The Face

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 [115] 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. [116] 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.
        Flanking the crank were two curious items that appeared to be valves of some kind.
        He opened the door, switched on the light, and stepped into a room measuring sixteen feet by twelve. An odd place in many ways.
        A series of steel plates formed the floor. The walls and the ceiling also were covered in sheets of steel.
        These plates and panels had been welded meticulously at every joint. During his study of the room, Fric had never been able to find the smallest crack or pinhole in the welds.
        The door featured a rubber gasket. Now old and dried and cracked, the rubber had probably once made an airtight seal with the jamb.
        Built into the inner face of the door was a fine-mesh screen behind which lay a mechanism that Fric had examined more than once with a flashlight. Through the screen, he could see fan blades, gears, dusty ball bearings, and other parts that he couldn’t name.
        He suspected that the crank on the outside of the door had once turned the suction fan, drawing all the air out of the room through the valves, until something like a vacuum had been created.
        He remained mystified as to the purpose of the place.
        For a while, he’d thought it might have been a suffacatorium.
         Suffacatorium was a