The Face (24 page)

CHAPTER 40

W
HEN A FIERCE-LOOKING GUY COMES OUT of a mirror as though it’s a doorway, and when he grabs for you and snags your shirt with his fingertips, you could be excused for wetting your pants or for losing total control of your sphincter, so Fric was amazed that he didn’t instantly void from every orifice, that he reacted quickly enough to slip free of the snagging fingers, and that he raced away into the memorabilia maze in a totally dry and stink-free condition.

He turned left, right, right, left, vaulted over a low stack of boxes from one aisle into another, knocking between two huge posters as he went, raced past a life-size Ghost-Dad-as-1930s-detective, pushed between more posters, dodged around a realistic-looking Styrofoam unicorn from the one film in the Manheim credit list that no one dared talk about in his father’s presence, turned left, left, right, and halted when he realized that he had lost track of where he’d come from and that he might be returning in a circle to the serpent-embraced mirror.

In his wake, across a significant portion of the wide attic, the framed posters swung like giant pendulums. He had stirred some of them during his flight, but the wind of those dozen fanned others into gentler motion, perpetrating a wider disturbance.

Among all this movement, the approach of the mirror man was more difficult to discern than it would have been in an attic steeped in stillness. Fric couldn’t catch a glimpse of him.

Unless you were a skulking fiend with a sympathy for shadows, the lighting here was troublesome. Wall lamps ringed the perimeter of the attic, while others were mounted to some of the columns that supported the trusswork, though the number and brightness of them left much to be desired. The hanging palisades of posters, arrayed like flags from the many nations of Manheim, thwarted the even flow of light from aisle to aisle.

Crouched warily in gloom, Fric drew a deep breath, held it, listened.

At first he could hear nothing but the
didop-da-bidda-boom
of his skipping-drumming heart, but near the useful end of that banked breath, he began to hear, as well, the dash of rain on slate.

Aware that by his every noise he would locate himself for the stalking predator, Fric
eased
out the dead breath, coaxed in a live one, held it.

Higher in the house, he was also higher in the storm. Here the lonely sighing of the rain swelled into the whispers of a multitude exchanging sinister secrets in the sea of night that now submerged Palazzo Rospo.

Yet in the same way that he had focused himself to hear the rain above the drumbeat of his heart, he tuned in to the footsteps of the mirror man. The attic architecture, the pendulum motion of the giant posters, and the whiffle of the rain served to distort the sound, to make it seem that the intruder was going away from Fric, then coming closer, then going, when in fact he most likely made steady progress toward his quarry.

Fric had heeded Mysterious Caller’s advice to find a deep and secret hiding place. He had believed that he would need a refuge soon, but he hadn’t realized that he would need it
this
soon.

Learning to breathe and listen at the same time, he took to heart his dotty mother’s insistence that he was “an almost invisible perfect little mouse.” He crept with quiet quickness past the red-and-gold cardboard spires of a futuristic city over which his father—in cardboard—towered with a fearsome laser rifle at the ready.

At an intersection of aisles, Fric looked both ways, turned left. He scurried onward, analyzing the sound of the heavy footsteps as he went, calculating what route might best put distance between him and the man from the mirror.

The intruder made no effort at stealth. He seemed to
want
Fric to hear him, as though confident that the boy couldn’t evade capture.

Moloch. This must be Moloch. Looking for a child to take as a sacrifice, a child to kill, perhaps to eat.

He’s Moloch, with the splintered bones of babies stuck between his teeth….

Fric refrained from screaming for help, certain that he would not be heard by anyone other than the man-god-beast-thing who stalked him. The walls of the house were thick, the floors thicker than the walls, and no one was nearer than the second floor down in the middle of the mansion.

He might have sought a window and risked a ledge or a three-story drop. The attic had no windows.

A fake stone sarcophagus stood on end, decorated with carved hieroglyphics and the image of a dead pharaoh, no longer inhabited by the evil mummy that had once done battle with the biggest movie star in the world.

A steamer trunk, in which a ruthless and clever murderer (played by Richard Gere) had once crammed the corpse of a gorgeous blonde (actually the live body of the aforementioned Cassandra Limone), now stood empty.

Fric wasn’t tempted to hide in those containers, nor in the black-lacquered coffin, nor in the trick box in which a magician’s assistant could be made to disappear with the help of angled mirrors. Even the ones that weren’t coffins
seemed
like coffins, and he was sure that crawling into any of them would mean certain death.

The wise thing to do would be to keep moving, mouse-quick and mouse-quiet, staying low, staying loose, always several twists and turns ahead of the mirror man. Eventually he could circle back to the spiral staircase, descend from the attic, and flee to lower floors where help could be found.

Suddenly he realized that he could no longer hear the footsteps of his pursuer.

No cardboard Ghost Dad stood more still, no mummy under Egyptian sands rested any more breathless with its shriveled lungs, than Fric as he began to suspect that this new silence was a bad development.

A shadow floated overhead, treading air as though it were water.

Fric gasped, looked up.

The roof-supporting trusses rested atop the attic columns, five feet above his head. From one truss line to another, above the movie posters, a figure flew across the aisle, wingless but more graceful than a bird, leaping with the slow and weightless form exhibited by any astronaut in space, contemptuous of gravity.

This was no caped phantom, but a man in a suit, the one who had stepped out of the mirror, executing an impossible aerial ballet. He landed on a horizontal beam, pivoted toward Fric, and swooped down from his high perch, not like a plummeting stone, but like a feather, grinning exactly as Fric had imagined that evil Moloch, hungry for a child, would grin.

Fric turned and ran.

Although Moloch’s descent had been feather-slow, suddenly he was
here
. He seized Fric from behind, one arm around his chest, one hand over his face.

Fric tried desperately to wrench loose but was lifted off his feet as a mouse might be snatched off the ground by the talons of a hunting hawk.

For an instant, he thought that Moloch would fly up into the rafters with him, there to rip at him with fierce appetite.

They remained on the floor, but Moloch was already moving. He strode along as if certain of where each turning of the maze would take him.

Fric struggled, kicked, kicked, but seemed to be fighting nothing more substantial than water, caught in the dreamy currents of a nightmare.

The hand on his face pressed up from beneath his chin, a clamp that jammed teeth to teeth, forcing him to swallow his scream, and pinching shut his nose.

He was overcome by the panic familiar from his worst asthma attacks, the terror of suffocation. He couldn’t open his mouth to bite, couldn’t land a kick that mattered. Couldn’t
breathe
.

And yet a worse fear gripped him, clawed him, tore at his mind as they passed the mummy’s sarcophagus, passed a cardboard cop with Ghost Dad’s face: the horrifying thought that Moloch would carry him through the mirror and into a world of perpetual night where children were fattened like cattle for the pleasure of cannibal gods, where you wouldn’t find even the paid kindness of Mrs. McBee, where there was no hope at all, not even the hope of growing up.

CHAPTER 41

E
THAN GLANCED AT HIS WRISTWATCH, THEN AT the indicator light on Line 24, timing the telephone call.

He didn’t believe a dead person had dialed up Palazzo Rospo, dropping metaphysical coins into a pay phone on the Other Side. Dependably, this would be either a wrong number or a solicitation from a salesman with such a high-pressure approach that he would rattle out his spiel even to the answering machine that recorded these messages.

When Ming du Lac, spiritual adviser to the Face, had explained Line 24, Ethan had been perceptive enough to realize that Ming would be impatient with even so much as a raised eyebrow, and hostile to any expression of disbelief. He had managed to keep a straight face and a solemn voice.

Only Mrs. McBee on the household staff and only Ming du Lac among Manheim’s other associates had the influence to get the great man to fire Ethan. He knew exactly with whom he must tread softly.

Calls from the dead.

Everyone has answered the phone, heard silence, and said “Hello” again, assuming that the caller has been distracted by someone on his end or that there is a problem with the switching equipment. When a third “Hello” draws no response, we hang up, convinced that the call must have been a wrong number or from a crank, or the result of a technical glitch in the system.

Some people, the Face among them, believe that a portion of such calls originate with deceased friends or loved ones trying to reach us from Beyond. For some reason, according to this theory, the dead can make your phone ring, but they can’t as easily send their voices across the chasm between life and death; therefore, all you hear is silence or peculiar static, or on rare occasion whispery scraps of words as if from a great distance.

Upon investigating this subject after Ming explained the purpose of Line 24, Ethan had learned that researchers in the paranormal had made recordings on telephone lines left open between test numbers, operating on the assumption that if the dead could initiate a call, they might also take advantage of an open line specifically set aside to detect their communications.

Next, the researchers amplified and enhanced the faint sounds on the recordings. Indeed, they discovered voices that often spoke English, but also that sometimes spoke French, Spanish, Greek, and other languages.

Most of these whispery entities offered only scraps of sentences or disjointed words that made little sense, providing insufficient data for analysis.

Other, more complete “messages” could sometimes be construed as predictions or even dire warnings. They were always short, however, and often enigmatic.

Reason suggested that the recordings had caught only bleed-over conversations from living people using other lines in the telephone system.

In fact, many of the coherent snippets seemed to deal with matters too mundane to motivate the dead to reach out to the living: questions about the weather, about grandchildren’s latest report cards from school, bits like”…always loved pecan pie, yours best of all…” and “…better put your pennies away for a rainy day…” and “…at that cafe you like, the owner keeps a dangerously dirty kitchen…”

And yet…

And yet a few of the voices were said to be so haunted, so bleak with despair or so full of desperate love and concern, that they could not be forgotten, could not be easily explained, especially when the messages were delivered with urgency: “…fumes from the furnace, fumes, don’t go to sleep tonight, fumes…” and “…I never told you how much I love you, so much, please look for me when you come across, remember me…” and “…a man in a blue truck, don’t let him get near little Laura, don’t let him near her…”

These most eerie messages reported by paranormal researchers were what motivated Channing Manheim to maintain Line 24 strictly for the convenience of the chatty dead.

Every day, wherever they were in the world, Manheim and Ming du Lac used part of their meditation periods to broadcast mentally the area code plus the seven-digit number for Line 24, casting this baited hook into the sea of immortality with the hope that it would catch a spirit.

Thus far, over a period of three years, they had recorded only wrong numbers, sales pitches, and a series of calls from a hoaxer who, before Ethan’s arrival, had proved to be a security guard on the estate. He had been let go with generous severance pay and, according to Mrs. McBee, with a lecture from Ming du Lac to the effect that he would be wise to put his spiritual house in order.

The signal light winked off. This call had lasted one minute and twelve seconds.

Sometimes Ethan wondered how the Channing Manheim who managed an acting career so brilliantly and who had proved himself an investment wizard could be the same man who employed Ming du Lac and also a feng-shui adviser, a clairvoyance instructor, and a past-life researcher who spent forty hours a week tracking the actor’s reincarnations backward through the centuries.

On the other hand, the singular events of this day left him less certain of his usual skepticism.

He turned his attention to the computer screen once more, to the telephone log. He frowned, wondering why Fric would have invented the heavy breather.

If someone had in fact made obscene calls to the boy, chances were good that this related to the implied threats against Manheim that had come in those black boxes. Otherwise, there were two sources of threats that had arisen simultaneously. Ethan didn’t believe in coincidences.

The heavy breather might be the real-life inspiration for the “professor” mentioned in Reynerd’s partial screenplay, the man who had conspired to send the black gift boxes and to kill Manheim. If so, he had somehow acquired at least one of the house’s unlisted numbers: a disturbing development.

Yet the phone log had never failed to record any call in the past. And though they might err, machines didn’t lie.

The recent incoming call to Line 24 was now the last item on the day’s log. As it should be.

Ethan had timed the call at one minute twelve seconds. The monitoring software registered one minute fourteen seconds. He had no doubt that the two-second error was his.

According to the log, Caller ID blocking prevented notation of the point-of-origin number. That was peculiar if the call had been from a phone-sales agent, a breed now forbidden by law to block their ID, not peculiar at all if it had been a wrong number.

Neither was it unusual for a wrong number to have tied up the line for a minute or longer. The outgoing greeting on the special answering machine that serviced Line 24 was not an elaborate hello to those in the spirit world, but a simple “Please leave a message.” Some callers, failing to realize that they hadn’t reached the desired number, complied with that invitation.

Anyway, whoever called Line 24 wasn’t the issue. The question was if the ever-dependable machine had erred or lied in failing to record the calls that the boy claimed to have received.

Logically, Ethan could only conclude that the machine couldn’t be faulted. In the morning, he would have a talk with Fric.

On the desk beside the computer were the three silvery bells from the ambulance. He stared at them for a long time.

Beside the bells was a nine-by-twelve manila envelope that had been left here for him by Mrs. McBee. She had printed his name in matchless calligraphy.

As with all things McBee, her graceful penmanship made Ethan smile. She knew the best and most elegant way that every task ought to be performed, and she held herself to her own high standards.

He opened the envelope and confirmed a truth that he already knew: Freddie Nielander, Fric’s mother, was a braying jackass.