The Face

out of a void, Ethan turned and turned, tumbling across wet blacktop, until he turned one last time into a quiet darkness of damp tangled sheets.
        Sitting up in bed, he said, “Hannah,” for in sleep, where all his psychological defenses were removed, he had recognized her voice as the one that he had heard on the telephone.
        Initially, she had repeated the same cry three times, and then three times again. In sleep, he had recognized the word, his name: “Ethan … Ethan … Ethan.”
        What else she had said to him, the urgent message that she had struggled to convey across the gulf between them, continued to elude him. Even in sleep, that room next door to death, he had not been close enough to Hannah to hear more than his name.
        As the shrouds of sleep slipped off him, Ethan was overcome by a conviction that he was being watched.
        Every child knows well the feeling of waking from a dream to the perception that the bedroom darkness grants cover to vicious fiends of innumerable descriptions and appetites. The presence of demons [327] seemed so real that many a small hand had hesitated on a lamp switch, for fear that seeing would be even worse than the images that the fevered imagination provided; yet always the terrors evaporated in the light.
        Ethan wasn’t sure that light would banish unreason this time. He sensed that what watched him were owls and crack-beaked crows, ravens and fierce-eyed hawks, that they perched not on his furniture but in somber black-and-white photographs on the walls, pictures that hadn’t hung there when he’d gone to sleep. Although hours ago the night had melted into the predawn blackness of a new day, he had no reason to suppose that Tuesday would be less stained by irrationality than Monday had been.
        He didn’t reach for the lamp switch. He reclined once more, head upon his pillows, resigned to the presence of whatever the darkness might conceal.
        He doubted that he would be able to doze off again. Sooner than later, however, his eyes grew heavy.
        On the rim of sleep’s whirlpool, as Ethan drifted lazily around, around, he heard from time to time a tick-tick-tick that might have been the talons of sentinel crows as they shifted position on an iron fence. Or perhaps it was only claws of cold rain scratching at the windows.
        As he began to revolve more rapidly around the relentless pull of black-hole gravity that was sleep, Ethan’s eyes fluttered one last time, and he noticed a small light in the lampblack gloom. The phone. Without investigation, he couldn’t with certainty identify the number of the indicator light, but he knew instinctively that it must be Line 24.
        He slid off the rim of the whirlpool, into the vortex, down into whatever dreams might come.

CHAPTER 48
        
        FREE OF ENVY, FREE OF HATRED, BUOYANT IN the service of chaos, Corky Laputa began his day with a cinnamon-pecan roll, four cups of black coffee, and a pair of caffeine tablets.
        Anyone who would bring the social order to ruin must embrace anything that gives him an additional edge, even at the risk of destroying his stomach lining and instigating chronic intestinal inflammation. Fortunately for Corky, periodically consuming massive quantities of caffeine seemed to increase the bitter potency of his bile without causing acid indigestion or other regrettable symptoms.
        Washing down caffeine with caffeine, he stood at his kitchen window, smiling at the low somber sky and at the trailing beard of night fog that had not entirely been shorn away by the blunt gray dawn. Bad weather was again his co-conspirator.
        The current pause in the rain would be brief. Rushing in fast on the heels of the departing tempest, a new and reportedly stronger storm would wash the city and justify the wearing of rain gear, regardless of how elaborate it might be.
        Corky had already reloaded the weatherproof interior pockets of his yellow vinyl slicker, which hung now from a hook in the garage.
        [329] He carried his last cup of coffee upstairs to the guest room, where he finished it while informing Stinky Cheese Man that his beloved daughter, Emily, was dead.
        The previous night he’d reported the final torture and savage murder of Rachel, Stinky’s wife, who was still alive, of course, and not in Corky’s custody. The invented details were so imaginative and vivid that Stinky had been reduced to