The Face

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.”
        [312] 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.”
        [313] “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,