Plot: Widower Jack Terriss is
a commercial artist living in remote moorland with his son Marcus.
Aside from his bread and butter work, Terriss is also working
on a masterpiece. Sapphire and Steel arrive wishing to see the
painting Terriss has hidden - it is of a distored lizard-like
face which Terriss claims is a picture of Marcus that came to
him in a dream. Sapphire tries to paint over the canvas and
struggling with Terriss, the man falls against it and tears
the picture. Enraged, Terriss metamorphoses into a primordial
creature. Steel runs to help but his path is blocked by a falling
painting of the French Revolution - suddenly Steel finds himself
inside the picture, threatened with execution at the guillotine
and is only saved when Sapphire takes time back. Terriss meanwhile
finds a mirror in the cellar but his alter ego traps his normal
self the other side of the mirror. Sapphire also finds the cellar
mirror but is tricked by the Terriss-creature to find herself
in a mirror-image world. The beast then traps Marcus using a
hand mirror and next tries to lure Steel. Fleeing, Steel suddenly
realises he can telepathically communicate wih Sapphire on the
other side of the mirror by using backwards language - he pulls
Sapphire, Terriss and son from a bedroom mirror back into the
real world. Casting her voice, Sapphire tricks the beast into
looking into the mirror at the same moment she smashes it and
every other mirror within the house, sealing the creature in
the image dimension.
Comments: It's easy to see why
people reckon P. J. Hammond might have had a hand in these stories
- the use of pictures and mirrors as conveyances into other
dimensions foreshadows TV's Assignment Four. Even the closing
dialogue - "Every mirror in the house! Smash it!" - presages
Steel's line to Alison in that TV story. The words 'almost satanic
force' appear here and it's suggested that the hostile presence has used the psychic memory of Marcus as an unwanted child to 'inspire' the painting and provide its means of escape. The primordial beast
man is quite frighteningly portrayed, too. The colouring is
maybe a little bright in places and Ranson's work is broader
here and lacking its usual detail but the storyline more than
carries this one through.
