The Face

Whistler.
        Subsequently, the call that he’d received, which had lasted nearly half an hour, had not registered in the log.
        Impossible.
        He stared at the screen, thinking about Fric’s calls from the heavy breather. He’d been too quick to dismiss the boy’s story.
        When Ethan glanced at the phone, he discovered the indicator light aglow at Line 24.
        Sales call. Wrong number. And yet…
        Had it been easy to satisfy his curiosity, he would have gone up to the third floor where the answering machine serving Line 24 was isolated in a special chamber behind a locked blue door. By the very act of entering that room, however, he would be surrendering his job.
        To Ming du Lac and Charming Manheim, the room behind the blue door was a sacred place. Entry by anyone but them had been forbidden.
        In the event of an emergency, Ethan was authorized to use his master key anywhere in the house. The only door that it didn’t open was the blue one.

        A flock of angels, the pleasant smell of spruce, and the comfort of the huge armchair could not lull Fric into sleep.
        He got out of the chair, ventured warily to the nearest shelves of books, and selected a novel.
        Although ten, he read at a sixteen-year-old level. He took no pride in this, for in his experience, most sixteen-year-olds, these days, weren’t whiz kids, probably because no one expected them to be.
        [325] Even Ms. Dowd, his English and reading tutor, didn’t expect him to enjoy books; she doubted they were good for him. She said books were relics; the future would be shaped by images, not by words. In fact, she believed in “memes,” which she pronounced meems and defined as ideas that arose spontaneously among “informed people” and spread mind-to-mind among the populace, like a mental virus, creating “new ways of thinking.”
        Ms. Dowd visited Fric four times a week, and after each session, she left behind enough manure to fertilize the lawns and flower beds of the estate for at least a year.
        In the armchair once more, Fric discovered that he couldn’t concentrate well enough to become involved in the story. This didn’t mean that books were obsolete, only that he was tired and scared.
        He sat for a while, waiting for a meme to pop into his mind and give him something radically new to think about, something that would blow out of his head all thoughts of Moloch, child sacrifices, and strange men who traveled by mirrors. Apparently, however, there was currently no męme epidemic underway.
        As his eyes began to feel hot and grainy but no heavier, he took from a pocket of his jeans the photo that had been passed to him out of a mirror. He unfolded the picture and smoothed it on his leg.
        The lady looked even prettier than he remembered. Not supermodel beautiful, but pretty in a real way. Kind and gentle.
        He wondered who she was. He spun a story for himself about what life would be like if this woman were his mother and if her husband were his father. He felt a little guilty for dumping Nominal Mom and Ghost Dad out of this imaginary life, but they lived make-believe, so he didn’t think they would begrudge him a fantasy family for one night.
        After a while, the smile of the woman in the photo fostered a smile in Fric, which was better than catching a meme.
        Later, when Fric was living with his new mom and her husband, whom he had not yet met, in a cozy cottage in Goose Crotch, [326] Montana, where no one knew who he had once been, the gray-eyed mirror man stepped out of the shine on the side of a toaster, patted the dog on the head, and warned that it would be dangerous to *69 him. “If an angel uses the idea of a phone to call me,” Fric said, “and then if I star sixty-nine him, why would I be connected to a place like Hell instead of to Heaven?” Instead of answering the question, the man breathed a dragon’s snort of fire at him and disappeared back through the shine on the toaster. The flames singed Fric’s clothes and caused wisps of smoke to rise from him, but he wasn’t set afire. His wonderful new mother poured him another glass of lemonade to cool him off, and they continued to talk about favorite books as he ate a fat slice of the homemade chocolate cake that she had baked for him.

        In a tumultuous darkness filled first with gunfire and the roar of approaching engines, then with a voice crying