The Face

experience.”
        He loves that voice so much that he can’t forever avert his gaze from she who speaks with it. Steeling himself for the discovery that the gentle voice issues from a face as hideous as Typhon’s, he raises his eyes and finds that Hannah looks as beautiful as she did in life.
        This surprise is followed by an astonishment: He has misjudged the motion of the elevator. They are not going down to a darkness even deeper than the darkness visible. They are ascending.
        The walls are no longer encrusted with mold and filth. The air no longer reeks.
        With wonder, not yet daring to hope, Dunny says, “How can this be?”
        “Words are the world, Dunny. They have meaning, and by virtue of the fact that they have meaning, they have power. When you open your heart to sorrow,” Hannah says, “when after sorrow you learn regret, and when after regret you achieve remorse, then beyond remorse lies contrition, which is the word that describes your anguish now. This is a word of awesome power, Dunny. With this word sincerely in your heart, no hour is too late, no darkness eternal, no stupid bargain binding on a man as changed as you.”
        She smiles. Her smile is radiant.
        The Face.
        Her face is lovely, but within it, he sees another Face, as within Typhon had been another, though this visage is not poured from a distillery of nightmares. Impossibly, this Face- the Face-within her face is yet more beautiful than hers, the source of her radiance, so profoundly beautiful that he would be stunned breathless if he were [602] not a spirit who had given up breathing when his body had been shorn from him.
        The Face of infinite and beautiful complexity is also the Face of a mercy that-even now, in his ascendant state-he can’t fully comprehend but for which he is inexpressibly grateful.
        And yet another amazement: He realizes from Hannah’s expression that she recognizes within his countenance the same shining awesome Face that he sees within hers, that in her eyes, he is as radiant as she to him.
        “Life is a long road, Dunny, even when it’s cut short. A long road and often hard. But that’s behind you.” She grinned. “Get ready for the next and better ride. Man, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
         Ping!

CHAPTER 96
        
        ETHAN AND FRIC STOOD SIDE BY SIDE AT A window in the second-floor drawing room, which was known as the green room for reasons obvious to all but the color-blind.
        Ming du Lac believed that no great house of this size could be a place of spiritual harmony without one room furnished and decorated entirely in shades of green. Their feng-shui consultant agreed with this green decree, perhaps because his own philosophy included such a notion, but more likely because he knew better than to cross Ming.
        All the shades of green that had been applied herein to walls, upholstery, carpet, and wood finishes were seen by Ming in dreams. You had to wonder what he’d been eating before bed.
        Mrs. McBee called this room “the horrid moss pit,” though not within Ming’s hearing.
        Beyond the window, the sprawling estate presented better shades of green, and above it all hung a glorious blue sky rinsed clean of even the memory of rain.
        From where they stood, they could see the front gate, and the mob of media in the public street beyond. Sunlight flared off cars, news [604] vans, and larger network-television trucks with satellite-uplink dishes on their roofs.
        “Gonna be a circus,” Fric said.
        “Gonna be a carnival,” Ethan agreed.
        “Gonna be a freak show.”
        “Gonna be a zoo.”
        “Gonna be Halloween on Christmas Eve,” Fric said, “if you look at how they’ll use us on the TV news.”
        “Then don’t look,” Ethan suggested. “To hell with the TV news. Anyway, it’ll all blow over soon enough.”
        “Fat chance,” said Fric. “It’ll go on for weeks, big story about the little prince of Hollywood and the nut case who almost got me.”
        “So you see yourself as the little prince of Hollywood?”
        Fric grimaced with disgust. “That’s what they’ll call me. I can hear it now. I won’t be able to go out in public until I’m fifty, and even then they’ll pinch my cheeks and tell me how worried they were about me.”
        “I don’t know,” Ethan said. “I think you’re overestimating how interesting you are to the