“Not me. I’m only one among multitudes, nameless now. There’s trouble coming, young Fric, and you need to be ready for it.”
“What trouble?”
“Do you know of a place in your house where you could hide and never be found?” the stranger asked.
“That’s a weird-ass question.”
“You’re going to need a place to hide where no one can find you, Fric. A deep and special secret place.”
“Hide from who?”
“I can’t tell you that. Let’s just call him the Beast in Yellow. But you’re going to need a secret place real soon.”
Fric knew that he should hang up, that it might be dangerous to play along with this nutball. Most likely he was a pathetic pervert loser who got lucky with a phone number and would sooner or later start with the dirty talk. But the guy might also be a sorcerer who could cast a spell long distance, or he might be an evil psychologist who could hypnotize a boy over the telephone and make him rob liquor stores and then make him turn over all the money while clucking like a chicken.
Aware of those risks and many more, Fric nevertheless stayed on the line. This was by far the most interesting phone conversation he’d ever had.
Just in case this guy with no name happened to be the one from whom he might need to hide, Fric said, “Anyway, I’ve got bodyguards, and they carry submachine guns.”
“That’s not true, Aelfric. Lying won’t get you anything but misery. There’s heavy security on the estate, but it won’t be good enough when the time comes, when the Beast in Yellow shows up.”
“It is true,” Fric deceitfully insisted. “My bodyguards are former Delta Force commandos, and one of them was even Mr. Universe before that. They can for sure kick major ass.”
The stranger didn’t respond.
After a couple seconds, Fric said, “Hello? You there?”
The man spoke in a whisper now. “Seems like I have a visitor, Fric. I’ll call you again later.” His whisper subsided to a murmur that Fric had to strain to hear. “Meanwhile, you start looking for that deep and special hiding place. There’s not much time.”
“Wait,” Fric said, but the line went dead.
GUN READY, MUZZLE UP, CHAMBER BY hall by chamber, through Dunny Whistler’s nautilus apartment, Ethan came to the bedroom.
One nightstand lamp had been left on. Against the headboard of the Chinese sleigh bed, decorative silk pillows fashioned from cheongsam fabrics had been artfully arranged by the housekeeper.
Also on the bed, cast off with evident haste, lay articles of men’s clothing. Wrinkled, stained, still damp from the rain. Slacks, shirt, socks, underwear.
Tumbled in a corner were a pair of shoes.
Ethan didn’t know what Dunny had been wearing when he had left the morgue at Our Lady of Angels Hospital. However, he wouldn’t have wagered a penny against the proposition that these were the very clothes.
Moving closer to the bed, he detected the faint malodor that he’d first smelled in the elevator. Some of the components of the scent were more easily identified than they had been earlier: stale perspiration, a whiff of rancid ointment with a sulfate base, thin fumes of sour urine. The smell of illness, of being long abed and bathed only with basin and sponge.
Ethan became aware of a background sizzle, which he initially mistook for a new manifestation of the rain. Then he realized that he was listening to the fall of water in the master-bathroom shower.
The bathroom door stood ajar. Past the jamb and through the gap, with the sizzle came a wedge of light and wisps of steam.
He eased the door all the way open.
Golden marble sheathed the floor, the walls. In the black granite countertop, two black ceramic sinks were served by brushed-gold spouts and faucets.
Above the counter, a long expanse of beveled mirror, hazed with condensation, failed to present a clear reflection. His distorted shape moved under that frosted surface, like a strange pale something glimpsed swimming just beneath the shadow-dappled surface of a pond.
Veils of steam floated in the air.
Within the bathroom was a water closet. The door stood open, the toilet visible. No one in there.
Dunny had nearly been drowned in this toilet.
Neighbors in a fourth-floor apartment had heard him struggling furiously for his life, shouting for help.
Police arrived quickly and caught the assailants in desperate flight. They found Dunny lying on his side in front of the toilet, semiconscious and coughing up water.
By the time the ambulance arrived, he had fallen into a coma.
His attackers—who’d come for money, vengeance, or both—had not been cheated recently by Dunny. They had been in prison for six years and, only recently released, had come to settle a long-overdue account.
Dunny might have hoped to journey far from his life of crime, but old sins had caught up with him that night.
Now on the bathroom floor lay two rumpled, damp black towels. Two dry towels still hung on the rack.
The shower was in the far-right corner from the entrance to the bathroom. Even if the steam-opaqued glass door had been clear, Ethan couldn’t have seen into that cubicle from any distance.
Approaching the stall, he had an image in his mind of the Dunny Whistler whom he expected to encounter. Skin sickly pale where not a lifeless gray, impervious to the pinking effect of hot water. Gray eyes, the whites now pure crimson with hemorrhages.
Still holding the gun in his right hand, he gripped the door with his left and, after a hesitation, pulled it open.
The stall was unoccupied. Water beat upon the marble floor and swirled down the drain.
Leaning into the stall, he reached behind the cascade, to the single control, and turned off the flow.
The sudden silence in the wake of the watery sizzle seemed to announce his presence as clearly as if he had triggered an air horn.
Nervously, he turned toward the bathroom entrance, expecting some response, but not sure what that might be.
Even with the water turned off, steam continued to escape the shower, though in thinner veils, pouring over the top of the glass door and around Ethan.
In spite of the moist air, his mouth had gone dry. Pressed together, tongue and palate came apart as reluctantly as two strips of Velcro.
When he started toward the bathroom door, his attention was drawn again to the movement of his vague and distorted reflection in the clouded mirror above the sinks.
Then he saw the impossible shape, which brought him to a halt.
In the mirror, under the skin of condensation, loomed a pale form as blurred as Ethan’s veiled image but nonetheless recognizable as a figure, man or woman.
Ethan was alone. A quick survey of the bathroom failed to reveal any object or any fluke of architecture that the misted mirror might trick into a ghostly human shape.
So he closed his eyes. Opened them. Still the shape.
He could hear only his heart now, only his heart, not fast, but faster, sledgehammer heavy, pounding and pounding, slamming blood to his brain to flush out unreason.
Of course his imagination had given meaning to a meaningless blur in a mirror, in the same way that he might have found men and dragons and all