The Face

weakness…
        Fric opened his mouth to issue what all but certainly would have been an invitation similar to those that users of a Ouija board were well advised to avoid. Before he could speak, he was distracted by movement at the periphery of his vision.
        When he turned to look at what had drawn his attention, Fric saw that the stretchy, coiled cord between the handset and the telephone, once a clean white length of vinyl-coated wires, now appeared to be organic, pink and slick, like that rope of tissue that tied a mother to a newborn baby. A pulse throbbed through the cord, slow and thick, but strong, moving from the phone box on the floor to the handset that he held, toward his ear, as if in anticipation of the invitation that trembled on his tongue.

        Sitting at the desk in his study, eating a ham sandwich, trying to puzzle meaning from Reynerd’s six taunting gifts, Ethan found his thoughts drifting repeatedly to Duncan Whistler.
        [320] In the garden room at Our Lady of Angels, when he had initially learned that Dunny’s body had gone missing, he had known intuitively that the uncanny events at Reynerd’s apartment and Dunny’s dead-man-walking stunt were related. Later, Dunny’s apparent involvement in the murder of Reynerd, though unexpected, had been no surprise.
        What did surprise Ethan, the more he thought about it, was the close encounter with Dunny in the hotel bar.
        More than coincidence must be involved. Dunny had been in the bar because Ethan was in the bar. He had been meant to see Dunny.
        If he’d been meant to see Dunny, then he’d been meant to follow him. Perhaps he had also been meant to catch up with Dunny.
        Outside the hotel, in the bustle and the rain, unable to get a glimpse of his quarry, Ethan had received the urgent phone call from Hazard. Now he paused to think what he would have done next, if he had not been obliged to meet Hazard at the church.
        He obtained the number of the hotel from information and called it. “I’d like to speak to one of your guests. I don’t know his room number. The name’s Duncan Whistler.”
        After a pause to check the hotel computer, the desk clerk said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we have no registration for Mr. Whistler.”

        Previously, only a few table lamps had been lit here and there throughout the big room, but now all the lamps glowed, as did the ceiling lights, the cove lights, and the looping strings of tiny twinkle bulbs on the Christmas tree. The library had been nearly as purged of shadows as any surgery would have been; but it was still not bright enough for Fric.
        He had returned the phone to the desk. He’d unplugged it.
        He supposed that the phones were ringing in his third-floor rooms and that they would ring for a long while. He wasn’t going to go up there to listen. When Hell was calling, it could be persistent.
        [321] He had dragged an armchair close to the Christmas tree. Close to the angels.
        Maybe he was being superstitious, childish, stupid. He didn’t care. Those desperate people on that phone, those things …
        He sat with his back to the tree because he figured that nothing could come through all those branches full of roosting angels to take him by surprise from behind.
        If he had not earlier lied to Mr. Truman, he could now have gone directly down to the security chief’s apartment to seek help.
        Here in Fricburg, USA, the time was always high noon, and the sheriff could not expect backup from the townsfolk when the gang of outlaws rode in for the showdown.

        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,