The Face

branch, not lurking in the green shadows of the boughs: Instead, this movement manifested in the ornaments. Each silver ball, silver trumpet, silver pendant was a three-dimensional mirror. A formless shadowy reflection flowed across those curved and shiny surfaces, back and forth, up the tree, and down.
        Only something flying around the rotunda, repeatedly approaching and retreating from the glittering tree, could possibly have cast such a reflection. No great bird, no bat with wings the size of flags, no [291] Christmas angel, no Moloch plied this air, however, and so it seemed that the swooping darkness flowed within the ornaments, rippling up one flank of the tree, cascading down another.
        Less bright, murkier than the silver decorations, the red were mirrors, too. The same pulsing shadow traveled through those candy-apple curves and ruby planes, inevitably suggesting the spurt and flow of blood.
        Fric sensed that what stalked him now-if in fact anything did-was what had stalked him in the wine cellar earlier in the evening.
        The skin tightened on his scalp, puckered on the back of his neck.
        In one of the fantasy novels he loved, Fric had read that ghosts could appear by an act of their own will, but could not long sustain material form if you failed to focus on them, that your wonder and your fear empowered and sustained them.
        He’d read that vampires could not enter your home unless someone inside invited them to cross the threshold.
        He’d read that an evil entity can escape the chains of Hell and enter a person in this world through the trivet of a Ouija board, not if you simply ask questions of the dead, but only if you’re careless enough to say something like “come join us” or “come be with us.”
        He’d read a shitload of stupid things, in fact, and most of them were probably just made up by stupid novelists trying to make a buck while they peddled their stupid screenplays to stupid producers.
        Nevertheless, Fric convinced himself that if he didn’t look away from the Christmas tree, the apparition in the blown glass would move faster, faster, growing in power by the second until, like bandoliers of grenades, every ornament would at once explode, piercing him with ten thousand splinters, whereupon every jagged shard would carry into his flesh a fragment of this pulsing darkness, which would flourish in his blood and soon become his master.
        He ran past the tree, out of the rotunda.
        He pressed a light switch in the north hall, and squeaked his [292] rubber-soled sneakers along an avenue of newly polished limestone floor. Past drawing room, tea room, intimate dining room, grand dining room, breakfast room, butler’s pantry, kitchen, to the end of the north wing he raced, and did not look back this time, or left, or right.
        In addition to the dayroom in which the household staff took breaks and ate their lunch, and also the professionally equipped laundry, the ground-floor west wing housed the rooms and apartments of the live-in staff members.
        The maids, Ms. Sanchez and Ms. Norbert, were away until the morning of the twenty-fourth. He wouldn’t have gone to them, anyway. They were nice enough, but one had a giggle problem and the other was full of tales of her native North Dakota, which to Fric seemed even less interesting than the island nation of Tuvalu with its thrilling coconut-export industry.
        Mrs. McBee and Mr. McBee had put in an especially long hard day. By now they might be asleep, and Fric was reluctant to disturb them.
        Arriving at the door of the apartment assigned to Mr. Truman, who had so recently invited him to call for help at any hour of the day or night, and to whom he had intended to go from the moment that he’d fled the attic, Fric abruptly lost his nerve. A man stepping out of a mirror; the same man flying among the attic rafters; some spirit that lived in, watched from, and might explode out of the ornaments on a Christmas tree: Fric could not imagine that such a fantastic and incoherent story would be believed by anyone, especially not by an ex-cop who’d probably grown cynical after listening to a million crazy tales from uncounted lying sleazeballs and deluded fruitcakes.
        Fric worried a little about being put in a booby hatch. No one had ever before suggested that he belonged in one. But at least one booby hatch was a part of his family history.