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Sometimes he just couldn’t help but feel like a proud father.
    A Jack of all Trades, Eli’s mentor could now be found in the directory under his new name, Mr. Gamble. He’d once confided in Eli that the ones man had given him—Mephistopheles, Satan, Archenemy, and so on—were just a bit too conspicuous for his tastes, as he was his own plastic surgeon now, had reshaped his identity by nipping here and tucking there, and was truly a timid sort of fellow who could “certainly do without such sphincter-crimping introductions when entering a room.”
    Again, Eli wondered where truth began and reality ended, what was man’s reflection and what wasn’t, and what used to be but isn’t anymore. It was so hard to even guess with his mentor. A veritable heap of integrity and guile, fact and fiction, Gamble was.
    But at least his mentor showed up when paged. No one else had even returned his calls. Ever.
    Heaven still might be a likelihood, Eli had to admit, but the mind of man—the real hell if there ever was one—was just a magical window away.
    At least it would be for him.
    Behind him, on a sheet-rocked wall, was a sweeping, shrine-like montage of black-and-white photographs; pictures of winged little girls. His angels. And the pain and terror shared by all were so extreme as to be the definitive expressions of looming death.
    This he called the Wall of Faces.
    Out of the nearly hundred pictures, there emerged six distinct girls.
    Eli had arranged the snapshots into the shapes of two outspread wings. The right wing was complete, while the left lacked finality by a few dozen more photos, the ones he would soon take of his seventh and last angel. And the space between the two wings, the place where they would naturally join to a body, was a black chalk outline of his physical self, arms flat against his sides, traced by his own mother over a decade ago.
    This seventh angel would provide him his own doorway to an infinite kingdom. And if he wanted, he could even pick out a crown and scepter on the way. This he’d been promised.
    The anticipation finally overwhelming him, he stopped his pacing, unlocked his hands from behind his back, then pushed them against the sides of his head, noticing as he did the bloodless tips of his fingers, looking as if they’d been fitted with white thimbles. As he pushed them through his hair, into his scalp, he discovered that they were completely numb, as well.
    He stepped up to the wall. “Why isn’t it here yet!” he screamed at the empty space. Spittle flew with the words, arcing like a rainbow across the sixth window.
    Mouth gaping, he stared at the indelicacy. He couldn’t have been more mortified if he’d ejaculated on the Pope’s Easter sermon.
    Then, a distant commotion of wings. Coming from behind the same window. Getting close now. Closer. Eli peered into the mural, his despair now ebbing into stark dismay, confusion.
    Finally, then, his last flicker of hope was doused.
    The courier slammed into the back of the window, then continued to beat itself against the glass, desperate to come through.
    Eli touched the mural and the courier materialized, pouring out from the window and its Romanesque traceries like dough through a sieve. It fell unmanageably to the floor, coalesced, then unfolded its wings; wings plenty large enough to conceal an adolescent girl.
    But Eli already knew there was no girl, no angel; knew it the moment he heard the courier approaching from behind window number six, the same one from which it had been earlier dispatched. He knew then that sweet little girl number seven, for whatever reason, wasn’t in the courier’s custody.
    Eli wavered unsteadily, and for a moment feared he just might faint.
    The creature, agitated as hell, rose up on its haunches and began sniffing the air. It turned to Eli, regarded him with a suspicious glare, snorted, then leapt to the Wall of Faces, and began perusing the photographs.
    Dumbstruck, Eli stood motionless, rapt in the