Corrie found Glen's number in the church directory, picked up her phone, and dialed while the pastor watched. She realized that there was less than a month left until the Second Coming.
That suddenly seemed very important to her.
Very important.
Glen, obviously hungover, answered the phone after six rings. She told him in a cold voice that the next time he volunteered his time and did not show, causing construction of the church to fall behind schedule, Pastor Wheeler would rip his balls out by the roots and feed them to Jesus. She liked saying that word: "balls."
And she found that she liked hearing the terror in Glen's voice as he desperately and pathetically tried to apologize.
She hung up on him in the middle of his apology, and looked up at the pastor. He grinned at her. "Very good," he said. "Very good."
Her doubts seemed to have disappeared, and in their place she felt only a quietly unobtrusive bliss. She was smiling to herself as she returned her attention to the invoices on her desk.
He saw it again. The Face in the Sand. Cutler closed his eyes and gripped the sides of the sink for support. Outside the restroom of the Shell station he heard the blowing wind, a whooshing noise that would have sounded like water were it not for the tiny granules of sand that scraped against the metal door and the small dirty window above the wastebasket. From inside the gas station itself, muffled by the wall, he heard the dinging of the bell as a late-night customer ran over the cable and pulled up to the pumps.
Cutler opened his eyes, looked again at the mirror. Over his shoulder, he could still see the reflection of The Face, peering in at him through the window.
He looked down into the sink, concentrating on a rust stain connected to the drain directly below the faucet. The Face in the Sand. The malevolence of its gaze and the un naturalness of its composition had been burned permanently into his brain, and after all these years had lost none of its terrifying power. Seeing it again, Cutler felt like a small frightened child, and he was dimly aware that he had wet his pants.
The whooshing sound seemed to grow louder.
It was The Face in the Sand that had kept him from setting out and searching for the Lost Dutchman when he was eighteen. Along with Hobie Beecham and Phil Emmons, he'd been planning to take a year off after high school and before college, to search for the fabled gold mine.
Having grown up in east Mesa, practically under the shadow of the Superstition Mountains, the three of them had spent most of their grammar school years obsessed with the Lost Dutchman, dreaming of becoming rough, tough, rich, and famous prospectors. For six months in fifth grade, after they'd pooled their allowance money one week and purchased a weathered "Genuine Lost Dutchman Treasure Map" from the tourist trap on Main Street, they'd thought the mine was theirs. The obsession had cooled somewhat by high school, but they were still seriously planning to spend a year prospecting in the Superstitions beginning the summer after graduation. They didn't really expect to find the mine, but they were expecting to party, live off the land, and generally enjoy their last gasp of freedom before becoming responsible adults.
Then he'd seen The Face in the Sand.
Cutler had never told his two friends what he'd seen, knowing they would think him pussy or worse. Instead, he'd given them a transparently false story about growing up and putting away childish things, a story neither of them bought. Both Hobie and Phil had tried desperately, together and separately, to change his mind, playing on his sympathy, on his memory, on his loyalty, but he'd re fused to budge. They'd ended up fighting with him, then fighting with each other, and the whole idea had died an ignominious death. He hadn't seen either of them after that, was not even sure if they'd kept in touch with each other. At the end of the summer, carrying only the stuffed backpack that he'd planned to bring with him into the Superstitions, he'd hit the road to Denver, where there was supposed to be an airplane mechanic's school. He had some half-baked idea of becoming a jet mechanic, but he'd lasted there about nine months before moving on to Colorado Springs, where he lasted about nine months before moving on to Albuquerque, where he lasted about nine months before moving on... :: And always The Face had haunted him. He'd seen The Face in the flat desert outside Apache Junction. It had been a hot Saturday afternoon, and he'd been walking alone, down one of the old Indian trails that wound through private property and reservation land to the base of the Superstitions. The sky had been spectacularly, unnaturally blue, so blue that he had specifically noticed it, though that was not something that often captured his attention. He'd felt slightly dizzy, and he'd stopped to rest on a low mound of sand, taking off his T-shirt and using it to wipe the sweat from his face, knowing from touch that his nose and forehead were already burned. He'd glanced down at his feet. : And he'd seen The Face. Twice the size of a normal human face, it had looked like a sculpture protruding from the ground. The chin and cheeks, eyes and mouth, nose and forehead had all been formed from sand and had a strange, grainily smooth texture. For a brief second he'd wondered why he hadn't seen it before and what its creators had used to hold the sand together. Then he'd seen that the face was moving, muscles outlined in ridges beneath the cheeks stretching taut, lips spreading out into a silent scream, eyes rolling wildly.
He'd jumped up, nearly tripping over his feet in his at tempt to scramble away from the mound. Even as he moved frantically back, he kept his gaze on the face in the sand. Or The Face in the Sand, as it had immediately become. He would have screamed, wanted to scream, but was afraid of what The Face would do in reaction. The sweat pouring down his face was cold, and his heart was pumping crazily. It was not merely the fact that sand was sen dent that scared him so; it was the structure of The Face itself, the contours of its form. There was something about the cruel shape of the mouth, the way the eyes were positioned above the nose that seemed wrong, unnatural. Evil The effect was all the more terrifying because of the monochromatic nature of the sand. The eyes that were glaring at him, the mouth that was grimacing at him, everything was the same light tan white color, and the imposition of a three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional substance was monstrous.
Above the beating of his heart and the pounding of blood in his temples, he'd thought he heard a noise, a hiss issuing from those shifting sand lips. He held his breath, tried to hear the sound above the panicked rasp of his own breathing.
The words were faint, but audible: "I will find you." The eyes had met his, locked, and though he'd tried to look away, he couldn't. The Face had strained, grown, pushed outward, as though trying to break free of the confines of the earth, then had sunk back into ordinary sand.
There'd been a brief moment of respite, a few confusing seconds in which he'd put it all down to heat prostration and an overactive imagination. Then The Face had reformed in the sand at his feet, thrusting upward from the ground. A small cactus was sucked into the opening mouth. The horrible eyes had glared at him, then the mouth had grinned and whispered his name. "Cutler." Again: "Cutler."
And: "I will find you."
He'd run then, back down the trail on which he'd come, knowing that at any moment The Face in the Sand might reappear, might pop up before him, might whisper his name.
Might do something worse.
He had not known why The Face had promised to follow him, but it was instantly clear that he had to get away from the desert, away from Arizona, away from the sand. Whatever it was, whatever its purpose or motives, it would not be able to find him if he stayed in forests or cities, if he got away from the stuff of its substance.
He'd done a good job of keeping away from the desert before coming to Rio Verde to work at the Rocking D. But somehow, he had never traveled far. He had never gone to the East Coast or the South or the Pacific North west or another country. He'd always stayed in the South west, near Arizona.