The Face

message to leave on an answering machine if the caller was either a salesman or someone who’d unknowingly reached a wrong number. Curious.
        The indicator light blinked off.

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