HURRYING THE LENGTH OF THE LONG NORTH hall, Fric more than once looked worriedly over his shoulder, for he had always half believed that ghosts lurked in the lonelier corners of the great house. On this night, he was all but certain of their presence.
As he passed a gilded mirror set above an old-as-dirt console, he thought he glimpsed two figures in the age-discolored glass: he himself, but also someone taller, darker, hurrying just behind him.
In a tapestry that probably dated from before the last ice age, threatening-looking horsemen on dark steeds seemed to turn their heads to watch him pass. Peripherally, he thought he saw the horses—eyes wild, nostrils flared—begin to gallop through that fabric field and forest, as if intent on bolting out of their woven world and into the third-floor hallway.
Considering his current state of mind, Fric was not suited for work in a graveyard, a mortuary, a morgue, or in a cryogenics facility where gaggles of dead people were frozen in expectation that one day they could be thawed and returned to life.
In a movie, Ghost Dad had played Sherlock Holmes, who had turned out to be the first man ever to have his body scientifically [257] frozen upon death. Holmes was revived in the year 2225, where a Utopian society needed his help to solve the first murder in a hundred years.
Deleting either the evil robots or the evil aliens, or the evil mummies, would have made it a better movie. Sometimes a film could be too imaginative.
At this moment, however, Fric had no difficulty believing that Palazzo Rospo might be seething with ghosts, robots, aliens, mummies, and some unnameable thing worse than all the others, especially here on the third floor, where he was alone. Not safely alone, perhaps, but alone in the sense that he was the only living human presence.
His father’s bedroom and the suite of rooms related to it were on this level, in the west wing and along part of the north corridor. With Ghost Dad in residence, Fric had company in this high retreat, but most nights he dwelt alone here on the third floor.
Like now.
At the junction of the north and the east hallways, he stood as still as a corpsicle in a cryogenic vat, listening to the house.
Fric more imagined than heard the patter of rain. The roof was slate, well insulated, and far above even this high hallway.
The faint and inconstant sough of winter wind was but a memory from another time, for this was largely a windless night.
In addition to Fric’s suite, along the east hall were other chambers. Seldom-used guest bedrooms. A walk-in linen closet. An electric-utilities room crammed with equipment mysterious to Fric but reminiscent of Frankenstein’s laboratory. There was a small sitting room, richly furnished and well maintained, in which no one ever sat.
At the end of the hall lay the door to a set of back stairs that went down five stories, all the way to the lower garage. Another set of stairs, at the end of the west hall, also descended to the bottom of Palazzo Rospo. Neither was as wide or as grand, of course, as the main staircase, which featured a crystal chandelier at each landing.
[258] The actress Cassandra Lirnone—born name, Sandy Leaky—who had lived with Fric’s father for five months, staying in the house even when he was absent, had churned up and down every staircase fifteen times a day, as part of her workout regimen. A well-equipped gym on the second floor offered a StairMaster among numerous machines, but Cassandra said the “authentic” stairs were less boring than the make-believe stairs and had a more natural effect on leg and butt muscles.
Slathered in sweat, grunting, squinting, grimacing, cursing like the possessed girl in The Exorcist, screeching at Fric if he happened onto the stairs when she was using them, climbing Cassandra would not have been recognizable to the editors at People magazine. They had twice selected her as one of the most beautiful people in the world.
Apparently, however, all the effort had been worthwhile. Ghost Dad had more than once told Cassandra that she was a deadly weapon because her calf muscles could crack a man’s skull, her thigh muscles could break any heart, and her butt could drive a man crazy.
Ha, ha, ha. Instead of testing your sense of humor, some jokes tested your gag reflex.
One day near the end of her stay, Cassandra had fallen down the back west stairs and broken an ankle.
Genuinely funny.
Now Fric followed the east hall not to his suite, but to the last room on the right before the stairs.
This inelegant space, measuring about twelve feet by fourteen, had a sturdy plank floor and bare white walls. Empty at the moment, it served as a staging point for the transferral of goods in and out of the attic.
A spacious dumbwaiter, driven by an electric motor, could carry up to four hundred pounds, allowing for the storage of heavy boxes and large objects in the vastness above. A door opened to a ............