FED, FRIGHTENED, AND FRUSTRATED1, FRIC WENT directly from the wine cellar to the library, proceeding2 by an indirect route least likely to result in an encounter with a member of the house staff.
Like a spirit, like a phantom3, like a boy wearing a cloak of invisibility, he passed room to hall to stair to room, and no one in the great house registered his passage, in part because he carried a rare gene4 for catlike stealth, but in part because no one, with the possible exception of Mrs. McBee, cared where the hell he was or ever wondered what the hell he was up to.
Being small, thin, and ignored was not always a curse. When the forces of evil were rising up against you in vast dark battalions5, having a low profile improved your chances of avoiding evisceration6, decapitation, induction7 into the soulless legions of the living dead, or whatever other hideous8 fate they might have planned for you.
The last time that Nominal9 Mom had visited, which wasn’t quite as far back in the mists of time as mastodons and sabertooths, she had told Fric that he was a mouse: “A sweet little mouse that no one ever realizes is there because he’s so quiet, so quick, so quick and so [221] gray, as quick as the gray shadow of a darting10 bird. You’re a little mouse, Aelfric, an almost invisible perfect little mouse.”
Freddie Nielander said a lot of stupid things.
Fric didn’t hold any of them against her.
She’d been so beautiful for so long that nobody really listened to her. They were overwhelmed by the visuals.
When no one ever listened to you, really listened, you could begin to lose the ability to tell whether or not you were making sense when you talked.
Fric understood this danger because no one really listened to him, either. In his case, they weren’t overwhelmed by the visuals. They were underwhelmed.
Without exception, people loved Freddie Nielander on sight, and they wanted her to love them in return. Even if they had listened to her, therefore, they wouldn’t have disagreed with her, and even when she made no sense whatsoever11, people praised her wit.
Poor Freddie didn’t get any truthful12 feedback from anything but a mirror. No explanation short of a miracle explained why she hadn’t gone as crazy as a nuclear-waste-dump rat a long time ago.
Arriving in the library, Fric discovered that the furniture in the reading area nearest the entrance had been slightly rearranged to accommodate a twelve-foot Christmas tree. The fresh forestal smell of evergreens14 was so strong that he expected to see squirrels sitting in the armchairs and busily storing acorns15 in the antique Chinese vases.
This was one of nine massive spruces erected16 this very evening in key rooms throughout the mansion17. Flawlessly shaped, perfectly18 symmetrical, greener-than-green clone trees.
Each of the nine evergreens would be decorated with a different theme. Here the subject was angels.
Every ornament19 on the tree was an angel or featured an angel in its design. Baby angels, child angels, adult angels, blond angels with blue eyes, African-American angels, Asian angels, noble-looking American [222] Indian angels with feathered headdresses as well as halos. Angels smiling, angels laughing, angels using their halos as Hula-Hoops, angels flying, dancing, caroling, praying, and skipping rope. Cute dogs with angel wings. Angel cats, angel toads20, an angel pig.
Fric resisted the urge to puke.
Leaving all the angels to glitter and glimmer21 and dangle22 and grin, he went into the book stacks, directly to the shelf that held the dictionaries. He sat on the floor with the biggest volume—The Random23 House Dictionary of the English Language—and paged to ROBIN24 GOODFELLOW, because Mysterious Caller had said that the man from whom Fric would soon need to hide “styles himself as Robin Goodfellow.”
The definition was a single word: Puck.
To Fric, this appeared to be an obscenity, although he didn’t know what it meant.
Dictionaries were full of obscenities. This didn’t bother Fric. He assumed that the people who compiled dictionaries weren’t just a bunch of foul25-mouthed gutter26 scum, that they had scholarly reasons for including trash talk.
When they started providing one-word obscene definitions that made no sense, however, maybe the time had come for the publisher to start smelling their coffee to see if it was loaded with booze.
Many of his father’s associates used so many obscenities per sentence that they probably owned dictionaries that contained nothing but foul language. Yet Puck was so obscure none of them had ever spoken it in Fric’s presence.
Fric paged forward through the volume, pretty sure he would discover that Puck meant “Screw you, we’re tired of defining words, make up your own meaning.”
Instead, he learned that Puck was a “mischievous27 sprite” in English folklore28 and a character in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
[223] Most words had more than one meaning, and that was true of Puck. The second definition proved to be less cheerful-sounding than the first: “a malicious29 or mischievous demon30 or spirit; a goblin,”
Mysterious Caller had said that the guy Fric needed to worry about had a darker side than Robin Goodfellow, alias31 Puck. A darker side than a malicious demon or goblin.
Ugly clouds were gathering32 over Friclandia.
Fric paged farther forward in the dictionary, looking for a guy named M-o-e L-o-c-k. Instead, after some searching, he found MOLOCH. He read the definition twice.
Not good.
Moloch had been a deity33, mentioned in two books of the Bible, whose worshipers were required to sacrifice children. Obviously, he had not been a Bible-approved deity.
The last four words of the definition particularly disturbed Fric: “... the sacrifice of children by their own parents.”
This seemed to be carrying child sacrifice one step too far.
He didn’t for a moment believe that Ghost Dad and Nominal Mom would strap34 him down on an altar and chop him to pieces for Moloch.
For one thing, with their superstar schedules, they’d probably never again be together in the same place at the same time.
Besides, while they might not be the kind of parents who tucked you in bed at night and taught you how to throw a baseball, they were not monsters, either. They were just people. Confused. Trying to do the best they knew how.
Fric had no doubt they cared about him. They had to care. They’d made him.
They just didn’t express their feelings well. Images, not words, were your average supermodel’s strength. Naturally, the biggest movie star in the world, being an actor, was better with words than Freddie was, but only when someone wrote them for him.
[224] For a while, just to have something to do that didn’t require thinking about being brutally35 murdered, Fric looked up obscene words in the dictionary. It was an amazingly dirty book.
Eventually he began to feel ashamed of himself for reading all these filthy36 definitions in the same room with a tree full of angels.
After returning the dictionary to its shelf, he went to the nearest telephone. Because the library was a humongous space, three phones were distributed among its armchair-furnished reading areas.
On those rare occasions when Ghost Dad invited a magazine journalist to interview him at home rather than on a set or some other neutral ground, he usually noted37 that the library contained more than twice as many books as there were bottles of wine in the wine cellar. Then he said, “When I’m a has-been, at least I’ll be a pleasantly wasted, well-educated has-been.”
Ha, ha, ha.
Fric sat on the edge of a chair, picked up the phone beside it, pressed the access button for his private line, and keyed in *69. He had forgotten to do this in the wine-tasting room, after Mysterious Caller had hung up on him.
Previously38, when he’d tried this trick, the call-back number had rung and rung, and no one had ever answered it.
This time, someone answered. Someone picked up on the fourth ring, but didn’t say anything.
“It’s me, “said Fric.
Though he didn’t receive a reply, Fric knew he wasn’t listening to a dead line. He could sense a presence at the other end.
“Are you surprised?” Fric asked.
He could hear breathing.
“I used star sixty-nine.”
The breathing grew strange, a little ragged39, as though the idea of being tracked down with *69 excited the guy.
“I’m calling you from the crapper in my father’s bathroom,” he [225] lied, and waited to see if his weird40 phone buddy41 would warn him about the misery42 with which lying was rewarded.
Instead, he just got breathed at some more.
The guy was obviously trying to spook him. Fric refused to give the pervert43 the satisfaction of knowing that he had succeeded.
“What I forgot to ask you is how long I’ll need to hide from this Puck when he shows up.”
The longer he listened to the breathing, the more Fric realized that this had peculiar44 and disturbing qualities far different from the standard pervert-on-the-phone panting that he’d heard in movies.
“I looked up Moloch, too.”
This name seemed to excite the freak. The breathing grew rougher and more urgent.
Abruptly45 Fric became convinced that the heavy breather was not a man, but an animal. Like a bear, maybe, but worse than a bear. Like a bull, but nothing as ordinary as a bull.
Up the coiled cord, into the handset, into the ear piece, into Fric’s right ear, the breathing squirmed, a serpent of sound, seeking to coil inside his skull46 and set its fangs47 into his brain.
This didn’t seem at all like Mysterious Caller. He hung up.
Instantly, his line rang: Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
He didn’t answer it.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Fric got up from the armchair. He walked away.
He passed quickly along aisles48 of bookshelves to the front of the library.
His personal call tone continued to mock him. He paused to stare at the phone in this main reading area, watching as the signal light burned bright with each ring.
Like all the members of the household and the staff who enjoyed dedicated49 phone lines, Fric had voice mail. If he didn’t pick up by the fifth ring, the call would be recorded for him.
[226] Although his voice mail was currently activated50, the phone had rung fourteen times, maybe more.
He circled the Christmas tree, opened one of the two tall doors, and stepped out of the library, into the hall.
At last the phone stopped taunting51 him.
Fric glanced to his left, then to his right. He stood alone in the hall, yet the feeling of being watched had once more settled over him.
In the library, among the hundreds of tiny white lights strung like stars across the dark boughs52 of the evergreen13, the angels sang silently, laughed silently, silently blew heralds’ horns, glimmered53, glittered, hung from their halos or harps54, dangled55 from their pierced wings, from their hands raised in blessing56, from their necks, as if they had broken all the laws of Heaven and, executed in one great throng57, had been condemned58 forever to this hangman’s tree.
收听单词发音 |
1
frustrated
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| adj.挫败的，失意的，泄气的v.使不成功( frustrate的过去式和过去分词 )；挫败；使受挫折；令人沮丧 | |
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proceeding
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| n.行动，进行，(pl.)会议录，学报 | |
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phantom
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| n.幻影，虚位，幽灵；adj.错觉的，幻影的，幽灵的 | |
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gene
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| n.遗传因子，基因 | |
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battalions
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| n.（陆军的）一营（大约有一千兵士）( battalion的名词复数 )；协同作战的部队；军队；（组织在一起工作的）队伍 | |
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evisceration
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| n.除脏（术） | |
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induction
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| n.感应，感应现象 | |
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hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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nominal
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| adj.名义上的；(金额、租金)微不足道的 | |
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10
darting
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| v.投掷，投射( dart的现在分词 )；向前冲，飞奔 | |
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whatsoever
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| adv.（用于否定句中以加强语气）任何；pron.无论什么 | |
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truthful
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| adj.真实的，说实话的，诚实的 | |
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evergreen
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| n.常青树；adj.四季常青的 | |
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evergreens
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| n.常青树，常绿植物，万年青( evergreen的名词复数 ) | |
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acorns
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| n.橡子，栎实( acorn的名词复数 ) | |
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ERECTED
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| adj. 直立的，竖立的，笔直的 vt. 使 ... 直立，建立 | |
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mansion
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| n.大厦，大楼；宅第 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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ornament
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| v.装饰，美化；n.装饰，装饰物 | |
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toads
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| n.蟾蜍，癞蛤蟆( toad的名词复数 ) | |
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glimmer
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| v.发出闪烁的微光；n.微光，微弱的闪光 | |
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dangle
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| v.(使)悬荡，(使)悬垂 | |
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random
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| adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动 | |
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robin
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| n.知更鸟，红襟鸟 | |
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foul
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| adj.污秽的；邪恶的；v.弄脏；妨害；犯规；n.犯规 | |
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gutter
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| n.沟，街沟，水槽，檐槽，贫民窟 | |
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27
mischievous
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| adj.调皮的，恶作剧的，有害的，伤人的 | |
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28
folklore
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| n.民间信仰，民间传说，民俗 | |
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29
malicious
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| adj.有恶意的，心怀恶意的 | |
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demon
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| n.魔鬼，恶魔 | |
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31
alias
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| n.化名；别名；adv.又名 | |
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32
gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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33
deity
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| n.神，神性；被奉若神明的人(或物) | |
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34
strap
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| n.皮带，带子；v.用带扣住，束牢；用绷带包扎 | |
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brutally
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| adv.残忍地，野蛮地，冷酷无情地 | |
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filthy
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| adj.卑劣的；恶劣的，肮脏的 | |
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noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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40
weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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41
buddy
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| n.（美口）密友，伙伴 | |
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42
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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43
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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44
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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45
abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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46
skull
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| n.头骨；颅骨 | |
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47
fangs
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| n.（尤指狗和狼的）长而尖的牙( fang的名词复数 )；（蛇的）毒牙；罐座 | |
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48
aisles
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| n. (席位间的)通道, 侧廊 | |
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49
dedicated
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| adj.一心一意的；献身的；热诚的 | |
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50
activated
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| adj. 激活的 动词activate的过去式和过去分词 | |
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51
taunting
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| 嘲讽( taunt的现在分词 )； 嘲弄； 辱骂； 奚落 | |
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52
boughs
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| 大树枝( bough的名词复数 ) | |
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53
glimmered
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| v.发闪光，发微光( glimmer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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54
harps
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| abbr.harpsichord 拨弦古钢琴n.竖琴( harp的名词复数 ) | |
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55
dangled
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| 悬吊着( dangle的过去式和过去分词 )； 摆动不定； 用某事物诱惑…； 吊胃口 | |
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56
blessing
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| n.祈神赐福；祷告；祝福，祝愿 | |
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57
throng
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| n.人群，群众；v.拥挤，群集 | |
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58
condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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