The Face

he’d conducted enough stakeouts to learn patience. He listened to the listener, trading silence for silence.
        Time passed. Ham waited. Still hungry, Ethan also grew thirsty for a beer.
        [322] Eventually, he heard a cry, repeated three times. The voice was faint neither because it whispered nor because it was feeble but because it arose from a great distance, so fragile that it might have been merely a mirage of sound.
        More silence, more time, and then the voice rose again, no less frail than before, so ephemeral that Ethan could not confidently say whether it was the voice of a man or a woman. Indeed, it might have been the mournful cry of a bird or an animal, repeated three times again, with a damped quality similar to that provided by a filter of fog.
        He had ceased to expect heavy breathing.
        Although no louder than before, the quiet hiss of static had acquired a menacing quality, as though each soft tick represented the impact of a radioactive particle on his eardrum.
        When the voice came a third time, it didn’t resort to the short cry that it had previously repeated. Ethan detected patterns of sound surely meant to convey meaning. Words. Not quite comprehensible.
        As though broadcast from a distant radio station into an ether troubled by storms, these words were distorted by fading, by drift, by scratchy atmospherics. A voice out of time might sound like this, or one sent by spacefarers from the night side of Saturn.
        He didn’t remember leaning far forward in his chair. Neither did he recall when his arms had slid off the arms of the chair nor when he had propped his elbows on his knees. Yet here he sat in this compacted posture, both hands to his head, one holding the phone, like a man humbled by remorse or bent by despair upon the receipt of terrible news.
        Although Ethan strained to capture the content of the faraway speaker’s conversation, it continuously sifted through him without sticking, as elusive as cloud shadows projected by moonlight upon a rolling seascape.
        Indeed, when he struggled the hardest to find meaning in these [323] might-be words, they receded farther behind a screen of static and distortion. He suspected that if he relaxed, the flow of speech might clarify, the voice grow stronger, but he could not relax. Although he pressed the handset to his head with such force that his ear ached, he was unable to relent; as if a brief moment of less-intense focus would prove to be the very instant when the words would come clearly, but only to he who faithfully attended them.
        The voice possessed a plaintive quality. Although unable to grasp the words and deduce their meaning, Ethan detected an urgent and beseeching tone, and perhaps a yearning sadness.
        When he assumed that he had spent five minutes striving without success to net those words from the sea of static and silence, Ethan glanced at his wristwatch. 12:26. He had been riveted to the phone for nearly half an hour.
        Having been crushed so long against the earpiece, his ear burned and throbbed. His neck felt stiff, his shoulders ached.
        Surprised and somewhat disoriented, he sat up straight in his chair. He had never been hypnotized; but he imagined that this must be how it would feel to shake off the lingering effects of a trance.
        Reluctantly, he put down the phone.
        The suggestion of a voice in the void might have been that and nothing more, merely a suggestion, an audial illusion. Yet he had pursued it with the single-minded sweaty expectation of a submarine sonar operator listening for the ping of an approaching battleship as it off-loaded depth charges.
        He didn’t quite understand what he’d done. Or why.
        Although the room was not excessively warm, he blotted his brow with his shirt sleeve.
        He expected the phone to ring again. Perhaps he would be wise not to answer it.
        That thought disturbed him because he didn’t understand it. Why not answer a ringing phone?
        [324] His gaze traveled across the six items from Reynerd, but his attention settled longest on the three small bells from the ambulance in which he’d never ridden.
        When the phone had not rung after two or three minutes, he switched on the computer and again accessed the telephone log. The most recent entry was the call that he had placed to the hotel to inquire about Dunny