The Face (29 page)

Ethan concluded his conversation with the hotel desk clerk and picked up the remaining wedge of his ham sandwich, but one of his two phone lines rang before he could take a bite.

When he answered the call, he was met with silence. He said, “Hello,” again, but failed to elicit a response.

He wondered if this might be Fric’s pervert.

He heard no heavy breathing, suggestive or otherwise. Only the hollowness of an open line and a hiss of static so thin as to be just this side of subaudible.

Ethan rarely received calls this late: nearly midnight. Because of the hour and the events of this day, he found even silence to be significant.

Whether instinct or imagination was at work, he could not be sure, but he sensed a presence on the line.

During the years that he had carried a badge, he’d conducted enough stakeouts to learn patience. He listened to the listener, trading silence for silence.

Time passed. Ham waited. Still hungry, Ethan also grew thirsty for a beer.

Eventually, he heard a cry, repeated three times. The voice was faint neither because it whispered nor because it was feeble but because it arose from a great distance, so fragile that it might have been merely a mirage of sound.

More silence, more time, and then the voice rose again, no less frail than before, so ephemeral that Ethan could not confidently say whether it was the voice of a man or a woman. Indeed, it might have been the mournful cry of a bird or an animal, repeated three times again, with a damped quality similar to that provided by a filter of fog.

He had ceased to expect heavy breathing.

Although no louder than before, the quiet hiss of static had acquired a menacing quality, as though each soft tick represented the impact of a radioactive particle on his eardrum.

When the voice came a third time, it didn’t resort to the short cry that it had previously repeated. Ethan detected patterns of sound surely meant to convey meaning. Words. Not quite comprehensible.

As though broadcast from a distant radio station into an ether troubled by storms, these words were distorted by fading, by drift, by scratchy atmospherics. A voice out of time might sound like this, or one sent by spacefarers from the night side of Saturn.

He didn’t remember leaning far forward in his chair. Neither did he recall when his arms had slid off the arms of the chair nor when he had propped his elbows on his knees. Yet here he sat in this compacted posture, both hands to his head, one holding the phone, like a man humbled by remorse or bent by despair upon the receipt of terrible news.

Although Ethan strained to capture the content of the faraway speaker’s conversation, it continuously sifted through him without sticking, as elusive as cloud shadows projected by moonlight upon a rolling seascape.

Indeed, when he struggled the hardest to find meaning in these might-be words, they receded farther behind a screen of static and distortion. He suspected that if he relaxed, the flow of speech might clarify, the voice grow stronger, but he could not relax. Although he pressed the handset to his head with such force that his ear ached, he was unable to relent, as if a brief moment of less-intense focus would prove to be the very instant when the words would come clearly, but only to he who faithfully attended them.

The voice possessed a plaintive quality. Although unable to grasp the words and deduce their meaning, Ethan detected an urgent and beseeching tone, and perhaps a yearning sadness.

When he assumed that he had spent five minutes striving without success to net those words from the sea of static and silence, Ethan glanced at his wristwatch. 12:26. He had been riveted to the phone for nearly half an hour.

Having been crushed so long against the earpiece, his ear burned and throbbed. His neck felt stiff, his shoulders ached.

Surprised and somewhat disoriented, he sat up straight in his chair. He had never been hypnotized; but he imagined that this must be how it would feel to shake off the lingering effects of a trance.

Reluctantly, he put down the phone.

The suggestion of a voice in the void might have been that and nothing more, merely a suggestion, an audial illusion. Yet he had pursued it with the single-minded sweaty expectation of a submarine sonar operator listening for the
ping
of an approaching battleship as it offloaded depth charges.

He didn’t quite understand what he’d done. Or why.

Although the room was not excessively warm, he blotted his brow with his shirt sleeve.

He expected the phone to ring again. Perhaps he would be wise not to answer it.

That thought disturbed him because he didn’t understand it. Why not answer a ringing phone?

His gaze traveled across the six items from Reynerd, but his attention settled longest on the three small bells from the ambulance in which he’d never ridden.

When the phone had not rung after two or three minutes, he switched on the computer and again accessed the telephone log. The most recent entry was the call that he had placed to the hotel to inquire about Dunny Whistler.

Subsequently, the call that he’d received, which had lasted nearly half an hour, had not registered in the log.

Impossible.

He stared at the screen, thinking about Fric’s calls from the heavy breather. He’d been too quick to dismiss the boy’s story.

When Ethan glanced at the phone, he discovered the indicator light aglow at Line 24.

Sales call. Wrong number. And yet…

Had it been easy to satisfy his curiosity, he would have gone up to the third floor where the answering machine serving Line 24 was isolated in a special chamber behind a locked blue door. By the very act of entering that room, however, he would be surrendering his job.

To Ming du Lac and Channing Manheim, the room behind the blue door was a sacred place. Entry by anyone but them had been forbidden.

In the event of an emergency, Ethan was authorized to use his master key anywhere in the house. The only door that it didn’t open was the blue one.

A flock of angels, the pleasant smell of spruce, and the comfort of the huge armchair could not lull Fric into sleep.

He got out of the chair, ventured warily to the nearest shelves of books, and selected a novel.

Although ten, he read at a sixteen-year-old level. He took no pride in this, for in his experience, most sixteen-year-olds, these days, weren’t whiz kids, probably because no one expected them to be.

Even Ms. Dowd, his English and reading tutor, didn’t expect him to
enjoy
books; she doubted they were good for him. She said books were relics; the future would be shaped by images, not by words. In fact, she believed in “memes,” which she pronounced
meems
and defined as ideas that arose spontaneously among “informed people” and spread mind-to-mind among the populace, like a mental virus, creating “new ways of thinking.”

Ms. Dowd visited Fric four times a week, and after each session, she left behind enough manure to fertilize the lawns and flower beds of the estate for at least a year.

In the armchair once more, Fric discovered that he couldn’t concentrate well enough to become involved in the story. This didn’t mean that books were obsolete, only that he was tired and scared.

He sat for a while, waiting for a meme to pop into his mind and give him something radically new to think about, something that would blow out of his head all thoughts of Moloch, child sacrifices, and strange men who traveled by mirrors. Apparently, however, there was currently no meme epidemic underway.

As his eyes began to feel hot and grainy but no heavier, he took from a pocket of his jeans the photo that had been passed to him out of a mirror. He unfolded the picture and smoothed it on his leg.

The lady looked even prettier than he remembered. Not supermodel beautiful, but pretty in a
real
way. Kind and gentle.

He wondered who she was. He spun a story for himself about what life would be like if this woman were his mother and if her husband were his father. He felt a little guilty for dumping Nominal Mom and Ghost Dad out of this imaginary life, but they
lived
make-believe, so he didn’t think they would begrudge him a fantasy family for one night.

After a while, the smile of the woman in the photo fostered a smile in Fric, which was better than catching a meme.

Later, when Fric was living with his new mom and her husband, whom he had not yet met, in a cozy cottage in Goose Crotch, Montana, where no one knew who he had once been, the gray-eyed mirror man stepped out of the shine on the side of a toaster, patted the dog on the head, and warned that it would be dangerous to *69 him. “If an angel uses the
idea
of a phone to call me,” Fric said, “and then if I star sixty-nine him, why would I be connected to a place like Hell instead of to Heaven?” Instead of answering the question, the man breathed a dragon’s snort of fire at him and disappeared back through the shine on the toaster. The flames singed Fric’s clothes and caused wisps of smoke to rise from him, but he wasn’t set afire. His wonderful new mother poured him another glass of lemonade to cool him off, and they continued to talk about favorite books as he ate a fat slice of the homemade chocolate cake that she had baked for him.

In a tumultuous darkness filled first with gunfire and the roar of approaching engines, then with a voice crying out of a void, Ethan turned and turned, tumbling across wet blacktop, until he turned one last time into a quiet darkness of damp tangled sheets.

Sitting up in bed, he said, “Hannah,” for in sleep, where all his psychological defenses were removed, he had recognized her voice as the one that he had heard on the telephone.

Initially, she had repeated the same cry three times, and then three times again. In sleep, he had recognized the word, his name:
“Ethan…Ethan…Ethan.”

What else she had said to him, the urgent message that she had struggled to convey across the gulf between them, continued to elude him. Even in sleep, that room next door to death, he had not been close enough to Hannah to hear more than his name.

As the shrouds of sleep slipped off him, Ethan was overcome by a conviction that he was being watched.

Every child knows well the feeling of waking from a dream to the perception that the bedroom darkness grants cover to vicious fiends of innumerable descriptions and appetites. The presence of demons seemed so real that many a small hand had hesitated on a lamp switch, for fear that seeing would be even worse than the images that the fevered imagination provided; yet always the terrors evaporated in the light.

Ethan wasn’t sure that light would banish unreason this time. He sensed that what watched him were owls and crack-beaked crows, ravens and fierce-eyed hawks, that they perched not on his furniture but in somber black-and-white photographs on the walls, pictures that hadn’t hung there when he’d gone to sleep. Although hours ago the night had melted into the predawn blackness of a new day, he had no reason to suppose that Tuesday would be less stained by irrationality than Monday had been.

He didn’t reach for the lamp switch. He reclined once more, head upon his pillows, resigned to the presence of whatever the darkness might conceal.

He doubted that he would be able to doze off again. Sooner than later, however, his eyes grew heavy.

On the rim of sleep’s whirlpool, as Ethan drifted lazily around, around, he heard from time to time a
tick-tick-tick
that might have been the talons of sentinel crows as they shifted position on an iron fence. Or perhaps it was only claws of cold rain scratching at the windows.

As he began to revolve more rapidly around the relentless pull of black-hole gravity that was sleep, Ethan’s eyes fluttered one last time, and he noticed a small light in the lampblack gloom. The phone. Without investigation, he couldn’t with certainty identify the number of the indicator light, but he knew instinctively that it must be Line 24.

He slid off the rim of the whirlpool, into the vortex, down into whatever dreams might come.

CHAPTER 48

F
REE OF ENVY, FREE OF HATRED, BUOYANT IN THE service of chaos, Corky Laputa began his day with a cinnamon-pecan roll, four cups of black coffee, and a pair of caffeine tablets.

Anyone who would bring the social order to ruin must embrace anything that gives him an additional edge, even at the risk of destroying his stomach lining and instigating chronic intestinal inflammation. Fortunately for Corky, periodically consuming massive quantities of caffeine seemed to increase the bitter potency of his bile without causing acid indigestion or other regrettable symptoms.

Washing down caffeine with caffeine, he stood at his kitchen window, smiling at the low somber sky and at the trailing beard of night fog that had not entirely been shorn away by the blunt gray dawn. Bad weather was again his co-conspirator.

The current pause in the rain would be brief. Rushing in fast on the heels of the departing tempest, a new and reportedly stronger storm would wash the city and justify the wearing of rain gear, regardless of how elaborate it might be.

Corky had already reloaded the weatherproof interior pockets of his yellow vinyl slicker, which hung now from a hook in the garage.

He carried his last cup of coffee upstairs to the guest room, where he finished it while informing Stinky Cheese Man that his beloved daughter, Emily, was dead.

The previous night he’d reported the final torture and savage murder of Rachel, Stinky’s wife, who was still alive, of course, and not in Corky’s custody. The invented details were so imaginative and vivid that Stinky had been reduced to uncontrollable tears, to sobs that sounded weirdly inhuman—and quite disgusting—coming from his withered voice box.

Although crushed by despair, Stinky had not suffered the heart attack for which Corky had been hoping.

Rather than coddle the man with a sedative, Corky had introduced a powerful hallucinogenic through a port in the IV line. His hope was that Stinky would be unable to sleep and would pass the darkest hours between midnight and dawn in a hell of drug-induced visions featuring his brutalized wife.

Now, regaling his guest with an even more outrageous tale of the many crude violations and cruel acts of violence visited upon young Emily, Corky grew weary of the tears and anguish that were replayed here yet again. Under the circumstances, a massive cardiac infarction didn’t seem too much to ask, but Stinky would not cooperate.

For a man who supposedly loved his wife and daughter more than life itself, Stinky’s determination to survive was unseemly now that he’d been told that his family was nothing more than rotting meat. Like most traditionalists, with all their loudly expressed belief in language and meaning and purpose and principle, Stinky was probably a fraud.

Now and then, Corky glimpsed rage underlying Stinky’s grief. Into the man’s eyes came hatred hot enough to sear with a look, but then at once vanished under pools of tears.

Perhaps Stinky clung to life only for the hope of revenge. The guy was delusional.

Besides, hatred only destroys the hater. By the example of her wasted life, Corky’s mother had proved the truth of that contention.

With facility and efficiency, Corky changed infusion bags after doctoring the new one with a drug that would induce a semiparalytic state. Stinky had so little muscle tissue left that an artificially induced paralysis seemed unnecessary, but Corky was loath to let anything to chance.

Ironically, to serve chaos well, he needed to be well organized. He required a strategy for victory and the carefully planned tactics necessary to fulfill that strategy.

Without strategy and tactics, you weren’t a true agent of chaos. You were just Jeffrey Dahmer or some crazy lady who kept a hundred cats and filled her yard with unsightly piles of junk, or a recent governor of California.

Five years ago, Corky had learned how to give injections, how to insert a cannula in a vein, how to handle the equipment related to an IV setup, how to catheterize either a man or a woman…. Since then, he had enjoyed a few opportunities, as with Stinky Cheese Man, to practice these skills; consequently, he used these instruments and devices with a facility that any nurse would admire.

In fact, he’d been trained by a nurse, Mary Noone. She had the face of a Botticelli Madonna and the eyes of a ferret.

He’d met Mary at a university mixer for people interested in utilitarian bioethics. Utilitarians believed that every life could be assigned a value to society and that medical care should be rationed according to that assigned value. This philosophy supported the killing, by neglect, of the physically handicapped, Down-syndrome children, people over sixty with medical problems requiring expensive treatment like dialysis and bypass surgery, and many others.

The mixer had been full of fun and witty conversation—and he and Mary Noone had clicked the moment their eyes met. They’d both been drinking Cabernet Sauvignon when they were introduced, and over refills, they had fallen in lust.

Weeks thereafter, when he had asked Mary to teach him the proper way to give an injection and how to maintain a patient on intravenous infusion, Corky had solemnly revealed that his mother’s health was rapidly declining. “I dread the day when she’ll be bedridden, but I’d rather attend to her myself than turn her over to strangers in a nursing home.”

Mary told him that he was a wonderful son, and Corky pretended to accept this compliment with humility, which was an easy pretense to maintain because he was lying about both his mother’s health and his intentions. The old bitch had been as healthy as Methuselah still six centuries short of the grave, and Corky had been toying with the idea of injecting her with something lethal while she slept.

He was pretty sure that Mary suspected the truth. Nevertheless, she taught him what he wanted to know.

Initially he believed that her willingness to educate him in these matters could be attributed to the fact that she was hot for him. Jungle cats in heat didn’t copulate with the ferocity or the frequency of Mary Noone and Corky in the few months that they had been together.

Eventually he realized that she understood his true motives and didn’t disapprove. Furthermore, he began to suspect that Mary was a self-styled Angel of Death who acted upon her utilitarian bioethics by quietly killing the patients whose lives she deemed to be of poor quality and of little value to society.

He dared not remain her sex toy under such circumstances. Sooner or later, she would be arrested and put on trial, as angels of her breed usually were. By virtue of being her lover, Corky was sure to be closely scrutinized by the police, which would put his life’s work and possibly his freedom in jeopardy.

Besides, after they had been together more than three months, Corky grew uneasy about sleeping in the same bed with Mary Noone. Although as a lover he might command a high value in horny Mary’s estimation, Corky didn’t know how much—or how little—she thought he was worth to society.

To his surprise, when he cautiously raised the issue of an amicable breakup, Mary responded with relief. Apparently, she had not been sleeping well, either.

In time he had chosen not to kill his mother by injection, but the effort to educate himself in these aspects of medical care had not been wasted.

During the years since, he had seen Mary only twice, both times at bioethics parties. The old heat was still there between them, but so was the wariness.

With an efficiency and tenderness that Mary Noone would admire, Corky finished ministering to Stinky Cheese Man.

The paralytic drug would incapacitate Stinky without making him drowsy or putting him in an altered state of consciousness. With full mental clarity, he could spend the day agonizing over the deaths of his wife and daughter.

“Now I’ve got to dispose of Rachel’s and Emily’s bodies,” Corky lied with panache that pleased him. “I’d feed their remains to hogs, if I knew where to find a hog farm.”

He remembered a recent news story about a young blonde whose body had been dumped in a sewage-treatment plant. Borrowing details from that crime, he spun for Stinky a story about the ponds of human waste for which his loved ones were bound.

Still no heart attack.

Late this evening, when he returned here with Aelfric Manheim, Corky would introduce the boy to this emaciated wretch, to prime him for the terrors that awaited him. Aelfric’s suffering would be of a somewhat different variety from what had been required of this once-arrogant lover of Dickens, Dickinson, Tolstoi, and Twain. If the stubborn drudge hadn’t died of a heart attack during the day, Corky would kill him before midnight.

Leaving Stinky to whatever strange thoughts might occupy the odd mind of a traditionalist in these circumstances, Corky donned his amply provisioned yellow slicker, locked the house, and set out into the December day in his BMW.

The new storm had already shouldered into the city. Great dragon herds of black clouds seethed from horizon to horizon, coils tangled in one colossal heaving mass, full of pent-up roars and white fire that might soon be breathed out in dazzling, jagged plumes.

A tentative drizzle fell, but cataracts were sure to follow, vertical rivers, torrents, Niagaras, a deluge.