HAVING FURTHER SEARED THE ROOTS OF THE potted palm with his mighty Manheim urine, which he could probably have bottled and sold to his father’s craziest fans, Fric shopped the library shelves for a book, mindful that Mr. Truman had said not to dawdle.
In case they didn’t make s’mores and sit on the floor telling scary stories, he took the trouble of finding a book that he might actually enjoy reading. He figured that he would be awake most of this long night, and not because he was excited about Christmas Eve coming in just two days. If he didn’t have a book to pass the time, he would go as crazy as Barbra Streisand’s two-headed cat.
He had just found a novel that looked good when he heard noise overhead: a shimmering, bright music much like the soft ringing of a hundred tiny wind chimes all agitated at once.
When he looked up at the stained-glass dome, he saw hundreds of pieces of glass break out of the leading and fall toward him.
No. Not glass. The stained-glass mosaic remained in place across the entire arc of the thirty-foot dome. Shards of color and shadow fell out of the glass without breaking it, fell through it from the night above or maybe from somewhere immeasurably stranger than the night.
[556] The shards fell slowly, not to the demand of gravity, and as they drifted down they changed color. As they changed color, they tumbled upon one another and fused together. As they fused together, they acquired greater dimension and a form.
The gathered shards became Mysterious Caller, whom Fric had most recently seen pictured in the Los Angeles Times in the rose room this afternoon, whom he had last encountered life-size in the memorabilia maze the previous night. As the guardian angel had on that occasion glided without benefit of wings from rafters to attic floor, so now he descended with soundless grace to the carpet only a few feet from Fric.
“You have this knack for entrances,” Fric said, but his shaky voice belied his cocky Hollywood-kid attitude.
“Moloch is here,” the guardian declared in a tone of voice so dire that it would have made Fric’s heart clench and then punch his ribs even if the message had bee............