The Face by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Mystery, Calif.), Fiction - Psychological Suspense, Koontz, Hollywood (Los Angeles, Motion picture actors and actr, Stalking victims, Mystery & Thrillers, Fiction, Psychological, Dean R. (Dean Ray) - Prose & Criticism, Suspense, Talking books, Private security services, Motion picture actors and actresses, Thrillers, Suspense fiction, Calif
ISBN: 9780553802481
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 2003-05-27T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 46

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.

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