FRIC IN THE SUFFACATORIUM, ANXIOUS AND wheezing1, and no doubt bluer than a blue moon, dragged himself out of the middle of the room and sat with his back against a steel wall.
The medicinal inhaler in his right hand weighed slightly more than a Mercedes 500 M-Class SUV.
If he’d been his father, he would have been surrounded by an entourage big enough to help him lift the stupid thing. Yet another disadvantage of being a geek loner.
For lack of oxygen, his thoughts grew muddled2. For a moment he believed that his right hand was trapped on the floor under a heavy shotgun, that it was a shotgun he wanted to lift, put in his mouth.
Fric almost cast the device away in terror. Then in a moment of clarity, he recognized the inhaler and held fast to it.
He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only wheeze3 and cough and wheeze, and seemed to be spiraling into one of those rare attacks that were severe enough to require hospital emergency-room treatment. Doctors would poke4 him and prod5 him, bend him and fold him, babbling6 about their favorite Manheim movies. The scene with the elephants! The airplane-to-airplane midair jump with no [126] parachute! The sinking ship! The alien snake king! The funny monkeys! Nurses would gush7 over him, telling him how lucky he was and how exciting it must be to have a father who was a star, a hero, a hunk, a genius.
He might as well die here, die now.
Although he was not Clark Kent or Peter Parker, Fric raised the gazillion-pound device to his face. He slipped the mouthpiece between his lips and administered a dose of medication, sucking in the deepest breath that he could manage, which wasn’t deep at all.
In his throat: a hard-boiled egg or a stone, or a huge wad of phlegm worthy8 of the Guinness book of world records, a plug of some kind, allowing only thin wisps of air to enter, to exit.
He leaned forward. Clenching9 and relaxing neck muscles, chest and abdominal10 muscles. Struggling to draw cool medicated air into his lungs, to exhale11 the hot stale breath pooled like syrup12 in his chest.
Two puffs14. That was the prescribed dosage.
He triggered puff13 two.
He might have gagged on the faint metallic15 taste if his inflamed16 and swollen17 airways18 could have executed a gag, but the tissues were able only to contract, not expand, flexing19 tighter, tighter, tighter.
A yellow-gray soot20 seemed to sift21 down through his eyes, the slow fall of an interior twilight22.
Dizzy. Sitting here on the floor, back against the wall, legs straight out in front of him, he felt as if he were balanced on one foot on a high wire, teetering, about to take a death plunge23.
Two puffs. He’d taken two doses.
Overmedicating was inadvisable. Dangerous.
Two puffs. That ought to be enough. Usually was. Sometimes just one dose allowed him to slip out of this invisible hangman’s noose24.
Don’t overmedicate. Doctor’s orders.
Don’t panic. Doctor’s advice.
Give the medication a chance to work. Doctor’s instruction.
[127] Screw the doctor.
He triggered a third puff.
A bone-click sound like dice25 on a game board rattled26 out of his throat, and his wheezing became less shrill27, less of a whistle, more of a raw windy rasping.
Hot air exploding out. Cool air going down. Fric on the mend.
He dropped the inhaler on his lap.
Fifteen minutes was the average time required to recover from an asthma28 attack. Nothing could be done but wait it out.
Darkness faded from the edges of his vision. Blur29 gradually gave way to clarity.
Fric on the floor in an empty steel room, with nothing to distract him but hooks in the ceiling, naturally looked at those peculiar30 curved forms, and thought about them.
When he’d first discovered the room, he’d been reminded of movie scenes set in meat lockers31, cow carcasses hanging from ceiling hooks.
He had wondered if a mad criminal genius had hung the bodies of his human victims in this meat locker32. Perhaps the room had once been refrigerated.
The hooks weren’t set far enough apart to accommodate the bodies of grown men and women. Initially33, Fric had sprung to the grim conclusion that the killer34 had collected dead, refrigerated children.
On closer inspection35, he had seen that the stainless-steel hooks were not sharp. They were too blunt to pierce either kids or cows.
That’s when he’d set the matter of the hooks aside for later contemplation and had come to the determination that the room had been a suffacatorium. The existence of the interior lock release, however, had proved this theory wrong.
As his wheezing quieted, as breath came more easily, as the tightness in his chest loosened, Fric studied the hooks, the brushed-steel walls, trying to arrive at a third theory regarding the purpose of this place. He remained mystified.
[128] He’d told no one about the pivoting36 section of closet shelving or about the hidden room. What made the hidey-hole so cool was less its exotic nature than the fact that only he knew it existed.
This space could serve as the “deep and special secret place” that, according to Mysterious Caller, would soon be needed.
Maybe he should stock it with supplies. Two or three six-packs of Pepsi. Several packages of peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches. A couple flashlights with spare batteries.
Warm cola would never be his first choice of beverage37, but it would be preferable to dying of thirst. And even warm cola was better than being stranded38 in the Mojave with no source of water, forced to save and drink your own urine.
Peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches, tasty under ordinary circumstances, would be unspeakably vile39 if accompanied by urine.
Maybe he should stock four six-packs of cola.
Even though he wouldn’t be drinking his urine, he would need something in which to pee, supposing that he would be required to hide out longer than a few hours. A pot with a lid. Better yet, a jar with a screw top.
Mysterious Caller hadn’t said how long Fric should expect to be under siege. They would have to discuss that in their next chat.
The stranger had promised that he would be in touch again. If he was a pervert40, he would call for sure, drooling all over his phone. If he wasn’t a pervert, then he might be a sincere friend, in which case he would still call, but for better reasons.
Time passed, the asthma relented, and Fric got to his feet. He clipped the inhaler to his belt.
A little woozy, he balanced himself with one hand against the cold steel wall as he went to the door.
A minute later, in his bedroom, he sat on the edge of the bed and lifted the handset from the telephone. An indicator41 light on the keyboard appeared at his private line.
No one had phoned him since he’d answered his [129] Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo in the train room. After pressing *69, he listened while his phone automatically entered the number of his most recent caller.
If he’d been a brainiac trained in the skills required to be an enormously dangerous spy, and if he’d had the supernaturally attuned42 ear of Beethoven before Beethoven went deaf, or if one of his parents had been an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to crossbreed with humans, perhaps Fric could have translated those rapidly sounded telephone tones into numerals. He could have memorized Mysterious Caller’s phone number for future use.
He was nothing more, however, than the son of the biggest movie star in the world. That position came with lots of perks43, like a free Xbox from Microsoft and a lifetime pass to Disneyland, but it didn’t confer upon him either astonishing genius or paranormal powers.
After waiting through twelve rings, he engaged the speakerphone feature. He went to a window while the number continued to ring.
The billiards-table smoothness of the east lawn sloped away through oaks, through cedars44, to rose gardens, vanishing into gray rain and silver mist.
Fric wondered if he should tell anyone about Mysterious Caller and the warning of impending45 danger.
If he called Ghost Dad’s global cell-phone number, it would be answered either by a bodyguard46 or by his father’s personal makeup47 artist. Or by his personal hair stylist. Or by the masseur who always traveled with him. Or by his spiritual adviser48, Ming du Lac, or by any of a dozen other flunkies orbiting the Fourth Most Admired Man in the World.
The phone would be handed from one to another of them, across unknowable vertical49 and horizontal distances, until after ten minutes or fifteen, Ghost Dad would come on the line. He would say, “Hey, my main man, guess who’s here with me and wants to talk to you.”
Then before Fric could say a word, Ghost Dad would pass the [130] phone to Julia Roberts or Arnold Schwarzenegger, or to Tobey Maguire, or to Kirsten Dunst, or to Winnie the Wonder Horse, probably to all of them, and they would be sweet to Fric. They would ask him how he was doing in school, whether he wanted to be the biggest movie star in the world when he grew up, what variety of oats he preferred in his feed bag. ...
By the time that the phone had been passed around to Ghost Dad again, a reporter from Entertainment Weekly, using the wrong end of a pencil, would be taking notes for a feature piece about the father-son chat. When the story hit print, every fact would be wrong, and Fric would be made to look like either a whiny50 moron51 or a spoiled sissy.
Worse, a giggly52 young actress with no serious credits but with a little industry buzz—what they used to call a starlet—might answer Ghost Dad’s phone, as often one of them did. She would be tickled53 by the name Fric because these girls were always tickled by everything. He’d talked to scores of them, hundreds, over the years, and they seemed to be as alike as ears of corn picked in the same field, as if some farmer grew them out in Iowa and shipped them to Hollywood in railroad cars.
Fric wasn’t able to phone his Nominal54 Mom, Freddie Nielander, because she would be in some far and fabulously55 glamorous56 place like Monte Carlo, being gorgeous. He didn’t have a reliable phone number for her.
Mrs. McBee, and by extension Mr. McBee, were kind to Fric. They seemed to have his best interests always in mind.
Nevertheless, Fric was reluctant to turn to them in a case like this. Mr. McBee was just a little ... daffy. And Mrs. McBee was an all-knowing, all-seeing, rule-making, formidable woman whose soft-spoken words and mere57 looks of disapproval58 were powerful enough to cause the object of her reprimand to suffer internal bleeding.
Mr. and Mrs. McBee served in loco parentis. This was a Latin legal phrase that meant they had been given the authority of Fric’s parents when his parents were absent, which was nearly always.
[131] When he’d first heard in loco parentis, he’d thought it meant that his parents were loco.
The McBees, however, had come with the house, which they had managed long before Ghost Dad had owned it. To Fric, their deeper allegiance seemed to be to Palazzo Rospo, to place and to tradition, more than to any single employer or his family.
Mr. Baptiste, the happy cook, was a friendly acquaintance, not actually a friend, and certainly not a confidant.
Mr. Hachette, the fearsome and possibly insane chef, was not a person to whom anyone would turn in time of need, except perhaps Satan. The Prince of Hell would value the chef’s advice.
Fric carefully planned every foray into the kitchen so as to avoid Mr. Hachette. Garlic wouldn’t repel59 the chef, because he loved garlic, but a crucifix pressed to his flesh would surely cause him to burst into flames and, screaming, to take flight like a bat.
The possibility existed that the psychotic chef was the very danger about which Mysterious Caller had been warning Fric.
Indeed, virtually any of the twenty-five staff members might be a scheming homicidal nutjob cunningly concealed60 behind a smiley mask. An ax murderer. An ice-pick killer. A silk-scarf strangler.
Maybe all twenty-five were ax murderers waiting to strike. Maybe the next full moon would stir tides of madness in their heads, and they would explode simultaneously61, committing hideous62 acts of bloody63 violence, attacking one another with guns, hatchets64, and high-speed food processors.
If you couldn’t know the full truth of what your father and your mother thought of you, if you couldn’t really know who they were and what went on inside their heads, then you couldn’t expect to know for sure anything about other people who were even less close to you.
Fric pretty much trusted Mr. Truman not to be a psychopath with a chain-saw obsession65. Mr. Truman had once been a cop, after all.
Besides, something about Ethan Truman was so right. Fric didn’t [132] have the words to describe it, but he recognized it. Mr. Truman was solid. When he came into a room, he was there. When he talked to you, he was connected to you.
Fric had never known anyone quite like him.
Nevertheless, he wouldn’t tell even Mr. Truman about Mysterious Caller and the need to find a hiding place.
For one thing, he feared not being believed. Boys his age often made up wild stories. Not Fric. But other boys did. Fric didn’t want Mr. Truman to think he was a lying sack of kid crap.
Neither did he want Mr. Truman to think that he was a fraidy-cat, a spineless jellyfish, a chicken-hearted coward.
No one would ever believe that Fric could save the world twenty times over, the way they believed his father had done, but he didn’t want anyone to think he was a timid baby. Especially not Mr. Truman.
Besides, he sort of liked having this secret. It was better than trains.
He watched the wet day, half expecting to catch a brief glimpse of a villain66 skulking67 across the estate, obscured by rain and mist.
After Mysterious Caller’s number had rung maybe a hundred times without being answered, Fric returned to the phone and terminated the call.
He had work to do. Preparations to make.
A bad thing was coming. Fric intended to be ready to meet it, greet it, defeat it.
收听单词发音 |
1
wheezing
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| v.喘息，发出呼哧呼哧的喘息声( wheeze的现在分词 )；哮鸣 | |
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muddled
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| adj.混乱的；糊涂的；头脑昏昏然的v.弄乱，弄糟( muddle的过去式)；使糊涂；对付，混日子 | |
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wheeze
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| n.喘息声，气喘声；v.喘息着说 | |
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poke
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| n.刺，戳，袋；vt.拨开，刺，戳；vi.戳，刺，捅，搜索，伸出，行动散慢 | |
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prod
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| vt.戳，刺；刺激，激励 | |
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babbling
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| n.胡说，婴儿发出的咿哑声adj.胡说的v.喋喋不休( babble的现在分词 )；作潺潺声（如流水）；含糊不清地说话；泄漏秘密 | |
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gush
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| v.喷，涌；滔滔不绝(说话)；n.喷，涌流；迸发 | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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clenching
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| v.紧握，抓紧，咬紧( clench的现在分词 ) | |
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abdominal
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| adj.腹（部）的，下腹的；n.腹肌 | |
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exhale
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| v.呼气，散出，吐出，蒸发 | |
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syrup
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| n.糖浆，糖水 | |
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puff
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| n.一口(气)；一阵(风)；v.喷气，喘气 | |
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puffs
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| n.吸( puff的名词复数 )；（烟斗或香烟的）一吸；一缕（烟、蒸汽等）；（呼吸或风的）呼v.使喷出( puff的第三人称单数 )；喷着汽（或烟）移动；吹嘘；吹捧 | |
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metallic
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| adj.金属的；金属制的；含金属的；产金属的；像金属的 | |
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inflamed
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| adj.发炎的，红肿的v.（使）变红，发怒，过热( inflame的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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swollen
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| adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀 | |
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AIRWAYS
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| 航空公司 | |
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flexing
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| n.挠曲，可挠性v.屈曲( flex的现在分词 )；弯曲；（为准备大干而）显示实力；摩拳擦掌 | |
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soot
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| n.煤烟，烟尘；vt.熏以煤烟 | |
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sift
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| v.筛撒，纷落，详察 | |
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twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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plunge
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| v.跳入，(使)投入，(使)陷入；猛冲 | |
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noose
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| n.绳套，绞索（刑）；v.用套索捉；使落入圈套；处以绞刑 | |
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dice
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| n.骰子；vt.把（食物）切成小方块，冒险 | |
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rattled
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| 慌乱的，恼火的 | |
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shrill
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| adj.尖声的；刺耳的；v尖叫 | |
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asthma
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| n.气喘病，哮喘病 | |
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blur
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| n.模糊不清的事物；vt.使模糊，使看不清楚 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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lockers
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| n.寄物柜( locker的名词复数 ) | |
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locker
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| n.更衣箱，储物柜，冷藏室，上锁的人 | |
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initially
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| adv.最初，开始 | |
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killer
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| n.杀人者，杀人犯，杀手，屠杀者 | |
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inspection
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| n.检查，审查，检阅 | |
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36
pivoting
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| n.绕轴旋转，绕公共法线旋转v.（似）在枢轴上转动( pivot的现在分词 )；把…放在枢轴上；以…为核心，围绕（主旨）展开 | |
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beverage
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| n.(水，酒等之外的)饮料 | |
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stranded
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| a.搁浅的，进退两难的 | |
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vile
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| adj.卑鄙的，可耻的，邪恶的；坏透的 | |
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40
pervert
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| n.堕落者，反常者；vt.误用，滥用；使人堕落，使入邪路 | |
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41
indicator
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| n.指标；指示物，指示者；指示器 | |
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42
attuned
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| v.使协调( attune的过去式和过去分词 )；调音 | |
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43
perks
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| 额外津贴，附带福利，外快( perk的名词复数 ) | |
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cedars
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| 雪松，西洋杉( cedar的名词复数 ) | |
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45
impending
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| a.imminent, about to come or happen | |
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bodyguard
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| n.护卫，保镖 | |
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makeup
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| n.组织；性格；化装品 | |
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48
adviser
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| n.劝告者，顾问 | |
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49
vertical
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| adj.垂直的，顶点的，纵向的；n.垂直物，垂直的位置 | |
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50
whiny
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| adj. 好发牢骚的, 嘀咕不停的, 烦躁的 | |
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51
moron
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| n.极蠢之人，低能儿 | |
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52
giggly
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| adj.傻笑的，吃吃笑的 | |
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53
tickled
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| （使）发痒( tickle的过去式和过去分词 )； （使）愉快，逗乐 | |
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54
nominal
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| adj.名义上的；(金额、租金)微不足道的 | |
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fabulously
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| 难以置信地，惊人地 | |
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56
glamorous
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| adj.富有魅力的；美丽动人的；令人向往的 | |
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57
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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58
disapproval
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| n.反对，不赞成 | |
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59
repel
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| v.击退，抵制，拒绝，排斥 | |
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60
concealed
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| a.隐藏的，隐蔽的 | |
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61
simultaneously
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| adv.同时发生地，同时进行地 | |
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62
hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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63
bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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64
hatchets
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| n.短柄小斧( hatchet的名词复数 )；恶毒攻击；诽谤；休战 | |
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65
obsession
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| n.困扰，无法摆脱的思想(或情感) | |
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66
villain
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| n.反派演员，反面人物；恶棍；问题的起因 | |
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67
skulking
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| v.潜伏，偷偷摸摸地走动，鬼鬼祟祟地活动( skulk的现在分词 ) | |
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