NIGHT ON THE MOON, CRATERED AND COLD, could be no less lonely than this night in the Manheim mansion.
Within, the only sounds were Fric’s footsteps, his breathing, the faint creak of hinges when he opened a door.
Outside, a changeable wind, alternately menacing and melancholy, quarreled with the trees, raised lamentations in the eaves, battered the walls, moaned as if in sorrowful protest of its exclusion from the house. Rain rapped angrily against the windows, but then cried silently down the leaded panes.
For a while, Fric believed that he would be safer on the move than settled in any one place, that when he stopped, unseen forces would at once begin to gather around him. Besides, on his feet, in motion, he could break into a run and more readily escape.
His father believed that when a child reached the age of six, an arbitrary bedtime should not be forced on him, but that he should be allowed to find his personal circadian rhythms. Consequently, for years, Fric had been going to bed when he wanted, sometimes at nine o’clock, sometimes after midnight.
Soon, ceaselessly rambling, turning lights on ahead of him and [302] leaving them aglow in his wake, he grew tired. He had thought that the possibility of Moloch, child-eating god, walking out of a mirror at any moment would keep him awake for the rest of his life or at least until he turned eighteen and no longer qualified as a child under most definitions. Fear, however, proved as exhausting as hard labor.
Worried that he might slump upon a sofa or a chair and fall asleep in a place that made him more vulnerable than necessary, he considered returning to the west wing on the ground floor, where he could curl up outside Mr. Truman’s apartment. If Mr. Truman or the McBees found him sleeping there, however, he would appear to be a gutless weenie and an embarrassment to the name Manheim.
He decided that the library offered the best refuge. He always felt comfortable among books. And although the library lay on the second floor, which was as lonely as the third, it had no mirrors.
The tree of angels greeted him.
He recoiled from the winged multitude.
Then he realized that this evergreen featured not a single shiny ornament from which an evil other-dimensional entity could pass into this world or watch from another.
Indeed, the dangling angels seemed to suggest that here was a protected place, true sanctuary.
Throughout the massive chamber, the decorative urns and pots and amphorae and figurines were either Wedgwood basalts with Empire-period themes or Han Dynasty porcelains. The basalts were all matte-finish black, not shiny. Two thousand years had worn the luster from the glaze on the Han pieces, and Fric had no concern that an ancient figure of a horse or a water jar made before the birth of Christ might serve as a peephole through which he could be watched by some wicked creature in a neighboring dimension.
At the back of the library, a door led to a powder room. Using a straight-backed chair, Fric wedged this door securely shut without daring to open it, for above the sink in the powder room, a mirror waited.
[303] This sensible precaution presented a minor problem easily resolved. He had to pee, so he relieved himself in a potted palm.
Always he washed his hands after toileting. This time he would have to risk contamination, disease, and plague.
At least twenty potted palms were distributed throughout the big room. He made a point of remembering which one he had sprinkled, to avoid killing off the entire library rainforest.
He returned to the conversation area nearest the Christmas tree and the battalion of sentinel angels. Surely this was a safe place.
The arrangement of armchairs and footstools included a sofa. Fric was about to stretch out on this makeshift bed when the silence gave way to a cheerful child-pleasing sound suitable for the nursery or the bedrooms of younger children.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
The telephone stood on a piece of furniture that Mrs. McBee referred to as an “escritoire,” but which was still a writing desk to Fric. He stood beside it, watching the signal light flutter at his private line each time that the phone rang.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
He expected Mr. Truman to answer the call by the third ring.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Mr. Truman didn’t respond.
The phone rang a fourth time. A fifth.
The voice-mail system didn’t take the call, either.
Six rings. Seven.
Fric refused to pick up the handset.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
 
In his apartment, Ethan had retrieved the six black-box items from a cabinet and had arranged them on his desk in the order that they had been received.
He had switched off the computer.
[304] The phone was near at hand, where he could intercept calls to Fric should that line in fact ring, and where he would notice the indicator light on Line 24 if it signaled additional incoming calls. Traffic on this messages-from-the-dead line seemed to be increasing, which disturbed him for reasons he could not articulate, and he wanted to keep an eye on the situation.
Sitting in his desk chair with a can of Coke, he considered the elements of the riddle.
The small jar containing twenty-two dead ladybugs. Hippodamia convergens, of the family Coccinellidae.
Another, larger jar into which he had transferred the ten dead snails. An uglier sight by the day.
A pickle-relish jar holding nine foreskins in formaldehyde. The tenth had been destroyed by the lab in the process of analysis.
The closed drapes muffled the snap of rain on glass, the threat of wind enraged.
Beetles, snails, foreskins ...
For some reason, Ethan’s attention drifted to the phone, though it hadn’t rung. No indicator light burned on Line 24 or on any of the first twenty-three.
He tipped the Coke can, took a swallow.
Beetles, snails, foreskins ...
 
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Maybe Mr. Truman had slipped and fallen and hit his head, and maybe he lay unconscious, oblivious of the ringing. Or maybe he had been carried off into a land beyond a mirror. Or maybe he had just forgotten to modify the system to receive Fric’s private calls.
The caller would not give up. After twenty-one repetitions of the stupid child-pleasing tones, Fric decided that if he didn’t pick up the phone, he would have to listen to it ringing all night.
The slight tremor in his voice dismayed him, but he persevered:
[305] “Vinnie’s Soda Parlor and Vomitorium, home of the nine-pound ice-cream sundae, where you splurge and then purge.”
“Hello, Aelfric,” said Mysterious Caller.
“I can’t make up my mind whether you’re a pervert or a friend like you say. I’m leaning toward pervert.”
“You’re leaning wrong. Look around you for the truth, Aelfric.”
“Look around me at what?”
“At what’s there with you in the library.”
“I’m in the kitchen.”
“By now you ought to realize that you can’t lie to me.”
“My deep and secret hiding place is going to be one of the bigger ovens. I’ll crawl inside and pull the door shut behind me.”
“You better baste yourself in butter, because Moloch will just turn on the gas.”
“Moloch has already been here,” Fric said.
“That wasn’t Moloch. That was me.”
Receiving this revelation, Fric almost slammed down the phone.
Mysterious Caller said, “I paid you a visit because I wanted you to understand, Aelfric, that you really are at risk, and that time really is running out. If I’d been Moloch, you’d be toast.”
“You came out of a mirror,” said Fric, his curiosity and sense of wonder for the moment outweighing his fear.
“And I went back into one.”
“How can you come out of a mirror?”
“For the answer, look around you, son.”
Fric surveyed the library.
“What do you see?” asked Mysterious Caller.
“Books.”
“Oh? You have a lot of books there in the kitchen?”
“I’m in the library.”
“Ah, truth. There’s hope that you’ll avoid at least some misery, after all. What else do you see besides books?”
“A writing desk. Chairs. A sofa.”
[306] “Keep looking.”
“A Christmas tree.”
“There you go.”
“There I go where?” asked Fric.
“What dingles and what dangles?”
“Huh?”
“And is spelled almost like angles.”
“Angels,” Fric said, surveying the radiant white flock that gathered with trumpets and harps upon the tree.
“I travel by mirrors, by mist, by smoke, by doorways in water, by stairways made of shadows, on roads of moonlight, by wish and hope and simple expectation. I’ve given up my car.”
Amazed, Fric clenched the phone so hard that his hand ached, as if he might squeeze a few more revealing words from the mirror man.
Mysterious Caller met silence with silence, waited.
Of all the kinds of weirdness Fric had been expecting, this had not been on the list.
Finally, with a tremor of a different quality in his voice, he said, “Are you telling me you’re an angel?”
“Do you believe I could be?”
“My ... guardian angel?”
Instead of answering directly, the mirror man said, “Believing is important in all this, Aelfric. In many ways, the world is what we make it, and our future is ours to shape.”
“My father says that our future is in the stars, our fate set when we’re born.”
“There’s much in your old man to admire, son, but as far as his thoughts on fate are concerned, he’s full of shit.”
“Wow,” said Fric, “can angels say ‘shit’?”
“I just did. But then I’m new at this, and I’m quite capable of making a mistake now and then.”
“You’re still wearing your training wings.”
“You could say that. Anyway, I don’t want to see any harm come [307] to you, Aelfric. But I alone can’t guarantee your safety. You’ve got to help save yourself from Moloch when he comes.”
 
Beetles, snails, foreskins ...
On Ethan’s desk with the other items stood the cookie-jar kitten filled with two hundred seventy tiles, ninety each of O, W, and E.
Owe. Woe. Wee woo. Ewe woo.
Beside the cookie jar lay Paws for Reflection, the hardcover book by Donald Gainsworth, who had trained guide dogs for the blind and service dogs for people in wheelchairs.
Beetles, snails, foreskins, cookie jar with tiles, book ...
Next to the book stood the sutured apple opened to reveal the doll’s eye. THE EYE IN THE APPLE? THE WATCHFUL WORM? THE WORM OF ORIGINAL SIN? DO WORDS HAVE ANY PURPOSE OTHER THAN CONFUSION?
Ethan had a headache. He probably ought to be grateful that a headache was all he had, after dying twice.
Leaving the six gifts from Reynerd on the desk, he went into the bathroom. He took a bottle of aspirin from the medicine cabinet and shook a pair of tablets into his hand.
He intended to draw a glass of water from the bathroom sink and take the aspirin. When he glanced in the mirror, however, he found himself looking at his reflection only briefly, then searching for a shadowy form that shouldn’t be there, that might slide away from his eyes as he tried to pin it with his stare, as in the bathroom at Dunny’s penthouse apartment.
For the glass of water, he went into the kitchen, where no mirrors hung.
Curiously, his attention was drawn to the wall-mounted telephone near the refrigerator. None of the lines was in use. Not Line 24. Not Fric’s line.
He thought about the heavy breather. Even if the boy was the type to invent little dramas to focus attention on himself, which he was [308] not, this seemed a pale invention, not worth the effort of a lie. When kids made up stuff, they tended toward flamboyant details.
After taking the aspirin, Ethan went to the phone and picked up the handset. A light appeared at the............