The Face

by Dean Koontz

  Dr. O’Brien brought with him the complete patient file in three thickly packed folders. During their discussion, he gradually spread the entire contents across one of the tables.

  They sat side by side in the orange pseudochairs, the better to review the documents together.

  Dunny’s coma resulted from cerebral hypoxia, a lack of adequate oxygen to the brain for an extended period of time. Results revealed on EEG scrolls and by brain-imaging tests—angiography, CT scanning, MRI—led inescapably to the conclusion that if he had ever regained consciousness, he would have been profoundly handicapped.

  “Even among patients in the deepest comas,” O’Brien explained, “where there’s little or no apparent activity in the cerebrum, there is usually enough function in the brain stem to allow them to exhibit some automatic responses. They continue to breathe unaided. Once in a while they might cough, blink their eyes, even yawn.”

  Throughout most of his hospitalization, Dunny had breathed on his own. Three days ago, his declining automatic responses required that he be connected to a ventilator. He’d no longer been able to breathe without mechanical assistance.

  In his early weeks at the hospital, although deeply comatose, he had at times coughed, sneezed, yawned, blinked. Occasionally he had even exhibited roving eye movements.

  Gradually, those automatic responses declined in frequency until they ceased to be observed at all. This suggested a steady loss of function in the lower brain stem.

  The previous morning, Dunny’s heart had stopped. Defibrillation and injections of epinephrine restarted the heart, but only briefly.

  “The automatic function of the circulatory system is maintained by the lower brain stem,” Dr. O’Brien said. “It was clear his heart had failed because brain-stem function failed. There’s no coming back from irreparable damage to the brain stem. Death inevitably follows.”

  In a case like this, the patient would not be connected to a heart-lung machine, providing artificial circulation and respiration, unless his family insisted. The family would need to have the means to pay because insurance companies would disallow such expenditures on the grounds that the patient could never regain consciousness.

  “As regards Mr. Whistler,” O’Brien said, “you held a power of attorney in matters of health care.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you signed a release quite some time ago, specifying that heroic efforts, other than a ventilator, were not to be employed to keep him alive.”

  “That’s right,” Ethan said. “And I’ve no intention of suing.”

  This sincere assurance caused no visible relief on O’Brien’s part. Evidently he believed that even though the conscientious medical care given to Dunny was lawsuit-proof, a plague of lawyers would nonetheless rain down on him.

  “Dr. O’Brien, whatever happened to Dunny once his body reached the hospital morgue is another matter altogether, unrelated to you.”

  “But I’m not any less disturbed about it than you are. I’ve discussed it twice with the police. I’m…bewildered.”

  “I just want you to know that I don’t hold the morgue employees at all responsible for his disappearance, either.”

  “They’re good people,” O’Brien said.

  “I’m sure they are. Whatever’s going on here isn’t the fault of the hospital. The explanation is…something extraordinary.”

  The physician dared to let hope tweak a little color into his face. “Extraordinary? And what would that be?”

  “I don’t know. But amazing things have happened to me in the past twenty-four hours, in some way all related to Dunny, I think. So why I wanted to speak to you this morning…”

  “Yes?”

  Searching for words, Ethan pushed back from the table. He got to his feet, his tongue stilled by a thirty-seven-year-long reliance on reason and rationality.

  He wished for a window. Gazing out at the rain would have given him an excuse not to look at O’Brien while he asked what needed to be asked.

  “Doctor, you weren’t Dunny’s primary physician…”

  Talking while gazing moodily at a vending machine full of candy bars seemed eccentric.

  “…but you were involved with his treatment.”

  O’Brien said nothing, waited.

  Having finished his coffee, Ethan scooped the paper cup off the table, crumpled it in his fist.

  “And after what happened yesterday, I’d wager that you know his file better than anyone.”

  “Backward and forward,” O’Brien confirmed.

  Taking the paper cup to the waste can, Ethan said, “Is there anything in the file that you’d consider unusual?”

  “I can’t find a single misstep in diagnosis, treatment, or in the death-certification protocols.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” He tossed the crumpled cup in the can and paced, looking at the floor. “I’m sincere when I tell you that I’m convinced you and the hospital are utterly blameless. When I say ‘unusual,’ what I really mean is…strange, uncanny.”

  “Uncanny?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how to put a finer point on it.”

  Dr. O’Brien remained silent so long that Ethan stopped pacing and looked up from the floor.

  The physician chewed on his lower lip, staring at the piles of documents.

  “There was something,” Ethan guessed. He returned to the table, sat in the orange torture device. “Something uncanny, all right.”

  “It’s here in the file. I didn’t bring it up. It’s meaningless.”

  “What?”

  “It could be misconstrued as evidence that he came out of the coma for a period, but he didn’t. Some attributed the problem to a machine malfunction. It wasn’t.”

  “Malfunction? What machine?”

  “The EEG.”

  “The machine that records his brain waves.”

  O’Brien chewed his lip.

  “Doctor?”

  The physician met Ethan’s eyes. He sighed. He pushed his chair away from the table and got up. “It’ll be better if you actually see it yourself.”

  CHAPTER 51

  CORKY PARKED ON THE WRONG STREET AND walked two blocks through the cold rain to the home of the three-eyed freak.

  Windier than Monday’s storm, this one snapped weak fronds off queen palms, tumbled an empty plastic trash can down the center of the street, tore a window awning and loudly flapped the loose length of forest-green canvas.

  Melaleucas lashed their willowy branches as though trying to whip themselves to pieces. Stone pines were stripped of dead brown needles that bristled through the churning air and gave it the power to prick, to blind.

  As Corky walked, a dead rat bobbed past him on the racing water in the gutter. The lolling head rolled toward him, revealing one dark empty socket and one milky eye.

  The grand and lovely spectacle made him wish that he had time to join in the celebration of disorder, to spread some prankish chaos of his own. He longed to poison a few trees, stuff mailboxes with hate literature, spread nails under the tires of parked cars, set a house afire….

  This was a busy day of a different kind, however, and he had numerous scheduled tasks to which he must attend. Monday he had been a devilish rascal, an amusing imp of nihilism, but this day he must be a serious soldier of anarchy.

  The neighborhood was an eclectic mix of two-story Craftsman houses with raised front porches and classic single-story California bungalows that borrowed from many styles of architecture. They were maintained with evident pride, enhanced with brick walkways, picket fences, beds of flowers.

  By contrast, the bungalow of the three-eyed freak sat behind a half-dead front lawn, skirted by masses of unkempt shrubbery, at the end of a cracked and hoved concrete walkway. Under the Mexican-tile roof, the filthy tangles of long-empty birds’ nests dripped from the eaves, and the stucco walls were cracked, chipped, in need of paint.

  The structure looked like the residence of a troll who had grown weary of living under bridg
es, without amenities, but who had neither the knowledge nor the industry, nor the sense of pride, needed to maintain a house.

  Corky rang the doorbell, which produced not sweet chimes but the sputtering racket of a broken, corroded mechanism.

  He loved this place.

  Because Corky had called ahead and promised money, the three-eyed freak was waiting by the door. He answered the tubercular cough of the bell even before the sound finished grating on Corky’s ear.

  Yanking the door open, looming, one great grizzled grimace with a pendulous gut and size-thirteen bare feet, wearing gray sweat pants and a Megadeth concert T-shirt, Ned Hokenberry said, “You look like a damn mustard pot.”

  “It’s raining,” Corky observed.

  “You look like a pimple on Godzilla’s ass.”

  “If you’re worried about getting the carpet wet—”

  “Hell, scuzzy as this carpet is, a bunch of pukin’-drunk hobos with bad bladders couldn’t do it any harm.”

  Hokenberry turned away, lumbering into the living room. Corky stepped inside and closed the door behind himself.

  The carpet looked as if previously it had been wall-to-wall in a barn.

  Should the day arrive when mahogany-finish Formica furniture with green-and-blue-striped polyester upholstery became prized by collectors and museums, Hokenberry would be a wealthy man. The two best items in the living room were a recliner littered with crushed corn chips and a big-screen TV.

  The small windows were half covered by drapes. No lamps were aglow; only the TV screen cast light.

  Corky was comfortable with the gloom. In spite of his affinity for chaos, he hoped never to see the interior of this house in bright light.

  “The last batch of information you gave me checks out, as far as I’m able to check it,” Corky said, “and it’s really been helpful.”

  “Told you I know the estate better than that candy-ass actor knows his own dick.”

  Until he’d been dismissed, with generous severance pay, for leaving prank messages on the answering machine that his employer had dedicated to phone calls from the dead, Ned Hokenberry had been a security guard at Palazzo Rospo.

  “You say they got a new security chief. I can’t guarantee he didn’t change some procedures.”

  “I understand.”

  “You have my twenty thousand?”

  “I have it right here.” Corky withdrew his right arm from the voluminous sleeve of the slicker, and reached to an interior pocket for the packet of cash, his second payment to Hokenberry.

  Even framed by the snugly buttoned yellow collar of his slicker and the drooping yellow brim of his rain hat, Corky’s face must have revealed more of his contempt than he intended.

  Hokenberry’s bloodshot eyes blurred with self-pity, and his doughy face kneaded itself into more and deeper folds as he said, “I wasn’t always a sorry damn wreck, you know. Didn’t used to have this gut. Shaved every day, cleaned up real nice. Front lawn used to be green. Bein’ fired by that son of a bitch is what ruined me.”

  “I thought you said Manheim gave you lots of severance pay?”

  “That was soul-buyin’ money, I now understand. Anyway, Manheim wasn’t man enough to fire me himself. He had his creepy guru do it.”

  “Ming du Lac.”

  “That’s the one. Ming, he takes me to the rose garden, pours tea, which I’m polite enough to drink even if it tastes like piss.”

  “You’re a gentleman.”

  “We’re sittin’ at this table surrounded by roses, got this white lace cloth and fancy china—”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “—while he talks at me about gettin’ my spiritual house in order. I’m not just bored shitless, but thinkin’ he’s even a bigger fruitcake than I ever figured, when after fifteen minutes I realize I’m bein’ fired. If he’d made that clear at the start, I wouldn’t have had to drink his piss-poor tea.”

  “That does sound traumatizing,” Corky said, pretending sympathy.

  “It wasn’t traumatizin’, you ass pimple. What do you think I am, some pansy gets his dainties all puckered just ’cause someone looks at him wrong? I wasn’t traumatized, I was hexed.”

  “Hexed?”

  “Hexed, cursed, hoodooed, diabolized, spellcast by the evil eye—whatever you want to call it. Ming du Lac, he’s got hell power in him, the creepy runt, and he ruined me forever in that rose garden. I’ve been slidin’ downhill ever since.”

  “He sounds like the usual Hollywood fraud to me.”

  “I’m tellin’ you, that little weasel’s the real juju, and I been spell-struck.”

  Corky held out the package of cash, but then pulled it back as the hexed wreckage of a man reached for it. “One more thing.”

  “Don’t screw with me,” Hokenberry said, hulking over Corky and glowering as if he’d come down a beanstalk, angry and looking for whoever had stolen his hen’s eggs.

  “You’ll get your money,” Corky assured him. “I’d just like to hear how you acquired your third eye.”

  Hokenberry had only two eyes of his own, but around his neck, on a pendant, hung the eye of a stranger.

  “I already told you twice how I got it.”

  “I just like to hear it,” Corky said. “You tell it so well. It tickles me.”

  Scrunching his face until he resembled a Shar-Pei, Hokenberry considered the concept of himself as a raconteur, and he seemed to like it. “Twenty-five years ago, I started doin’ road security for rock groups, tour security. I don’t mean I planned it or managed it. That’s not my zone.”

  “You’ve always been just beef,” Corky said, anticipating him.

  “Yeah, I’ve always been just beef, been out front to intimidate the crazier fans, the totally wired meth freaks and PCP spongebrains. Been beef for Rollin’ Stones tours, Megadeth, Metallica, Van Halen, Alice Cooper, Meat Loaf, Pink Floyd—”

  “Queen, Kiss,” Corky added, “even for Michael Jackson when he still was Michael Jackson.”

  “—Michael Jackson back when he still was Michael Jackson if he ever really was,” Hokenberry agreed. “Anyway I had this three-week gig with…My memory’s fuzzy about this. I think it was either the Eagles or could’ve been Peaches and Herb.”

  “Or it could’ve been the Captain and Tennille.”

  “Yeah, it could’ve been. One of them three acts. This crowd gets all jammed up, gonads gone nuclear, too much of some bad juice bein’ toked and poked that night.”

  “You could feel they might rush the stage.”

  “I could feel they might rush the stage. All you need is one idiot punk with spunk for brains, he decides to bolt for the band, and he starts a riot.”

  “You’ve got to anticipate him,” Corky encouraged.

  “Anticipate him, put him down like the instant he makes his move, or another two hundred headcases will follow him.”

  “So this punk with blue hair—”

  “Who’s tellin’ this story?” Hokenberry grumbled. “Me or you?”

  “You are. It’s your story. I love this story.”

  To express his disgust with these interruptions, Hokenberry spat on the carpet. “So this punk with blue hair tenses to make his move, gonna climb the stage, try to get to Peaches and Herb—”

  “Or the Captain.”

  “Or Tennille. So I call him out, move in on him fast, and the little butthead flips me the finger, which gives me absolute license to pop him.” Hokenberry raised one fist the size of a ham. “I planted Bullwinkle as deep in his face as it would go.”

  “You call your right fist Bullwinkle.”

  “Yeah, and my left is Rocky. Didn’t even need Rocky. Bullwinkled him so hard one of his eyes popped out. Startled me, but I caught it in midair. Glass eye. The punk went down cold, and I kept the eye, had it made into this pendant.”

  “It’s a terrific pendant.”

  “Glass eyes aren’t really glass, you know. They’re thin plastic shells, and the iris is hand-painted on the inside. Wa
y cool.”

  “Way,” Corky agreed.

  “Had an artist friend make this little glass sphere to hold the eye, stop it deteriorating. That’s the story, gimme my twenty grand.”

  Corky passed to him the plastic-wrapped packet of cash.

  As he had done with his initial twenty thousand on the first of their three previous meetings, Hokenberry turned away from Corky and took the bundle to the table in the adjacent dinette area to count every crisp hundred-dollar bill.

  Corky shot him three times in the back.

  When Hokenberry hit the floor, the bungalow shook.

  The big man’s fall was much louder than the shots because the pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor that Corky had purchased from an anarchic survivalist with deep ties to an aggressive group of anti-veal activists who manufactured the suppressors both for their own use and as a fund-raising activity. Each of the shots made a quiet sound like someone pronouncing the word supper with a lisp.

  This was the weapon with which he had shot Rolf Reynerd’s mother in the foot.

  Considering Hokenberry’s intimidating size, Corky hadn’t trusted the ice pick to do the job.

  He moved closer to the beef and shot him three more times, just to be certain no punch remained in Rocky and Bullwinkle.

  CHAPTER 52

  TWO WINDOWS PRESENTED A SOLVENT SKY AND a city dissolving in drips, drizzles, and vapors.

  Most of the large records room at Our Lady of Angels was divided into aisles by tall banks of filing cabinets. Near the windows lay a more open area with four work stations, and people were busy at two.

  Dr. O’Brien settled at one of the unused stations and switched on the computer. Ethan pulled up a chair beside him.

  Inserting a DVD into the computer, the physician said, “Mr. Whistler began to experience difficulty breathing three days ago. He needed to be put on a ventilator, and he was moved into the intensive care unit.”

  When the DVD was accessed, WHISTLER, DUNCAN EUGENE appeared on the screen with Dunny’s patient number and other vital information that had been collected by the admissions office.