The Face

concocted the story of the heavy breather. Fric was not a self-dramatizer and certainly not an attention-seeker.
        Besides, he had seemed genuinely disturbed when he’d recounted those calls. He just breathed . And made some … some almost like animal sounds.
        Aware of a winking brightness at the periphery of his vision, Ethan turned from the computer and saw the indicator light fluttering on Line 24. As he watched, the call was answered, a connection made, and the light burned steadily.
        Line 24, the last line on the board, was set aside to receive phone calls from the dead.

CHAPTER 40
        
        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