The Face

“December twenty-fourth. In the early afternoon. Christmas Eve,” the stranger said.

Fric wasn’t impressed. Millions of people knew his old man’s whereabouts and his Christmas plans. Just a week ago, Ghost Dad had done a spot on Entertainment Tonight, talking about the film that he was shooting and about how much he looked forward to going home for the holidays.

“Fric, I’d like to be your friend.”

“What’re you, a pervert?”

Fric had heard about perverts. Heck, he’d probably met hundreds of them. He didn’t know all the things they might do to a kid, and he wasn’t exactly sure what thing they liked most to do, but he knew they were out there with their collections of kids’ eyeballs, wearing necklaces made out of their victims’ bones.

“I have no desire to hurt you,” said the stranger, which was no doubt what any pervert would have said. “Quite the opposite. I want to help you, Fric.”

“Help me do what?”

“Survive.”

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t have a name.”

“Everyone has to have a name, even if it’s just one, like Cher or Godzilla.”

“Not me. I’m only one among multitudes, nameless now. There’s trouble coming, young Fric, and you need to be ready for it.”

“What trouble?”

“Do you know of a place in your house where you could hide and never be found?” the stranger asked.

“That’s a weird-ass question.”

“You’re going to need a place to hide where no one can find you, Fric. A deep and special secret place.”

“Hide from who?”

“I can’t tell you that. Let’s just call him the Beast in Yellow. But you’re going to need a secret place real soon.”

Fric knew that he should hang up, that it might be dangerous to play along with this nutball. Most likely he was a pathetic pervert loser who got lucky with a phone number and would sooner or later start with the dirty talk. But the guy might also be a sorcerer who could cast a spell long distance, or he might be an evil psychologist who could hypnotize a boy over the telephone and make him rob liquor stores and then make him turn over all the money while clucking like a chicken.

Aware of those risks and many more, Fric nevertheless stayed on the line. This was by far the most interesting phone conversation he’d ever had.

Just in case this guy with no name happened to be the one from whom he might need to hide, Fric said, “Anyway, I’ve got bodyguards, and they carry submachine guns.”

“That’s not true, Aelfric. Lying won’t get you anything but misery. There’s heavy security on the estate, but it won’t be good enough when the time comes, when the Beast in Yellow shows up.”

“It is true,” Fric deceitfully insisted. “My bodyguards are former Delta Force commandos, and one of them was even Mr. Universe before that. They can for sure kick major ass.”

The stranger didn’t respond.

After a couple seconds, Fric said, “Hello? You there?”

The man spoke in a whisper now. “Seems like I have a visitor, Fric. I’ll call you again later.” His whisper subsided to a murmur that Fric had to strain to hear. “Meanwhile, you start looking for that deep and special hiding place. There’s not much time.”

“Wait,” Fric said, but the line went dead.

CHAPTER 14

GUN READY, MUZZLE UP, CHAMBER BY hall by chamber, through Dunny Whistler’s nautilus apartment, Ethan came to the bedroom.

One nightstand lamp had been left on. Against the headboard of the Chinese sleigh bed, decorative silk pillows fashioned from cheongsam fabrics had been artfully arranged by the housekeeper.

Also on the bed, cast off with evident haste, lay articles of men’s clothing. Wrinkled, stained, still damp from the rain. Slacks, shirt, socks, underwear.

Tumbled in a corner were a pair of shoes.

Ethan didn’t know what Dunny had been wearing when he had left the morgue at Our Lady of Angels Hospital. However, he wouldn’t have wagered a penny against the proposition that these were the very clothes.

Moving closer to the bed, he detected the faint malodor that he’d first smelled in the elevator. Some of the components of the scent were more easily identified than they had been earlier: stale perspiration, a whiff of rancid ointment with a sulfate base, thin fumes of sour urine. The smell of illness, of being long abed and bathed only with basin and sponge.

Ethan became aware of a background sizzle, which he initially mistook for a new manifestation of the rain. Then he realized that he was listening to the fall of water in the master-bathroom shower.

The bathroom door stood ajar. Past the jamb and through the gap, with the sizzle came a wedge of light and wisps of steam.

He eased the door all the way open.

Golden marble sheathed the floor, the walls. In the black granite countertop, two black ceramic sinks were served by brushed-gold spouts and faucets.

Above the counter, a long expanse of beveled mirror, hazed with condensation, failed to present a clear reflection. His distorted shape moved under that frosted surface, like a strange pale something glimpsed swimming just beneath the shadow-dappled surface of a pond.

Veils of steam floated in the air.

Within the bathroom was a water closet. The door stood open, the toilet visible. No one in there.

Dunny had nearly been drowned in this toilet.

Neighbors in a fourth-floor apartment had heard him struggling furiously for his life, shouting for help.

Police arrived quickly and caught the assailants in desperate flight. They found Dunny lying on his side in front of the toilet, semiconscious and coughing up water.

By the time the ambulance arrived, he had fallen into a coma.

His attackers—who’d come for money, vengeance, or both—had not been cheated recently by Dunny. They had been in prison for six years and, only recently released, had come to settle a long-overdue account.

Dunny might have hoped to journey far from his life of crime, but old sins had caught up with him that night.

Now on the bathroom floor lay two rumpled, damp black towels. Two dry towels still hung on the rack.

The shower was in the far-right corner from the entrance to the bathroom. Even if the steam-opaqued glass door had been clear, Ethan couldn’t have seen into that cubicle from any distance.

Approaching the stall, he had an image in his mind of the Dunny Whistler whom he expected to encounter. Skin sickly pale where not a lifeless gray, impervious to the pinking effect of hot water. Gray eyes, the whites now pure crimson with hemorrhages.

Still holding the gun in his right hand, he gripped the door with his left and, after a hesitation, pulled it open.

The stall was unoccupied. Water beat upon the marble floor and swirled down the drain.

Leaning into the stall, he reached behind the cascade, to the single control, and turned off the flow.

The sudden silence in the wake of the watery sizzle seemed to announce his presence as clearly as if he had triggered an air horn.

Nervously, he turned toward the bathroom entrance, expecting some response, but not sure what that might be.

Even with the water turned off, steam continued to escape the shower, though in thinner veils, pouring over the top of the glass door and around Ethan.

In spite of the moist air, his mouth had gone dry. Pressed together, tongue and palate came apart as reluctantly as two strips of Velcro.

When he started toward the bathroom door, his attention was drawn again to the movement of his vague and distorted reflection in the clouded mirror above the sinks.

Then he saw the impossible shape, which brought him to a halt.

In the mirror, under the skin of condensation, loomed a pale form as blurred as Ethan’s veiled image but nonetheless recognizable as a figure, man or woman.

Ethan was alone. A quick survey of the bathroom failed to reveal any object or any fluke of architecture that the misted mirror might trick into a ghostly human shape.

So he closed his eyes. Opened them. Still the shape.

He could hear only his heart now, only his heart, not fast, but faster, sledgehammer heavy, pounding and pounding, slamming blood to his brain to flush out unreason.

Of course his imagination had given meaning to a meaningless blur in a mirror, in the same way that he might have found men and dragons and all kinds of fanciful creatures among the clouds in a summer sky. Imagination. Of course.

But then this man, this dragon, whatever—it moved in the mirror. Not much: a little, enough to make Ethan’s sledgehammer heart stutter between blows.

Maybe the movement also was imaginary.

Hesitantly he approached the mirror. He didn’t step directly in front of the phantom form, for in spite of the strong rush of blood that ought to have clarified his thinking, Ethan suffered from the superstitious conviction that something terrible would happen to him if his reflection were to overlay the ghostly shape.

Surely the movement of the misted apparition had been imaginary, but if it had been, then he imagined it again. The figure seemed to be motioning for him to come forward, closer.

Ethan would not have admitted to Hazard Yancy or to any other cop from the old days, perhaps not even to Hannah if she were alive, that when he put his hand to the mirror, he half expected to feel not wet glass, but the hand of another, making contact from a cold and forbidding Elsewhere.

He swabbed away an arc of mist, leaving a glimmering smear of water.

Even as Ethan’s hand moved, so did the phantom in the mirror, sliding away from the cleansing swipe. Cunningly elusive, it remained behind the shielding condensation—and moved directly in front of him.

With the exception of his face, Ethan’s vague reflection in the misted glass had been dark because his clothes were dark, his hair. The steam-frosted shape now before him rose as pale as moonlight and moth wings, impossibly supplanting his own image.

Fear knocked on his heart, but he wouldn’t let it in, as when he’d been a cop under fire and dared not panic.

Anyway, he felt as though he were half in a trance, accepting the impossible here as he might easily accept it in a dream.

The apparition leaned toward him, as if trying to discern his nature from the far side of the silvered glass, in much the same way that he himself leaned forward to study it.

Raising his hand once more, Ethan tentatively wiped away a narrow swath of mist, fully expecting that when he came eye to eye with his reflection, the eyes would not be his, but gray like Dunny Whistler’s eyes.

Again the mystery in the mirror moved, quicker than Ethan’s hand, remaining blurred behind the frosting of condensation.

Only when breath exploded from Ethan did he realize that he had been holding it.

On the inhale, he heard a crash in a far room of the apartment, the brittle music of shattering glass.

CHAPTER 15

ETHAN HAD TOLD PALOMAR LAB-oratories to analyze his blood for traces of illicit chemicals, in case he’d been drugged without his knowledge. During the events at Reynerd’s apartment house, he had almost seemed to be in an altered state of consciousness.

Now, leaving the steamy bathroom, he felt no less disoriented than when, after being gut shot, he had found himself behind the wheel of the Expedition once more, unharmed.

Whatever had happened—or had only seemed to happen—at the mirror, he no longer entirely trusted his senses. As a consequence, he proceeded with greater caution than before, assuming that yet again things might not be as they appeared to be.

He passed through rooms he’d already searched and then into new territory, arriving at last in the kitchen. Shattered glass sparkled on the breakfast table and littered the floor.

Also on the floor lay the silver picture frame missing from the desk in the study. The photo of Hannah had been stripped out of it.

Whoever had taken the picture had been in too great a hurry to release the four fasteners on the back of the frame, and had instead smashed the glass.

The rear door of the apartment stood open.

Beyond lay a wide hall that served the back of both penthouse units. At the nearer end, an exit sign marked a stairwell. Toward the farther end was a freight elevator big enough to carry refrigerators and large pieces of furniture.

If someone had taken the freight route down, he had already completed his descent. No sound issued from the elevator machinery.

Ethan hurried to the stairs. Opened the fire door. Paused on the threshold, listening.

Groan or moan, or melancholy sigh, or clank of chains: Even a ghost ought to make a sound, but only a cold hollow silence rose out of the stairwell.

He went down quickly, ten flights to the ground floor, then another two flights to the garage. He encountered neither a flesh-and-blood resident nor a spirit.

The scent of sickness and fever sweats, first detected in the elevator, didn’t linger here. Instead, he smelled a faint soapy odor, as if someone fresh from a bath had passed this way. And a trace of spicy aftershave.

Pushing open the steel fire door, stepping into the garage, he heard an engine, smelled exhaust fumes. Of the forty parking stalls, many were empty at this hour on a work day.

Toward the front of the garage, a car backed out of a stall. Ethan recognized Dunny’s midnight-blue Mercedes sedan.

Triggered by remote control, the garage gate was already rising with a steely clack and clatter.

Pistol still in hand, Ethan ran toward the car as it pulled away from him. The gate rose slowly, and the Mercedes had to stop for it. Through the rear window, he could see the silhouette of a man behind the steering wheel, but not clearly enough to make an identification.

Drawing near to the Mercedes, he swung wide of it. He intended to go directly to the driver’s door.

The car shot forward while the barrier continued to rise, before it was fully out of the way. The roof of the Mercedes came within a fraction of an inch of leaving a generous paint sample on the bottom rail of the ascending gate, and raced up the steep exit ramp to the street.

The driver thumbed close on his remote even as he passed under the gate, which was clattering down again when Ethan reached it. Already the Mercedes had turned out of sight into the street above.

He stood there for a moment, peering through the gate into the gray storm light.

Rainwater streamed down the driveway ramp. Foaming, it vanished through the slots of a drain in the pavement immediately outside the garage.

On that concrete incline, a small lizard, back broken by a car tire, but still alive, struggled gamely against the sluicing water. So persistently did it twitch upward inch by inch that it seemed to believe all its needs could be satisfied and all its injuries healed by some power at the summit.

Not wanting to see the little creature inevitably defeated and washed down to die upon the drain grate, Ethan turned away from the sight of it.

He returned the pistol to his shoulder holster.

He studied his hands. They were trembling.

On the back stairs once more, climbing to the fifth floor, he encountered the lingering soapy smell, the trace of aftershave. This time, he also detected another odor less clean than the first two, elusive but disturbing.

Whatever else he might be, Dunny Whistler was surely a living man, not an animated corpse. Why would one of the walking dead come home to shower, shave, and dress in clean clothes? Absurd.

In the apartment kitchen, Ethan used a DustBuster to vacuum up the fragments of picture-frame glass.

He found a spoon and an open half-gallon container of ice cream in the sink. Apparently, those who were recently resurrected enjoyed chocolate caramel swirl.

He put the ice cream in the freezer and returned the empty picture frame to the study.

In the master bedroom, he stopped short of the bathroom doorway. He had intended to check the mirror once more, to see if it was still misted and if, in the glass, anything moved that shouldn’t be there.

Actively seeking that phantom suddenly seemed to be a bad idea. Instead, he left the apartment, turning off the lights and locking the door behind him.

In the main elevator, as Ethan descended, he thought, For the same reason that the proverbial wolf put on a sheep’s skin to move undetected among the lambs.

That was why one of the walking dead would shower, shave, and put on a good suit.

As the elevator conveyed Ethan to the ground floor, he knew how Alice must have felt in free fall down the rabbit hole.

CHAPTER 16

AFTER SHUTTING DOWN THE RAILROADS, Fric left the dirty Nazis to their evil schemes, departed the unreality of the train room for the unreality of the multimillion-dollar car collection in the garage, and ran for the stairs.

He should have taken the elevator. That cableless mechanism, which raised and lowered the cab on a powerful hydraulic ram, would be too slow, however, for his current mood.

Fric’s engine raced, raced. The telephone conversation with the weird stranger—whom he had dubbed Mysterious Caller—was high-octane fuel for a boy with a boring life, a feverish imagination, and empty hours to fill.

He didn’t climb the stairs; he assaulted them. Legs pumping, grabbing at the handrail, Fric flung himself up from the basement, conquering two, four, six, eight long flights, to the top of Palazzo Rospo, where he had rooms on the third floor.

Only Fric seemed to know the meaning of the name given to the great house by its first owner: Palazzo Rospo. Nearly everyone knew that palazzo was Italian for “palace,” but no one except perhaps a few sneeringly superior European film directors seemed to have any idea what rospo meant.

To be fair, most people who visited the estate didn’t give a rip what it was called or what its grand name actually meant. They had more important issues on their minds—such as the weekend box-office numbers, the overnight TV ratings, the latest executive shuffles at the studios and networks, who to screw in the new deal that they were putting together, how much to screw them out of, how to bedazzle them so they wouldn’t realize they were being screwed, how to find a new source for cocaine, and whether their careers might have been even bigger if they had begun having face-lifts when they were eighteen.

Among the few who had ever given a thought to the name of the estate, there were competing theories.

Some believed the house had been named after a famous Italian statesman or philosopher, or architect. The number of people in the film industry who knew anything about statesmen, philosophers, and architects was almost as small as the number who’d be able to give a lecture regarding the structure of matter on a subatomic level; consequently, this theory was easily embraced and never challenged.

Others were certain that Rospo had been either the maiden name of the original owner’s beloved mother or the name of a snow sled that he had ridden with great delight in childhood, when he had been truly happy for the last time in his life.

Still others assumed that it had been named after the original owner’s secret love, a young actress named Vera Jean Rospo.

Vera Jean Rospo had actually existed back in the 1930s, though her real name had been Hilda May Glorkal.

The producer, agent, or whoever had renamed her Rospo must have secretly despised poor Hilda. Rospo was Italian for “toad.”

Only Fric seemed to know that Palazzo Rospo was as close as you could get, in Italian, to naming a house Toad Hall.

Fric had done some research. He liked knowing things.

Evidently, the film mogul who built the estate more than sixty years ago had possessed a sense of humor and had read The Wind in the Willows. In that book, a character named Toad lived in a grand house named Toad Hall.

These days, no one in the film business read books.

In Fric’s experience, no one in the business had a sense of humor anymore, either.

He climbed the stairs so fast that he was breathing hard by the time that he reached the north hallway on the third floor. This wasn’t good. He should have stopped. He should have rested.

Instead, he hurried along the north hall to the east hall, where his private rooms were located. The antiques that he passed on the top floor were spectacular, although not of the museum quality to be found on the two lower levels.

Fric’s rooms had been refurnished a year ago. Ghost Dad’s interior designer had taken Fric shopping. To redo the furniture in these quarters, his father had provided him with a budget of thirty-five thousand dollars.

Fric had not asked for fancy new furniture. He never asked for anything—except at Christmas, when he was required to fill out the childish Dear Santa form that his father insisted be provided by Mrs. McBee. The idea of refurnishing was entirely Ghost Dad’s.

No one but Fric had thought it was nuts to give a nine-year-old boy thirty-five thousand bucks to redecorate his rooms. The designer and the salespeople acted as if this were the usual drill, that every nine-year-old had an equal amount to spend on a room makeover.

Lunatics.

Fric often suspected that the soft-spoken, seemingly reasonable people surrounding him were in fact all BIG-TIME CRAZY.

Every item in his remade rooms was modern, sleek, and bright.

He had nothing against the furniture and artworks of distant times. He liked all that stuff. But sixty thousand square feet of fine antiques was enough already.

In his own private space, he wanted to feel like a kid, not like an old French dwarf, which sometimes he seemed to be among all these French antiques. He wanted to believe that such a thing as the future actually existed.

An entire suite had been set aside for his use. Living room, bedroom, bathroom, walk-in closet.

Still breathing hard, Fric hurried through his living room. Breathing harder still, he crossed his bedroom to the walk-in closet.

Walk-in was a seriously inadequate description. If Fric had owned a Porsche, he could have driven into the closet.

Were he to add a Porsche to his Dear Santa list, one would most likely be parked in the driveway come Christmas morn, with a giant gift bow on the roof.

Lunatics.

Although Fric had more clothes than he needed, more than he wanted, his wardrobe required only a quarter of the closet. The rest of the space had been fitted out with shelves on which were stored collections of toy soldiers, which he cherished, boxed games to which he was indifferent—as well as videos and DVDs of every stupid boring movie for kids made in the past five years, which were sent to him free by studio executives and by others who wanted to score points with his father.

At the back of the closet, the nineteen-foot width was divided into three sections of floor-to-ceiling shelves. Reaching under the third shelf in the right-hand section, he pressed a concealed button.

The middle section proved to be a secret door that swung open on a centrally mounted pivot hinge. The shelving unit measured ten inches deep, which left a passageway of about two and a half feet to either side.

Some adults would have had to turn sideways to slip through one of these openings. Fric, however, could walk straight into the secret realm beyond the closet.

Behind the shelves lay a six-by-six space and a stainless-steel door. Although not solid steel, it was four inches thick and looked formidable.

The door had been unlocked when Fric discovered it three years ago. It was unlocked now. He had never found the key.

In addition to the regular lever handle at the right side, the door featured a second handle in the center. This one turned a full 360 degrees and in fact was not a handle, but a crank, similar to those featured on casement windows throughout the house.