The Face (28 page)

For the glass of water, he went into the kitchen, where no mirrors hung.

Curiously, his attention was drawn to the wall-mounted telephone near the refrigerator. None of the lines was in use. Not Line 24. Not Fric’s line.

He thought about the heavy breather. Even if the boy was the type to invent little dramas to focus attention on himself, which he was not, this seemed a pale invention, not worth the effort of a lie. When kids made up stuff, they tended toward flamboyant details.

After taking the aspirin, Ethan went to the phone and picked up the handset. A light appeared at the first of his two private lines.

The house phones doubled as an intercom system. If he pressed the button marked
INTERCOM
and then the button for Fric’s line, he would be able to speak directly to the boy in his room.

He didn’t know what he would say or why he felt that he ought to seek out Fric at this late hour rather than in the morning. He stared at the boy’s line. He put one finger on the button, but hesitated to press it.

The kid was most likely asleep by now. If not asleep, he ought to be.

Ethan racked the handset.

He went to the refrigerator. Earlier, he had not been able to eat. The events of the day had left him with a stomach clenched as tight as a fist. For a while, all he’d wanted was good Scotch. Now, unexpectedly, the thought of a ham sandwich made his mouth water.

You got up every day, hoping for the best, but life threw crap at you, and you were shot in the gut and died, then you got up and went on, and life threw more crap at you, and you were run down in traffic and died again, and when you just tried, for God’s sake,
to get on with it,
life threw still more crap at you, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that eventually all this strenuous activity gave you the appetite of an Olympic power lifter.

Looking at frosted-glass angels, plastic angels, carved-wood angels, painted-tin angels, while at the same time talking to a maybe-for-real angel on the telephone, Fric said, “How can I ever find a safe place if Moloch can travel by mirrors and moonlight?”

“He can’t,” said Mysterious Caller. “He doesn’t have my powers, Aelfric. He’s mortal. But don’t think being mortal makes him less dangerous. A demon would be no worse than him.”

“Why don’t you come here and wait with me till he shows up, and then beat the crap out of him with your holy cudgel?”

“I don’t have a holy cudgel, Aelfric.”

“You must have something. Cudgel, staff, truncheon, a sanctified broadsword glowing with divine energy. I’ve read about angels in this fantasy novel. They’re not airy-fairy types as fragile as fart gas. They’re warriors. They fought Satan’s legions and drove them out of Heaven, into Hell. That was a cool scene in the book.”

“This isn’t Heaven, son. This is Earth. Here, I’m authorized to work only by indirection.”

Quoting Mysterious Caller from their previous conversation, when they had spoken on the wine-cellar phone, Fric said, “‘Encourage, inspire, terrify, cajole, advise.’”

“You’ve a good memory. I know what’s coming, but I may influence events only by means that are sly—”

“—slippery, and seductive,” Fric finished.

“I may not interfere directly with Moloch’s pursuit of his own damnation. Just as I may not interfere with any heroic policeman who is about to sacrifice his life to save another, and therefore raise himself forever high.”

“I guess I understand that. You’re like a director who doesn’t get final cut of the film.”

“I’m not even a director. Think of me as just another studio executive who gives notes for suggested revisions of the script.”

“The kind of notes that always make screenwriters so pissy and turn them into drunks. They’ll bore your butt off talking about that, like a ten-year-old kid could care, like
anyone
could care.”

“The difference,” said the maybe-angel, “is that my notes are always well intended—and based on a vision of the future that may be too true.”

Fric thought about all this for a moment as he pulled the chair out from the kneehole of the desk. Sitting down, he said, “Wow. Being a guardian angel must be frustrating.”

“You can’t begin to know.
You
control the final cut of your life, Aelfric. It’s called free will. You’ve got it. Everyone here has it. And in the end, I can’t act for you. That’s what you’re here to do…to make choices, right or wrong, to be wise or not, to be courageous or not.”

“I guess I can try.”

“I guess you better. What’ve you done with the photo I gave you?”

“The pretty lady with the nice smile? She’s folded in my back pocket.”

“It won’t be any good to you there.”

“What do you expect me to do with it?”

“Think. Use your brain, Aelfric. Even in your family, that’s possible. Think. Be wise.”

“I’m too drag-ass tired to think right now. Who is she—the lady in the picture?”

“Why don’t you play detective? Make inquiries.”

“I did make an inquiry. Who is she?”

“Ask around. That’s not a question for me to answer.”

“Why isn’t it?”

“Because I have to abide by the sly-slippery-seductive rule, which sometimes makes any guardian angel a pain in the ass.”

“Okay. Forget it. Am I safe tonight? Can I wait till morning to find that deep and special secret place to hide?”

“First thing in the morning will be all right,” the guardian said. “But don’t waste any more time. Prepare, Aelfric. Prepare.”

“Okay. And, hey, I’m sorry for what I called you.”

“You mean earlier—an attorney?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been called worse.”

“Really?”

“Much worse.”

“And I’m sorry for trying to track you back.”

“What do you mean?”

“It seems like a sneaky thing to do to an angel. I’m sorry for star sixty-nining you.”

Mysterious Caller fell silent.

An indefinable quality of the silence made it different from any hush that Fric had ever heard.

This was a
perfect
silence, for one thing, and it sucked away not only all the noise on the open line but also every whisper of sound in the library, until he seemed to have gone deafer than deaf.

The silence felt deep, too, as though the guardian were calling from the bottom of an oceanic trench. Deep and so
cold
.

Fric shuddered. He could not hear his teeth chatter or his body quake. He could not hear his exhalation, either, although he felt the breath rush from him, hot enough to dry his teeth.

Perfect, deep, cold silence, yes, but more and stranger than simply perfect, deep, and cold.

Fric imagined that such a silence might be cast like a spell by
any
angel with supernatural powers, but that it might be a trick most characteristic of the Angel of Death.

The Mysterious Caller drew a breath, inhaling the very silence and letting sound into the world once more, beginning with his voice, which resonated with an ominous note of concern: “When did you use star sixty-nine, Aelfric?”

“Well, after you called me in the train room.”

“And also after I called you in the wine cellar?”

“Yeah. Don’t you know all this…being who you are?”

“Angels don’t know everything, Aelfric. Now and then, some things are…slipped by us.”

“The first time, your phone just rang and rang—”

“That’s because I used the telephone in my old apartment, where I lived before I died. I didn’t enter your number, just thought of you, but I
did
pick up the phone. I was still learning…learning what I can do now. I’m getting smoother at this by the hour.”

Fric wondered if he was more tired even than he realized. The conversation wasn’t always making sense. “Your old apartment?”

“I’m a relatively new angel, son. Died this morning. I’m using the body I used to live in, though it’s…more flexible now, with my new powers. What happened the second time you used star sixty-nine?”

“You really don’t know?”

“I’m afraid I might. But tell me.”

“I got this pervert.”

“What did it say to you?”

“Didn’t say anything. He just breathed heavy…and then made these like animal sounds.”

The Mysterious Caller was quiet, but this proved to be a far different silence from the death-deep stillness of a moment ago. This hush had in it a host of half-heard twitches, the moth-wing vibration of fluttering nerves, the so-soft tensing of muscles.

“At first, I thought he was you,” Fric explained. “So I told him I’d looked up Moloch in the dictionary. The name excited him.”

“Don’t ever use star sixty-nine after I call, Aelfric. Not ever, ever again.”

“Why?”

With hard insistence, revealing a degree of alarm that seemed to be too mortal in character for an immortal guardian angel, the caller said, “Not
ever
again. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you promise me you’ll never again try to call me back with star sixty-nine?”

“All right. But why?”

“When I called you in the wine cellar, I didn’t use a phone, the way I did the first time. I don’t require a phone to ring you up any more than I need a car to travel. I need only the
idea
of a phone.”

“The idea of a phone? How’s that work?”

“My current position comes with certain supernatural abilities.”

“Being a guardian angel, you mean.”

“But when I use only the idea of a phone, star sixty-nine might connect you with a place you must not go.”

“What place?”

The guardian hesitated. Then he said, “The dark eternity.”

“Doesn’t sound good,” Fric agreed, and uneasily surveyed the library.

In the labyrinth of shelves, monsters both human and not abided between the covers of so many books. Perhaps one beast prowled not in those paper worlds but in this one, breathing not ink fumes but air, waiting for a small boy to find it along one turning or another of those quiet aisles.

“The dark eternity. The bottomless abyss, the darkness visible, and all that dwells there,” the guardian elaborated. “You were lucky, son. It didn’t talk to you.”

“It?”

“What you called ‘the pervert.’ If they talk to you, they can wheedle, persuade, charm, sometimes even command.”

Fric glanced at the tree again. The angels seemed to be watching him, every one.

“When you press star sixty-nine,” the guardian said, “you open a door to them.”

“Who?”

“Do we need to speak their sulfurous name? We both know who I mean, do we not?”

Being a boy with a taste for fantasy in his reading, with a home theater in which he could watch everything from kid flicks to R-rated monster fests, with an imagination stropped sharp by solitude, Fric was pretty sure he knew who was meant.

The caller said, “You open a door to them, and then, with one wrong word, you might unintentionally…invite them in.”

“In here, to Palazzo Rospo?”

“You might invite one of them into
you
, Aelfric. When invited, they can travel by the telephone connection, by that fragile link of spirit to spirit, much the way that I can travel through one mirror to another.”

“No lie?”

“No lie. Don’t you dare use star sixty-nine after I hang up.”

“All right.”

“Or ever again when I call you.”

“Never.”

“I’m deadly serious about this, Aelfric.”

“I wouldn’t expect a guardian angel to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Scare the crap out of me.”

“Encourage, inspire,
terrify,
” the caller reminded him. “Now sleep in peace tonight, while you can. And in the morning, waste no time. Prepare. Prepare to survive, Aelfric, prepare, because when I look forward right now to see how things will most likely unfold…I see you dead.”

CHAPTER 47

F
RIC IN A QUANDARY, LYING FACEDOWN ON THE sofa, looked at the telephone on the library floor. He had moved it from the writing desk to the maximum length of its cord.

He’d relocated it for extra security, in the event that he needed to make a quick call for help.

While that was true, it represented only part of the truth. He also toyed with the idea of keying in *69.

Fric didn’t embrace self-destruction. He wasn’t one of those Hollywood brats who were eager to grow up and become a rich heroin junkie. He had no intention of killing himself with a sports car, a handgun, a shotgun, diet pills, hard liquor, marijuana-induced lung cancer, or women.

Sometimes during a party, when Palazzo Rospo was crawling with hundreds of famous and semifamous and craving-to-be-famous people, Fric made himself invisible, the better to eavesdrop. In a crowd of that kind, you could easily become invisible, because half of the guests were barely aware of anyone but themselves, anyway, and the other half were intently focused on the handful of directors, agents, and studio honchos who could make them either filthy rich or filthier rich than they already were.

During one of these spells of invisibility, Fric had heard it said of the third—or possibly the fourth—biggest movie star in the world that “the stupid prick will kill himself with women, the way he’s going.” Fric had no slightest idea how one could kill oneself with women, or why a suicidal person would not just buy a pistol.

That intriguing statement had remained with him, however, and he intended to be careful. These days, when he met new women, he studied them surreptitiously for indications that they were the potentially dangerous type.

Until this weird night, he had likewise never imagined that death could be rung up just by pressing *69.

Maybe what came through the phone would not kill him. Maybe it would imprison his soul and take control of his body and make him so miserable that he would
wish
he were dead.

Or perhaps it would take control of him and run him headfirst into a brick wall, into an open cesspool (assuming an open cesspool could be found in Bel Air), off the roof of Palazzo Rospo, or into the arms of a deadly blonde (with which Bel Air apparently was infested).

His quandary was that he didn’t know whether to believe anything that Mysterious Caller had said.

On the one hand, the entire rap about being a guardian angel, about moving by mirrors and moonlight—it might all be a shitload of nonsense. A bigger pile even than Ghost Dad’s unicorn movie.

On the other hand—and there was always another hand—Mysterious Caller
had
walked out of a mirror. He
had
flown through the rafters. His performance in the attic—and later in the shiny surfaces of the Christmas-tree ornaments—had been so incredible that it had earned him some credibility.

Yet what kind of guardian angel wore a suit and tie straight out of a big-bucks Rodeo Drive shop, had skin as pale as fish flesh, looked a lot less holy than scary, and had gray eyes as cold as ashes in ice?

Possibly Mysterious Caller, for reasons unknown, had been lying, leading Fric toward wrong conclusions, setting him up.

He’d once overheard his father say that virtually everyone in this town was setting someone up for a fall, that if they weren’t doing it for money, then they were doing it for sport.

Mysterious Caller said Fric must not use *69 because it would connect him with the dark eternity. Maybe the
truth
was that the guy just didn’t want Fric to try tracking him.

Still belly-down on the sofa, leaning out toward the phone, Fric picked up the handset. He pressed the button for his private line.

He listened to the dial tone.

The angels on the tree
looked
like angels. You could trust an angel with a harp, with a trumpet, wearing white, sporting wings.

He pressed * and 6 and 9.

The phone was picked up not on the fourth ring, as it had been previously, but on the first. No one said hello. As before, only silence greeted him.

Then, after a few seconds, he heard breathing.

Fric intended to outwait the breather, make the pervert speak first. After twenty or thirty seconds, however, he grew so nervous that he said, “It’s me again.”

His concession didn’t bring a response.

Trying to strike a light and somewhat jokey tone, but largely failing, Fric asked, “How’re things in the dark eternity?”

The breathing grew rougher, heavier.

“You know—the dark eternity?” Fric asked tauntingly but also with a faint tremor that he could not control and that put the lie to his pose of bold self-assurance. “Also known on some maps as the bottomless abyss. Or the darkness visible.”

The freak continued to breathe at him.

“You don’t sound so good. You have a bad sinus thing going on there,” said Fric.

With his head hanging over the edge of the sofa, he began to feel a little dizzy.

“I’ll give you my doctor’s name. He’ll write a prescription. You’ll be able to breathe better. You’ll thank me.”

A croaking-grinding voice, issuing from a throat clogged with razor blades, drier than the ashes of ashes twice burnt, arising from a terrible depth, through crevices in the broken stones of strange ruins, said just one word:
“Boy.”

In Fric’s ear, the word crawled as if it were an insect, maybe one of those earwigs that legend said could find its way into your brain and lay eggs in there, transforming you into a walking hive filled with squirming legions.

Remembering all those posters of his father looking noble and brave and full of steely resolve, Fric held fast to the phone. He summoned an iron weight of determination to press the wrinkles of fear from his voice, and he said, “You don’t scare me.”

“Boy,”
the other repeated,
“boy,”
and additional voices arose on the phone, initially just four or five, at a lower volume than the first, male and female, punctuating their gabble with
“boy…boy.”
Their voices were urgent, eager. Desperate. Voices whispery and smooth, voices rough. “…who’s there?” “…the way, he’s the way…” “…sweet flesh…” “…stupid little piglet, easy for the taking…” “…ask me in…” “…ask
me
…” “…no, ask
me
…” In seconds their numbers swelled to a dozen, a score, a crowd. Maybe because they were all talking at once, their speech sounded as though it descended into bestial mutterings and snarls, and what words remained were as often as not obscenities strung together in incoherent sequences. Chilling cries of fear, pain, frustration, and raw anger sewed these rags of raucous noise into a tapestry of
need.

Fric’s strong heart rapped hard against his ribs, pulsed in his throat, throbbed in his temples. He had claimed not to be scared, but he was scared, all right, too scared to come up with a single smart-ass remark or to speak at all.

Yet the churning voices intrigued him, compelled his attention. The hunger in them, the intense yearning, the pitiful desperation, the melancholy longing wove a poignant song that strummed the cords of his abiding loneliness, that
spoke
to him and assured him that he need not suffer solitude, that companionship was his for the asking, that purpose and meaning and family were all his if only he would open his heart to them.

Even when wordless, when bursting with ripe obscenities that ought to have repelled Fric, the guttural chorus, full of growl and hiss, steadily soothed his terror. His heart continued to pound, but moment by moment, the power driving its frenzied hammering was less fear than excitement. Everything could change. Utterly. Completely. Now and forever. Change in an instant. He could have a new life and a better one simply for the asking, a life from which all loneliness would be banished, all uncertainty, all confusion and self-doubt and weakness….

Fric opened his mouth to issue what all but certainly would have been an invitation similar to those that users of a Ouija board were well advised to avoid. Before he could speak, he was distracted by movement at the periphery of his vision.

When he turned to look at what had drawn his attention, Fric saw that the stretchy, coiled cord between the handset and the telephone, once a clean white length of vinyl-coated wires, now appeared to be organic, pink and slick, like that rope of tissue that tied a mother to a newborn baby. A pulse throbbed through the cord, slow and thick, but strong, moving from the phone box on the floor to the handset that he held, toward his ear, as if in anticipation of the invitation that trembled on his tongue.

Sitting at the desk in his study, eating a ham sandwich, trying to puzzle meaning from Reynerd’s six taunting gifts, Ethan found his thoughts drifting repeatedly to Duncan Whistler.

In the garden room at Our Lady of Angels, when he had initially learned that Dunny’s body had gone missing, he had known intuitively that the uncanny events at Reynerd’s apartment and Dunny’s dead-man-walking stunt were related. Later, Dunny’s apparent involvement in the murder of Reynerd, though unexpected, had been no surprise.

What
did
surprise Ethan, the more he thought about it, was the close encounter with Dunny in the hotel bar.

More than coincidence must be involved. Dunny had been in the bar because Ethan was in the bar. He had been
meant
to see Dunny.

If he’d been meant to see Dunny, then he’d been meant to follow him. Perhaps he had also been meant to catch up with Dunny.

Outside the hotel, in the bustle and the rain, unable to get a glimpse of his quarry, Ethan had received the urgent phone call from Hazard. Now he paused to think what he would have done next, if he had not been obliged to meet Hazard at the church.

He obtained the number of the hotel from information and called it. “I’d like to speak to one of your guests. I don’t know his room number. The name’s Duncan Whistler.”

After a pause to check the hotel computer, the desk clerk said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we have no registration for Mr. Whistler.”

Previously, only a few table lamps had been lit here and there throughout the big room, but now all the lamps glowed, as did the ceiling lights, the cove lights, and the looping strings of tiny twinkle bulbs on the Christmas tree. The library had been nearly as purged of shadows as any surgery would have been; but it was still not bright enough for Fric.

He had returned the phone to the desk. He’d unplugged it.

He supposed that the phones were ringing in his third-floor rooms and that they would ring for a long while. He wasn’t going to go up there to listen. When Hell was calling, it could be persistent.

He had dragged an armchair close to the Christmas tree. Close to the angels.

Maybe he was being superstitious, childish, stupid. He didn’t care. Those desperate people on that phone, those
things…

He sat with his back to the tree because he figured that nothing could come through all those branches full of roosting angels to take him by surprise from behind.

If he had not earlier lied to Mr. Truman, he could now have gone directly down to the security chief’s apartment to seek help.

Here in Fricburg, USA, the time was always high noon, and the sheriff could not expect backup from the townsfolk when the gang of outlaws rode in for the showdown.