CHAPTER 46
NIGHT ON THE MOON, CRATERED AND COLD, could be no less lonely than this night in the Manheim mansion.
Within, the only sounds were Fric?s footsteps, his breathing, the faint creak of hinges when he opened a door.
Outside, a changeable wind, alternately menacing and melancholy, quarreled with the trees, raised lamentations in the eaves, battered the walls, moaned as if in sorrowful protest of its exclusion from the house. Rain rapped angrily against the windows, but then cried silently down the leaded panes.
For a while, Fric believed that he would be safer on the move than settled in any one place, that when he stopped, unseen forces would at once begin to gather around him. Besides, on his feet, in motion, he could break into a run and more readily escape.
His father believed that when a child reached the age of six, an arbitrary bedtime should not be forced on him, but that he should be allowed to find his personal circadian rhythms. Consequently, for years, Fric had been going to bed when he wanted, sometimes at nine o?clock, sometimes after midnight.
Soon, ceaselessly rambling, turning lights on ahead of him and [302] leaving them aglow in his wake, he grew tired. He had thought that the possibility of Moloch, child-eating god, walking out of a mirror at any moment would keep him awake for the rest of his life or at least until he turned eighteen and no longer qualified as a child under most definitions. Fear, however, proved as exhausting as hard labor.
Worried that he might slump upon a sofa or a chair and fall asleep in a place that made him more vulnerable than necessary, he considered returning to the west wing on the ground floor, where he could curl up outside Mr. Truman?s apartment. If Mr. Truman or the McBees found him sleeping there, however, he would appear to be a gutless weenie and an embarrassment to the name Manheim.
He decided that the library offered the best refuge. He always felt comfortable among books. And although the library lay on the second floor, which was as lonely as the third, it had no mirrors.
The tree of angels greeted him.
He recoiled from the winged multitude.
Then he realized that this evergreen featured not a single shiny ornament from which an evil other-dimensional entity could pass into this world or watch from another.
Indeed, the dangling angels seemed to suggest that here was a protected place, true sanctuary.
Throughout the massive chamber, the decorative urns and pots and amphorae and figurines were either Wedgwood basalts with Empire-period themes or Han Dynasty porcelains. The basalts were all matte-finish black, not shiny. Two thousand years had worn the luster from the glaze on the Han pieces, and Fric had no concern that an ancient figure of a horse or a water jar made before the birth of Christ might serve as a peephole through which he could be watched by some wicked creature in a neighboring dimension.
At the back of the library, a door led to a powder room. Using a straight-backed chair, Fric wedged this door securely shut without daring to open it, for above the sink in the powder room, a mirror waited.
[303] This sensible precaution presented a minor problem easily resolved. He had to pee, so he relieved himself in a potted palm.
Always he washed his hands after toileting. This time he would have to risk contamination, disease, and plague.
At least twenty potted palms were distributed throughout the big room. He made a point of remembering which one he had sprinkled, to avoid killing off the entire library rainforest.
He returned to the conversation area nearest the Christmas tree and the battalion of sentinel angels. Surely this was a safe place.
The arrangement of armchairs and footstools included a sofa. Fric was about to stretch out on this makeshift bed when the silence gave way to a cheerful child-pleasing sound suitable for the nursery or the bedrooms of younger children.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
The telephone stood on a piece of furniture that Mrs. McBee referred to as an ?escritoire,? but which was still a writing desk to Fric. He stood beside it, watching the signal light flutter at his private line each time that the phone rang.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
He expected Mr. Truman to answer the call by the third ring.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Mr. Truman didn?t respond.
The phone rang a fourth time. A fifth.
The voice-mail system didn?t take the call, either.
Six rings. Seven.
Fric refused to pick up the handset.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
In his apartment, Ethan had retrieved the six black-box items from a cabinet and had arranged them on his desk in the order that they had been received.
He had switched off the computer.
[304] The phone was near at hand, where he could intercept calls to Fric should that line in fact ring, and where he would notice the indicator light on Line 24 if it signaled additional incoming calls. Traffic on this messages-from-the-dead line seemed to be increasing, which disturbed him for reasons he could not articulate, and he wanted to keep an eye on the situation.
Sitting in his desk chair with a can of Coke, he considered the elements of the riddle.
The small jar containing twenty-two dead ladybugs. Hippodamia convergens, of the family Coccinellidae.
Another, larger jar into which he had transferred the ten dead snails. An uglier sight by the day.
A pickle-relish jar holding nine foreskins in formaldehyde. The tenth had been destroyed by the lab in the process of analysis.
The closed drapes muffled the snap of rain on glass, the threat of wind enraged.
Beetles, snails, foreskins
For some reason, Ethan?s attention drifted to the phone, though it hadn?t rung. No indicator light burned on Line 24 or on any of the first twenty-three.
He tipped the Coke can, took a swallow.
Beetles, snails, foreskins