The Face

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        ETHAN GLANCED AT HIS WRISTWATCH, THEN at the indicator light on Line 24, timing the telephone call.
        He didn’t believe a dead person had dialed up Palazzo Rospo, dropping metaphysical coins into a pay phone on the Other Side. Dependably, this would be either a wrong number or a solicitation from a salesman with such a high-pressure approach that he would rattle out his spiel even to the answering machine that recorded these messages.
        When Ming du Lac, spiritual adviser to the Face, had explained Line 24, Ethan had been perceptive enough to realize that Ming would be impatient with even so much as a raised eyebrow, and hostile to any expression of disbelief. He had managed to keep a straight face and a solemn voice.
        Only Mrs. McBee on the household staff and only Ming du Lac among Manheim’s other associates had the influence to get the great man to fire Ethan. He knew exactly with whom he must tread softly.
        Calls from the dead.
        Everyone has answered the phone, heard silence, and said “Hello” again, assuming that the caller has been distracted by someone on his end or that there is a problem with the switching equipment. When a [271] third “Hello” draws no response, we hang up, convinced that the call must have been a wrong number or from a crank, or the result of a technical glitch in the system.
        Some people, the Face among them, believe that a portion of such calls originate with deceased friends or loved ones trying to reach us from Beyond. For some reason, according to this theory, the dead can make your phone ring, but they can’t as easily send their voices across the chasm between life and death; therefore, all you hear is silence or peculiar static, or on rare occasion whispery scraps of words as if from a great distance.
        Upon investigating this subject after Ming explained the purpose of Line 24, Ethan had learned that researchers in the paranormal had made recordings on telephone lines left open between test numbers, operating on the assumption that if the dead could initiate a call, they might also take advantage of an open line specifically set aside to detect their communications.
        Next, the researchers amplified and enhanced the faint sounds on the recordings. Indeed, they discovered voices that often spoke English, but also that sometimes spoke French, Spanish, Greek, and other languages.
        Most of these whispery entities offered only scraps of sentences or disjointed words that made little sense, providing insufficient data for analysis.
        Other, more complete “messages” could sometimes be construed as predictions or even dire warnings. They were always short, however, and often enigmatic.
        Reason suggested that the recordings had caught only bleed-over conversations from living people using other lines in the telephone system.
        In fact, many of the coherent snippets seemed to deal with matters too mundane to motivate the dead to reach out to the living: questions about the weather, about grandchildren’s latest report cards from school, bits like “… always loved pecan pie, yours best of [272] all…” and “… better put your pennies away for a rainy day…” and “… at that cafe you like, the owner keeps a dangerously dirty kitchen…”
        And yet…
        And yet a few of the voices were said to be so haunted, so bleak with despair or so full of desperate love and concern, that they could not be forgotten, could not be easily explained, especially when the messages were delivered with urgency: “… fumes from the furnace, fumes, don’t go to sleep tonight, fumes…” and “… I never told you how much I love you, so much, please look for me when you come across, remember me…” and “… a man in a blue truck, don’t let him get near little Laura, don’t let him near her…”
        These most eerie messages reported by paranormal researchers were what motivated Channing Manheim to maintain Line 24 strictly for the convenience of the chatty dead.
        Every day, wherever they were in the world, Manheim and Ming du Lac used part of their meditation periods to broadcast mentally the area code plus the seven-digit number for Line 24, casting this baited hook into the sea of immortality with the hope that it would catch a spirit.
        Thus far, over a period of three years, they had recorded only wrong numbers, sales pitches, and a series of calls from a hoaxer