The Face (17 page)

CHAPTER 25

S
NOW FELL ON THE CITY OF ANGELS.

Unprecedented, the shepherd wind drove white flocks out of the dark meadows above the world, gently harried them between ficus trees and palms, along avenues that had never known a snowy Christmas.

Dazzled, Ethan gazed up into the fleecy night.

Abed in his room, he realized that the roof must have been lifted off the house by a prying wind. Snowdrifts would bury the furniture, ruin the carpet.

Soon he would have to rise, go along the hall to his parents’ room. Dad would know what to do about the missing roof.

First, however, Ethan wanted to enjoy this spectacle: Above him, the snowfall hung an infinite crystal chandelier, its beautiful swags of cut beads and beveled pendants in perpetual glittering movement.

His eyelashes were frosted.

Flakes delivered cold kisses to his face, melted on his cheeks.

When his vision fully focused, he discovered that in truth the December night was full of raindrops, to which his troubled eyes had imparted crystalline structures and mysterious hieroglyphic forms.

Once soft, his bed had been spellcast into blacktop.

He felt no discomfort, except that his feather pillow pressed like hard pavement against the back of his head.

The rain on his face fell as cold as snow, imparting an equal chill to his upturned left hand.

His right hand lay exposed, as well, but with it he could not feel the cold or the tap-and-trickle of the rain.

He couldn’t feel his legs, either. Couldn’t move them. Could not move anything other than his head and left hand.

If his roofless room filled with rain, and if he were unable to move, he might drown.

In the pool of dreamy speculation on which Ethan had been drifting, sudden terror darted sharklike through the depths beneath him, rising.

He closed his eyes to avoid seeing a bigger and more terrible truth than that the snowflakes were actually raindrops.

Voices approached. Dad and Mom must be coming to put the roof back where it belonged, to fluff his stone pillow into comfortable plumpness once more, and to set all wrongness right.

He surrendered himself to their loving care, and like a feather, he drifted down into darkness, toward the Land of Nod, not the Nod to which Cain had fled after killing Abel, but the Nod to which dreaming children journeyed to find adventure and from which they woke safely in the golden dawn.

Still descending through the darkness north of Nod, he heard the words “spinal injury.”

Opening his eyes a minute or ten minutes later, he discovered the night aswarm with pulsing-revolving red and yellow lights, and blue, as if he were in an open-air discotheque, and he knew that he would never dance again, or walk.

To the tuneless broken songs of police-radio crackle, flanked by paramedics, Ethan glided through the rain on a gurney toward an ambulance.

On the white van, in red letters trimmed in gold, under the bold word AMBULANCE, glowed the smaller words O
UR
L
ADY OF
A
NGELS
H
OSPITAL
.

Maybe they would give him a bed in Dunny’s old room.

That prospect filled him with a choking dread.

He closed his eyes for what seemed a blink, heard men warning one another “careful” and “easy, easy,” and when he looked again, he had blinked himself into the ambulance.

He became aware that a needle already pierced his right arm, served by an IV tube and a dangling bag of plasma.

For the first time, he heard his breathing—full of wheeze and rush and rattle—whereupon he knew that more than his legs had been crushed. He suspected that one or both of his lungs struggled against the confinement of a partially collapsed rib cage.

He wished for pain. Anything but this terrible lack of feeling.

The paramedic at Ethan’s side spoke urgently to his teammate, who stood in the rain, beyond the open doors: “We’re gonna need speed.”

“I’ll burn asphalt,” the rain-lashed medic promised, and he slammed shut the doors.

Along both side walls, near the ceiling, taut garlands of red tinsel sparkled. At the ends and in the middle of each garland, small silver bells, three per set, dangled brightly. Christmas decorations.

The bells in each group were strung concentrically on the same string. The top bell, also the largest, overhung the middle bell, which overhung the third—which was also the smallest—in the set.

When the door slammed, the tiny bells on each string jiggled against one another, producing a silvery ringing as faint as fairy music.

The paramedic fitted Ethan with an oxygen mask.

As cool as autumn, as sweet as springtime, a rich blend of air soothed his hot throat, but his wheezing did not in the least abate.

Having climbed behind the steering wheel in the front of the ambulance, the driver slammed his door, again causing the red tinsel to shimmer and the bells to ring.

“Bells,” Ethan said, but the oxygen mask muffled the word.

In the process of fitting the binaurals of a stethoscope to his ears, the paramedic paused. “What did you say?”

The sight of the stethoscope inspired in Ethan the realization that he could hear his heartbeat, and that what he heard was ragged, uneven, alarming.

Listening, he knew that he was hearing not just his heart, but also the knock-hoofed canter of Death’s horse approaching.

“Bells,” he repeated, as throughout his mind the doors to a thousand fears flew open.

The ambulance began to move, and as it rolled, the siren found its shrill voice.

Ethan couldn’t hear the bells above the banshee wail, but he could see the nearest three trembling on their string. Trembling.

He raised his left hand toward the dangling cluster but couldn’t reach that far. His hand grasped at empty air.

This terrible intensity of fear brought with it a clouding confusion, and perhaps he was utterly delirious; nevertheless, the bells seemed to be more than mere decorations, seemed mystical in their shiny smoothness, in their glimmering curves, the embodiment of hope, and he desperately needed to hold them.

Apparently the paramedic understood the urgency of Ethan’s need to have the bells, if not the reason for it. He plucked a small pair of scissors from a kit, and swaying with the movement of the vehicle, he clipped the knot that secured the nearest cluster to the garland of tinsel.

Given the string of bells, Ethan clutched them in his left hand with a grip both tender and ferocious.

He was exhausted, but he dared not close his eyes again, for he feared that when he opened them, darkness would remain and never go away, that he would henceforth see nothing of this world.

The paramedic picked up the stethoscope once more. He inserted the binaural tips in his ears.

With the fingers of his left hand, Ethan counted the bells on the string, from tiniest to largest, to tiniest again.

He realized that he held these ornaments as he’d held a rosary in the hushed hospital room during the last few nights of Hannah’s life: with equal measures of despair and hope, with an unexpected awe that sustained the heart and with a stoicism that armored it. His hope had been unrealized, his stoicism essential, when he had found it necessary to survive her loss.

Between thumb and forefinger, he had tried to pinch mercy from the rosary beads. Now he smoothed the curvatures of bell, bell, and bell, seeking mercy less than understanding, seeking a revelation deaf to the ear but resonant in the heart.

Although Ethan did not close his eyes and bring the darkness down, seeping shadows encroached from the periphery of vision, like ink spreading through the fibers of a blotter.

Apparently the stethoscope captured rhythms that alarmed the paramedic. He loomed close, but his voice came from a distance, and though his face was a mask of calm professionalism, he spoke with an urgency that revealed the depth of his concern for his patient. “Ethan, don’t leave us here. Hang tight. Hold on, damn it.”

Cinched by a knot of darkness, Ethan’s vision narrowed as the cords pulled tighter, tighter.

He detected the astringent scent of rubbing alcohol. A coolness below the crook of his left arm preceded the sting of a needle.

Within him, the knocking hooves of one-horse Death gave way to the thunder of an apocalyptic herd in chaotic gallop.

The ambulance still rocketed toward Our Lady of Angels, but the driver gave the siren a rest, evidently trusting to the swiveling beacons on the roof.

In the absence of the banshee shriek, Ethan thought he heard bells again.

These were not the worry-bead bells that in his hand he smoothed and smoothed, nor were they the strings of ornamental bells suspended from the red sparkling tinsel. These chimes arose at some distance, calling him with a silvery insistence.

His vision irised to a dim spot of light, and then the mortal knot drew tighter still, blinding him completely. Accepting the inevitability of death and endless darkness, at last he closed his eyelids.

He opened the door, then opened his eyes.

In a growl of wind and a jingle of overhead bells, he stepped out of Forever Roses into the cold teeth of the December night, and drew the door shut behind him.

In shock to find himself alive, in disbelief that he stood on legs unbroken, he waited in the entry alcove, between the display windows, as a young couple in raincoats and hoods strolled by on the sidewalk, led by a golden retriever on a leash.

The dog looked up at Ethan, its eyes as wise as they were liquid and dark.

“Good evening,” the couple said.

Unable to speak, Ethan nodded.

“Tink, let’s go,” the woman urged, and then repeated the command when the dog hesitated.

The soaked retriever pranced away, snout lifted to savor the chilly air, followed by its companions.

Ethan turned to peer at the florist who still stood behind the counter, past the glass coffins full of roses.

Rowena had been staring after him. Now she quickly looked down as though attending to a task.

On legs as shaky as his reason, Ethan retraced the route that he had taken to this place, under the sheltering awnings of shops and restaurants, toward the Expedition in the red zone.

Ahead, Tink twice glanced back, but didn’t stop.

Passing a restaurant bejeweled with candlelight and sparkling tableware, breathing in the yeasty fragrance of freshly baked bread, Ethan thought,
The staff of life
.

At the end of the block, the dog looked back once more. Then the trio disappeared around the corner.

In the street, the traffic was lighter than usual at this hour, moving faster than the weather warranted.

Arriving at the red zone near the end of the block, Ethan stood under the last awning—and thought that he might stand there, well and safely back from the street, until dawn reclaimed the city from the night.

A long gap appeared in the approaching traffic.

With his trembling right hand, he fished his keys from a jacket pocket and thumbed the lock-release button on the fob. The Expedition chirruped at him, but he didn’t approach it.

Turning his attention toward the intersection, Ethan saw the headlights of the PT Cruiser as the vehicle approached at far too high a speed on the cross street.

The Cruiser fishtailed in the intersection, and its wheels locked. In the spinout, the car rotated past the parked Expedition, mere inches from a collision.

Had Ethan stood there, he would have been battered between the vehicles, like a pinball between warring flippers.

Here came the crushing truck, the shrill blast of air brakes.

With a sharp stuttering bark of tires against wet blacktop, the Cruiser spun into the far lanes where it belonged.

Parting the rain where the Cruiser had just whipped through it, the truck shook and shuddered to a stop.

When the driver of the Cruiser regained control, he raced away, at a lower but still reckless speed.

The agitated trucker blew his horn. Then he continued on the route that he’d been following before the near miss, toward whatever destination unhindered fate had planned for him.

In the wake of the truck, the gap in traffic had closed.

The signal light changed at the intersection. In two directions, traffic came to a halt, but in two others, it began to move again.

Drenching the night: the delicious aroma of baking bread.

Golden lamplight spending doubloons upon the pavement.

The rush and rustle of the rain.

Perhaps the signal light changed twice again or even three times before Ethan became aware of an aching in his left hand. The cramping pain had begun to spread into the muscles of his forearm.

Tangled through the fiercely clenched fingers of his fist was the string of three small silvery bells clipped from the ambulance tinsel and given to him by a compassionate paramedic.

CHAPTER 26

A
S IF THEY WERE THE DEGENERATE ELITE OF ancient Rome, reclining in midbacchanal, their togas scandalously disarranged, the nameless dead revealed here a smooth and creamy shoulder, here the pale curve of a breast, here a blue-veined thigh, here a hand with the fingers curled in a subtle obscene gesture, here a delicate foot and slender ankle, and here half a profile in which one open eye stared with milky lust.

The least-superstitious witness to this grotesque display might be inclined to suspect that in the absence of a living observer, these unidentified vagrants and teenage runaways would visit bunk to bunk. In the most lonely hours after midnight, might not the restless dead pair up in a cold and hideous parody of passion?

If Corky Laputa had believed in a moral code or even if he had believed that good taste required certain universal rules of social conduct, he might have passed his two-minute wait by rearranging these carelessly draped shrouds, insisting upon modesty even among the deceased.

Instead, he enjoyed the scene because in this chamber was the ultimate fruit of anarchy. Besides, with considerable excitement, he anticipated the arrival of the usually unflappable Roman Castevet, who would be fully flapped on this occasion.

Almost two minutes to the tick, the lever-action door handle clicked, creaked, and eased down. The door cracked open, but only an inch.

As though he expected to discover that Corky awaited him with a camera crew and a pack of muckraking reporters, Roman peered through the gap, his one revealed eye as wide as that of a startled owl.

“Come in, come, come,” Corky encouraged. “You’re among friends here, even though it
is
your intention eventually to dissect some of them.”

Opening the door only wide enough to accommodate his thin frame, Roman slipped into the cadaver vault, pausing to peer back worriedly at the hallway before closing himself in with Corky and the twenty naughty members of the toga party.

“What the hell are you wearing?” asked the nervous pathologist.

Corky turned in place, flaring the skirt of his yellow slicker. “Fashionable rain gear. Do you like the hat?”

“How did you slip by security in that ludicrous outfit? How did you slip by security at all?”

“No slipping necessary. I presented my credentials.”

“What credentials? You teach empty-calorie modern fiction to a bunch of self-important sluts and brain-dead, snot-nosed wonderboys.”

Like many in the sciences, Roman Castevet held a dim view of the liberal-arts departments in contemporary universities and of those students who sought, first, truth through literature and, second, a delayed entry into the job market.

Taking no offense, in fact approving of Roman’s nasty antisocial vitriol, Corky explained: “The pleasant fellows at your security desk think I’m a visiting pathologist from Indianapolis, here to discuss with you certain deeply puzzling entomological details related to the victims of a serial killer operating throughout the Midwest.”

“Huh? Why would they think that?”

“I have a source for excellent forged documents.”

Roman boggled. “
You?
”

“Frequently, it’s advisable for me to carry first-rate false identification.”

“Are you delusional or merely stupid?”

“As I’ve explained previously, I’m not just an effete professor who gets a thrill from hanging out with anarchists.”

“Yeah, right,” Roman said scornfully.

“I promote anarchy at every opportunity in my daily life, often at the risk of arrest and imprisonment.”

“You’re a regular Che Guevara.”

“Many of my operations are as clever and shocking as they are unconventional. You didn’t think I wanted those ten foreskins just for some sick personal use, did you?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought. When we met at that boring university mixer, you seemed like the grand pooh-bah of the demented, a moral and mental mutant of classic proportions.”

“Coming from a Satanist,” Corky said with a smile, “that could be taken as a compliment.”

“It’s not meant as one,” Roman replied impatiently, angrily.

At his best, groomed and togged and breath-freshened for serious socializing, Castevet was an unattractive man. Anger made him uglier than usual.

Slat-thin, all bony hips and elbows and sharp shoulders, with an Adam’s apple more prominent than his nose and with a nose sharper than any Corky had ever seen on another member of the human species, with gaunt cheeks and with a fleshless chin that resembled the knob of a femur, Roman appeared to have a serious eating disorder.

Every time that he met Castevet’s bird-keen, reptile-intense eyes, however, and whenever he caught the pathologist, for no apparent reason, sensuously licking his lips, which were the only ripe feature of that scarecrow face and form, Corky suspected that a fearsome erotic need spun the wheels of the man’s metabolism almost fast enough to cause smoke to issue from various orifices. Had there been a betting pool regarding the average number of calories that Roman burned up every day in obsessive self-abuse alone, Corky would have wagered heavily on at least three thousand—and he would no doubt have ensured a comfortable retirement with his winnings.

“Well, whatever you think of me,” Corky said, “nevertheless, I would like to place an order for another ten foreskins.”

“Hey, get it through your head—I’m not doing business with you anymore. You’re reckless, coming here like this.”

Partly as a profitable sideline, but also partly from a sense of religious duty and as an expression of his abiding faith in the King of Hell, Roman Castevet provided—only from cadavers—selected body parts, internal organs, blood, malignant tumors, occasionally even entire brains to other Satanists. His customers, other than Corky, had both a theological and a practical interest in arcane rituals designed to petition His Satanic Majesty for special favors or to summon actual demons out of the fiery pit. Frequently, after all, the most essential ingredients in a black-magic formula could not be purchased at the nearest Wal-Mart.

“You’re overreacting,” Corky said.

“I’m
not
overreacting. You’re imprudent, you’re foolhardy.”

“Foolhardy?”
Corky smiled, nearly laughed. “All of a sudden you seem awfully prissy for a man who believes plunder, torture, rape, and murder will be rewarded in the afterlife.”

“Lower your voice,” Roman demanded in a fierce whisper, though Corky had continued to speak in a pleasant conversational tone. “If somebody finds you here with me, it could mean my job.”

“Not at all. I’m a visiting pathologist from Indianapolis, and we’re discussing your current manpower shortage and this deplorable backlog of unidentified cadavers.”

“You’ll ruin me,” Roman moaned.

“All I’ve come here to do,” Corky lied, “is to order ten more foreskins. I don’t expect you to collect them while I wait. I just placed the order in person because I thought it would give you a chuckle.”

Although Roman Castevet appeared too emaciated, too juiceless to produce tears, his feverish black eyes grew watery with frustration.

“Anyway,” Corky continued, “there’s a bigger threat to your job than being caught here with me—if someone discovers you people have mistakenly penned up a living man in this place with all these dead bodies.”

“Are you wired on something?”

“I already told you on the phone, a few minutes ago. One of these unfortunate souls is still alive.”

“What kind of mind game is this?” Roman demanded.

“It’s not a game. It’s true. I heard him murmuring
‘Help me, help me,’
so soft, barely loud enough to hear.”

“Heard who?”

“I tracked him down, peeled the shroud back from his face. He’s paralyzed. Facial muscles distorted by a stroke.”

Hunching closer, bristling like the collection of dry sticks in a bindle of kindling, Roman
insisted
on eye-to-eye conversation, as if he believed the fierceness of his gaze would convey the message that his words had failed to deliver.

Corky blithely continued: “The poor guy was probably comatose when they brought him in here, then he regained consciousness. But he’s awfully weak.”

A crack of uncertainty breached Roman Castevet’s armor of disbelief. He broke eye contact and swept the bunks with his gaze. “Who?”

“Over there,” Corky said brightly, indicating the back of the vault, where the light from the overhead fixture barely reached, leaving the recumbent dead shrouded in gloom as well as in white cotton cloth. “Seems to me I’m saving
all
your jobs by alerting you to this, so you ought to fill my order for free, out of gratitude.”

Moving toward the back of the vault, Roman said, “Which one?”

Stepping close behind the pathologist, Corky replied, “On the left, the second from the bottom.”

As Roman bent to peel the shroud off the face of the corpse, Corky raised his right arm, revealing the hand that until now had been concealed in the sleeve of his yellow slicker, and the ice pick in the hand. With judicious aim, great force, and utter confidence, he drove the weapon into the pathologist’s back.

Placed with precision, an ice pick can penetrate atriums and ventricles, causing such a convulsive shock in cardiac muscle that the heart stops in an instant and forever.

With a rustle of clothes and a quiet knockety-knock of folding limbs, Roman Castevet collapsed without a cry to the floor.

Corky didn’t need to check for a pulse. The gaping mouth, from which no breath escaped, and the eyes, as fixed as the glass orbs in a fine work of taxidermy, confirmed the perfection of his aim.

Preparation paid off. At home, using this same ice pick, Corky had practiced on a CPR dummy that he had stolen from the university medical school.

If he’d needed to stab twice, three, four times, or if Roman’s heart had continued to pump for even a short while, the assault could have proved messy. For that reason, he’d worn the stainproof slicker.

In the unlikely event that one of the vault’s properly chilled treasures sprung an unfortunate leak, the tile floor featured a large drain. Near the door, a collapsible vinyl hose on a reel was attached to a wall spigot.

Corky knew about this janitorial equipment from the articles that he had read two years ago, when the rat scandal had made the front page. Happily, he didn’t need the hose.

He lifted Roman into one of the empty bunks along the back wall of the vault, where the shadows served his scheme.

From a deep inner pocket of his slicker, he withdrew the sheet that earlier he’d purchased in a department store at the mall. He draped the sheet over Roman, being careful to cover him entirely, for he needed to conceal both the identity of the corpse and the fact that, unlike the others here, it was fully clothed.

Because death had been instantaneous and the wound had been minute, no blood seeped forth to stain the sheet and thus call attention to the freshness of this carcass.

In a day or two, or three, Roman would most likely be found by a morgue employee taking inventory or withdrawing a cadaver for an overdue autopsy. Another frontpage story for the medical examiner.

Corky regretted having to kill a man like Roman Castevet. As a good Satanist and a committed anarchist, the pathologist had served well in the campaign to destabilize the social order and hasten its collapse.

Soon, however, ghastly events at Channing Manheim’s estate would make big headlines worldwide. Authorities would commit extraordinary resources to discover the identity of the man who’d sent the taunting gifts in the black boxes.

Logic would send them to private mortuaries and public morgues, in search of the source of the ten foreskins. If Roman had come under suspicion during that investigation, he would have tried to save his own hide by fingering Corky.

Anarchists labored under no obligation of loyalty to one another, which was as it should be among champions of disorder.

Indeed, Corky had other loose ends to tie up before the yuletide celebrations could begin.

Considering that his hands were sheathed in latex gloves, which had been hidden from his victim in the roomy sleeves of his slicker, he could have left the ice pick in the vault without worrying that he might provide police with incriminating fingerprints. Instead, he returned it to its sheath and then to a pocket not only because it might serve him well again, but also because it now had sentimental value.

Leaving the morgue, he said a friendly good-bye to the night security men. They had a thankless job, protecting the dead from the living. He even paused long enough to share with them an obscene joke about an attorney and a chicken.

He had no fear that eventually they would be able to provide the police with a useful description of his face. In his droopy hat and tentlike slicker, he was an eccentric and amusing figure about whom no one would remember more than his costume.

Later, in a fireplace at home, while he enjoyed a brandy, he would burn all the ID that had established him as a pathologist from Indianapolis. He possessed numerous additional sets of documentation for other identities if and when he needed them.

Now he returned to the night, the rain.

And so the time had come to deal with Rolf Reynerd, who by his actions had shown himself to be every bit as unfit for life as he had proved to be unfit for soap-opera stardom.