Frederic Edwin Church Sunset painting

Frederic Edwin Church Sunset painting
in the same way that he had focused himself to hear the rain above the drumbeat of his heart, he tuned in to the footsteps of the mirror man. The attic architecture, the pendulum motion of the giant posters, and the futuristic city over which his father—in cardboard—towered with a fearsome laser rifle at the ready.At an intersection of aisles, Fric looked both ways, turned left. He scurried onward, analyzing the sound of the heavy footsteps as he went, calculating what route might best put distance between him and the man from the mirror.The intruder made no effort at stealth. He seemed to want Fric to hear him, as though confident that the boy couldn’t evade capture.Moloch. This must be Moloch. Looking for a child to take as a sacrifice, a child to kill, perhaps to eat.He’s whiffle of the rain served to distort the sound, to make it seem that the intruder was going away from Fric, then coming he took to heart [267] his dotty mother’s insistence
Thomas Gainsborough The Blue Boy paintingGustav Klimt Mother and Child detail from The Three Ages of Woman painting
he was “an almost invisible perfect little mouse.” He crept with quiet quickness past the red-and-gold cardboard spires of a Moloch, with the splintered bones of babies stuck between his teeth. ...Fric refrained from screaming for help, certain that he would not be heard by anyone other than the man-god-beast-thing who stalked him. The walls of the house were thick, the floors thicker than the closer, then going, when in fact he most likely made steady progress toward his quarry.Fric had heeded Mysterious Caller’s advice to find a deep and secret hiding place. He had believed that he would need a refuge soon, but he hadn’t realized that he would need it this soon.Learning to breathe and listen at the same time,