The Face. Dean Koontz

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 worthy 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. Clenching and relaxing neck muscles, chest and abdominal muscles. Struggling to draw cool medicated air into his lungs, to exhale the hot stale breath pooled like syrup in his chest.

      Two puffs. That was the prescribed dosage.

      He triggered puff two.

      He might have gagged on the faint metallic taste if his inflamed and swollen airways could have executed a gag, but the tissues were able only to contract, not expand, flexing tighter, tighter, tighter.

      A yellow-gray soot seemed to sift down through his eyes, the slow fall of an interior twilight.

      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 plunge.

      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 noose.

      Don’t overmedicate. Doctor’s orders.

      Don’t panic. Doctor’s advice.

      Give the medication a chance to work. Doctor’s instruction.

      Screw the doctor.

      He triggered a third puff.

      A bone-click sound like dice on a game board rattled out of his throat, and his wheezing became less shrill, 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 asthma attack. Nothing could be done but wait it out.

      Darkness faded from the edges of his vision. Blur 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 peculiar curved forms, and thought about them.

      When he’d first discovered the room, he’d been reminded of movie scenes set in meat lockers, 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 locker. Perhaps the room had once been refrigerated.

      The hooks weren’t set far enough apart to accommodate the bodies of grown men and women. Initially, Fric had sprung to the grim conclusion that the killer had collected dead, refrigerated children.

      On closer inspection, 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.

      He’d told no one about the pivoting 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 beverage, but it would be preferable to dying of thirst. And even warm cola was better than being stranded 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 vile 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 pervert, 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 indicator light on the keyboard appeared at his private line.

      No one had phoned him since he’d answered his 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 attuned 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 perks, 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 cedars, to rose gardens, vanishing into gray rain and silver mist.

      Fric wondered if he should tell anyone about Mysterious Caller and the warning of impending danger.

      If he called Ghost Dad’s global cell-phone number, it would be answered either by a bodyguard or by his father’s personal makeup artist. Or by his personal hair stylist. Or by the masseur who always traveled with him. Or by his spiritual adviser, 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 vertical 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 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