Everyone on the estate had been assigned a different sound for the line or lines that were dedicated to him or her. Each of Ghost Dad’s lines produced a simple brrrrrrrr. Mrs. McBee’s signature tone was a series of musical chimes. Mr. Truman’s lines played the first nine notes from the theme song of an ancient TV cop show, Dragnet, which was stupid, and Mr. Truman thought so, too, but he endured it.
This highly sophisticated telephone system could produce up to twelve different signature tones. Eight were standard. Four—like Dragnet—could be custom-designed for the client.
Fric had been assigned the dumbest of the standard tones, which the phone manufacturer described as “a cheerful child-pleasing sound suitable for the nursery or the bedrooms of younger children.” Why infants in nurseries or toddlers in cribs ought to have their own telephones remained a mystery to Fric.
Were they going to call Babies R Us and order lobster-flavored teething rings? Maybe they would phone their mommies and say, Yuch. I crapped in my diaper, and it don’t feel good.
Stupid.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo, said the train-room phones.
Fric hated the sound. He had hated it when he’d been six, and he hated it even worse now.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
This was the annoying sound that might be made by some furry, roly-poly, pink, half-bear, half-dog, half-wit character in a video made for preschoolers who thought stupid shows like Teletubbies were the pinnacle of humor and sophistication.
Humiliated even though he was alone, Fric pushed two transformer switches to kill power to the trains, and he answered the phone on the fourth ring. “Bob’s Burger Barn and Cockroach Farm,” he said. “Our special today is salmonella on toast with coleslaw for a buck.”
“Hello, Aelfric,” a man said.
Fric had expected to hear his father’s voice. If instead he had heard the voice of Nominal Mom, he would have suffered cardiac arrest and dropped dead into the train controls.
The entire estate staff, with the possible exception of Chef Hachette, would have mourned for him. They would have been deeply, terribly sad. Deeply, deeply, terribly, terribly. For about forty minutes. Then they would have been busy, busy, busy preparing for the post-funeral gala to which would be invited perhaps a thousand famous and near-famous drunks, druggies, and butt-kissers eager to plant their lips on Ghost Dad’s golden ass.
“Who’s this?” Fric asked.
“Are you enjoying the trains, Fric?”
Fric had never heard this voice before. No one on the staff. Definitely a stranger.
Most of the people in the house didn’t know that Fric was in the train room, and no one outside the estate could possibly know.
“How do you know about the trains?”
The man said, “Oh, I know lots of things other people don’t. Just like you, Fric. Just like you.”
The talented hairs on the back of Fric’s neck did impressions of scurrying spiders.
“Who are you?”
“You don’t know me,” the man said. “When does your father return from Florida?”
“If you know so much, why don’t you tell me?”
“December twenty-fourth. In the early afternoon. Christmas Eve,” the stranger said.
Fric wasn’t impressed. Millions of people knew his old man’s whereabouts and his Christmas plans. Just a week ago, Ghost Dad had done a spot on Entertainment Tonight, talking about the film that he was shooting and about how much he looked forward to going home for the holidays.
“Fric, I’d like to be your friend.”
“What’re you, a pervert?”
Fric had heard about perverts. Heck, he’d probably met hundreds of them. He didn’t know all the things they might do to a kid, and he wasn’t exactly sure what thing they liked most to do, but he knew they were out there with their collections of kids’ eyeballs, wearing necklaces made out of their victims’ bones.
“I have no desire to hurt you,” said the stranger, which was no doubt what any pervert would have said. “Quite the opposite. I want to help you, Fric.”
“Help me do what?”
“Survive.”
“What’s your name?”
“I don’t have a name.”
“Everyone has to have a name, even if it’s just one, like Cher or Godzilla.”
“Not me. I’m only one among multitudes, nameless now. There’s trouble coming, young Fric, and you need to be ready for it.”
“What trouble?”
“Do you know of a place in your house where you could hide and never be found?” the stranger asked.
“That’s a weird-ass question.”
“You’re going to need a place to hide where no one can find you, Fric. A deep and special secret place.”
“Hide from who?”
“I can’t tell you that. Let’s just call him the Beast in Yellow. But you’re going to need a secret place real soon.”
Fric knew that he should hang up, that it might be dangerous to play along with this nutball. Most likely he was a pathetic pervert loser who got lucky with a phone number and would sooner or later start with the dirty talk. But the guy might also be a sorcerer who could cast a spell long distance, or he might be an evil psychologist who could hypnotize a boy over the telephone and make him rob liquor stores and then make him turn over all the money while clucking like a chicken.
Aware of those risks and many more, Fric nevertheless stayed on the line. This was by far the most interesting phone conversation he’d ever had.
Just in case this guy with no name happened to be the one from whom he might need to hide, Fric said, “Anyway, I’ve got bodyguards, and they carry submachine guns.”
“That’s not true, Aelfric. Lying won’t get you anything but misery. There’s heavy security on the estate, but it won’t be good enough when the time comes, when the Beast in Yellow shows up.”
“It is true,” Fric deceitfully insisted. “My bodyguards are former Delta Force commandos, and one of them was even Mr. Universe before that. They can for sure kick major ass.”
The stranger didn’t respond.
After a couple seconds, Fric said, “Hello? You there?”
The man spoke in a whisper now. “Seems like I have a visitor, Fric. I’ll call you again later.” His whisper subsided to a murmur that Fric had to strain to hear. “Meanwhile, you start looking for that deep and special hiding place. There’s not much time.”
“Wait,” Fric said, but the line went dead.
CHAPTER 14
GUN READY, MUZZLE UP, CHAMBER BY HALL by chamber, through Dunny Whistler’s nautilus apartment, Ethan came to the bedroom.
One nightstand lamp had been left on. Against the headboard of the Chinese sleigh bed, decorative silk pillows fashioned from cheongsam fabrics had been artfully arranged by the housekeeper.
Also on the bed, cast off with evident haste, lay articles of men’s clothing. Wrinkled, stained, still damp from the rain. Slacks, shirt, socks, underwear.
Tumbled in a corner were a pair of shoes.
Ethan didn’t know what Dunny had been wearing when he had left the morgue at Our Lady of Angels Hospital. However, he wouldn’t have wagered a penny against the proposition that these were the very clothes.
Moving closer to the bed, he detected the faint malodor that he’d first smelled in the elevator. Some of the components of the scent were more easily identified than they had been earlier: stale perspiration, a whiff of rancid ointment with a sulfate base, thin fumes of sour urine. The smell of illness, of being long abed and bathed only with basin and sponge.
Ethan became aware of a background sizzle, which he initially mistook for a new manifestation of the rain. Then he realized that he was listening to the fall of water in the master-bathroom shower.
The bathroom door stood ajar. Past the jamb and through the gap, with the sizzle came a wedge of light and wisps of steam.
He eased the door all the way open.
Golden marble sheathed the fl
oor, the walls. In the black granite countertop, two black ceramic sinks were served by brushed-gold spouts and faucets.
Above the counter, a long expanse of beveled mirror, hazed with condensation, failed to present a clear reflection. His distorted shape moved under that frosted surface, like a strange pale something glimpsed swimming just beneath the shadow-dappled surface of a pond.
Veils of steam floated in the air.
Within the bathroom was a water closet. The door stood open, the toilet visible. No one in there.
Dunny had nearly been drowned in this toilet.
Neighbors in a fourth-floor apartment had heard him struggling furiously for his life, shouting for help.
Police arrived quickly and caught the assailants in desperate flight. They found Dunny lying on his side in front of the toilet, semiconscious and coughing up water.
By the time the ambulance arrived, he had fallen into a coma.
His attackers—who’d come for money, vengeance, or both—had not been cheated recently by Dunny. They had been in prison for six years and, only recently released, had come to settle a long-overdue account.
Dunny might have hoped to journey far from his life of crime, but old sins had caught up with him that night.
Now on the bathroom floor lay two rumpled, damp black towels. Two dry towels still hung on the rack.
The shower was in the far-right corner from the entrance to the bathroom. Even if the steam-opaqued glass door had been clear, Ethan couldn’t have seen into that cubicle from any distance.
Approaching the stall, he had an image in his mind of the Dunny Whistler whom he expected to encounter. Skin sickly pale where not a lifeless gray, impervious to the pinking effect of hot water. Gray eyes, the whites now pure crimson with hemorrhages.
Still holding the gun in his right hand, he gripped the door with his left and, after a hesitation, pulled it open.
The stall was unoccupied. Water beat upon the marble floor and swirled down the drain.
Leaning into the stall, he reached behind the cascade, to the single control, and turned off the flow.
The sudden silence in the wake of the watery sizzle seemed to announce his presence as clearly as if he had triggered an air horn.
Nervously, he turned toward the bathroom entrance, expecting some response, but not sure what that might be.
Even with the water turned off, steam continued to escape the shower, though in thinner veils, pouring over the top of the glass door and around Ethan.
In spite of the moist air, his mouth had gone dry. Pressed together, tongue and palate came apart as reluctantly as two strips of Velcro.
When he started toward the bathroom door, his attention was drawn again to the movement of his vague and distorted reflection in the clouded mirror above the sinks.
Then he saw the impossible shape, which brought him to a halt.
In the mirror, under the skin of condensation, loomed a pale form as blurred as Ethan’s veiled image but nonetheless recognizable as a figure, man or woman.
Ethan was alone. A quick survey of the bathroom failed to reveal any object or any fluke of architecture that the misted mirror might trick into a ghostly human shape.
So he closed his eyes. Opened them. Still the shape.
He could hear only his heart now, only his heart, not fast, but faster, sledgehammer heavy, pounding and pounding, slamming blood to his brain to flush out unreason.
Of course his imagination had given meaning to a meaningless blur in a mirror, in the same way that he might have found men and dragons and all kinds of fanciful creatures among the clouds in a summer sky. Imagination. Of course.
But then this man, this dragon, whatever—it moved in the mirror. Not much: a little, enough to make Ethan’s sledgehammer heart stutter between blows.
Maybe the movement also was imaginary.
Hesitantly he approached the mirror. He didn’t step directly in front of the phantom form, for in spite of the strong rush of blood that ought to have clarified his thinking, Ethan suffered from the superstitious conviction that something terrible would happen to him if his reflection were to overlay the ghostly shape.
Surely the movement of the misted apparition had been imaginary, but if it had been, then he imagined it again. The figure seemed to be motioning for him to come forward, closer.
Ethan would not have admitted to Hazard Yancy or to any other cop from the old days, perhaps not even to Hannah if she were alive, that when he put his hand to the mirror, he half expected to feel not wet glass, but the hand of another, making contact from a cold and forbidding Elsewhere.
He swabbed away an arc of mist, leaving a glimmering smear of water.
Even as Ethan’s hand moved, so did the phantom in the mirror, sliding away from the cleansing swipe. Cunningly elusive, it remained behind the shielding condensation—and moved directly in front of him.
With the exception of his face, Ethan’s vague reflection in the misted glass had been dark because his clothes were dark, his hair. The steam-frosted shape now before him rose as pale as moonlight and moth wings, impossibly supplanting his own image.
Fear knocked on his heart, but he wouldn’t let it in, as when he’d been a cop under fire and dared not panic.
Anyway, he felt as though he were half in a trance, accepting the impossible here as he might easily accept it in a dream.
The apparition leaned toward him, as if trying to discern his nature from the far side of the silvered glass, in much the same way that he himself leaned forward to study it.
Raising his hand once more, Ethan tentatively wiped away a narrow swath of mist, fully expecting that when he came eye to eye with his reflection, the eyes would not be his, but gray like Dunny Whistler’s eyes.
Again the mystery in the mirror moved, quicker than Ethan’s hand, remaining blurred behind the frosting of condensation.
Only when breath exploded from Ethan did he realize that he had been holding it.
On the inhale, he heard a crash in a far room of the apartment, the brittle music of shattering glass.
CHAPTER 15
ETHAN HAD TOLD PALOMAR LABORATORIES TO analyze his blood for traces of illicit chemicals, in case he’d been drugged without his knowledge. During the events at Reynerd’s apartment house, he had almost seemed to be in an altered state of consciousness.
Now, leaving the steamy bathroom, he felt no less disoriented than when, after being gut shot, he had found himself behind the wheel of the Expedition once more, unharmed.
Whatever had happened—or had only seemed to happen—at the mirror, he no longer entirely trusted his senses. As a consequence, he proceeded with greater caution than before, assuming that yet again things might not be as they appeared to be.
He passed through rooms he’d already searched and then into new territory, arriving at last in the kitchen. Shattered glass sparkled on the breakfast table and littered the floor.
Also on the floor lay the silver picture frame missing from the desk in the study. The photo of Hannah had been stripped out of it.
Whoever had taken the picture had been in too great a hurry to release the four fasteners on the back of the frame, and had instead smashed the glass.
The rear door of the apartment stood open.
Beyond lay a wide hall that served the back of both penthouse units. At the nearer end, an exit sign marked a stairwell. Toward the farther end was a freight elevator big enough to carry refrigerators and large pieces of furniture.
If someone had taken the freight route down, he had already completed his descent. No sound issued from the elevator machinery.
Ethan hurried to the stairs. Opened the fire door. Paused on the threshold, listening.
Groan or moan, or melancholy sigh, or clank of chains: Even a ghost ought to make a sound, but only a cold hollow silence rose out of the stairwell.
He went down quickly, ten flights to the ground floor, then another two flights to the garage. He encountered neither a flesh-and-blo
od resident nor a spirit.
The scent of sickness and fever sweats, first detected in the elevator, didn’t linger here. Instead, he smelled a faint soapy odor, as if someone fresh from a bath had passed this way. And a trace of spicy aftershave.
Pushing open the steel fire door, stepping into the garage, he heard an engine, smelled exhaust fumes. Of the forty parking stalls, many were empty at this hour on a work day.
Toward the front of the garage, a car backed out of a stall. Ethan recognized Dunny’s midnight-blue Mercedes sedan.
Triggered by remote control, the garage gate was already rising with a steely clack and clatter.
Pistol still in hand, Ethan ran toward the car as it pulled away from him. The gate rose slowly, and the Mercedes had to stop for it. Through the rear window, he could see the silhouette of a man behind the steering wheel, but not clearly enough to make an identification.
Drawing near to the Mercedes, he swung wide of it. He intended to go directly to the driver’s door.
The car shot forward while the barrier continued to rise, before it was fully out of the way. The roof of the Mercedes came within a fraction of an inch of leaving a generous paint sample on the bottom rail of the ascending gate, and raced up the steep exit ramp to the street.
The driver thumbed CLOSE on his remote even as he passed under the gate, which was clattering down again when Ethan reached it. Already the Mercedes had turned out of sight into the street above.
He stood there for a moment, peering through the gate into the gray storm light.
Rainwater streamed down the driveway ramp. Foaming, it vanished through the slots of a drain in the pavement immediately outside the garage.
On that concrete incline, a small lizard, back broken by a car tire, but still alive, struggled gamely against the sluicing water. So persistently did it twitch upward inch by inch that it seemed to believe all its needs could be satisfied and all its injuries healed by some power at the summit.
Not wanting to see the little creature inevitably defeated and washed down to die upon the drain grate, Ethan turned away from the sight of it.