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.
[287] 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.
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.
[288] 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.
[289] 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.
[290] 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 jiggum-bob, a satanic polywhatsit, 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 [291] 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 shitload 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 [292] 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.