“Images of Moloch’s victims, which I conjured out of water and sent running at his car to frighten him,” Dunny explains.
“Damn, I missed that!” Fric says.
“Furthermore, we guardian angels don’t pull our white robes around us and just harp-strum ourselves from here to there the way movies would have you believe. How do we travel, Fric?”
The boy starts well but falters: “You travel by mirrors, by mist, by smoke, by doorways…”
“Doorways in water, by stairways made of shadows, on roads of moonlight,” Dunny prompts.
Fric picks up the thread of memory: “By wish and hope and simple expectation.”
“Would you like one last exhibition of an angel flying in this way that angels really fly?”
“Cool,” the boy says.
“Wait,” Ethan says.
“There is no waiting,” Dunny says, for now he receives the call and must answer. “I’m done here forever.”
“My friend,” Ethan says.
Grateful for those two words, grateful beyond expression, Dunny transforms his body by the power granted in his contract, becoming hundreds of luminous golden butterflies that rise gracefully into the rain and one by one, with flutter of wings, fold themselves into the night, away from the sight of mortal eyes.
CHAPTER 95
WHEN DUNNY MATERIALIZES ON THE THIRD floor of the great house, in answer to the call, Typhon steps through the double doors from Channing Manheim’s private suite, into the north hall, shaking his head in amazement. “Dear boy, have you taken a tour of these rooms?”
“No, sir.”
“Even I myself have not enjoyed quite such luxury. But then again, with all my traveling, I stay mostly in hotels, and even the finest of them offer no suites comparable to this.”
Sirens arise in the night outside.
“Mr. Hazard Yancy,” Typhon says, “has sent the cavalry a tad too late, but I’m sure they’ll be welcome.”
Together they walk to the main elevator, which opens as they approach.
With his usual grace, Typhon indicates that Dunny should enter ahead of him.
As the doors close behind them and they begin to descend, Typhon says, “Splendid work. Magnificent, really. I believe you achieved all you hoped and much more.”
“Much more,” Dunny admits, for between them he is required to speak only the truth.
Merry eyes twinkling, Typhon says, “You must acknowledge that I honored all the terms to which we agreed, and in fact I interpreted them with considerable elasticity.”
“I’m deeply grateful, sir, for the opportunity you gave me.”
Typhon pats Dunny’s shoulder affectionately. “For a few years there, dear boy, we thought we’d lost you.”
“Not even close.”
“Oh, much closer than you think,” Typhon assures him. “You were almost a goner. I’m so glad it worked out this way.”
Typhon pats his shoulder one more time, and Dunny’s body drops to the floor of the elevator, while still his spirit stands here in suit and tie, the very image of the corpse at its feet, but far less solid in appearance than the lifeless flesh.
After a moment, the body vanishes.
“Where?” Dunny wonders.
With a pleasant chuckle of delight, Typhon says, “There’s going to be some shocked and confounded people in the garden room back at Our Lady of Angels. The naked cadaver they lost is suddenly found well-dressed, with folding money in its pockets.”
They have reached the ground floor. The garages wait below.
With that note of sweet concern that is so characteristic of him, Typhon asks, “Dear boy, are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
Afraid but not terrified. At this moment, in his immortal heart, Dunny has no room for terror.
Minutes ago, looking at Ethan and the boy on the stone bench, aware of the love between them and of the future they would share as father and son in everything but name, Dunny had been pierced by a regret sharper than any he had known before. The night that Hannah died, a sorrow flooded through him, almost swept him away, sorrow not only for her, not only at the loss of her, but sorrow for the mess he had made of his life. Sorrow had changed him but had not changed him enough, for it brought him no further than to the point of regret.
This anguish that now comes upon him on the way from ground floor to garage is not, in fact, merely a keener regret, but is instead remorse so powerful that he feels sharply bitten and torn by guilt, which is the mother of remorse, feels a terrible gnawing in the bones of his spirit. He trembles, shakes, shakes violently with the first true realization of the hideous impact that his misled life has had on others.
Faces rise in memory, the faces of men he has broken, of women he has treated with unspeakable cruelty, of children who have found their way to a life of drugs and crime and ruin along the path that he has led them, and though these are faces painfully familiar, he sees them as if for the first time because he sees in each face now, as never he had seen before, an individual with hopes and dreams and the potential for good. In his life, all these people had been but the means with which he satisfied his desires and needs, not people at all to him, but merely sources of pleasure and tools to be used.
What had seemed to him to be a fundamental transformation of the heart following the death of Hannah had been more sentimental self-pity than meaningful change. He had known sorrow, yes, and a degree of regret, but he had not known this fierce remorse and the wracking humility that comes with it.
“Dear boy, I understand what you’re going through,” Typhon says as they pass the upper garage. He means the terror that he believes now consumes Dunny, but for Dunny terror is the least of it.
Mere remorse is an inadequate description, as well, for this is such devastating remorse, such a grinding anguish, that he knows no word for it. As the faces plague him, faces from a life squandered, Dunny asks forgiveness of them, one by one, begs forgiveness with a profound humility that is also new to him, cries out to them though he is dead and cannot make amends, though many of them died before him and cannot hear how desperately he wishes he could undo the past.
The elevator has passed the lower of the two garages, and still they descend. They are not in the elevator any longer, merely in the idea of an elevator, and a strange one. The walls are mottled with mold, filth. The air reeks. The floor looks like…compacted bones.
Dunny is aware that changes are occurring in Typhon’s face, that the sweet androgynous features and the merry eyes are giving way to something that better reflects the spirit within the grandfatherly form that he has heretofore assumed. Dunny is aware of this only from the corner of his eye, for he dares not look directly. Dares not.
Floor after floor they descend, though the numbers on the panel above the door run only from one to five.
“I am developing quite an appetite,” Typhon informs him. “As far as I am able to recall—and I’ve got a fine memory—I’ve never been as famished as this. I’m positively ravenous.”
Dunny refuses to think about what this might mean, and in fact he is beyond caring. “I have earned whatever comes,” he says, as the faces from his life still haunt his memory, faces in legions.
“Soon,” Typhon says.
Dunny stands in spirit bowed, looking at the floor from which his body had disappeared, ready to accept whatever suffering comes if it will mean an end to this unbearable anguish, this gnawing remorse.
“As terrible as this will be,” Typhon says, “perhaps it would have been as bad for you if you had rejected my offer and chosen to wait a thousand years in purgatory before moving…up. You weren’t ready to go directly to the light. The sweet deal I gave you has spared you from so much tedious waiting.”
The elevator slows, stops. A ping signifies arrival, as if they are going nowhere more exotic than to work in an office building.
When the doors slide open, someone enters, but Dunny will not look up at this new arrival. There is room in him
for terror now, but still he is not dominated by it.
At the sight of the person who has entered the elevator, Typhon curses explosively, with a rage inhuman, voice still recognizable but with none of its former humor or charm. He thrusts himself in front of Dunny and says with bitter condemnation, “We have a bargain. You sold your soul to me, boy, and I gave you more than you asked for.”
By the exertion of his greater will, by the awesome power at his command, Typhon makes Dunny look at him.
This face.
Oh, this face. This face of ten thousand nightmares distilled. This face that the mind of no mortal ever could imagine. Had Dunny been alive, the sight of this face would have killed him, and here it withered his spirit.
“You asked to save Truman, and you did,” Typhon reminds him in a voice that by the word grows more guttural and more saturated with hatred. “Guardian angel, you told him. Dark angel was nearer the truth. Truman is all you asked, but I gave you the brat and Yancy, too. You’re like those Hollywood pooh-bahs in that hotel bar, like the politician and her handlers that I snared in San Francisco. You all think you’re clever enough to slip out of the deals you make with me when the time comes to fulfill the terms, but all pay in the end. Bargains are not broken here!”
“Leave,” says the new arrival.
Dunny has chosen not to look at this person. If there are worse sights than what Typhon has here become—and surely there will be an infinite progression of far worse sights—he will not look at them by choice but only as he is forced to look, as Typhon forced him.
More insistently this time: “Leave.”
Typhon steps out of the elevator, and as Dunny starts to follow him, going to the fate that he has earned and accepted, the doors slide shut, barring his exit, and he is alone with the new arrival.
The elevator begins to move once more, and Dunny trembles at the realization that there may be even deeper realms than the abyss into which Typhon has gone.
“I understand what you’re going through,” the new arrival says, echoing the statement Typhon had made earlier as they had descended out of Palazzo Rospo to places stranger still.
When she’d spoken the single word, leave, he had not recognized her voice. Now he does. He knows this must be a trick, a torment, and he will not look up.
She says, “You’re right that the word remorse can’t describe the anguish that’s come over you, that tears so painfully at your spirit. Neither can sorrow or regret or grief. But you’re wrong to think you don’t know the word, Dunny. You learned it once, and you still know it, although until now it’s been an emotion beyond your 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 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 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 general population.”
Fric dared to look hopeful. “You think so?”
“Yeah. I mean, you aren’t one of those Hollywood kids who wants to go into the family business.”
“I’d rather eat worms.”
“You don’t take bit parts in your dad’s movies. You don’t sing or dance. You don’t do imitations, do you?”
“No.”
“Do you juggle or keep a dozen plates spinning at the top of a dozen bamboo poles all at the same time?”
“Not all at the same time, no,” said Fric.
“Magic tricks?”
“No.”
“Ventriloquism?”
“Not me.”
“See, I’m bored with you already. You know what I think’s got them all excited about this story, that’s really the focus of it?”
“What?” Fric asked.
“The blimp.”
“The blimp,” Fric agreed, “is totally cool.”
“No offense, but a kid your age, with your lack of experience…I’m sorry, but you just can’t compete with a blimp in
Bel Air.”
Out at the north end of the property, the gates began to open.
“Here comes the gang,” Fric said as the first black limousine glided in from the street. “You think he’ll stop out there and give the reporters face time?”
“I’ve asked him not to,” Ethan said. “We don’t have anywhere near enough manpower to police a media mob like that, and they don’t like being policed.”
“He’ll stop,” Fric predicted. “Bet you a million bucks to a pile of cow flop. What limousine is he in?”
“Number five out of seven.”
The second limo cruised through the gate.
“He’ll have a new girlfriend,” Fric worried.
“You’ll do fine with her.”
“Maybe.”
“You’ve got the perfect ice breaker.”
“What’s that?”
“The blimp.”
Fric brightened. “Yeah.”
The third limousine appeared.
“Just remember what we agreed. We’re not going to tell anyone about…the stranger parts of it all.”
“I sure won’t,” Fric said. “I don’t want to be booby-hatched.”
The fourth limousine entered, but the fifth paused outside the gates. From this distance, without binoculars, Ethan could not see that Channing Manheim had in fact gotten out of the limo to meet the cameras and charm the press, but he was nevertheless morally certain that he owed Fric a pile of cow flop.
“Doesn’t seem like Christmas Eve,” Fric said quietly.
“It will,” Ethan promised.
Christmas morning, in his study, Ethan listened yet again to all fifty-six messages that had been recorded on Line 24.
Before Manheim and Ming du Lac had returned to Palazzo Rospo, Ethan had loaded the enhanced recordings onto a CD. Then he erased them from the computer in the white room and removed them from the phone logs. Only he would ever know that they had been received.
These messages were his, and his alone, one heart speaking to another across eternity.
In some of them, Hannah solved every element of the maniac’s riddles. In others, she only repeated Ethan’s name, sometimes with yearning, sometimes with gentle affection.