The Face

Aelfric. When invited, they can travel by the telephone connection, by that fragile link of [314] 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
        
        FRIC 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.
        [316] 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?
        [317] 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