Fear itself: a novel Read online

  After dinner Linda went into the living room and logged on to the Gees’ computer, set up a phony Netscape user profile for an alter ego, then accessed phobia.com, the PWSPD Association web site, and signed into the chat room, selecting a user name of Skairdykat and a password of boo. The chat room counter went from 0 to 1—Linda was alone. She clicked onto the archives, read back a few weeks until she had the feel of the lingo, then began typing her first entry into the dialogue box:

  Hi everybody. Skairdykat here. Pleez dont flame me if I screw up, I’ve never done this before. Mostly cuz I never saw a chat room I wanted to join before. But reading you guys stories is like reading about my own life. It feels like coming home. Anyway, heres my story: I am…

  (No need to narrow the age or sex down yet; if he bites, we can set up a meeting and have our choice of decoys in place.)

  single, and I have been deathly afraid of…

  (Might as well use the snakes—it’ll sound more believable than if you make something up.)

  snakes since as long as I can remember. Thats ophidiophobia, as most of you probably know. The worst part is, I live…

  (Keep it vague—if you get any nibbles, you can improvise something later.)

  by myself, and sometimes I get so obsessed there might be a snake outside I cant even bring myself to leave the house. I am eager to chat with and maybe someday meet someone who knows how I feel. So if anybody…

  (How to put this? Don’t want to be too obvious, but if the killer is using the PWSPD web site for trolling, he’s going to want to take it private as soon as possible.)

  wants to contact me directly, my e-mail address is [email protected]….

  (Anything else? Not yet. After all, you’re trolling, too. Graceful exit.)

  Anyway, thanks for being there, all of you brave PWSPDs. Hope to hear from somebody soon. TT4N, Skairdy

  After reading her entry over and making a few minor corrections, Linda positioned the cursor on the SUBMIT box, took a deep breath, then with a single click of her mouse turned poor Skairdy into a piece of bait dangling from a hook somewhere in cyberspace.

  8

  Dorie opened her eyes and took stock. Her forehead hurt, and there was a little knot—she must have hit the floor with her head, or the corner of the table on her way down—but there was no blood and no egg, just a tender spot above the hairline. At least you didn’t break your nose again, she told herself—it’s already got all the character it can stand.

  Shaken, she sat up slowly, careful to keep her back to the window. Dorie had been dreaming about masks, avoiding them, and fainting at the sight of them for as long as she could remember. But having hallucinations, fainting over masks that aren’t even there—that would be a new and disturbing development.

  Unless of course there really was a mask in the window. But the only way to tell for sure would be to turn around, and she wasn’t ready for that, not with her head still pounding and her heart racing and the room spinning and her stomach…

  Whoops, here it comes. Dorie turned her head to the side just in time to save her clothes. When she finished vomiting, she crawled a few feet away and collapsed full length onto her side, one arm extended like Adam’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  Then she remembered reading someplace that headache, nausea, and dizziness were all symptoms of concussion, and that the last thing you should do was give in to the urge to sleep. She tried to raise herself up onto her hands and knees, but it felt as if she were fighting gravity on Jupiter—somehow the planet itself had grown impossibly heavy under her and was pulling her down toward that dreamless darkness.

  Fight it, she told herself as she sank back down to the kitchen floor, her head pillowed on her folded arms. Got to fight it. But by then she could no longer remember what she was supposed to be fighting against, or why. Still, she felt vaguely guilty.

  “Later, Mom,” she murmured as the darkness closed around her again. “I promise I’ll clean it up later.”

  * * *

  Later.

  Still on the floor, but on her back now, with her head pillowed on someone’s lap. Cool damp cloth on her forehead, the rim of a glass touching her lips. She smelled the musty-sharp, cough-medicine smell of brandy, sipped, swallowed, coughed feebly. Then her eyes fluttered open, a man’s hand came over her mouth to stifle her scream, and although the shock to her system was so profound it jarred her down to her soul, Dorie was not terribly surprised to see that the face leaning over her, hovering upside down only inches above her own, was wearing a leering Kabuki mask. Somehow, in fact, it seemed almost inevitable.

  Just Another Naked Body

  1

  Missy opened her eyes early Thursday morning and found herself lying in a strange room, in a bed not her own. Frightened and disoriented, she started to call out for Simon, then remembered that she was on the fold-out sofa in Ganny Wilson’s living room, and that Ganny had promised her pancakes for breakfast. Only Ganny called them hoecakes—sometimes different people had different words for the same thing.

  But as soon as she started thinking about food, Missy became aware of trouble inside her tummy and realized that that was what had awakened her in the first place. All that good Ganny cooking: pan-fried smothered chicken, corn fritters, southern-fried okra (Missy only ate the southern-fried part, not the okra itself), sweet potato pie, and after supper, all the little sesame seed cookies she could eat. Benni cakes, Ganny called them. And now it all wanted out all at once.

  “Uh-oh,” Missy told Tweety, who was rustling around in her little square cage on top of the TV. “This is gonna be a stinky.” Then another uh-oh occurred to her as she sat up and swung her legs over the side of the sofa bed: she couldn’t remember where the potty was.

  “Ganny! Ganny, I hafta make!” No answer. The cramps were getting worse. She pressed her palms tightly against the sides of her temple to make herself remember. Think, you silly—you went potty last night. Only Ganny calls it the toe-lit. Different people, different—

  Then it came to her: you had to go through Ganny’s bedroom. Missy shuffled across the room, doubled over from the cramps, clutching the waistband of her pajama bottoms to keep them from falling down. Please don’t lemme make in my jammies, she begged Jesus. In her own house you couldn’t ask Jesus for things, because Simon said he didn’t exist there, but in Ganny’s house it was okay to ask him for help because he existed all over the place here: there were pictures and statues of him in every room—baby Jesus in the cradle, grown-up Jesus on the cross, and lying asleep in his mommy’s lap. Missy mostly didn’t remember their mommy, but Simon did.

  Missy’s prayer was answered. She tiptoed through Ganny’s room without waking her up, did her stinky, and felt much better. When she came out of the bathroom, Ganny was still asleep under the covers, lying on her side with her face to the wall.

  “Spoons?” asked Missy. Taking Ganny’s silence for assent, she crawled into Ganny’s bed and snuggled up against her back. But something was wrong—Ganny was so stiff it felt like cuddling up against a wooden chair.

  “Are you sick?” Missy asked her, reaching around to feel Ganny’s forehead, the way Ganny used to feel hers when she was sick. “Nope, cool as a coocummer. C’mon, Ganny, wake up.”

  But Ganny would not wake up. Gently, Missy tugged the neck of her nightgown. “Ganny, I’m hungry.” No response. Missy pulled the covers back, saw that a watery coffee-colored stain had spread across the seat of Ganny’s long white nightgown. “Uh-oh.” Now she understood—it was Ganny who had made in her bed and was so embarrassed she was pretending to be asleep. Missy had done that once herself, when she was little, and Ganny had gone along with it, stripped her jammies off, carried her into the bathroom, cleaned her up, changed the bedding, tucked her back in, never said another word about it.

  Missy decided to handle this situation the same way—sort of. She crawled out of bed, pulled the covers back up over Ganny’s accident, and left the room to give Ganny a chance to cl
ean herself up in private.

  But when Missy returned to the bedroom, after what seemed to her to be a very long time—long enough to polish off a six-pack of little powdered doughnuts—Ganny still hadn’t moved. Quietly—somehow Missy understood she was in the presence of something solemn, though she wasn’t quite sure what—she walked around the side of the bed and saw that one side of Ganny’s face, the side she was lying on, was black and swollen, and that although Ganny’s eyes were open, she wasn’t looking out from inside them.

  Horrified, fascinated, not quite ready to let herself understand yet, Missy edged a little closer and saw that Ganny’s slightly parted lips were crisscrossed with cobweb-thin threads of cottony white dried spittle, as if little fairies had been trying to sew them back together.

  “Poor Ganny,” she said, as softly as she could—Simon was always telling Missy that she talked too loud. She knew she had to do something—but what? She couldn’t call the police even though she knew how to dial 911: Simon had drummed it into her head that if the police ever came to the house, they would end up taking her away from him or him away from her, and in either event, she was bound to end up in an institution for the feeble-minded.

  Feebleminded: that was the exact word he used, every time he gave her the speech, and Missy had come to fear the speech so much that she’d often be crying by the time he got to “in either event.” Then he’d stop, and dry her eyes, and promise to always be there for her, and she in turn would promise him that she’d never, ever call the police.

  Nine-one-one was out, then. But she wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, either. At times like this, there was only one person Missy could turn to—only one person she was allowed to turn to: Simon.

  The first thing to do was get dressed. No, undressed first. Missy stripped off her jammies, then dumped the contents of her valise onto the sofa bed. Picking out undies was easy—they were all white and the label went in the back. Socks were also easy—it didn’t matter what foot you put them on, so long as you picked out two of the same color.

  As for pants and shirt, Missy knew you had to match them with the weather if you were going outside that day. With some difficulty she managed to unbolt the kitchen door, then stepped out into Ganny’s sunlit backyard wearing only her socks and panties, and felt the warmth of the autumn sunshine on her bare skin. Shorts and T-shirt weather for sure—sunglasses, too.

  Always grateful for a chance to wear her sunglasses—which not only were pretty, with thick pink rims and lenses shaped like sideways teardrops, but hid her eyes so strangers couldn’t tell right off that she was a Downser (or so she sometimes thought)—Missy padded back inside, leaving the door open. She picked out a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts and a Special Olympics T-shirt from the pile on the sofa bed and took them back into the kitchen so she could look at the flowers in Ganny’s garden while she finished dressing. There were purple morning glories climbing the back fence, glowing in the sunlight, and golden sunflowers taller than Missy, just starting to go to seed.

  It took a few tries to get her Deedees—white Adidas cross-trainers—on the correct feet, with the tongues pulled up smooth instead of crumpled and the Velcro straps tight but not too tight. When she had finished, she slung her pink plastic purse that matched her sunglasses over her arm, picked up Tweety’s cage, and left the house via the front door, grim-faced and determined.

  “You stay here, Ganny,” she called on her way out. “I’ll go get Simon.”

  2

  Alluring as she’d been in the late afternoon, Pebble Beach was somehow even more bewitching in the early morning, with the fog drifting in wisps and tatters across moss-green fairways glistening with dew. And as if to make up to Pender for her behavior the day before—or perhaps, beautiful bitch that she was, just to keep him on the hook a little longer—she showered him with favors. The damp air kept his booming drives from flying too far, the breeze blowing in from the bay kept them dry, and the dewy greens saved more than one overmuscled putt from slipping past the hole and rolling all the way to Maui.

  The fog burned off a little before ten, leaving the sky a fresh-scrubbed blue. Pender stepped up to the eighteenth tee shooting eighty-four, laid up right, reached the green in three, and twoputted for a glorious, unashamed bogey: he’d broken ninety.

  After their round, and an elegant lunch at Roy’s, over in Spanish Bay—a Kobe beef carpaccio carved so exquisitely thin that the slices were almost transparent—Pender and Dolitz repaired to their two-bedroom suite at the Lodge. Naptime for Sid; time to get down to business for Pender. His first call was to Linda Abruzzi.

  “Linda, it’s Pender.”

  “Hi, Ed—how’s the vacation going?”

  “Good, pretty good. Weather’s great—and I broke ninety at Pebble this morning.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It is if your handicap’s higher than the drinking age.”

  “Have you talked to Dorie Bell yet?”

  “At her house last night.”

  “MDF?”

  “Negative on that—I think this one’s for real.” He started to lay out the plan of action he’d sketched in for Dorie last night.

  Linda interrupted him to explain about Maheu and the bank records.

  “What an extraordinary asshole,” said Pender when she’d finished. “Let me try to get in touch with McDougal. Liaison Support’s been his baby from the beginning—maybe he’ll let us have this one last hurrah.”

  “I haven’t had my first hurrah yet,” said Linda.

  “Yeah, well, stick with me, kid.”

  Pender’s next call was to McDougal’s office. He was informed that the deputy director would be in conference all afternoon—with Agents Driver, Woods, Irons, and Putter, Pender suspected. He left a message, then phoned Dorie, who wasn’t there either.

  “It’s Ed Pender,” he told her machine. Not “Agent Pender”—he had made up his mind to ask her out. “Give me a ring as soon as you can.”

  He left her his room number at the Lodge along with his cell phone number. By the time he’d finished, the jet lag he’d been trying to ignore all day finally caught up with him. Quick nap, he promised himself, climbing into bed in his boxers and sleeveless wife-beater strap undershirt, and while waiting for sleep to overtake him, he thought about Dorie Bell. Smart, funny, doing her best to get through a hard time, but constitutionally incapable of cruising in neutral. Handsome woman, too, even with that busted nose. Not to mention that certain something in the way she moved.

  3

  Simon Childs retired to his bedroom at dawn. Exhausted as he was from the evening’s exertions, he knew that sleep would not come easily. It never had: he’d been a fretful baby and a restless toddler even before his mother’s departure, and a full-blown insomniac afterward. His sleep disorder manifested in both multiple dyssomnias—difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep—and parasomnias—night terrors and somnambulism. Medications helped: a triurnal rotation of chloral hydrate, Seconal, and Nembutal prescribed by his grandfather’s tame physicians had seen him through adolescence, while as an adult he’d kept up with every pharmacological advance, legal or otherwise.

  His current favorite was Halwane, an experimental, short-acting benzodiazepine that had not yet been approved for the marketplace. Simon had learned about it on the Net, where it was nicknamed Halloween, and convinced his doctor to put him on the protocol, promising to eschew all other drugs for the three months of the FDA-monitored trial. He’d had no intention of keeping his promise, but the drug more than kept its promise: fifteen minutes, then bam, you were out; three hours later, bam, you were awake.

  If only they’d come up with anything half as effective for the blind rat syndrome, thought Simon—what a simple, ordinary life I might have led. For a rich man, anyway.

  But without the looming presence of the blind rat, he reminded himself, he’d never have known the highs of the fear game, never have experienced a moment of such radiant perfection as last night, wh
en Dorie looked up from his lap and their eyes met through the mask. Darkness and light, cruelty and tenderness, fear and hope, all in perfect equipoise for once—how in heaven had the world managed to keep turning, Simon wondered.

  Realizing he was still far too excited to sleep, even with the benefit of Halwane, Simon decided to approach Morpheus obliquely. First he treated himself to a long hot shower, then smoked a fat doobie of B.C. super-sinsemilla (what the FDA didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them) out on the deck adjoining the suite Grandfather Childs had occupied from 1924, when the house was built, until a few days after he’d cut his own throat, at which time Simon, age fourteen, moved in for keeps.

  Best not to think about the old man, though, Simon told himself—not compatible with relaxation. Think about the positives instead: this fine weed, the million-dollar view (more like ten million, these days) of the San Francisco Bay at dawn, and last but certainly not least, having the house all to himself for once—no Missy bleating mo hah, mo hah from the bathroom.

  Whoops—not so relaxing, that thought. He wondered how Missy and Ganny were getting along—was she too much for the old woman? Was it too early to call her? Old people rarely slept late.

  No, God bless it! If ever a man was owed a day off, it was Simon Childs. Besides, they were probably as happy as pigs at a trough, those two—if there’d been a problem, Ganny would have called. She wasn’t so decrepit she couldn’t use the telephone.

  Having satisfied what he knew to be his cheap slut of a conscience, Simon finished the joint and tossed the roach into the open urn that had originally contained his grandfather’s ashes, washed down a blue Halwane tablet with a shot of Hennessy’s (again, what the FDA didn’t know…).He set his alarm for 10 A.M., then stripped off his robe and climbed into bed naked, sighing with pleasure at the feel of the cool pearl-gray sheets against his bare skin. To relax himself while waiting for the Halwane to take effect, he cast his thoughts backward through time and hooked a juicy plum of a memory.