The Face

angels, Asian angels, noble-looking American [222] Indian angels with feathered headdresses as well as halos. Angels smiling, angels laughing, angels using their halos as Hula-Hoops, angels flying, dancing, caroling, praying, and skipping rope. Cute dogs with angel wings. Angel cats, angel toads, an angel pig.
        Fric resisted the urge to puke.
        Leaving all the angels to glitter and glimmer and dangle and grin, he went into the book stacks, directly to the shelf that held the dictionaries. He sat on the floor with the biggest volume- The Random House Dictionary of the English Language -and paged to ROBIN GOODFELLOW, because Mysterious Caller had said that the man from whom Fric would soon need to hide “styles himself as Robin Goodfellow.”
        The definition was a single word: Puck.
        To Fric, this appeared to be an obscenity, although he didn’t know what it meant.
        Dictionaries were full of obscenities. This didn’t bother Fric. He assumed that the people who compiled dictionaries weren’t just a bunch of foul-mouthed gutter scum, that they had scholarly reasons for including trash talk.
        When they started providing one-word obscene definitions that made no sense, however, maybe the time had come for the publisher to start smelling their coffee to see if it was loaded with booze.
        Many of his father’s associates used so many obscenities per sentence that they probably owned dictionaries that contained nothing but foul language. Yet Puck was so obscure none of them had ever spoken it in Fric’s presence.
        Fric paged forward through the volume, pretty sure he would discover that Puck meant “Screw you, we’re tired of defining words, make up your own meaning.”
        Instead, he learned that Puck was a “mischievous sprite” in English folklore and a character in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
        [223] Most words had more than one meaning, and that was true of Puck . The second definition proved to be less cheerful-sounding than the first: “a malicious or mischievous demon or spirit; a goblin,”
        Mysterious Caller had said that the guy Fric needed to worry about had a darker side than Robin Goodfellow, alias Puck. A darker side than a malicious demon or goblin.
        Ugly clouds were gathering over Friclandia.
        Fric paged farther forward in the dictionary, looking for a guy named M-o-e L-o-c-k. Instead, after some searching, he found MOLOCH. He read the definition twice.
        Not good.
        Moloch had been a deity, mentioned in two books of the Bible, whose worshipers were required to sacrifice children. Obviously, he had not been a Bible-approved deity.
        The last four words of the definition particularly disturbed Fric: “… the sacrifice of children by their own parents .”
        This seemed to be carrying child sacrifice one step too far.
        He didn’t for a moment believe that Ghost Dad and Nominal Mom would strap him down on an altar and chop him to pieces for Moloch.
        For one thing, with their superstar schedules, they’d probably never again be together in the same place at the same time.
        Besides, while they might not be the kind of parents who tucked you in bed at night and taught you how to throw a baseball, they were not monsters, either. They were just people. Confused. Trying to do the best they knew how.
        Fric had no doubt they cared about him. They had to care. They’d made him.
        They just didn’t express their feelings well. Images, not words, were your average supermodel’s strength. Naturally, the biggest movie star in the world, being an actor, was better with words than Freddie was, but only when someone wrote them for him.
        [224] For a while, just to have something to do that didn’t require thinking about being brutally murdered, Fric looked up obscene words in the dictionary. It was an amazingly dirty book.
        Eventually he began to feel ashamed of himself for reading all these filthy definitions in the same room with a tree full of angels.
        After returning the dictionary to its shelf, he went to the nearest telephone. Because the library was a humongous space, three phones were distributed among its armchair-furnished reading areas.
        On those rare occasions when Ghost Dad invited a magazine journalist to interview him at home rather than on a set or some other neutral ground, he usually noted that the library