The forehead frozen to the window: the second face, the ghost question, "told nobody but Lyle"

pivotal · 20 Nov YDAU ~0456h

• When: 20 Nov YDAU, ~0100–0456h (blizzard pre-dawn), a subdorm hall window; found by Hal (1st-P POV)
• What: Unable to sleep (Coyle's "discharges"), sweaty and "jittered," Stice carries a chair to a cold hall window to watch the blizzard, rests his sweated forehead against the glass "for just a second," and freezes fast — stuck for nearly four hours, forehead numb, too embarrassed to yell, quietly chanting for courage — and, by his own report, "just praying like hell it wouldn't be Pemulis" who found him (scene 167, p. 0869). Hal finds him and, on a hard yank, stretches half a meter of forehead-flesh into a "shelf" before Stice screams to put it back — and for an instant Hal glimpses, beneath the pulled-up prairie jowls, "Stice as he would appear after a radical face-lift: a narrow, fine-featured, and slightly rodential face, aflame with some sort of revelation." Stice asks Hal whether he believes in "Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit"; reports that something bit the back of his head while he was helpless, and that "somebody" — "Or… it" — stood behind him for a while and left. He says he's told "nobody but Lyle about it," is "sick of the secretness," and promises, once freed, to show Hal "some parabnormal shit that'll shake your personal tree but good." Kenkle and Brandt are summoned to thaw him with warm water. A note on the telling: the scene is Hal's first-person account; the "second face," the bite, and the standing figure are narrated as Hal sees them or as Stice claims — the reliability of the paranormal reading is left open.