The Face

by Dean Koontz

  The sky blazed again, and growled. Fat leaf-snapping droplets of cold rain roared through the trees and pounded, pounded the pavement.

  For a sweet half-minute, Corky capered like Gene Kelly, singing “Shake Your Groove Thing,” not caring who might see him.

  Then he got in the car and drove away from there, for he had much work to do on this most important day of his life to date.

  CHAPTER 54

  AS ETHAN WAITED FOR MUSIC THAT WOULD wither the soul and for the hospital elevator that would bring it, his cell phone rang.

  “Where are you?” Hazard Yancy asked.

  “Our Lady of Angels. About to leave.”

  “You in the garage?”

  “On my way down now.”

  “Upper or lower level?”

  “Upper.”

  “What’re you driving?”

  “A white Expedition, like yesterday.”

  “Wait there. We have to talk.” Hazard hung up.

  Ethan rode the elevator alone and without music. Apparently the sound system was malfunctioning. Nothing but hiss-pop-crackle came from the ceiling speaker.

  He had descended one floor when he thought that he detected a faint voice behind the static. Quickly it became less faint, though still too weak to convey meaning.

  By the time he traveled three floors, he convinced himself that this was the eerie voice to which he had listened for half an hour on the phone the previous night. He had been so intent on understanding what it was saying that he’d fallen into something like a trance.

  Drifting down from the ceiling speaker, in a fall of static as soft as snow, came his name. He heard it as if from a great distance but distinctly.

  “Ethan…Ethan…”

  On a foggy winter day at the beach or harbor, sea gulls in flight, high in muffling mist, sometimes called to one another with two-syllable cries that seemed part alarm and part searching signal issued in mournful hope of a reply, the most forlorn sound in the world. This call of “Ethan, Ethan,” as though echoing down to a ravine from a lofty peak, had that same quality of melancholy and urgency.

  Listening to gulls, however, he had never imagined that he heard his name in their desolate voices. Nor had he ever thought that their plaints in the fog sounded like Hannah, as the far voice behind the speaker static sounded like her now.

  She no longer called his name, but she cried out something not quite decipherable. Her tone was the same that you might use to shout a warning at a man standing on a sidewalk in complete ignorance of a terrible weight of broken cornice falling toward him from atop the building at his back.

  Between the lobby and the upper level of the garage, half a floor from his destination, Ethan pressed STOP on the control panel. The cab braked, sagging slightly and rebounding on its cables.

  Even if this was indeed a voice speaking to him—and to him alone—through the overhead speaker, rather than proof of mental imbalance, he couldn’t allow himself to be hypnotized by it as he had been on the phone.

  He thought of fogbound nights and the unwary sailors who heard the singing of the Lorelei. They turned their ships toward her voice, seeking to understand the alluring promise of her words, steered onto her rock, wrecked their vessels, and drowned.

  This voice was more likely to be that of the Lorelei than that of his lost Hannah. To desire what is forever beyond reach, to seek it in disregard of reason, is the fateful rock in an endless fog.

  Anyway, he hadn’t brought the elevator to a halt in order to puzzle out the words of the might-be warning. Heart knocking, he pressed STOP because he’d suddenly been overcome with the conviction that when the doors slid open, the garage would not lie beyond them.

  Crazily, he expected thick fog and black water. Or a precipice and a yawning abyss. The voice would be out there, beyond the water, beyond the chasm, and he would have nowhere to go but toward it.

  In another elevator, Monday afternoon, ascending toward Dunny’s apartment, he had been stricken by claustrophobia.

  Here again, the four walls crowded closer than they had been when he’d first boarded the cab. The ceiling squeezed lower, lower. He was going to be compressed meat in a can.

  He put his hands over his ears to block the ghostly voice.

  As the air seemed to grow hotter, thicker, Ethan heard himself straining to breathe, gasping on each inhalation, wheezing with each exhalation, and he was reminded of Fric in an asthma attack. At the thought of the boy, his heart hammered harder than ever, and with one hand he reached toward the START button on the control panel.

  As the walls continued to close upon him, they seemed to press into his mind more crazy ideas. Instead of black water and fog where the hospital garage should be, perhaps he’d step out of the elevator to find himself in that black-and-white apartment with the walls of watchful birds, with Rolf Reynerd alive and drawing a pistol from a bag of potato chips. Shot in the gut again, Ethan would receive no reprieve this time.

  He hesitated, didn’t push the button.

  Maybe because his labored breathing had recalled Fric in an asthmatic phase, Ethan began to think that among the faint and not quite comprehensible words coming from the overhead speaker was the boy’s name. “Fric…” When he held his breath and concentrated, he couldn’t hear it. When he breathed, the name came again. Or did it?

  In that other elevator, Monday afternoon, the passing bout of claustrophobia had been a sublimation of another dread that he had not wanted to face: the irrational and yet persistent fear that in Dunny’s apartment he would find his old friend dead but animated, as cold as a corpse but lively.

  He suspected that this current claustrophobia and the fear of Reynerd resurrected also masked another anxiety that he was reluctant to face, that he could not quite fish from his subconscious.

  Fric? Fric was emotionally vulnerable, and no wonder, but in no physical danger. The skeleton staff at the estate still numbered ten, counting Chef Hachette and the groundskeeper, Mr. Yorn. Estate security was formidable. The real danger to Fric remained that some lunatic might get at Channing Manheim, leaving the boy fatherless.

  Ethan pressed START.

  The elevator moved again. In but a moment it stopped at the upper level of the parking garage.

  Perhaps he would step out and find himself on a rainy street, in the path of an out-of-control PT Cruiser.

  The door slid aside, revealing nothing more impossible than the concrete walls of an underground garage and ranks of vehicles huddled under fluorescent lights.

  As he walked to the Expedition, his ragged breathing quickly grew normal. His racing heart not only slowed but also settled out of his throat, into his chest where it belonged.

  Behind the wheel of the SUV, he pushed the master switch to engage the power locks on all the doors.

  Through the windshield he could see nothing but a concrete wall mottled by water stains and car-exhaust deposits. Here and there, over time, florescences of lime had risen to the surface.

  His imagination wanted to search for images in this mottling, as it sometimes hunted big game and collected menageries among the shifting shapes of clouds. Here, he saw only decomposing faces and the tumbled, tangled bodies of the cruelly murdered. He might have been sitting before a ghastly mural of the many victims in the names of whom he, as a homicide detective, had sought justice.

  He tipped his head back, closed his eyes, and let the tension shiver out of him.

  After a while, he considered turning on the radio to pass the time until Hazard arrived. Sheryl Crow, Barenaked Ladies, Chris Isaak, without orchestral strings and timpanis and French horns, might mellow his mood.

  He was reluctant to click the switch. He suspected that instead of the usual music, news, and talk shows, he would discover, from one end of the dial to the other, only the voice that might be Hannah’s, futilely trying to speak to him on every frequency.

  Knuckles on glass—rap-rap-rap—startled him. Wearing a rolled seaman’s cap and a scowl to curdle vinegar, Ha
zard Yancy peered through the passenger’s window.

  Ethan unlocked the doors.

  Filling the SUV as fully as he might have filled a bumper car at a carnival, Hazard climbed into the front passenger’s seat and pulled the door shut. Although he had more knees than knee space, he didn’t adjust the power controls to move the seat back. He seemed nervous. “They find Dunny?”

  “Who?”

  “The hospital.”

  “No.”

  “Then why’re you here?”

  “I talked to the doctor who signed the death certificate, trying to figure it out.”

  “You get anywhere?”

  “Right back where I started—lookin’ up my own ass.”

  “Not a view that’ll draw tourists,” Hazard said. “Sam Kesselman has the flu.”

  Ethan needed Kesselman—the detective assigned to the ormolu-lamp murder of Rolf Reynerd’s mother—to read Reynerd’s unfinished screenplay and then to track down the real-life inspiration for the murderous professor depicted in its pages.

  “When’s he back on the job?” Ethan asked.

  “His wife says he can’t even keep chicken soup on his stomach. Looks like we won’t see him till after Christmas.”

  “Anybody partners with him?”

  “Right at the start, Glo Williams had a piece of it, but the case went cold fast, and he stepped out.”

  “Get him back in?”

  “He’s on the rape-and-chop of that eleven-year-old girl that’s all over the news, no time for anything else.”

  “Man, the world gets sicker by the week.”

  “By the hour. Otherwise, we’d be unemployed. They call Mina Reynerd’s case Vamp and the Lamp ’cause in pictures of her when she was younger, she looked like one of those vamps in the old movies, like Theda Bara or Jean Harlow. The file is strictly on Kesselman’s desk, along with other active cases.”

  “So even after Christmas, he might not get to it first thing.”

  Hazard stared at the concrete wall beyond the windshield, as if stocking a menagerie of his own. Maybe he saw gazelles and kangaroos. More likely, he could not avoid seeing battered children, strangled women, the bodies of men torn by gunfire.

  Memories of innocent victims. His ghost family. Always with him. They were as real to him as the badge he carried, more real than the pension that he might never live to collect.

  “After Christmas isn’t soon enough,” Hazard said. “I had this dream.”

  Ethan looked at him, waited. Then: “What dream?”

  Rolling his Paul Bunyan shoulders, shifting on the seat to gain legroom, looking as uncomfortable as Babe the Blue Ox in a canary cage, Hazard stared at the concrete wall while he said matter-of-factly, “You were with me in Reynerd’s apartment. He shot you in the gut. Next, we’re in an ambulance. You’re not gonna make it. They have these Christmas decorations in the ambulance. Tinsel, little bells. You ask me for a set of the bells. I take one set down, try to give them to you, but you’re gone, you’re dead.”

  Ethan turned his attention to the parking-garage wall once more. Among the decomposing corpses that his imagination identified in the stains and subtleties of texture, he expected to see his own face.

  “I wake up,” Hazard continued, still focused on the mottled concrete, “there’s someone in the room with me. Standing over the bed. A darker shape in the dark. Some guy. I’m up, I’m at him, but he’s not there. Now he’s across the room. I go after him. He moves. He’s quick. He doesn’t walk, he like glides. My piece is in my holster, hanging on a chair. I get it. He keeps moving, quick, too quick, gliding, like he’s playing with me. We circle the room. I get to a light switch, click on a lamp. He’s at my closet doors, his back to me. Mirrored closet doors. He walks into the mirror. Disappears into the mirror.”

  “This is still the dream,” Ethan suggested.

  “I told you, I wake up, there’s someone in the room with me,” Hazard reminded him. “I didn’t get a good look at him, his back to me, just a glimpse in the mirror, but I think it was Dunny Whistler. I open the closet door. He’s not in there. Where is he—in the damn mirror?”

  “Sometimes in a dream,” Ethan said, “you wake up, but the waking up is just part of the nightmare, and you’re really still dreaming.”

  “I search the apartment. Don’t find anybody. Back in the bedroom what I do find are these.”

  Ethan heard the sweet silvery ringing of small bells.

  He looked away from the concrete wall.

  Hazard held up an array of three concentrically strung bells like those that had hung in the ambulance.

  Their eyes met.

  Ethan knew that Hazard had instantly read not the nature of his secrets but certainly the fact that he had secrets.

  The astonishing things that had happened to Ethan in less than thirty hours, and now also to Hazard, plus the inexplicable case of dead Dunny walking and possibly orchestrating the murder of Reynerd: All this had to be connected somehow to the contents of the six black boxes and the threat against Manheim.

  “What aren’t you telling me,” Hazard demanded.

  After a long pause, Ethan said, “I have a set of bells, too.”

  “You get yours in a dream like I did?”

  “I got mine just before I died in an ambulance late yesterday afternoon.”

  CHAPTER 55

  FREE OF BOTH INSIPID MUSIC AND VOICES FROM Beyond, four flights of stairs led down to the lowest of the three subterranean levels of the hospital.

  Ethan and Hazard followed the familiar, brightly lighted white corridor past the garden room to a set of double doors. Beyond lay the ambulance garage.

  Among other vehicles belonging to the hospital, four van-type ambulances stood side by side. Empty parking stalls suggested that additional units in the fleet were at work in the rainy day.

  Ethan went to the nearest ambulance. He hesitated, then opened the rear door.

  Inside, red tinsel was strung at the ceiling along both the left and right sides of the compartment. Six clusters of tiny bells hung here, as well, one set at the beginning, another at the middle, and a third at the end of each garland of tinsel.

  At the second ambulance, Hazard said, “Here.”

  Ethan joined him at the open back door.

  Two lengths of red tinsel. Only five sets of bells. The missing set, in the middle of the right-hand garland of tinsel, was the one that had been given to him as he lay dying.

  A cold tremble, almost a pressure, moved slowly down the center of his back, as if the fleshless tip of a skeletal finger were tracing his spine from cervical vertebrae to coccyx.

  Hazard said, “One set of bells is missing, but between us we have two.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe we have the same set.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Behind them, a man said, “May I help you?”

  Turning, Ethan saw the paramedic who had attended to him in the racing ambulance less than twenty-four hours ago.

  The discovery of the bells in his hand outside Forever Roses had already been one piece of dark magic too many. Now, to come face to face with this man, seen before only in that dream, made the death in the ambulance seem real even though he still breathed, still lived.

  The shock of recognition was not mutual. The paramedic regarded Ethan with no greater interest than he might have shown toward any stranger.

  Hazard flashed his department ID. “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Cameron Sheen.”

  “Mr. Sheen, we need to know what calls this particular ambulance answered yesterday afternoon.”

  “What time exactly?” the paramedic asked.

  Hazard looked at Ethan, and Ethan found his voice. “Between five and six o’clock.”

  “I was crewing it then with Rick Laslow,” Sheen said. “Couple minutes after five, there’s a police call, an eleven-eighty, accident with major injury, corner of Westwood Boulevard and Wilshire.”

  That was miles from the location at w
hich Ethan had bounced off the PT Cruiser.

  “Honda tangled with a Hummer,” Sheen said. “We carried the guy in the car. He looked like he’d butted heads with a Peterbilt, not just a Hummer. We took him street to surgery in personal-best time, and from what I hear, he’ll come out of it good enough to jump and hump again.”

  Ethan named the two streets that formed the intersection half a block from Forever Roses. “You catch calls that far west?”

  “Sure. If we figure we know a way to beat the gridlock, we go wherever the blood is.”

  “Did you answer a call to that intersection yesterday?”

  The paramedic shook his head. “Not me and Rick. Maybe one of the other units. You could check the dispatcher’s log.”

  “You look familiar to me,” Ethan said. “Have we met somewhere before?”

  Sheen frowned, seemed to search his memory. Then: “Not that I recall. So do you want to check the dispatcher’s log?”

  “No,” Hazard said, “but there’s one more thing.” He pointed at one of the garlands of tinsel in the back of the ambulance. “The middle set of bells is missing.”

  Peering into the van, Sheen said, “Missing bells? Are they? I guess so. What about it?”

  “We’re wondering what happened to them.”

  Puzzlement worked Sheen’s face into a squint. “You are? Those little bells? Don’t recall anything happening to them during my watch. Maybe one of the guys on another shift could help you.”

  At a glance from Hazard, Ethan shrugged. Hazard slammed shut the ambulance door.

  Sheen’s puzzlement resolved into amazement. “You don’t mean they send two detectives ’cause maybe someone stole a two-dollar Christmas ornament?”

  Neither Ethan nor Hazard had an answer for that.

  Sheen should have let it go then, but like a lot of people these days, his ignorance of the true nature of a cop’s work allowed him to feel smugly superior to anyone with a badge. “What’s it take to get a kitten out of a tree—a SWAT team?”

  Hazard said, “The missing ornament isn’t simply a matter of two dollars, is it, Detective Truman?”