Home for ten-year-old Fric Manheim is a vast Bel Air mansion. Somebody has to live there. His father, who owns it, is Hollywood's biggest star - The Face - but he's hardly ever in Hollywood. Fric's mother went her own way long ago, though she still has her own suite in the house, and a phone line - it gets as few calls as line #24, which is for receiving phone calls from the dead.
Fric is pretty well home alone most of the time, with just the housekeeper, Mrs McBee, and the security chief, Ethan Truman. Frick would like to tell them about the pervert who rings him but he doesn't. Anyway, he doesn't really believe that Moloch is coming to get him like the caller says. But he does carefully prepare a hiding place . . .
Ethan meanwhile is worried about the six black boxes addressed to The Face that have been delivered to the mansion, each containing cryptic, maybe sinister objects - snails, the scrabble letters WOE, an apple with a doll's eye in its core. Is the weirdo that sent them threatening The Face?
