The Face

didn’t want Fric to try tracking him.
        Still belly-down on the sofa, leaning out toward the phone, Fric picked up the handset. He pressed the button for his private line.
        He listened to the dial tone.
        The angels on the tree looked like angels. You could trust an angel with a harp, with a trumpet, wearing white, sporting wings.
        He pressed * and 6 and 9.
        The phone was picked up not on the fourth ring, as it had been previously, but on the first. No one said hello. As before, only silence greeted him.
        Then, after a few seconds, he heard breathing.
        Fric intended to outwait the breather, make the pervert speak first. After twenty or thirty seconds, however, he grew so nervous that he said, “It’s me again.”
        His concession didn’t bring a response.
        Trying to strike a light and somewhat jokey tone, but largely failing, Fric asked, “How’re things in the dark eternity?”
        The breathing grew rougher, heavier.
        “You know-the dark eternity?” Fric asked tauntingly but also with a faint tremor that he could not control and that put the lie to his pose of bold self-assurance. “Also known on some maps as the bottomless abyss. Or the darkness visible.”
        The freak continued to breathe at him.
        “You don’t sound so good. You have a bad sinus thing going on there,” said Fric.
        [318] With his head hanging over the edge of the sofa, he began to feel a little dizzy.
        “I’ll give you my doctor’s name. He’ll write a prescription. You’ll be able to breathe better. You’ll thank me.”
        A creaking-grinding voice, issuing from a throat clogged with razor blades, drier than the ashes of ashes twice burnt, arising from a terrible depth, through crevices in the broken stones of strange ruins, said just one word: “Boy.”
        In Fric’s ear, the word crawled as if it were an insect, maybe one of those earwigs that legend said could find its way into your brain and lay eggs in there, transforming you into a walking hive filled with squirming legions.
        Remembering all those posters of his father looking noble and brave and full of steely resolve, Fric held fast to the phone. He summoned an iron weight of determination to press the wrinkles of fear from his voice, and he said, “You don’t scare me.”
         “Boy,” the other repeated, “boy,” and additional voices arose on the phone, initially just four or five, at a lower volume than the first, male and female, punctuating their gabble with “boy … boy.” Their voices were urgent, eager. Desperate. Voices whispery and smooth, voices rough. “… who’s there?” “… the way, he’s the way…” “… sweet flesh…” “… stupid little piglet, easy for the taking…” “… ask me in…” “… ask me …” “… no, ask me …” In seconds their numbers swelled to a dozen, a score, a crowd. Maybe because they were all talking at once, their speech sounded as though it descended into bestial mutterings and snarls, and what words remained were as often as not obscenities strung together in incoherent sequences. Chilling cries of fear, pain, frustration, and raw anger sewed these rags of raucous noise into a tapestry of need .
        Fric’s strong heart rapped hard against his ribs, pulsed in his throat, throbbed in his temples. He had claimed not to be scared, but he was scared, all right, too scared to come up with a single smart-ass remark or to speak at all.
        [319] Yet the churning voices intrigued him, compelled his attention. The hunger in them, the intense yearning, the pitiful desperation, the melancholy longing wove a poignant song that strummed the cords of his abiding loneliness, that spoke to him and assured him that he need not suffer solitude, that companionship was his for the asking, that purpose and meaning and family were all his if only he would open his heart to them.
        Even when wordless, when bursting with ripe obscenities that ought to have repelled Fric, the guttural chorus, full of growl and hiss, steadily soothed his terror. His heart continued to pound, but moment by moment, the power driving its frenzied hammering was less fear than excitement. Everything could change. Utterly. Completely. Now and forever. Change in an instant. He could have a new life and a better one simply for the asking, a life from which all loneliness would be banished, all uncertainty, all confusion and self-doubt and