The Face (23 page)

Surely Fric had arrived safely at the top of the house. He had not been consumed and digested by demonically possessed machinery.

As best he could, Ethan smoothed that bizarre idea from his mind as he went to his apartment in the west wing.

CHAPTER 38

H
URRYING THE LENGTH OF THE LONG NORTH hall, Fric more than once looked worriedly over his shoulder, for he had always half believed that ghosts lurked in the lonelier corners of the great house. On this night, he was all but certain of their presence.

As he passed a gilded mirror set above an old-as-dirt console, he thought he glimpsed
two
figures in the age-discolored glass: he himself, but also someone taller, darker, hurrying just behind him.

In a tapestry that probably dated from before the last ice age, threatening-looking horsemen on dark steeds seemed to turn their heads to watch him pass. Peripherally, he thought he saw the horses—eyes wild, nostrils flared—begin to gallop through that fabric field and forest, as if intent on bolting out of their woven world and into the third-floor hallway.

Considering his current state of mind, Fric was not suited for work in a graveyard, a mortuary, a morgue, or in a cryogenics facility where gaggles of dead people were frozen in expectation that one day they could be thawed and returned to life.

In a movie, Ghost Dad had played Sherlock Holmes, who had turned out to be the first man ever to have his body scientifically frozen upon death. Holmes was revived in the year 2225, where a utopian society needed his help to solve the first murder in a hundred years.

Deleting either the evil robots or the evil aliens, or the evil mummies, would have made it a better movie. Sometimes a film could be
too
imaginative.

At this moment, however, Fric had no difficulty believing that Palazzo Rospo might be seething with ghosts, robots, aliens, mummies, and some unnameable thing worse than all the others, especially here on the third floor, where he was alone. Not
safely
alone, perhaps, but alone in the sense that he was the only living human presence.

His father’s bedroom and the suite of rooms related to it were on this level, in the west wing and along part of the north corridor. With Ghost Dad in residence, Fric had company in this high retreat, but most nights he dwelt alone here on the third floor.

Like now.

At the junction of the north and the east hallways, he stood as still as a corpsicle in a cryogenic vat, listening to the house.

Fric more imagined than heard the patter of rain. The roof was slate, well insulated, and far above even this high hallway.

The faint and inconstant sough of winter wind was but a memory from another time, for this was largely a windless night.

In addition to Fric’s suite, along the east hall were other chambers. Seldom-used guest bedrooms. A walk-in linen closet. An electric-utilities room crammed with equipment mysterious to Fric but reminiscent of Frankenstein’s laboratory. There was a small sitting room, richly furnished and well maintained, in which no one ever sat.

At the end of the hall lay the door to a set of back stairs that went down five stories, all the way to the lower garage. Another set of stairs, at the end of the west hall, also descended to the bottom of Palazzo Rospo. Neither was as wide or as grand, of course, as the main staircase, which featured a crystal chandelier at each landing.

The actress Cassandra Limone—born name, Sandy Leaky—who had lived with Fric’s father for five months, staying in the house even when he was absent, had churned up and down every staircase fifteen times a day, as part of her workout regimen. A well-equipped gym on the second floor offered a StairMaster among numerous machines, but Cassandra said the “authentic” stairs were less boring than the make-believe stairs and had a more natural effect on leg and butt muscles.

Slathered in sweat, grunting, squinting, grimacing, cursing like the possessed girl in
The Exorcist,
screeching at Fric if he happened onto the stairs when she was using them, climbing Cassandra would not have been recognizable to the editors at
People
magazine. They had twice selected her as one of the most beautiful people in the world.

Apparently, however, all the effort had been worthwhile. Ghost Dad had more than once told Cassandra that she was a deadly weapon because her calf muscles could crack a man’s skull, her thigh muscles could break any heart, and her butt could drive a man crazy.

Ha, ha, ha. Instead of testing your sense of humor, some jokes tested your gag reflex.

One day near the end of her stay, Cassandra had fallen down the back west stairs and broken an ankle.

Genuinely funny.

Now Fric followed the east hall not to his suite, but to the last room on the right before the stairs.

This inelegant space, measuring about twelve feet by fourteen, had a sturdy plank floor and bare white walls. Empty at the moment, it served as a staging point for the transferral of goods in and out of the attic.

A spacious dumbwaiter, driven by an electric motor, could carry up to four hundred pounds, allowing for the storage of heavy boxes and large objects in the vastness above. A door opened to a spiral staircase that also led to the attic.

Fric used the stairs. He climbed carefully, with one hand always on the railing, concerned that his amusement regarding Cassandra’s broken ankle would jinx him with a shattered leg of his own.

The attic extended the entire length and breadth of the mansion. The space was finished, not rough: plaster walls, solid plank floor covered with linoleum for easy cleaning.

Colonnades of massive vertical beams supported an elaborate trusswork of rafters that held up the roof. No partitions had been constructed between these beams, so the attic remained one great open room.

In practice, you could not see easily from one end of the high chamber to another, for suspended by wires from the rafters were hundreds of enormous, framed movie posters. Every one of them bore the name and giant image of Channing Manheim.

Fric’s father had made just twenty-two films, but he collected career-related items in every language. His movies were big box office worldwide, and any one project produced dozens of posters.

The hanging posters formed walls of a kind, and aisles, as did hundreds of stacked boxes packed full of Channing Manheim memorabilia that included T-shirts bearing his likeness and/or catchphrases from his films, wristwatches on which time ticked across his famous face, coffee mugs bearing
his
mug, hats, caps, jackets, drinking glasses, action figures, dolls, hundreds of different toys, lingerie, lockets, lunchboxes, and more merchandise than Fric could remember or imagine.

At every turn were life-size and larger-than-life, freestanding cardboard figures of Ghost Dad. Here he was a roughneck cowboy, there the captain of a spaceship, here a naval officer, there a jet pilot, a jungle explorer, a nineteenth-century cavalry officer, a doctor, a boxer, a policeman, a firefighter….

More elaborate cardboard dioramas featured the biggest star in the world in whole sets from his movies. These had been displayed in theater lobbies, and many of them, if supplied with batteries, would prove to have moving parts and flashing lights.

Cool props from his films lay on open metal shelves or leaned against the walls. Futuristic weapons, firemen’s helmets, soldiers’ helmets, a suit of armor, a robot spider the size of an armchair…

Larger props, like the time machine from
Future Imperfect,
were stored at a warehouse in Santa Monica. That facility and this attic featured museum-quality heating and humidifying systems to ensure the least possible deterioration of the items in the collection.

Ghost Dad had recently bought the estate next door to Palazzo Rospo. He intended to tear down the existing house on that adjacent property, connect the two parcels of land, and build a museum in the architectural style of Palazzo Rospo, to display his memorabilia.

Although his father had never said as much, Fric suspected that the intention was for the estate to be opened to the public one day, in the manner of Graceland, and that Fric himself would be expected to manage this operation.

If that day ever came, he would, of course, have to blow his brains out or throw himself off a tall building, or both, if he had not already successfully started a new, secret life under an assumed identity in Goose Crotch, Montana, or in some other town so remote and simple that the locals still referred to movies as “magic-lantern shows.”

Once in a while when he climbed into the attic to wander the Manheim maze, Fric was enchanted. Sometimes he was even thrilled to be a part of this almost-legendary, nearly magical enterprise.

At other times, he felt at most an inch tall and shrinking, an insignificant bug of a boy, in danger of being stepped on, smashed flat, and forgotten.

This evening, he felt neither inspired nor discouraged by the collection, for he toured it solely in search of a hiding place. In this labyrinth, surely he would discover a pocket of sanctuary among the memorabilia, where he could conceal himself and be protected by his father’s omnipresent face and name, which might ward off evil in much the way that garlic and a crucifix discouraged vampires.

He came to a seven-foot-high mirror in a frame of carved and hand-painted snakes writhing in jewel-colored tangles. In
Black Snow,
Fric’s father had seen glimpses of his future in this mirror.

Fric saw Fric, and Fric alone, squinting at his reflection as he sometimes did, trying to blur his image into someone taller and tougher than who he really was. As usual, he failed to fool himself into feeling heroic, but he was glad that the mirror didn’t reveal scenes from
his
future, confirming what a hopeless geek he would still be at thirty, forty, fifty.

As Fric stepped back from the mirror and began to turn away, the glass appeared to ripple, and a man came
through
it, a big man, looking plenty tough without having to squint. The grinning brute reached for Fric, and Fric ran for his life.

CHAPTER 39

T
ROUBLED AS NEVER BEFORE BY THE DARKNESS beyond the windows, Ethan went through his apartment, closing the drapes and shutting out the rainy night as if, in fact, it had a thousand eyes.

In his study, at his desk, he switched on the computer and engaged the house-control program. On the screen, icons appeared for the heating-cooling controls, the pool and spa heaters, the landscape watering and lighting, the interior lighting, the interlinked audio-video equipment, the electronic security apparatus, the telephones, and other systems.

Using his mouse, he clicked the telephone icon. A request for his password appeared, and he entered it.

Among everyone on the household staff, only Ethan could access
and
reprogram the security and the telephone systems.

The screen changed, offering him a new set of options.

The phones in his apartment featured all twenty-four lines, but only two were accessible to him. He could not eavesdrop on anyone’s calls, and they were likewise unable to overhear his.

Furthermore, when calls came through to other lines in the house, Ethan heard no ringing in his rooms. The indicator light above the number of each line did, however, flutter when a call was coming in, and it burned steadily when a conversation was being conducted.

Having entered the telephone program, Ethan edited the controls to make Line 23, Fric’s line, henceforth accessible to his apartment phones. It would also ring here using Fric’s personal tone.

With this task completed, he perused the day’s phone log.

Every incoming call to Palazzo Rospo and all outgoing calls as well were automatically logged—although not voice recorded. Note was made of the time that each connection had been effected and of the duration of each conversation.

For every outgoing call, the phone number was also preserved on the computer log. Incoming caller numbers were noted as well, except in those instances when they had Caller ID blocking to protect their privacy.

He entered his name and saw that he had received only one call while he’d been out of the house. The calls he’d made and received on his cell phone were not included in these records.

He snatched up the phone to check his voice mail. The call had been from the hospital, informing him of Dunny’s death.

When Ethan cleared his name and typed Aelfric’s, the computer reported that the boy had received no calls at any time on this date, Monday, December 21.

According to Fric, the breather had phoned twice. And at least once, the boy had tracked him back with *69. All three occurrences should have been noted.

Ethan jumped from Fric’s file to the master log, which listed all phone-line activity since the previous midnight in the order that the calls had been placed and received. The list was long because the staff had been busy making Christmas preparations.

Carefully scrolling through the log, Ethan found no calls to or from Fric’s line.

Unless the record-keeping system had erred, which it had never done before in Ethan’s experience, the inescapable conclusion had to be that Fric lied about receiving obscene calls.

His respect for the boy motivated Ethan to scroll through the phone log again, bottom to top this time. The result was the same.

As difficult as it might be to believe that the system had failed to note the calls that Fric reported, Ethan found it almost equally hard to accept that the kid had concocted the story of the heavy breather. Fric was not a self-dramatizer and certainly not an attention-seeker.

Besides, he had seemed genuinely disturbed when he’d recounted those calls.
He just breathed. And made some…some almost like animal sounds.

Aware of a winking brightness at the periphery of his vision, Ethan turned from the computer and saw the indicator light fluttering on Line 24. As he watched, the call was answered, a connection made, and the light burned steadily.

Line 24, the last line on the board, was set aside to receive phone calls from the dead.