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
TROUBLED 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.
CHAPTER 40
WHEN 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 fighti
ng 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
ETHAN 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.