The Face

lamps.
        The entrance and exit passages more or less divided the grotto in half. To Fric’s right were yet more racks of wine bottles. To his left, stacked floor to ceiling along the wall, were sealed wooden cases of wine.
        According to the stenciled names, the cases contained a fine French Bordeaux. In fact they were filled with cheap vino that only gutter-living bums would drink, and the contents had no doubt turned to vinegar decades before Fric had been born.
        The wooden cases had been stacked here partly for decoration and partly to conceal the entrance to the port-wine closet.
        Fric pressed a hidden latch-release button. One stack of wooden cases swung inward.
        Beyond lay a room the size of a walk-in closet. At the back was a rack of port wines fifty, sixty, and seventy years old.
        Ports were dessert wines. Fric preferred chocolate cake.
        He assumed that even in the late 1930s, when this house had been built, the nation had not been plagued by gangs of port-wine thieves. The closet had most likely been concealed just for the fun of it.
        This secret chamber, smaller than the fur vault, might make an adequate hiding place-depending on how long he would need to remain hidden. The space would be comfortable enough for a few hours.
        If he had to stay in here for two or three days, however, he would start to feel that he’d been buried alive. He’d collapse into a screaming fit of claustrophobia and eventually, descending into madness, he would probably eat himself alive, beginning with his toes and working upward.
        Unnerved by the direction their second conversation had taken, he’d forgotten to ask Mysterious Caller how long he could expect to be under siege.
        He retreated from the port closet and pulled shut the clever wine-case door.
        [210] Turning, Fric saw movement in the passageway by which he had entered this last grotto. Not just the throb of fake gas flames.
        A large, strange, spiral silhouette wheeled across the racks and vaulted brick ceiling, layering itself over the familiar flicker of small pennants of light and small flags of shadow. It was approaching the grotto.
        Quite unlike his father in a big-screen pinch, Fric seized up with fear and could neither attack nor flee.
        Eerily shapeless, shifting, gently tumbling, the shadow billowed closer, closer, and then the fearsome source appeared at the mouth of the passageway: a spirit, a ghost, an apparition, ragged and milky, semitransparent and vaguely luminous, drifting slowly toward him by supernatural locomotion.
        Fric frantically stepped backward, stumbled, fell hard enough to remind himself that his butt was as scrawny as his biceps.
        Out of the passageway and into the grotto came the apparition, gliding like a stingray in ocean depths. Lambent light and pulsing shadow played upon the phantom form, lending it a greater mystery, an aura of veiled or bearded evil.
        Fric raised his hands protectively before his face and peered up between his spread fingers as the spirit arrived above him. For a moment, weightless and slowly revolving, the apparition reminded him of the Milky Way galaxy, with its gossamer spiral arms-and then he recognized it for what it was.
        Lazily drifting on the cool draft, a fake web, fabricated by Mr. Knute, had come unanchored. Floating with all the ghostly grace of a jellyfish, it followed the air currents across the grotto toward the next passageway.
        Mortified, Fric scrambled to his feet.
        Passing out of the grotto, the airborne web snared on one of the wall-mounted lamps, tangled upon itself, and hung there, flimsy and aflutter, like something from Tinkerbell’s lingerie drawer.
        [211] Angry with himself, Fric fled the wine cellar.
        He was in the tasting room, closing the heavy glass door behind himself, before he realized that the spider web could not have come loose all by itself. A draft alone would not have spun it free, up, and away.
        Someone would have had to brush against it, at the least, and Fric didn’t believe that he himself had done so.
        He suspected that someone close behind him in the wine maze had patiently worked the web loose from its corner, careful not to shred or wad it, and had set it afloat upon the draft, to taunt him.
        On the other hand, he remembered too well the toilet-spawned, scaly, green monster