LITMIR.BIZ

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because everyone in the world—once even the President of the United States—wanted to talk to him. Calls for Channing—or Chan or Channi, or even (in the case of one infatuated actress) Chi-Chi—often came in even when he wasn’t in residence.

      Mrs. McBee had four lines, although this didn’t mean, as the Ghost Dad sometimes joked, that Mrs. McBee should start to think that she was as important as her boss.

      Ha, ha, ha.

      One of those four lines served Mr. and Mrs. McBee’s apartment. The other three were her business phones.

      On an ordinary day, management of the house didn’t require those three lines. When Mrs. McBee had to plan and execute a party for four or five hundred Hollywood nitwits, however, three telephones were not always sufficient to deal with the event designer, the food caterer, the florist, the talent bookers, and the uncountable other mysterious agencies and forces that she had to marshal in order to produce an unforgettable evening.

      Fric wondered if all that effort and expense was worthwhile. At the end of the night, half the guests departed so drunk or so drug-fried that in the morning they wouldn’t remember where they had been.

      If you sat them in lawn chairs, gave them bags of burgers, and provided tanker trucks of wine, they would get wasted as usual. Then they’d go home and puke their guts out as usual, collapse into unconsciousness as usual, and wake up the next day none the wiser.

      Because he was chief of security, Mr. Truman had two lines in his apartment, one personal and one business.

      Only two of the six maids lived on the estate, and they shared a phone line with the chauffeur.

      The groundskeeper had a line of his own, but the totally scary chef, Mr. Hachette, and the happy cook, Mr. Baptiste, shared one of Mrs. McBee’s lines.

      Ms. Hepplewhite, personal assistant to Ghost Dad, had two lines for her use.

      Freddie Nielander, the famous supermodel known in Fricsylvania as Nominal Mom, had a dedicated phone line here, although she had divorced Ghost Dad nearly ten years ago and had stayed overnight less than ten times since then.

      Ghost Dad once told Freddie that he called her line every now and then, hoping she would answer and would tell him that she had come back to him at last and was home forever.

      Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha.

      Fric had enjoyed his own line since he was six. He never called anyone, except once when he’d used his father’s contacts to get the unlisted home number for Mr. Mike Myers, the actor, who had dubbed the voice of the title character in Shrek, to tell him that Shrek absolutely, no doubt about it, rocked.

      Mr. Myers had been very nice, had done the Shrek voice for him, and lots of other voices, and had made him laugh until his stomach hurt. This injury to his abdominal muscles resulted partly from the fact that Mr. Myers was wickedly funny and partly because Fric had not recently exercised his laugh-muscle group as much as he would have liked.

      Fric’s father, a believer in a shitload of paranormal phenomena, had set aside the last telephone line to receive calls from the dead. That was a story in itself.

      Now, for the first time in eight days, since the Ghost Dad’s most recent call, Fric heard his signature tone coming from the train-room phones.

      Everyone on the estate had been assigned a different sound for the line or lines that were dedicated to him or her. Each of Ghost Dad’s lines produced a simple brrrrrrrr. Mrs. McBee’s signature tone was a series of musical chimes. Mr. Truman’s lines played the first nine notes from the theme song of an ancient TV cop show, Dragnet, which was stupid, and Mr. Truman thought so, too, but he endured it.

      This highly sophisticated telephone system could produce up to twelve different signature tones. Eight were standard. Four—like Dragnet—could be custom-designed for the client.

      Fric had been assigned the dumbest of the standard tones, which the phone manufacturer described as “a cheerful child-pleasing sound suitable for the nursery or the bedrooms of younger children.” Why infants in nurseries or toddlers in cribs ought to have their own telephones remained a mystery to Fric.

      Were they going to call Babies R Us and order lobster-flavored teething rings? Maybe they would phone their mommies and say, Yuch. I crapped in my diaper, and it don’t feel good.

      Stupid.

      Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo, said the train-room phones.

      Fric hated the sound. He had hated it when he’d been six, and he hated it even worse now.

      Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.

      This was the annoying sound that might be made by some furry, roly-poly, pink, half-bear, half-dog, halfwit character in a video made for preschoolers who thought stupid shows like Teletubbies were the pinnacle of humor and sophistication.

      Humiliated even though he was alone, Fric pushed two transformer switches to kill power to the trains, and he answered the phone on the fourth ring. “Bob’s Burger Barn and Cockroach Farm,” he said. “Our special today is salmonella on toast with coleslaw for a buck.”

      “Hello, Aelfric,” a man said.

      Fric had expected to hear his father’s voice. If instead he had heard the voice of Nominal Mom, he would have suffered cardiac arrest and dropped dead into the train controls.

      The entire estate staff, with the possible exception of Chef Hachette, would have mourned for him. They would have been deeply, terribly sad. Deeply, deeply, terribly, terribly. For about forty minutes. Then they would have been busy, busy, busy preparing for the post-funeral gala to which would be invited perhaps a thousand famous and near-famous drunks, druggies, and butt-kissers eager to plant their lips on Ghost Dad’s golden ass.

      “Who’s this?” Fric asked.

      “Are you enjoying the trains, Fric?”

      Fric had never heard this voice before. No one on the staff. Definitely a stranger.

      Most of the people in the house didn’t know that Fric was in the train room, and no one outside the estate could possibly know.

      “How do you know about the trains?”

      The man said, “Oh, I know lots of things other people don’t. Just like you, Fric. Just like you.”

      The talented hairs on the back of Fric’s neck did impressions of scurrying spiders.

      “Who are you?”

      “You don’t know me,” the man said. “When does your father return from Florida?”

      “If you know so much, why don’t you tell me?”

      “December twenty-fourth. In the early afternoon. Christmas Eve,” the stranger said.

      Fric wasn’t impressed. Millions of people knew his old man’s whereabouts and his Christmas plans. Just a week ago, Ghost Dad had done a spot on Entertainment Tonight, talking about the film that he was shooting and about how much he looked forward to going home for the holidays.

      “Fric, I’d like to be your friend.”

      “What’re you, a pervert?”

      Fric had heard about perverts. Heck, he’d probably met hundreds of them. He didn’t know all the things they might do to a kid, and he wasn’t exactly sure what thing they liked most to do, but he knew they were out there with their collections of kids’ eyeballs, wearing necklaces made out of their victims’ bones.

      “I have no desire to hurt you,” said the stranger, which was no doubt what any pervert would have said. “Quite the opposite. I want to help you, Fric.”

      “Help me do what?”

      “Survive.”

      “What’s your name?”

      “I

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