CHAPTER 33
FED, FRIGHTENED, AND FRUSTRATED, FRIC WENT directly from the wine cellar to the library, proceeding by an indirect route least likely to result in an encounter with a member of the house staff.
Like a spirit, like a phantom, like a boy wearing a cloak of invisibility, he passed room to hall to stair to room, and no one in the great house registered his passage, in part because he carried a rare gene for catlike stealth, but in part because no one, with the possible exception of Mrs. McBee, cared where the hell he was or ever wondered what the hell he was up to.
Being small, thin, and ignored was not always a curse. When the forces of evil were rising up against you in vast dark battalions, having a low profile improved your chances of avoiding evisceration, decapitation, induction into the soulless legions of the living dead, or whatever other hideous fate they might have planned for you.
The last time that Nominal Mom had visited, which wasn?t quite as far back in the mists of time as mastodons and sabertooths, she had told Fric that he was a mouse: ?A sweet little mouse that no one ever realizes is there because he?s so quiet, so quick, so quick and so [221] gray, as quick as the gray shadow of a darting bird. You?re a little mouse, Aelfric, an almost invisible perfect little mouse.?
Freddie Nielander said a lot of stupid things.
Fric didn?t hold any of them against her.
She?d been so beautiful for so long that nobody really listened to her. They were overwhelmed by the visuals.
When no one ever listened to you, really listened, you could begin to lose the ability to tell whether or not you were making sense when you talked.
Fric understood this danger because no one really listened to him, either. In his case, they weren?t overwhelmed by the visuals. They were underwhelmed.
Without exception, people loved Freddie Nielander on sight, and they wanted her to love them in return. Even if they had listened to her, therefore, they wouldn?t have disagreed with her, and even when she made no sense whatsoever, people praised her wit.
Poor Freddie didn?t get any truthful feedback from anything but a mirror. No explanation short of a miracle explained why she hadn?t gone as crazy as a nuclear-waste-dump rat a long time ago.
Arriving in the library, Fric discovered that the furniture in the reading area nearest the entrance had been slightly rearranged to accommodate a twelve-foot Christmas tree. The fresh forestal smell of evergreens was so strong that he expected to see squirrels sitting in the armchairs and busily storing acorns in the antique Chinese vases.
This was one of nine massive spruces erected this very evening in key rooms throughout the mansion. Flawlessly shaped, perfectly symmetrical, greener-than-green clone trees.
Each of the nine evergreens would be decorated with a different theme. Here the subject was angels.
Every ornament on the tree was an angel or featured an angel in its design. Baby angels, child angels, adult angels, blond angels with blue eyes, African-American angels, Asian angels, noble-looking American [222] Indian angels with feathered headdresses as well as halos. Angels smiling, angels laughing, angels using their halos as Hula-Hoops, angels flying, dancing, caroling, praying, and skipping rope. Cute dogs with angel wings. Angel cats, angel toads, an angel pig.
Fric resisted the urge to puke.
Leaving all the angels to glitter and glimmer and dangle and grin, he went into the book stacks, directly to the shelf that held the dictionaries. He sat on the floor with the biggest volume-The Random House Dictionary of the English Language-and paged to ROBIN GOODFELLOW, because Mysterious Caller had said that the man from whom Fric would soon need to hide ?styles himself as Robin Goodfellow.?
The definition was a single word: Puck.
To Fric, this appeared to be an obscenity, although he didn?t know what it meant.
Dictionaries were full of obscenities. This didn?t bother Fric. He assumed that the people who compiled dictionaries weren?t just a bunch of foul-mouthed gutter scum, that they had scholarly reasons for including trash talk.
When they started providing one-word obscene definitions that made no sense, however, maybe the time had come for the publisher to start smelling their coffee to see if it was loaded with booze.
Many of his father?s associates used so many obscenities per sentence that they probably owned dictionaries that contained nothing but foul language. Yet Puck was so obscure none of them had ever spoken it in Fric?s presence.
Fric paged forward through the volume, pretty sure he would discover that Puck meant ?Screw you, we?re tired of defining words, make up your own meaning.?
Instead, he learned that Puck was a ?mischievous sprite? in English folklore and a character in Shakespeare?s A Midsummer Night?s Dream.
[223] Most words had more than one meaning, and that was true of Puck. The second definition proved to be less cheerful-sounding than the first: ?a malicious or mischievous demon or spirit; a goblin,?
Mysterious Caller had said that the guy Fric needed to worry about had a darker side than Robin Goodfellow, alias Puck. A darker side than a malicious demon or goblin.
Ugly clouds were gathering over Friclandia.
Fric paged farther forward in the dictionary, looking for a guy named M-o-e L-o-c-k. Instead, after some searching, he found MOLOCH. He read the definition twice.
Not good.
Moloch had been a deity, mentioned in two books of the Bible, whose worshipers were required to sacrifice children. Obviously, he had not been a Bible-approved deity.
The last four words of the definition particularly disturbed Fric: ? the sacrifice of children by their own parents.?
This seemed to be carrying child sacrifice one step too far.
He didn?t for a moment believe that Ghost Dad and Nominal Mom would strap him down on an altar and chop him to pieces for Moloch.
For one thing, with their superstar schedules, they?d probably never again be together in the same place at the same time.
Besides, while they might not be the kind of parents who tucked you in bed at night and taught you how to throw a baseball, they were not monsters, either. They were just people. Confused. Trying to do the best they knew how.
Fric had no doubt they cared about him. They had to care. They?d made him.
They just didn?t express their feelings well. Images, not words, were your average supermodel?s strength. Naturally, the biggest movie star in the world, being an actor, was better with words than Freddie was, but only when someone wrote them for him.
[224] For a while, just to have something to do that didn?t require thinking about being brutally murdered, Fric looked up obscene words in the dictionary. It was an amazingly dirty book.
Eventually he began to feel ashamed of himself for reading all these filthy definitions in the same room with a tree full of angels.
After returning the dictionary to its shelf, he went to the nearest telephone. Because the library was a humongous space, three phones were distributed among its armchair-furnished reading areas.
On those rare occasions when Ghost Dad invited a magazine journalist to interview him at home rather than on a set or some other neutral ground, he usually noted that the library contained more than twice as many books as there were bottles of wine in the wine cellar. Then he said, ?When I?m a has-been, at least I?ll be a pleasantly wasted, well-educated has-been.?
Ha, ha, ha.
Fric sat on the edge of a chair, picked up the phone beside it, pressed the access button for his private line, and keyed in *69. He had forgotten to do this in the wine-tasting room, after Mysterious Caller had hung up on him.
Previously, when he?d tried this trick, the call-back number had rung and rung, and no one had ever answered it.
This time, someone answered. Someone picked up on the fourth ring, but didn?t say anything.
?It?s me, ?said Fric.
Though he didn?t receive a reply, Fric knew he wasn?t listening to a dead line. He could sense a presence at the other end.
?Are you surprised?? Fric asked.
He could hear breathing.
?I used star sixty-nine.?
The breathing grew strange, a little ragged, as though the idea of being tracked down with *69 excited the guy.
?I?m calling you from the crapper in my father?s bathroom,? he [225] lied, and waited to see if his weird phone buddy would warn him about the misery with which lying was rewarded.