Mrs. McBee had brooded for a long moment, as though consulting in memory a version of Standards and Practices much longer than the one in the ring-bound notebook that she presented to every employee.
At last she’d said, “Mr. Manheim isn’t a bad man, or heartless, just overwhelmed by his life…and perhaps too in love with the flash of it. On some level, he recognizes what he’s failed to give Fric, and he surely wishes that things were different between them, but he doesn’t know how to fix it and still do everything he needs to do to keep being who he is. So he pushes it out of mind. If you were to put a gift under the tree for Fric, Mr. Manheim’s guilt would surface, and he’d be hurt by what your gesture implied. Although he’s a fair man with employees, I wouldn’t be able to predict what he might do.”
“Sometimes, when I think about that lonely little kid, I want to shake a little sense into his old man even if—”
Mrs. McBee had raised a warning hand. “Even among ourselves, we don’t gossip about those who buy our bread, Mr. Truman. That would be ungrateful and indecent. What I’ve said here has been by way of friendly advice, because I believe you’re a valuable member of the staff and a good example to our Fric, who is more observant of you than you probably realize.”
Now, in her memo, Mrs. McBee addressed the gift issue once more. She’d had the day to reconsider her advice: As to the delicate issue of an unexpected gift, I find that I want to qualify what I told you earlier. A small and very special item, something more magical than expensive, if left not under the tree but elsewhere, and anonymously, would thrill the recipient in the way that you and I recall being thrilled on the Christmas mornings of our youth. I suspect that he would intuitively understand the wisdom of discretion in the matter, and would all but surely keep the existence of the gift to himself if only for the sheer deliciousness of having such a secret. But the item must be truly special, and caution is advised. Indeed, when you have read the last of this, please shred and eat.
Ethan laughed again.
Simultaneous with his laugh, an indicator light fluttered on the telephone: Line 24. He watched as, on the third ring, the answering machine picked up, whereafter the light burned steadily.
He could not go into the computer and edit the program to allow him to receive Line 24 here in his apartment. Only the first twenty-three lines were accessible to his manipulation. Other than Manheim, only Ming du Lac had access to the sacred twenty-fourth. A request to change that situation would have made Ming as angry as a spiritual guru ever got, which was in fact as furious as a rattlesnake teased with a sharp stick, minus all the hissing.
Even if he’d had access to Line 24, Ethan wouldn’t have been able to monitor any call once the answering machine picked it up, because the recorder established an exclusive connection that as a matter of mechanics precluded eavesdropping.
He had never previously been a fraction as interested in Line 24 as he was this evening, and his interest made him uneasy. If he were ever to puzzle his way through what had happened to him on this momentous day, he would need to keep superstition at bay and think logically.
Nevertheless, when he stopped staring at the light on Line 24, he found himself gazing at the three silvery bells on his desk. And could not easily look away.
The last item in Mrs. McBee’s memo regarded the magazine that she had enclosed, the latest issue of Vanity Fair.
She wrote: This publication arrived in the mail on Saturday, with several others and was, as usual, put on the proper table in the library. This morning, shortly after the young master had left the library, I discovered the magazine open to the page I’ve marked. This discovery had much to do with my reconsideration of the advice I’d given you regarding the matter of Christmas gifts.
Between the second and third pages of an article about Fric’s mother, Fredericka Nielander, Mrs. McBee had placed a yellow Post-it. With a pen, she had marked a section of the text.
Ethan read the piece from the beginning. Near the top of the second page, he found a reference to Aelfric. Freddie had told the interviewer that she and her son were “as thick as thieves,” and that wherever in the world her glamorous work might take her, they stayed in touch “with long gossipy chats, like two school chums, sharing dreams and more secrets than two spies aligned against the world.”
In fact, their entire telephone relationship was so secret that even Fric didn’t know about it.
Freddie described Fric as “an exuberant, self-assured boy, very athletic like his father, wonderful with horses, a superb rider.”
Horses?
Ethan would have bet a year’s pay that if Fric ever had dealings with horses, they had been the kind that never left droppings and ran always to calliope music.
By manufacturing this false Fric, Freddie seemed to suggest that the real qualities of her son either did not impress her or possibly even embarrassed her.
Fric was smart enough and sensitive enough to draw that very conclusion.
The thought of the boy reading this hurtful drivel moved Ethan not to toss the magazine in the trash basket beside his desk, but to throw it angrily toward the fireplace, with the intention of burning it later.
Freddie would probably argue that in an interview with Vanity Fair, she needed to calculate each statement to enhance her image. How super could a supermodel be, if from her loins had sprung any but a supernaturally super son?
Burning those pages of the magazine that featured photographs of Freddie would be especially satisfying. Make-believe voodoo.
Line 24 was still engaged.
He looked at the computer, where the telephone log continued to be displayed. This call, too, appeared to be from a number screened by Caller ID blocking.
Because the connection had not been broken, the time continued to change in the column headed LENGTH OF CALL. Already it was over four minutes.
That was a long message to leave on an answering machine if the caller was either a salesman or someone who’d unknowingly reached a wrong number. Curious.
The indicator light blinked off.
CHAPTER 44
FRIC WOKE TO THE SIGHT OF A MULTITUDE OF fathers on all sides of him, a guardian army in which every soldier had the same famous face.
He lay flat on his back, and not in bed. Although he remained cautiously still, pressing with something akin to desperation against the hard smooth surface under him, his mind turned lazily, lazily, in a whirlpool of confusion.
Huge they were, these fathers, sometimes full towering figures and sometimes only disembodied heads, but giant heads, like balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade.
Fric had the impression that he’d passed out for lack of air, which meant a terrible asthma attack. When he tried to breathe, however, he experienced no difficulty.
Often these enormous father faces wore noble expressions, expressions of fearless determination, of squint-eyed ferocity, but some smiled. One winked. One laughed soundlessly. A few gazed fondly or dreamily not at Fric but at famous women with equally huge heads.
As his mind turned at a steadily slower speed, toward stability, Fric abruptly remembered the man who had come out of the mirror. He sat straight up on the attic floor.
For a moment, his slowly spinning mind spun faster.
The urge to puke overcame him. He successfully resisted it and felt semiheroic.
Fric dared to tip his head back to scan the rafters for the wingless phantom. He expected a glimpse or more of a gray wool suit in flight, black wing-tip shoes skating across the air with an ice-dancer’s grace.
He spied no flying freak, but saw everywhere the guardian fathers in full color, in duochromatic schemes, in black-and-white. They advanced, they receded, they encircled, they loomed.
Paper fathers, all of them.
A daredevil of modest ambition, he got to his feet and stood for a moment as if he were balancing on a high wire.
He listened and heard only the rain. The incessant, besieging, all-dissolving rain.
&nb
sp; Too quick for caution, too slow for courage, Fric found his way through the memorabilia maze, seeking the attic stairs. Perhaps inevitably, he came to the serpent-framed mirror.
He intended to give it a wide berth. Yet the silvered glass exerted a dark and powerful attraction.
By turns, his experience with the man from the mirror played in memory like a dream but then as real as the smell of his own fear sweat.
He felt a need to know what was truth and what was not, perhaps because too much of his life seemed unreal, making it impossible to tolerate yet one more uncertainty. Far from brave, but less a coward than he had expected to be, he approached the snake-protected glass.
Convinced by recent events that the universe of Aelfric Manheim and that of Harry Potter were in quiet collision, Fric would have been alarmed but not much surprised if the carved serpents had come magically to life and had struck at him as he approached. The painted scales, the sinuous coils remained motionless, and the green-glass eyes glittered with only inanimate malice.
In the looking glass, he saw only himself and a reversed still life of all that lay behind him. No glimpse of Elsewhere, no hint of Otherwhen.
Tentatively, with his right hand, dismayed to see how severely it trembled, Fric reached toward his image. The glass felt cool and smooth—and undeniably solid—beneath his fingertips.
When he flattened his palm against the silver surface, making full-hand contact, the memory of Moloch seemed less like a real encounter than like a dream.
Then he realized that the eyes in his reflection were not the green that he’d grown up with, the green that he had inherited from Nominal Mom. These eyes were gray, a luminous satiny gray, with only flecks of green.
They were the eyes of the mirror man.
The instant that Fric recognized this terrifying difference in his reflection, a man’s two hands came from the mirror, seized him by the wrist, and passed something to him. Then the man’s hands closed over his hand and compressed it into a fist, crumpling the bestowed object before shoving him away.
In terror, Fric threw down whatever had been given to him, shuddering at the simultaneously slick and crackled texture of it.
He sprinted along the end aisle, to the attic stairs, around and down the spiral staircase, feet slamming with such panic-powered force that behind him the metal treads thrummed like drumskins quivering with the memory of thunder.
From east hall to north, along the lonely third floor, he quaked as he passed closed doors that might be flung open by any monster the mind could imagine. He cringed from the sight of age-clouded antique mirrors above old-as-dirt consoles.
Repeatedly, he looked back, looked up, in fearful expectation. Surely Moloch would be floating toward him, an unlikely cannibal god in a business suit.
He reached the main stairs without being harmed or pursued, but he was not relieved. The banging of his heart could have drowned out the iron-shod hooves of a hundred horses mounted by a hundred Deaths with a hundred scythes.
Anyway, his enemy didn’t need to run him to ground as a fox would chase down a rabbit. If Moloch could travel by way of mirrors, why not by way of window glass? Why not through any surface well enough polished to present even a dim reflection, such as the bowl of that bronze urn, such as the black-lacquered doors of that tall Empire cabinet, such as, such as, such as…?
Before him, the three-story entry rotunda dropped into darkness. The grand stairs that followed the curved wall to the ground floor vanished in the winding gloom.
The evening had waned. The floor polishers and the decorating crew had finished their work and departed, as had the overtime staff. The McBees had gone to bed.
He could not remain here alone on the third floor.
Impossible.
When he pressed a wall switch, the series of crystal chandeliers that followed the curve of stairs were as one illuminated. Hundreds of dangling beveled pendants cast prismatic rainbows of color on the walls.
He descended to the ground floor with such headlong momentum that if Cassandra Limone, the actress with the skull-cracking calf muscles, had been exercising on these stairs, Fric could not have avoided knocking her to worse than a broken ankle.
Leaping off the last step, he skidded to a stop on the marble floor of the rotunda, halted by his first sight of the main Christmas tree. Sixteen or eighteen feet tall, decorated exclusively with red and silver and crystal ornaments, the tree was paralyzingly sensational even when its garlands of electric lights were not switched on.
The dazzling spectacle of the tree alone would not have been sufficient to give him more than the briefest pause in his flight, but as he stared up at the glitter-bedecked evergreen, he realized that he clutched something in his right hand. Opening his fist, he saw the object that had been passed to him from the man within the mirror, the crumpled thing that he had been certain he’d thrown to the attic floor.
Both slick and crackled in texture, light in weight, it was not a dead beetle, not the shed skin of a snake, not a crushed bat wing, not any of the ingredients of a witch’s brew that he had imagined it to be. Just a wadded-up photograph.
He unfolded the picture, smoothed it between trembling hands.
Ragged at two edges, as if torn from a frame, the five-by-six portrait showed a pretty lady with dark hair and dark eyes. She was a stranger to him.
Fric knew from considerable experience that the way people look in pictures has nothing to do with the qualities they exhibit in life. Yet from this woman’s gentle smile, he inferred a kind heart, and he wished that he knew her.
A cursed amulet, a poultice formulated to draw the immortal soul out of anyone who held it, a voodoo dofunny, a black-magic jiggumbob, a satanic polywhat-sit, or any of the weird and grisly items you might have expected to receive from something that lived inside mirrors would have been less surprising and less mystifying than this creased photograph. He couldn’t imagine who this woman was, what her picture was meant to signify, how he could proceed to identify her, or what he might have to gain or lose by learning her name.
His fright had been diluted by the calming effect of the woman’s face in the photograph, but when he lifted his gaze from the picture to the evergreen, fear concentrated in him again. Something moved in the tree.
Not branch to branch, not lurking in the green shadows of the boughs: Instead, this movement manifested in the ornaments. Each silver ball, silver trumpet, silver pendant was a three-dimensional mirror. A formless shadowy reflection flowed across those curved and shiny surfaces, back and forth, up the tree, and down.
Only something flying around the rotunda, repeatedly approaching and retreating from the glittering tree, could possibly have cast such a reflection. No great bird, no bat with wings the size of flags, no Christmas angel, no Moloch plied this air, however, and so it seemed that the swooping darkness flowed within the ornaments, rippling up one flank of the tree, cascading down another.
Less bright, murkier than the silver decorations, the red were mirrors, too. The same pulsing shadow traveled through those candy-apple curves and ruby planes, inevitably suggesting the spurt and flow of blood.
Fric sensed that what stalked him now—if in fact anything did—was what had stalked him in the wine cellar earlier in the evening.
The skin tightened on his scalp, puckered on the back of his neck.
In one of the fantasy novels he loved, Fric had read that ghosts could appear by an act of their own will, but could not long sustain material form if you failed to focus on them, that your wonder and your fear empowered and sustained them.
He’d read that vampires could not enter your home unless someone inside invited them to cross the threshold.
He’d read that an evil entity can escape the chains of Hell and enter a person in this world through the trivet of a Ouija board, not if you simply ask questions of the dead, but only if you’re careless enough to say something like “come join us” or “come be with us.”
He’d read a shitloa
d of stupid things, in fact, and most of them were probably just made up by stupid novelists trying to make a buck while they peddled their stupid screenplays to stupid producers.
Nevertheless, Fric convinced himself that if he didn’t look away from the Christmas tree, the apparition in the blown glass would move faster, faster, growing in power by the second until, like bandoliers of grenades, every ornament would at once explode, piercing him with ten thousand splinters, whereupon every jagged shard would carry into his flesh a fragment of this pulsing darkness, which would flourish in his blood and soon become his master.
He ran past the tree, out of the rotunda.
He pressed a light switch in the north hall, and squeaked his rubber-soled sneakers along an avenue of newly polished limestone floor. Past drawing room, tea room, intimate dining room, grand dining room, breakfast room, butler’s pantry, kitchen, to the end of the north wing he raced, and did not look back this time, or left, or right.
In addition to the dayroom in which the household staff took breaks and ate their lunch, and also the professionally equipped laundry, the ground-floor west wing housed the rooms and apartments of the live-in staff members.
The maids, Ms. Sanchez and Ms. Norbert, were away until the morning of the twenty-fourth. He wouldn’t have gone to them, anyway. They were nice enough, but one had a giggle problem and the other was full of tales of her native North Dakota, which to Fric seemed even less interesting than the island nation of Tuvalu with its thrilling coconut-export industry.
Mrs. McBee and Mr. McBee had put in an especially long hard day. By now they might be asleep, and Fric was reluctant to disturb them.
Arriving at the door of the apartment assigned to Mr. Truman, who had so recently invited him to call for help at any hour of the day or night, and to whom he had intended to go from the moment that he’d fled the attic, Fric abruptly lost his nerve. A man stepping out of a mirror; the same man flying among the attic rafters; some spirit that lived in, watched from, and might explode out of the ornaments on a Christmas tree: Fric could not imagine that such a fantastic and incoherent story would be believed by anyone, especially not by an ex-cop who’d probably grown cynical after listening to a million crazy tales from uncounted lying sleazeballs and deluded fruitcakes.