The Face

word of Fric’s invention. He imagined an evil genius forcing his terrified prey into the suffacatorium at gunpoint, slamming the door, and gleefully cranking the air out of the chamber, until the victim gradually suffocated.
        In fiction, villains sometimes engineered elaborate devices and [117] schemes to kill people when a knife or gun would be much quicker and cheaper. Evil minds were apparently as complex as anthill mazes.
        Or maybe some psycho killers were squeamish about blood. Maybe they enjoyed killing, but not if they were left with a mess to clean. Such murderous types might install a secret suffacatorium.
        Certain elements of the room design, however, argued against this creepily appealing explanation.
        For one thing, a lever handle on the inside of the door overrode the deadbolt lock operated by a key from the outside. Clearly, the intention had been to guard against anyone being trapped in the room by accident, but it also ensured that no one could be locked in here on purpose, either.
        The stainless-steel hooks in the ceiling were another issue. Two rows of them extended the length of the room, each row about two feet from a wall.
        Gazing up at the gleaming hooks, Fric heard himself breathing as hard now as when he’d just finished racing up eight flights of stairs. The sound of every inhalation and exhalation rushed and reverberated along the metal walls.
        An itching between his shoulders spread quickly to the back of his neck. He knew what that meant.
        This wasn’t merely rapid respiration, either. He’d begun to wheeze.
        Suddenly his chest tightened, and he grew short of breath. The wheezing became louder on the exhale than on the inhale, leaving no doubt that he was having an asthmatic attack. He could feel his airways narrowing.
        He could get air in more easily than he could get it out. But he had to expel the stale to draw in the fresh.
        Hunching his shoulders, leaning forward, he used the muscles of his chest walls and of his neck to try to squeeze out his trapped breath. He didn’t succeed.
        As asthma attacks went, this was a bad one.
        [118] He clutched at the medicinal inhaler clipped to his belt.
        On three occasions that he could remember, Fric had been so severely deprived of air that his skin had taken on a bluish tint, and he had required emergency treatment. The sight of a blue Fric had scared the piss out of everyone.
        Freed from his belt, the inhaler slipped out of his fingers. It fell to the floor, clattered against the steel plates.
        Wheezing, he stooped to retrieve the device, grew dizzy, dropped to his knees.
        Breath had become so hard to draw that a killer might as well have had both hands around Fric’s throat, throttling him.
        Anxious but not yet desperate, he crawled forward, groping for the inhaler. The device squirted between his suddenly sweaty fingers and rattled farther across the floor.
        Vision swam, vision blurred, vision darkened at the edges.
        No one had ever taken a photo of him in a blue phase. He’d long been curious about what he looked like when lavender, when indigo.
        His airways tightened further. His wheezing grew higher pitched. He sounded as if he had swallowed a whistle that had lodged in his throat.
        When he put his hand on the inhaler again, he held fast to it and rolled onto his back. No good. He couldn’t breathe at all on his back. He wasn’t in a proper position to use the inhaler, either.
        Overhead: the hooks, gleaming, gleaming.
        Not a good place to have a severe asthma attack. He didn’t have enough wind to cry out. No one would hear a shout, anyway. Palazzo Rospo was well built; sound didn’t travel through these walls.
         Now he was desperate.

CHAPTER 17
        
        IN A MEN’S-ROOM STALL AT THE SHOPPING mall, Corky Laputa used a felt-tip marker to write vicious racial epithets on the walls.
        He himself was not a racist. He harbored no malice toward any particular group, but regarded humanity in general with disdain. Indeed, he didn’t know anyone who entertained racist sentiments.
        People existed, however, who believed that closet racists were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have purpose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.
        For a significant portion of humanity, having