The Face (27 page)

Lying won’t get you anything but misery.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The sole proof of his tale was the crumpled photograph of the pretty lady with the gentle smile, which had been thrust into his hands by the man in the mirror.

He stared at the door to Mr. Truman’s apartment.

He looked at the photograph.

The photograph didn’t prove anything. He could have gotten it from anyone, from anywhere.

If the man in the mirror had given him a magic ring that allowed him to turn into a cat, or had given him a two-headed toad that spoke English out of one head and French out of the other, and sang Britney Spears tunes out of its butt,
that
would have been proof.

The photo amounted to nothing. Just a crumpled picture. Nothing more than a portrait of a pretty lady with a great smile, a stranger.

If Fric reported what had happened in the attic, Mr. Truman would think that he’d been smoking weed. He would lose whatever credibility he currently had.

Without knocking, he turned away from the door.

In this battle, he stood alone. Standing alone was nothing new, but it sure was getting tiresome.

CHAPTER 45

H
AVING EATEN TOO MUCH CHINESE TAKEOUT, having refreshed his knowledge of the more obscure corners of Palazzo Rospo, having fed the leftovers to the garbage disposal, Corky Laputa prepared a second martini and returned upstairs to the guest bedroom at the back of the house, where Stinky Cheese Man lay in a state of such emaciation that even ravenously hungry vultures would have considered him to be slim pickings and would have declined to sit deathwatch.

Corky called him Stinky Cheese Man because after many weeks abed, unbathed, he had acquired a stench reminiscent of many things objectionable, including certain particularly strong cheeses.

A long time had passed since Stinky had produced any solid waste. Odors associated with the bowel had therefore ceased to be an issue.

Upon first taking the man captive, Corky had catheterized him, with the consequence that urine-soaked bedclothes had never been a problem. The catheter line served a one-gallon glass collection jug beside the bed, which was currently only a quarter full.

The sour, biting stink resulted largely from weeks of repeated fear sweats left to dry without attention, and from natural skin oils accumulated so long that they had turned rancid. Sponge baths were not among the services that Corky provided.

Upon entering the bedroom, he put aside his martini and picked up a can of pine-scented disinfectant from the nightstand.

Stinky closed his eyes because he knew what was coming.

Corky pulled the sheet and blanket to the bottom of the bed and liberally sprayed his skeletal captive from head to foot. This was a quick and effective method of reducing the malodor to an acceptable level for the duration of their nightly chat.

Beside the bed stood a bar stool with a comfortably padded seat and back. Corky settled upon this perch.

A tall plant stand, crafted from oak and serving as a table, stood beside the stool. After taking a sip of his martini, Corky put it down on the plant stand.

He studied Stinky for a while, saying nothing.

Of course, Stinky didn’t speak because he had learned the hard way that it was not his place to initiate conversations.

Furthermore, his once robust voice had deteriorated until it was weaker than that of any terminal tuberculosis patient, marked by an eerie rasp and rattle: a voice like wind-driven sand scouring across ancient stone, like the brittle whispery click of scuttling scarabs. The sound of his voice scared Stinky these days, and speaking had become painful; evening by evening he said less.

In the early days, to prevent him from crying out loud enough to make the neighbors curious, his mouth had been taped shut. Tape was no longer necessary, for he could not project a worrisome volume of sound.

Initially, although maintained in a state of semiparal-ysis with drugs, Stinky had been chained to the bed. With the severe withering of his body, with the total collapse of his physical strength, the chains had become superfluous.

In Corky’s absence, the captive’s glucose drip always included drugs to keep him docile, as insurance against an unlikely escape.

Evenings, he was allowed a clear mind. For their sessions.

Now his fright-stricken eyes alternately avoided Corky and were drawn to him by magnetic dread. He lay in terror of what was to come.

Corky had never struck this man, had never employed physical torture. He never would.

With words and words alone he had broken his captive’s heart, had shattered his hope, had crushed his sense of self-worth. With words he would break his mind, as well, if in fact Stinky was not already insane.

Stinky’s real name was Maxwell Dalton. He had been a professor of English at the same university where Corky still enjoyed tenure.

Corky taught literature from a deconstructionist perspective, instilling in students the belief that language can never describe reality because words only refer to other words, not to anything real. He taught them that whether a piece of writing is a novel or a law, each person is the sole arbiter of what that writing says and what it means, that all truth is relative, that all moral principles are fraudulent interpretations of religious and philosophical texts that actually have no meaning other than what each person
wants
them to mean. These were deliciously destructive ideas, and Corky took great pride in his work as a teacher.

Professor Maxwell Dalton was a traditionalist. He believed in language, meaning, purpose, and principle.

For decades, Corky’s like-minded colleagues had controlled the English Department. In the past few years, Dalton had attempted to mount a revolt against meaninglessness.

He was a nuisance, a pest, a threat to the triumph of chaos. He admired the work of Charles Dickens and T. S. Eliot and Mark Twain. He was an unspeakably vile man.

Thanks to Rolf Reynerd, Dalton had been imprisoned in this bedroom for more than twelve weeks.

When Corky and Reynerd had sworn that together they would make a statement to the world by making a well-planned assault on Channing Manheim’s tightly guarded estate, they had also agreed that to prove the seriousness of their pledge, each would first commit a capital crime on behalf of the other. Corky would murder Reynerd’s mother; in return, the actor would kidnap Dalton and deliver him to Corky.

Keeping in mind how his intention to smother his own mother with a minimum of mess had so easily degenerated into a frenzied clubbing with a fireplace poker, Corky had obtained an untraceable handgun with which to despatch Mina Reynerd quickly, professionally, with a shot through the heart to ensure that there would be little blood.

Unfortunately, at that time, he’d not been expert in the use of firearms. His first shot hit her not in the heart, but in the foot.

Mrs. Reynerd had begun to scream in pain. For reasons that Corky still didn’t fully understand, instead of proceeding with the gun, he eventually discovered himself flailing away furiously with an antique marble-and-bronze lamp, which he severely damaged.

Later, he had apologized to Rolf for diminishing the value of this lovely heirloom.

True to his word, the actor had subsequently kidnapped Maxwell Dalton. He delivered the professor, unconscious, to this bedroom, where Corky had been waiting with a stock of refrigerated infusion bags and a supply of drugs required to keep his captive docile during the early weeks when Dalton still possessed the physical potential for resistance.

Since then, he had methodically starved his colleague, providing him with only sufficient nutrients, by intravenous drip, to keep him alive. Evening after evening, sometimes in the morning, he subjected Dalton to extreme psychological torment.

The good professor believed that his wife, Rachel, and his ten-year-old daughter, Emily, had been kidnapped as well. He thought that they were being kept in other rooms of this house.

Daily, Corky regaled Dalton with accounts of the indignities, abuses, and torments to which he had most recently subjected lovely Rachel and tender Emily. His reports were graphic, exquisitely crude, gloriously obscene.

His talent for pornographic invention surprised and delighted Corky, but he was more surprised that Dalton so readily accepted his stories as truth, withering with grief and despair when he listened to them. Had he been tending to
three
captives in addition to the demands of daily life, had he committed a fraction of the atrocities on Rachel and Emily that he claimed to have enjoyed, he would have been nearly as thin and weak as the starving man in the bed.

Corky’s mother, the economist and vicious academic infighter, would have been astonished to know that her son had proved to be a greater terror to at least one colleague than she had ever dreamed of being to one of hers. She would not have been capable of devising and executing such a complex and clever scheme as the one with which he had brought down Maxwell Dalton.

Mother had been motivated by envy, hatred. Free of envy, free of hatred, Corky was instead motivated by the dream of a better world through anarchy. She wanted to destroy a handful of enemies, while he wished to destroy
everything
.

Success often comes in greater measure to those with a greater vision.

Here at the end of an unusually successful day, Corky sat on his stool, overlooking the shrunken professor, and took small sips of his martini for perhaps ten minutes, saying nothing, letting the suspense build. Even during his busy hours in and out of the rain, he’d found the time to concoct a fabulously brutal story that might at last crack Dalton’s sanity as if it were a breadstick.

Corky intended to report that he had murdered Rachel, the wife. Considering Dalton’s extremely fragile condition, perhaps that lie, if well told, would precipitate a fatal heart attack.

Should the professor survive this hideous news, he would be informed in the morning that his daughter had been killed as well. Maybe the second shock would finish him.

One way or another, Corky was ready to be done with Maxwell Dalton. He’d squeezed all the entertainment value out of this situation. The time had come to move on.

Besides, soon he would need this room for Aelfric Manheim.

CHAPTER 46

N
IGHT ON THE MOON, CRATERED AND COLD, could be no less lonely than this night in the Manheim mansion.

Within, the only sounds were Fric’s footsteps, his breathing, the faint creak of hinges when he opened a door.

Outside, a changeable wind, alternately menacing and melancholy, quarreled with the trees, raised lamentations in the eaves, battered the walls, moaned as if in sorrowful protest of its exclusion from the house. Rain rapped angrily against the windows, but then cried silently down the leaded panes.

For a while, Fric believed that he would be safer on the move than settled in any one place, that when he stopped, unseen forces would at once begin to gather around him. Besides, on his feet, in motion, he could break into a run and more readily escape.

His father believed that when a child reached the age of six, an arbitrary bedtime should not be forced on him, but that he should be allowed to find his personal circadian rhythms. Consequently, for years, Fric had been going to bed when he wanted, sometimes at nine o’clock, sometimes after midnight.

Soon, ceaselessly rambling, turning lights on ahead of him and leaving them aglow in his wake, he grew tired. He had thought that the possibility of Moloch, child-eating god, walking out of a mirror at any moment would keep him awake for the rest of his life or at least until he turned eighteen and no longer qualified as a child under most definitions. Fear, however, proved as exhausting as hard labor.

Worried that he might slump upon a sofa or a chair and fall asleep in a place that made him more vulnerable than necessary, he considered returning to the west wing on the ground floor, where he could curl up outside Mr. Truman’s apartment. If Mr. Truman or the McBees found him sleeping there, however, he would appear to be a gutless weenie and an embarrassment to the name Manheim.

He decided that the library offered the best refuge. He always felt comfortable among books. And although the library lay on the second floor, which was as lonely as the third, it had no mirrors.

The tree of angels greeted him.

He recoiled from the winged multitude.

Then he realized that this evergreen featured not a single shiny ornament from which an evil other-dimensional entity could pass into this world or watch from another.

Indeed, the dangling angels seemed to suggest that here was a protected place, true sanctuary.

Throughout the massive chamber, the decorative urns and pots and amphorae and figurines were either Wedgwood basalts with Empire-period themes or Han Dynasty porcelains. The basalts were all matte-finish black, not shiny. Two thousand years had worn the luster from the glaze on the Han pieces, and Fric had no concern that an ancient figure of a horse or a water jar made before the birth of Christ might serve as a peephole through which he could be watched by some wicked creature in a neighboring dimension.

At the back of the library, a door led to a powder room. Using a straight-backed chair, Fric wedged this door securely shut without daring to open it, for above the sink in the powder room, a mirror waited.

This sensible precaution presented a minor problem easily resolved. He had to pee, so he relieved himself in a potted palm.

Always he washed his hands after toileting. This time he would have to risk contamination, disease, and plague.

At least twenty potted palms were distributed throughout the big room. He made a point of remembering which one he had sprinkled, to avoid killing off the entire library rainforest.

He returned to the conversation area nearest the Christmas tree and the battalion of sentinel angels. Surely this was a safe place.

The arrangement of armchairs and footstools included a sofa. Fric was about to stretch out on this makeshift bed when the silence gave way to a cheerful child-pleasing sound suitable for the nursery or the bedrooms of younger children.

Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.

The telephone stood on a piece of furniture that Mrs. McBee referred to as an “escritoire,” but which was still a writing desk to Fric. He stood beside it, watching the signal light flutter at his private line each time that the phone rang.

Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.

He expected Mr. Truman to answer the call by the third ring.

Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.

Mr. Truman didn’t respond.

The phone rang a fourth time. A fifth.

The voice-mail system didn’t take the call, either.

Six rings. Seven.

Fric refused to pick up the handset.

Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo
.

In his apartment, Ethan had retrieved the six black-box items from a cabinet and had arranged them on his desk in the order that they had been received.

He had switched off the computer.

The phone was near at hand, where he could intercept calls to Fric should that line in fact ring, and where he would notice the indicator light on Line 24 if it signaled additional incoming calls. Traffic on this messages-from-the-dead line seemed to be increasing, which disturbed him for reasons he could not articulate, and he wanted to keep an eye on the situation.

Sitting in his desk chair with a can of Coke, he considered the elements of the riddle.

The small jar containing twenty-two dead ladybugs.
Hippodamia convergens,
of the family Coccinellidae.

Another, larger jar into which he had transferred the ten dead snails. An uglier sight by the day.

A pickle-relish jar holding nine foreskins in formaldehyde. The tenth had been destroyed by the lab in the process of analysis.

The closed drapes muffled the snap of rain on glass, the threat of wind enraged.

Beetles, snails, foreskins…

For some reason, Ethan’s attention drifted to the phone, though it hadn’t rung. No indicator light burned on Line 24 or on any of the first twenty-three.

He tipped the Coke can, took a swallow.

Beetles, snails, foreskins…

Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.

Maybe Mr. Truman had slipped and fallen and hit his head, and maybe he lay unconscious, oblivious of the ringing. Or maybe he had been carried off into a land beyond a mirror. Or maybe he had just forgotten to modify the system to receive Fric’s private calls.

The caller would not give up. After twenty-one repetitions of the stupid child-pleasing tones, Fric decided that if he didn’t pick up the phone, he would have to listen to it ringing all night.

The slight tremor in his voice dismayed him, but he persevered: “Vinnie’s Soda Parlor and Vomitorium, home of the nine-pound ice-cream sundae, where you splurge and then purge.”

“Hello, Aelfric,” said Mysterious Caller.

“I can’t make up my mind whether you’re a pervert or a friend like you say. I’m leaning toward pervert.”

“You’re leaning wrong. Look around you for the truth, Aelfric.”

“Look around me at what?”

“At what’s there with you in the library.”

“I’m in the kitchen.”

“By now you ought to realize that you can’t lie to me.”

“My deep and secret hiding place is going to be one of the bigger ovens. I’ll crawl inside and pull the door shut behind me.”

“You better baste yourself in butter, because Moloch will just turn on the gas.”

“Moloch has already been here,” Fric said.

“That wasn’t Moloch. That was me.”

Receiving this revelation, Fric almost slammed down the phone.

Mysterious Caller said, “I paid you a visit because I wanted you to understand, Aelfric, that you really
are
at risk, and that time really
is
running out. If I’d been Moloch, you’d be toast.”

“You came out of a mirror,” said Fric, his curiosity and sense of wonder for the moment outweighing his fear.

“And I went back into one.”

“How can you come out of a mirror?”

“For the answer, look around you, son.”

Fric surveyed the library.

“What do you see?” asked Mysterious Caller.

“Books.”

“Oh? You have a lot of books there in the kitchen?”

“I’m in the library.”

“Ah, truth. There’s hope that you’ll avoid at least some misery, after all. What else do you see besides books?”

“A writing desk. Chairs. A sofa.”

“Keep looking.”

“A Christmas tree.”

“There you go.”

“There I go where?” asked Fric.

“What dingles and what dangles?”

“Huh?”

“And is spelled almost like
angles.
”

“Angels,” Fric said, surveying the radiant white flock that gathered with trumpets and harps upon the tree.

“I travel by mirrors, by mist, by smoke, by doorways in water, by stairways made of shadows, on roads of moonlight, by wish and hope and simple expectation. I’ve given up my car.”

Amazed, Fric clenched the phone so hard that his hand ached, as if he might squeeze a few more revealing words from the mirror man.

Mysterious Caller met silence with silence, waited.

Of all the kinds of weirdness Fric had been expecting, this had not been on the list.

Finally, with a tremor of a different quality in his voice, he said, “Are you telling me you’re an angel?”

“Do you believe I could be?”

“My…guardian angel?”

Instead of answering directly, the mirror man said, “Believing is important in all this, Aelfric. In many ways, the world is what we make it, and our future is ours to shape.”

“My father says that our future is in the stars, our fate set when we’re born.”

“There’s much in your old man to admire, son, but as far as his thoughts on fate are concerned, he’s full of shit.”

“Wow,” said Fric, “can angels say ‘shit’?”

“I just did. But then I’m new at this, and I’m quite capable of making a mistake now and then.”

“You’re still wearing your training wings.”

“You could say that. Anyway, I don’t want to see any harm come to you, Aelfric. But I alone can’t guarantee your safety. You’ve got to help save yourself from Moloch when he comes.”

Beetles, snails, foreskins…

On Ethan’s desk with the other items stood the cookie-jar kitten filled with two hundred seventy tiles, ninety each of
O, W,
and
E
.

Owe. Woe. Wee woo. Ewe woo.

Beside the cookie jar lay
Paws for Reflection,
the hardcover book by Donald Gainsworth, who had trained guide dogs for the blind and service dogs for people in wheelchairs.

Beetles, snails, foreskins, cookie jar with tiles, book…

Next to the book stood the sutured apple opened to reveal the doll’s eye. T
HE EYE IN THE APPLE?
T
HE WATCHFUL WORM?
T
HE WORM OF ORIGINAL SIN?
D
O WORDS HAVE ANY PURPOSE OTHER THAN CONFUSION?

Ethan had a headache. He probably ought to be grateful that a headache was all he had, after dying twice.

Leaving the six gifts from Reynerd on the desk, he went into the bathroom. He took a bottle of aspirin from the medicine cabinet and shook a pair of tablets into his hand.

He intended to draw a glass of water from the bathroom sink and take the aspirin. When he glanced in the mirror, however, he found himself looking at his reflection only briefly, then searching for a shadowy form that shouldn’t be there, that might slide away from his eyes as he tried to pin it with his stare, as in the bathroom at Dunny’s penthouse apartment.