The Face

the threat, and he mocked Ethan by his every intrusion, proving that no one here was safe.
        If Ethan failed Channing Manheim, if someone got at the star in spite of all precautions, he would be failing not only his boss but also the special boy who’d be left fatherless. Fric would be remanded to the mercy of his self-absorbed mother, set further adrift than ever, consigned to a deeper loneliness than the one he already endured.
        Ethan had gotten up from the computer without realizing it. He stood in a state of agitation, overwhelmed by the need to move, to do something, but unable to understand what must be done.
        At the phone, he pressed INTERCOM and the number for the library. “Fric, are you there?” He waited. “Fric, you hear me?”
        The boy’s voice came wrapped in a curious caution: “Who’s that?”
        “Nobody here but us broken-down old former cops. Have you found a book?”
        “Not yet.”
        “Don’t take too long.”
        “Gimme a couple minutes,” Fric said.
        As Ethan released the intercom button, a light flashed on the telephone, then burned steadily: Line 24.
        [520] He studied the items arranged on the desk between the computer and the telephone. Ladybugs, snails, foreskins…
        His attention drifted back to the phone. The indicator lamp. Line 24.
        The half-heard voice issuing from the far side of the moon, to which he’d listened for half an hour on this phone the previous night, had been resonating in his heart ever since. And the faint voice that he’d thought he heard coming from the musicless speaker in the hospital elevator just this morning.
        Cookie jar full of Scrabble tiles, the book Paws for Reflection, the stitched apple with the eye at its core…
        In the elevator, he had pressed STOP, not merely to listen longer to the voice but because he’d had the feeling that when he reached the hospital garage, no garage would be there. Only lapping black water. Or an abyss.
        At the time, he had sensed that this absurd phobic response must be the sublimation of a more realistic fear he was reluctant to face. Now he was on the verge of grasping the true terror.
        Suddenly he knew that reality as he perceived it was like the colored-glass image presented by the angled mirrors at the end of a kaleidoscope. The pattern of reality that he’d always seen was about to change before his eyes, about to shift into one far more dazzling, and fearsome.
        Ladybugs, snails, foreskins…
        Line 24, engaged.
        The faraway voice echoed in his memory, like the cries of sea gulls, melancholy in a mist: Ethan, Ethan …
        Phone calls from the dead.
        Ladybugs, snails, foreskins…
        The indicator lamp: a tiny version of the dome light high atop Our Lady of Angels Hospital, the last line on the phone board, last line, last chance, last hope.
        Ethan caught the scent of roses. There were no roses in the apartment.
        [521] In his mind’s eye: Broadway roses on her grave, red-gold blooms against wet grass.
        The fragrance of roses grew stronger, intense. The scent was real, not imagined, stronger here than in Forever Roses.
        The skin crawling on the back of his neck, across his scalp, was the result less of ordinary fear than of humbling awe. A cool quiver in the pit of his stomach.
        He had no key to the forbidden room behind the blue door, where calls on Line 24 were recorded. Suddenly he was in a mood that made keys unimportant.
        With an intuitive sense of urgency that he could not explain but that he trusted, Ethan ran from the apartment to the back stairs and all the way to the third floor.

CHAPTER 83
        
        TETHERED BY TWO FAINTLY THRUMMING ROPES to the sturdy limbs of a pair of old coral trees and by a taut nose line to the truck, the blimp appeared to be straining like a hooked fish, reeled here to the shallows of the air, but desperate to soar again into the depths of the sky.
        Gray and whalelike, perhaps thirty feet in length and ten or twelve feet in diameter, the airship was a minnow compared to the Goodyear blimp. Yet to Corky it looked huge.
        The leviathan loomed impressively, underlit by two Coleman lanterns that provided work light. Tinsel-silver rain streamed from its round flanks. The craft was more striking than its dimensions would suggest, perhaps because here in Bel Air in the first