by Dean Koontz
Sometimes during a party, when Palazzo Rospo was crawling with hundreds of famous and semifamous and craving-to-be-famous people, Fric made himself invisible, the better to eavesdrop. In a crowd of that kind, you could easily become invisible, because half of the guests were barely aware of anyone but themselves, anyway, and the other half were intently focused on the handful of directors, agents, and studio honchos who could make them either filthy rich or filthier rich than they already were.
During one of these spells of invisibility, Fric had heard it said of the third—or possibly the fourth—biggest movie star in the world that “the stupid prick will kill himself with women, the way he’s going.” Fric had no slightest idea how one could kill oneself with women, or why a suicidal person would not just buy a pistol.
That intriguing statement had remained with him, however, and he intended to be careful. These days, when he met new women, he studied them surreptitiously for indications that they were the potentially dangerous type.
Until this weird night, he had likewise never imagined that death could be rung up just by pressing *69.
Maybe what came through the phone would not kill him. Maybe it would imprison his soul and take control of his body and make him so miserable that he would wish he were dead.
Or perhaps it would take control of him and run him headfirst into a brick wall, into an open cesspool (assuming an open cesspool could be found in Bel Air), off the roof of Palazzo Rospo, or into the arms of a deadly blonde (with which Bel Air apparently was infested).
His quandary was that he didn’t know whether to believe anything that Mysterious Caller had said.
On the one hand, the entire rap about being a guardian angel, about moving by mirrors and moonlight—it might all be a shitload of nonsense. A bigger pile even than Ghost Dad’s unicorn movie.
On the other hand—and there was always another hand—Mysterious Caller had walked out of a mirror. He had flown through the rafters. His performance in the attic—and later in the shiny surfaces of the Christmas-tree ornaments—had been so incredible that it had earned him some credibility.
Yet what kind of guardian angel wore a suit and tie straight out of a big-bucks Rodeo Drive shop, had skin as pale as fish flesh, looked a lot less holy than scary, and had gray eyes as cold as ashes in ice?
Possibly Mysterious Caller, for reasons unknown, had been lying, leading Fric toward wrong conclusions, setting him up.
He’d once overheard his father say that virtually everyone in this town was setting someone up for a fall, that if they weren’t doing it for money, then they were doing it for sport.
Mysterious Caller said Fric must not use *69 because it would connect him with the dark eternity. Maybe the truth was that the guy just didn’t want Fric to try tracking him.
Still belly-down on the sofa, leaning out toward the phone, Fric picked up the handset. He pressed the button for his private line.
He listened to the dial tone.
The angels on the tree looked like angels. You could trust an angel with a harp, with a trumpet, wearing white, sporting wings.
He pressed * and 6 and 9.
The phone was picked up not on the fourth ring, as it had been previously, but on the first. No one said hello. As before, only silence greeted him.
Then, after a few seconds, he heard breathing.
Fric intended to outwait the breather, make the pervert speak first. After twenty or thirty seconds, however, he grew so nervous that he said, “It’s me again.”
His concession didn’t bring a response.
Trying to strike a light and somewhat jokey tone, but largely failing, Fric asked, “How’re things in the dark eternity?”
The breathing grew rougher, heavier.
“You know—the dark eternity?” Fric asked tauntingly but also with a faint tremor that he could not control and that put the lie to his pose of bold self-assurance. “Also known on some maps as the bottomless abyss. Or the darkness visible.”
The freak continued to breathe at him.
“You don’t sound so good. You have a bad sinus thing going on there,” said Fric.
With his head hanging over the edge of the sofa, he began to feel a little dizzy.
“I’ll give you my doctor’s name. He’ll write a prescription. You’ll be able to breathe better. You’ll thank me.”
A croaking-grinding voice, issuing from a throat clogged with razor blades, drier than the ashes of ashes twice burnt, arising from a terrible depth, through crevices in the broken stones of strange ruins, said just one word: “Boy.”
In Fric’s ear, the word crawled as if it were an insect, maybe one of those earwigs that legend said could find its way into your brain and lay eggs in there, transforming you into a walking hive filled with squirming legions.
Remembering all those posters of his father looking noble and brave and full of steely resolve, Fric held fast to the phone. He summoned an iron weight of determination to press the wrinkles of fear from his voice, and he said, “You don’t scare me.”
“Boy,” the other repeated, “boy,” and additional voices arose on the phone, initially just four or five, at a lower volume than the first, male and female, punctuating their gabble with “boy…boy.” Their voices were urgent, eager. Desperate. Voices whispery and smooth, voices rough. “…who’s there?” “…the way, he’s the way…” “…sweet flesh…” “…stupid little piglet, easy for the taking…” “…ask me in…” “…ask me…” “…no, ask me…” In seconds their numbers swelled to a dozen, a score, a crowd. Maybe because they were all talking at once, their speech sounded as though it descended into bestial mutterings and snarls, and what words remained were as often as not obscenities strung together in incoherent sequences. Chilling cries of fear, pain, frustration, and raw anger sewed these rags of raucous noise into a tapestry of need.
Fric’s strong heart rapped hard against his ribs, pulsed in his throat, throbbed in his temples. He had claimed not to be scared, but he was scared, all right, too scared to come up with a single smart-ass remark or to speak at all.
Yet the churning voices intrigued him, compelled his attention. The hunger in them, the intense yearning, the pitiful desperation, the melancholy longing wove a poignant song that strummed the cords of his abiding loneliness, that spoke to him and assured him that he need not suffer solitude, that companionship was his for the asking, that purpose and meaning and family were all his if only he would open his heart to them.
Even when wordless, when bursting with ripe obscenities that ought to have repelled Fric, the guttural chorus, full of growl and hiss, steadily soothed his terror. His heart continued to pound, but moment by moment, the power driving its frenzied hammering was less fear than excitement. Everything could change. Utterly. Completely. Now and forever. Change in an instant. He could have a new life and a better one simply for the asking, a life from which all loneliness would be banished, all uncertainty, all confusion and self-doubt and weakness….
Fric opened his mouth to issue what all but certainly would have been an invitation similar to those that users of a Ouija board were well advised to avoid. Before he could speak, he was distracted by movement at the periphery of his vision.
When he turned to look at what had drawn his attention, Fric saw that the stretchy, coiled cord between the handset and the telephone, once a clean white length of vinyl-coated wires, now appeared to be organic, pink and slick, like that rope of tissue that tied a mother to a newborn baby. A pulse throbbed through the cord, slow and thick, but strong, moving from the phone box on the floor to the handset that he held, toward his ear, as if in anticipation of the invitation that trembled on his tongue.
Sitting at the desk in his study, eating a ham sandwich, trying to puzzle meaning from Reynerd’s six taunting gifts, Ethan found his thoughts drifting repeatedly to Duncan Whistler.
In the garden room at Our Lady of Angels, when he had initially learned that Dunny’s body had gone missing, he had known int
uitively that the uncanny events at Reynerd’s apartment and Dunny’s dead-man-walking stunt were related. Later, Dunny’s apparent involvement in the murder of Reynerd, though unexpected, had been no surprise.
What did surprise Ethan, the more he thought about it, was the close encounter with Dunny in the hotel bar.
More than coincidence must be involved. Dunny had been in the bar because Ethan was in the bar. He had been meant to see Dunny.
If he’d been meant to see Dunny, then he’d been meant to follow him. Perhaps he had also been meant to catch up with Dunny.
Outside the hotel, in the bustle and the rain, unable to get a glimpse of his quarry, Ethan had received the urgent phone call from Hazard. Now he paused to think what he would have done next, if he had not been obliged to meet Hazard at the church.
He obtained the number of the hotel from information and called it. “I’d like to speak to one of your guests. I don’t know his room number. The name’s Duncan Whistler.”
After a pause to check the hotel computer, the desk clerk said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we have no registration for Mr. Whistler.”
Previously, only a few table lamps had been lit here and there throughout the big room, but now all the lamps glowed, as did the ceiling lights, the cove lights, and the looping strings of tiny twinkle bulbs on the Christmas tree. The library had been nearly as purged of shadows as any surgery would have been; but it was still not bright enough for Fric.
He had returned the phone to the desk. He’d unplugged it.
He supposed that the phones were ringing in his third-floor rooms and that they would ring for a long while. He wasn’t going to go up there to listen. When Hell was calling, it could be persistent.
He had dragged an armchair close to the Christmas tree. Close to the angels.
Maybe he was being superstitious, childish, stupid. He didn’t care. Those desperate people on that phone, those things…
He sat with his back to the tree because he figured that nothing could come through all those branches full of roosting angels to take him by surprise from behind.
If he had not earlier lied to Mr. Truman, he could now have gone directly down to the security chief’s apartment to seek help.
Here in Fricburg, USA, the time was always high noon, and the sheriff could not expect backup from the townsfolk when the gang of outlaws rode in for the showdown.
Ethan concluded his conversation with the hotel desk clerk and picked up the remaining wedge of his ham sandwich, but one of his two phone lines rang before he could take a bite.
When he answered the call, he was met with silence. He said, “Hello,” again, but failed to elicit a response.
He wondered if this might be Fric’s pervert.
He heard no heavy breathing, suggestive or otherwise. Only the hollowness of an open line and a hiss of static so thin as to be just this side of subaudible.
Ethan rarely received calls this late: nearly midnight. Because of the hour and the events of this day, he found even silence to be significant.
Whether instinct or imagination was at work, he could not be sure, but he sensed a presence on the line.
During the years that he had carried a badge, 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.
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 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 offloaded 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?
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 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 ver
y act of entering that room, however, he would be surrendering his job.
To Ming du Lac and Channing 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.
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 meme 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.
