All were six to eight years old. Some were better dressed for the rain and the cold than others were, but all remained unflaggingly exuberant, dancing-playing-chasing in the nasty night, as though they were storm petrels born to wet wind and turbulent skies.
Focused on the hubbub of cops and ambulances, the adults stood oblivious of their offspring. The kids were wise enough to understand that as long as they played on the lawn behind their elders and kept their chatter below a certain volume, they could prolong their night adventure indefinitely.
In this paranoid age, a stranger dared not offer candy to any child. Even the most gullible among them would shriek for the cops at the offer of a lollipop.
Corky had no lollipops, but he traveled with a bag of luscious, chewy caramels.
He waited until the kids’ attention turned elsewhere, whereupon he extracted the bag from a deep inner pocket of his slicker. He dropped it on the grass where the children were sure to find it when their games brought them in this direction again.
He hadn’t laced the candy with poison, but only with a potent hallucinogenic. Terror and disorder could be spread through society by means more subtle than extreme violence.
The amount of drug infused in each sweet morsel was small enough that even a child who greedily stuffed his face with six or eight of them would not risk toxic overdose. By the third piece, the waking nightmares would begin.
Corky mingled a while longer with the adults, surreptitiously observing the children, until two girls found the bag. Being girls, they at once generously shared the contents with the four boys.
This particular drug, unless taken in concert with a mellowing antidepressant like Prozac, was known to cause hallucinations so horrific that they tested the user’s sanity. Soon, the kids would believe that mouths, bristling with sharp teeth and serpent tongues, had opened in the earth to swallow them, that alien parasites were bursting from their chests, and that everyone they knew and loved now intended to rend them limb from limb. Even after they recovered, flashbacks would trouble them for months, possibly for years.
Having sown these seeds of chaos, he returned to his car through the refreshingly cool night and cleansing rain.
If he had been born in an earlier century, Corky Laputa would have followed the original trail of Johnny Appleseed, killing one by one all the trees that the fabled orchardist had planted on this continent.
CHAPTER 31
IF FRIC HAD SUSPECTED THAT THE WINE CELLAR was haunted or that something less than human prowled its channels and chambers, he would have eaten dinner in his bedroom.
He proceeded without caution.
Likening the separation noise of the rubber seal to the sucking sound made by popping the lid off a vacuum-packed can of peanuts, Fric opened the thick glass door in the insulated-glass wall.
He stepped out of the wine-tasting room into the wine cellar proper. Here the temperature was maintained at a constant fifty-five degrees.
Fourteen thousand bottles required a lot of racks—a maze of racks. These weren’t simply arranged like aisles in a supermarket. Instead, they lined a cozy brick labyrinth of vaulted passageways that intersected at circular grottoes ringed by more racks.
Four times each year, every bottle in the collection was gently rotated a quarter turn—ninety degrees—in its niche. This ensured that no edge of any cork would dry out and that the sediment would settle properly to the bottom of each punt.
The two porters, Mr. Worthy and Mr. Phan, were able to attend to the turning of the wine bottles for only four hours a day due to the tediousness of the work, the measured care that it required, and the havoc that it caused with neck and shoulder muscles. Each man could properly rotate between twelve hundred and thirteen hundred bottles per four-hour session.
Through a flow of cool dry air that pumped ceaselessly from ceiling vents, Fric followed a narrow dome-vaulted passageway of Pinot Noir to a wider groin-vaulted corridor of Cabernet, circled a curiously coved grotto of Lafitte Rothschild stocked with various vintages, continued through a tunnel of Merlot, in search of a place where he would be able to hide without fear of discovery.
Arriving in an elongated-oval gallery stocked with French Burgundy, he thought he heard footsteps other than his own, elsewhere in the maze. He froze, listened.
Nothing. Just the whispery voice of the perpetual wine-cooling draft lazily entering the gallery by one passageway, leaving by a second.
The fluttering false flames of the fake gas lamps, which were wall-mounted in some places but also hung from grotto ceilings where height allowed, caused shimmers of light to chase twists of shadow along the racks and brickwork. This meaningless but spooky movement teased the mind into hearing footsteps that probably weren’t there.
Probably.
Proceeding less boldly than before, occasionally glancing over his shoulder, he moved on with the gentle draft.
Other wine cellars might be musty dens in which time shed skin after skin of dust, leaving a record of its unending progress. In fact a dusty film on the bottles was often considered good ambience.
Fric’s father had an almost obsessive aversion to dust, however, and none could be found in this place. Taking special care not to disturb the bottles, the staff vacuumed the racks once a month, as well as the ceiling, walls, and floor.
Here and there in the corners of the passageways and more often in the shadowed curves of the masonry ceiling vaults were delicate spider webs. Some were simple, others elaborate.
No eight-legged architects could be glimpsed at home in these constructions. Spiders were not tolerated.
When at work, the housekeepers kept the vacuum cleaner away from these gossamer architectures, which had been made not by spiders but by a specialist in set decoration from Ghost Dad’s favorite film studio. Nevertheless, the webs deteriorated. Twice a year, Mr. Knute, the set decorator, swabbed them off the bricks and then rebuilt them as good as new.
The wine itself was real.
Turn by turn through the labyrinth, Fric calculated how long his father could stay blind drunk on wine before exhausting the contents of this cellar.
Certain assumptions had to be made, the first being that Ghost Dad would sleep eight hours a night. Perpetually soused, he might sleep longer; however, in the interest of keeping these calculations simple, an arbitrary number must be selected. Eight.
Also assume that a grown man could stay seriously drunk by consuming one bottle of wine every three hours. To establish a state of inebriation, the first bottle might have to be slugged down in an hour or two, but after that, one every three hours.
This was actually not an assumption but hard knowledge. Fric had on numerous occasions been in a position to observe actors, writers, rock stars, directors, and other famous drunks with a taste for fine wine, and while some could pour it down faster than one bottle every three hours, those aggressive drinkers always passed out.
Okay. Five bottles spread over each sixteen-hour day. Divide fourteen thousand by five. Twenty-eight hundred.
The contents of this cellar ought to keep Ghost Dad shitfaced for twenty-eight hundred days. So then divide 2, 800 by 365…
Over seven and a half years. The old man could stay blind drunk until Fric had graduated from high school and had run away to join the United States Marine Corps.
Of course, the biggest movie star in the world never drank more than one glass of wine with dinner. He didn’t use drugs at all—not even pot, which everyone else in Hollywood seemed to think was just a health food. “I’m far from perfect,” he’d once told a reporter for Premiere magazine, “but all my faults and failures and foibles tend to be spiritual in nature.”
Fric had no idea what that meant, even though he’d spent more than a little time trying to figure it out.
Maybe Ming du Lac, his father’s full-time spiritual adviser, could have explained the quote. Fric never dared to ask him for a translation because he found Ming nearly as scary as Mr. Hachette, the extraterrestrial pred
ator disguised as their household chef.
Arriving in the last grotto, the point farthest from the wine-cellar entrance, he heard footsteps again. As before, when he cocked his head and listened intently, he detected nothing suspicious.
Sometimes his imagination went into overdrive.
Three years ago, when he’d been seven, he’d been convinced that something strange and green and scaly crawled out of the toilet bowl in his bathroom every night and waited to devour him if ever he went for a postmidnight pee. For months, when Fric woke in the middle of the night with a bloated bladder, he left his suite and used safe bathrooms elsewhere in the house.
In his own monster-occupied bath, he’d left a cookie on a plate. Night after night, the cookie remained untouched. Eventually he had substituted a chunk of cheese for the cookie, and then a package of lunch meat in place of the cheese. A monster might have no interest in cookies, might even turn its nose up at cheese, but surely no carnivorous beast could resist pimento-loaf bologna.
When the bologna went unmolested for a week, Fric used his own bathroom again. Nothing ate him.
Now nothing followed him into the final grotto. Nothing but the cool draft and the flicker of light and shadow from fake gas lamps.
The entrance and exit passages more or less divided the grotto in half. To Fric’s right were yet more racks of wine bottles. To his left, stacked floor to ceiling along the wall, were sealed wooden cases of wine.
According to the stenciled names, the cases contained a fine French Bordeaux. In fact they were filled with cheap vino that only gutter-living bums would drink, and the contents had no doubt turned to vinegar decades before Fric had been born.
The wooden cases had been stacked here partly for decoration and partly to conceal the entrance to the port-wine closet.
Fric pressed a hidden latch-release button. One stack of wooden cases swung inward.
Beyond lay a room the size of a walk-in closet. At the back was a rack of port wines fifty, sixty, and seventy years old.
Ports were dessert wines. Fric preferred chocolate cake.
He assumed that even in the late 1930s, when this house had been built, the nation had not been plagued by gangs of port-wine thieves. The closet had most likely been concealed just for the fun of it.
This secret chamber, smaller than the fur vault, might make an adequate hiding place—depending on how long he would need to remain hidden. The space would be comfortable enough for a few hours.
If he had to stay in here for two or three days, however, he would start to feel that he’d been buried alive. He’d collapse into a screaming fit of claustrophobia and eventually, descending into madness, he would probably eat himself alive, beginning with his toes and working upward.
Unnerved by the direction their second conversation had taken, he’d forgotten to ask Mysterious Caller how long he could expect to be under siege.
He retreated from the port closet and pulled shut the clever wine-case door.
Turning, Fric saw movement in the passageway by which he had entered this last grotto. Not just the throb of fake gas flames.
A large, strange, spiral silhouette wheeled across the racks and vaulted brick ceiling, layering itself over the familiar flicker of small pennants of light and small flags of shadow. It was approaching the grotto.
Quite unlike his father in a big-screen pinch, Fric seized up with fear and could neither attack nor flee.
Eerily shapeless, shifting, gently tumbling, the shadow billowed closer, closer, and then the fearsome source appeared at the mouth of the passageway: a spirit, a ghost, an apparition, ragged and milky, semitransparent and vaguely luminous, drifting slowly toward him by supernatural locomotion.
Fric frantically stepped backward, stumbled, fell hard enough to remind himself that his butt was as scrawny as his biceps.
Out of the passageway and into the grotto came the apparition, gliding like a stingray in ocean depths. Lambent light and pulsing shadow played upon the phantom form, lending it a greater mystery, an aura of veiled or bearded evil.
Fric raised his hands protectively before his face and peered up between his spread fingers as the spirit arrived above him. For a moment, weightless and slowly revolving, the apparition reminded him of the Milky Way galaxy, with its gossamer spiral arms—and then he recognized it for what it was.
Lazily drifting on the cool draft, a fake web, fabricated by Mr. Knute, had come unanchored. Floating with all the ghostly grace of a jellyfish, it followed the air currents across the grotto toward the next passageway.
Mortified, Fric scrambled to his feet.
Passing out of the grotto, the airborne web snared on one of the wall-mounted lamps, tangled upon itself, and hung there, flimsy and aflutter, like something from Tinkerbell’s lingerie drawer.
Angry with himself, Fric fled the wine cellar.
He was in the tasting room, closing the heavy glass door behind himself, before he realized that the spider web could not have come loose all by itself. A draft alone would not have spun it free, up, and away.
Someone would have had to brush against it, at the least, and Fric didn’t believe that he himself had done so.
He suspected that someone close behind him in the wine maze had patiently worked the web loose from its corner, careful not to shred or wad it, and had set it afloat upon the draft, to taunt him.
On the other hand, he remembered too well the toilet-spawned, scaly, green monster that had not even been real enough to nibble on a slice of bologna.
He stood for a moment, frowning at the refectory table. While he had been wandering the wine cellar, his dinner dishes had been taken away.
One of the maids might have cleaned up after him. Or Mrs. McBee, though as busy as she was this evening, she would probably send the mister.
Why any of them would have followed him into the wine cellar without calling out to him, why they would have set the Knute-spun cobweb afloat, he couldn’t begin to understand.
Fric felt that he was at the center of a web not manufactured by Mr. Knute, an invisible web of conspiracy.
CHAPTER 32
UPON RECEIVING THE CALL, DUNNY WHISTLER at once responds to it, driving directly to Beverly Hills.
He doesn’t need the car anymore. Nevertheless, he enjoys being behind the wheel of a well-engineered automobile, and even the simple pleasure of driving has a new poignancy in light of recent events.
En route, traffic lights turn green just when needed, gaps in traffic repeatedly open for him, and he makes such speed that dark wings of water plume from his tires most of the way. He should feel exhilarated, but many concerns weigh on his mind.
At the hotel, where the arriving and departing vehicles seem to be those makes that retail for six figures, he leaves his car with valet parking. He tips the attendant twenty bucks, going in, because he’s not likely to be around long enough to spend all his cash on pleasures for himself.
The sumptuous luxury of the lobby embraces him with such warmth of color, texture, and form that Dunny could easily forget that the night outside is cold and rainy.
Richly paneled, expensively appointed, lighted for romance, a textbook on glamorous decor, the hotel bar is huge, but crowded in spite of its size.
Every woman in sight, regardless of age, is beautiful, by either the grace of God or the knife of a good surgeon. Half the men are as handsome as movie stars, and the other half think they are.
Most of these people work in the entertainment industry. No actors, but agents and studio executives, publicists and producers.
In another hotel, elsewhere in the city, you might hear several foreign tongues, but in this place only English is spoken, and only that narrow but colorful version of English known as the dialect of the deal. Connections are being secured here; money is being made; sexual excesses are being plotted.
These people are energetic, optimistic, flirtatious, loud, and convinced of their immortality.
In the manner that Cary Grant once navig
ated crowded parties in the movies, as though skating while everyone around him walked with leg weights, Dunny glides past the bar, among the crowded tables, directly to a prized corner table for four where only one man sits.
This man’s name is Typhon, or so he would have you believe. He pronounces it tie-fon, and tells you on first meeting that he bears the name of a monster from Greek mythology, a beast that traveled in storms and spread terror wherever the rain took it. Then he laughs, perhaps in recognition that his name is dramatically at odds with his appearance, his genteel business style, and his polished manners.
Nothing about Typhon appears the least monstrous or stormy. He is plump, white-haired, with a sweet androgynous face that would serve well in a movie as either that of a beatific nun or that of a saintly friar. His smile comes easily and often, and seems sincere. Soft-spoken, a good listener, irresistibly likable, the man can make a friend in a minute.
He is impeccably dressed in a dark blue suit, white silk shirt, blue-and-red club tie, and red display handkerchief. His thick white hair has been cut by a stylist to stars and royalty. Unblemished skin smoothed by expensive emollients, bleached teeth, and manicured nails suggest that he takes pride in his appearance.
Typhon sits facing the room, pleasantly regal in demeanor, as might be a kindly monarch holding court. Although he must be known to this crowd, no one bothers him, as though it is understood that he prefers to see and be seen rather than to talk with anyone.
Of the four chairs at the table, two face the room. Dunny takes the second.
Typhon is eating oysters and drinking a superb Pinot Grigio. He says, “Dine with me, please, dear boy. Have anything you wish.”
As if conjured by a sorcerer, a waiter instantly appears. Dunny orders double oysters and a bottle of Pinot Grigio for himself. He has always been a man of large appetites.
“You have always been a man of large appetites,” Typhon notes, and smiles impishly.
“There’ll be an end to that soon enough,” Dunny says. “While there’s still a banquet in front of me, I intend to gorge.”