The Face[脸]
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WHEN A FIERCE-LOOKING GUY COMES OUT of a mirror as though it’s a doorway, and when he grabs for you and snags your shirt with his fingertips, you could be excused for wetting your pants or for losing total control of your sphincter, so Fric was amazed that he didn’t instantly void from every orifice, that he reacted quickly enough to slip free of the snagging fingers, and that he raced away into the memorabilia maze in a totally dry and stink-free condition.
He turned left, right, right, left, vaulted over a low stack of boxes from one aisle into another, knocking between two huge posters as he went, raced past a life-size Ghost-Dad-as-1930s-detective, pushed between more posters, dodged around a realistic-looking Styrofoam unicorn from the one film in the Manheim credit list that no one dared talk about in his father’s presence, turned left, left, right, and halted when he realized that he had lost track of where he’d come from and that he might be returning in a circle to the serpent-embraced mirror.
In his wake, across a significant portion of the wide attic, the framed posters swung like giant pendulums. He had stirred some of them during his flight, but the wind of those dozen fanned others into gentler motion, perpetrating a wider disturbance.
[266] Among all this movement, the approach of the mirror man was more difficult to discern than it would have been in an attic steeped in stillness. Fric couldn’t catch a glimpse of him.
Unless you were a skulking fiend with a sympathy for shadows, the lighting here was troublesome. Wall lamps ringed the perimeter of the attic, while others were mounted to some of the columns that supported the trusswork, though the number and brightness of them left much to be desired. The hanging palisades of posters, arrayed like flags from the many nations of Manheim, thwarted the even flow of light from aisle to aisle.
Crouched warily in gloom, Fric drew a deep breath, held it, listened.
At first he could hear nothing but the didop-da-bidda-boom of his skipping-drumming heart, but near the useful end of that banked breath, he began to hear, as well, the dash of rain on slate.
Aware that by his every noise he would locate himself for the stalking predator, Fric eased out the dead breath, coaxed in a live one, held it.
Higher in the house, he was also higher in the storm. Here the lonely sighing of the rain swelled into the whispers of a multitude exchanging sinister secrets in the sea of night that now submerged Palazzo Rospo.
Yet in the same way that he had focused himself to hear the rain above the drumbeat of his heart, he tuned in to the footsteps of the mirror man. The attic architecture, the pendulum motion of the giant posters, and the whiffle of the rain served to distort the sound, to make it seem that the intruder was going away from Fric, then coming closer, then going, when in fact he most likely made steady progress toward his quarry.
Fric had heeded Mysterious Caller’s advice to find a deep and secret hiding place. He had believed that he would need a refuge soon, but he hadn’t realized that he would need it this soon.
Learning to breathe and listen at the same time, he took to heart [267] his dotty mother’s insistence that he was “an almost invisible perfect little mouse.” He crept with quiet quickness past the red-and-gold cardboard spires of a futuristic city over which his father—in cardboard—towered with a fearsome laser rifle at the ready.
At an intersection of aisles, Fric looked both ways, turned left. He scurried onward, analyzing the sound of the heavy footsteps as he went, calculating what route might best put distance between him and the man from the mirror.
The intruder made no effort at stealth. He seemed to want Fric to hear him, as though confident that the boy couldn’t evade capture.
Moloch. This must be Moloch. Looking for a child to take as a sacrifice, a child to kill, perhaps to eat.
He’s Moloch, with the splintered bones of babies stuck between his teeth. ...
Fric refrained from screaming for help, certain that he would not be heard by anyone other than the man-god-beast-thing who stalked him. The walls of the house were thick, the floors thicker than the walls, and no one was nearer than the second floor down in the middle of the mansion.
He might have sought a window and risked a ledge or a three-story drop. The attic had no windows.
A fake stone sarcophagus stood on end, decorated with carved hieroglyphics and the image of a dead pharaoh, no longer inhabited by the evil mummy that had once done battle with the biggest movie star in the world.
A steamer trunk, in which a ruthless and clever murderer (played by Richard Gere) had once crammed the corpse of a gorgeous blonde (actually the live body of the aforementioned Cassandra Limone), now stood empty.
Fric wasn’t tempted to hide in those containers, nor in the black-lacquered coffin, nor in the trick box in which a magician’s assistant could be made to disappear with the help of angled mirrors. Even the [268] ones that weren’t coffins seemed like coffins, and he was sure that crawling into any of them would mean certain death.
The wise thing to do would be to keep moving, mouse-quick and mouse-quiet, staying low, staying loose, always several twists and turns ahead of the mirror man. Eventually he could circle back to the spiral staircase, descend from the attic, and flee to lower floors where help could be found.
Suddenly he realized that he could no longer hear the footsteps of his pursuer.
No cardboard Ghost Dad stood more still, no mummy under Egyptian sands rested any more breathless with its shriveled lungs, than Fric as he began to suspect that this new silence was a bad development.
A shadow floated overhead, treading air as though it were water.
Fric gasped, looked up.
The roof-supporting trusses rested atop the attic columns, five feet above his head. From one truss line to another, above the movie posters, a figure flew across the aisle, wingless but more graceful than a bird, leaping with the slow and weightless form exhibited by any astronaut in space, contemptuous of gravity.
This was no caped phantom, but a man in a suit, the one who had stepped out of the mirror, executing an impossible aerial ballet. He landed on a horizontal beam, pivoted toward Fric, and swooped down from his high perch, not like a plummeting stone, but like a feather, grinning exactly as Fric had imagined that evil Moloch, hungry for a child, would grin.
Fric turned and ran.
Although Moloch’s descent had been feather-slow, suddenly he was here. He seized Fric from behind, one arm around his chest, one hand over his face.
Fric tried desperately to wrench loose but was lifted off his feet as a mouse might be snatched off the ground by the talons of a hunting hawk.
[269] For an instant, he thought that Moloch would fly up into the rafters with him, there to rip at him with fierce appetite.
They remained on the floor, but Moloch was already moving. He strode along as if certain of where each turning of the maze would take him.
Fric struggled, kicked, kicked, but seemed to be fighting nothing more substantial than water, caught in the dreamy currents of a nightmare.
The hand on his face pressed up from beneath his chin, a clamp that jammed teeth to teeth, forcing him to swallow his scream, and pinching shut his nose.
He was overcome by the panic familiar from his worst asthma attacks, the terror of suffocation. He couldn’t open his mouth to bite, couldn’t land a kick that mattered. Couldn’t breathe.
And yet a worse fear gripped him, clawed him, tore at his mind as they passed the mummy’s sarcophagus, passed a cardboard cop with Ghost Dad’s face: the horrifying thought that Moloch would carry him through the mirror and into a world of perpetual night where children were fattened like cattle for the pleasure of cannibal gods, where you wouldn’t find even the paid kindness of Mrs. McBee, where there was no hope at all, not even the hope of growing up.
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