—it’s not that he didn’t recognize me. He did. He knew who I was, but…he said I wasn’t actually his son. He was really gentle about it, but it was too much, and I passed out. I came round in the hospital and PJ was there, and thank God, he knew me, he remembered me, he accepted my apology for lying about the house and said it was okay, we could maybe go in halves, but—but he agreed with Dad. He ‘reminded’ me that Goofy didn’t have a son, had never been married, that I’d been some…distant cousin or other whose pushy showbiz mom had shoved him into acting, trying to capitalize on the Goof fame and name, and that since I was the same age as PJ they cast me in the show, but that I was always acting. He was pretty worried about me, actually, and I—I couldn’t get him to believe me.
“They kept me there for a couple weeks, until the doctor was assured I was hydrated and in good health and…mentally better. They didn’t put me in the crackerdog ward, luckily, but they thought I might have some kind of amnesia, so I was in a memory care unit. They tried to ‘jog my memory.’ PJ came to visit me every other day…Dad never did. I was getting more and more upset, but for whatever reason, nobody was ever going to believe my word against Goofy’s, so finally I pretended I agreed with them and they let me go. When I left, they gave me an envelope, and there was a letter from Dad. He’d paid for my ticket back to London because he felt bad, it said, that he’d upset me. PJ hugged me and said he and his husband would be here as soon as the baby was born and safe to fly, and…and I got on the plane. I got home, and the first thing, the first thing I did was go to my desk and find my letters. And they’re all there, every last one of them, every letter Dad sent me, and the handwriting is the same as it is in the letter I got at the hospital, but…but nobody believes me and I don’t know why.” Max rubbed a hand over his face. “The second thing I did was call the real estate agent and reschedule that tour. This time I actually met with Helen Richardson. She was kind of annoyed that I’d flaked out on my first appointment. I didn’t argue with her, but I did spend the whole tour looking for that yellow door again. Never found it. Made an offer on the house, got the keys three days ago, called PJ to let him know. I’ve been looking for the door ever since, hoping—hoping that maybe I could go through it, go back the way I came, and come out and Dad will remember me as his son again. If that’s the only thing wrong, maybe it’s not so bad, but…I didn’t want to be the son of Goofy, but I never didn’t want to be my dad’s son.”