CHAPTER 84
ON THE THIRD FLOOR, AT THE NORTH END OF the west wing, across the hall from the thirty-five-hundred-square-foot suite that included the Face?s bedroom, Ethan arrived at the blue door. No other door in the house resembled it.
Ming du Lac had seen the appropriate shade of blue in a dream. According to Mrs. McBee, the interior decorator had then gone through forty-six custom blends of paint until the spiritual adviser had been satisfied that reality had been matched to dream.
As it turned out, the necessary blue was precisely the same as that on any box of Ronzoni pasta.
Merely dedicating a telephone line to calls from the dead and hooking up an answering machine to service it was not sufficient to satisfy Ming?s and Manheim?s vision of a serious investigation of the phenomenon. A space apart had been required for the equipment, which grew in complexity from a simple answering machine. And they decreed that the ambience of this chamber must be serene, beginning with the color of the door.
A sacred place, Ming called it. Sacrosanct, Channing Manheim had instructed.
[527] The simple lockset-no deadbolt-featured a keyhole in the knob. If he wasn?t able to loid the latch, he?d kick his way into the room.
A credit card, slipped between door and jamb, forced the spring latch out of the striker plate, and the blue barrier opened to reveal a sixteen-by-fourteen-foot room in which the windows had been covered with wa?lboard. The ceiling and the walls had been padded and then upholstered in white silk. The carpet was white, as well. The inside of the door was not blue but white.
In the center of this space stood two white chairs and a long white table. On the table and under part of it was what Fric might have called a shitload of high-tech equipment supporting a computer with tremendous processing capacity. All the equipment had white molded-plastic casings; the logos had been painted over with white nail polish. Even the connecting cables were white.
You could go snowblind in this room if the lights were turned too bright. The concealed cold-cathode tubes in the coves near the ceiling came on automatically when someone entered, and they were set at a comfortable level that caused the silk walls to shimmer radiantly like fields of snow on a winter twilight.
Ethan had been in this room once previously, during his first day of orientation, when he?d been new to the job.
The computer and supporting equipment operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Ethan sat in one of the white chairs.
On the white answering machine, the indicator light had gone dark. Line 24 was no longer in use.
The blue screen, a different shade from the door, provided the only vibrant color in the room. The icons were white.
He had never used this computer before. The software that organized the incoming calls was, however, the same used for the rest of the mansion?s telephone system.
Fortunately, the letters, numbers, and symbols on the keyboard [528] had not been painted white and thus obliterated. Even the gray-shaded keys were in the state intended by the manufacturer. By comparison to the surroundings, the keyboard was a riot of color.
Ethan called forth data exactly as he would have done for Lines 1 through 23, using the computer in his study. He wanted to know how many calls Line 24 had received in the past forty-eight hours.
He had been told that five or six messages were received each week on Line 24. Most were wrong numbers or cold-call sales pitches.
The list of Monday and Tuesday calls appeared with the latest count at the head of the column: fifty-six. Ten weeks? worth had been received in two days.
He?d been aware that Line 24 was carrying higher than usual traffic, but he hadn?t realized that it was being hit more than once per hour, on average.
The temperature in this talk-to-the-dead zone was with great effort maintained always at sixty-eight degrees, a figure from Ming?s original dream. This evening, the air felt colder than sixty-eight.
Scrolling through the phone log, Ethan saw that every one of the fifty-six entries lacked an incoming-caller number. This meant that none of them were from sales operations, which were now required by law to forego Caller ID blocking.
Maybe some were wrong-number calls made by people who did have Caller ID blocking. Maybe. But he would have bet everything he owned against that proposition. These calls had come from a place where the phone company couldn?t offer service.
At the bottom of the log, he highlighted the most recent entry, the call received while he had been downstairs in his study, trying to make sense of ladybugs, snails, and foreskins.
Boxed options appeared in the upper right corner of the screen. He could receive a printout of the call transcript; he could read the transcript on the screen; or he could listen to the call.
He chose to listen.
If the call was like the one to which he?d bent his ear for nearly thirty [529] minutes the previous night, an open line full of hiss and pop woven through with a faint voice half-imagined and not at all understood, he would hear something better from this equipment. The computerized audio analyzer filtered out static, identified patterned sounds that fit the profile of speech, clarified and enhanced that speech, and finally eliminated gaps in order to condense the call to its essence before storing it.
Caller 56 still sounded as though she cried out from a great distance, across an abyss. Her fragile voice made him lean forward in his chair, afraid that he would lose it. Nevertheless, because of the computer enhancement, he could hear every word spoken, though the message puzzled him.
The voice was Hannah?s.