Faces of Fear (29 page)

“Jamie? Are you there, Jamie? It's me.”

He took a long, long time to open the door. Security chains, locks, bolts. At last the door swung ajar, and I heard him say, “You'd better come along in.”

I hesitated for a moment and then stepped inside. The room was lit by a single desk lamp, without a shade, so that the shadows it cast were coarse and uncompromising. There was a terrible smell in the room – a sweet smell of urine and decay. On the far side, there was a sofa bed, heaped with dirty red blankets. On my left, a tipped-over armchair, revealing its torn-out innards.

Jamie was naked. His body was so scarred and emaciated that I wouldn't have recognized him. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his hair was sticking up in wild, mad tufts. Around his neck, tied in a hangman's noose, was a long, thin nylon cord. It was so long that he had loosely coiled it, and had looped the coil over his left forearm, like a waiter holding a napkin.

“I thought you were cured of all this,” I told him.

He gave me a furtive, erratic smile. “You're never cured. It's the way you are.”

“You said there'd been an accident. What accident?”

He limped over to the sofa bed. He glanced at me once, and then he dragged back the filthy blankets. At first I couldn't understand what I was looking at. A white, curved shape. Then – when I stepped closer
– I saw that it was Ms Suffer Kate. She was wearing black lacy split-crotch panties, and the butt of a huge blue plastic vibrator protruded from her hairy vulva. Her stomach sagged sideways. Her breasts were bruised, and her nipples were purple, like prunes. She was staring unblinkingly at the fold in the blanket only an inch in front of her nose, as if she found it totally absorbing. Her face was so white. So white that it was almost blue. Around her neck was a thin cord, which had been twisted around and around with a broken pencil until it had throttled her.

“She's dead,” said Jamie.

I covered her up with the blanket. “You know I can't save you now,” I told him. “Christ knows, I've tried to save you. But I really can't save you now.”

“It was what she wanted,” said Jamie, in a matter-of-fact voice. “We talked about it for weeks beforehand. And when I twisted that pencil, and twisted that pencil, she came and she came and she came.” He paused. “I wish it could have been me, instead of that … dildo thing. But these days, there's only one way that
I
can get it up.”

“I'm calling the cops now.”

Jamie fingered the noose around his neck. “Sure you are. You have to.”

“Do you have a phone in here?”

“Unh-unh. But there's a pay phone at the end of the hall.”

I was shuddering, as if I were freezing cold, but I knew that it was only shock. “You'll have to come with me,” I told him. “I can't leave you here alone.”

“That's okay.” He nodded. He thought for a moment, and then he handed me the end of his rope. “You can hold onto this. Stop me from running away.”

We stepped out into the corridor, Jamie limping a little way in front of me.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

He lifted one hand. “Okay as I'll ever be.”

I was trying to think what I was going to say to the police when we turned the corner in the corridor. Directly in front of us was the elevator shaft – and it was open. A dark, drafty doorway to noplace at all. Somebody had wedged the trellis gates with a paint-spotted pickax handle. No wonder the porter had thought it was out of commission.

There was an instant when I knew what Jamie was going to do – a stroboscopic split-second when I might have been able to stop him. But you and I and most of the rest of the world are doing their darndest to survive – so when somebody is determined to do the opposite, we have a fatal tendency not to believe it.

And Jamie ran –
sprinted
– right to the open elevator gate and threw himself into it, without a scream, without any sound at all. Tumbled, fell, disappeared like a conjuring trick.

The rope that I was holding wriggled and snaked, and then abruptly thumped tight. It almost took my arms out of my sockets. I shuffle-staggered to the elevator gates, straining at it, pulling at it, until I reached the very brink.

With my shoulder pressed against the folded trellis gates to give myself support, I leaned over the edge of the elevator shaft and cautiously looked down. I was panting and sweating and whispering under my breath, “God help me, please, God help me.”

Thirty feet below me, in the windy echoing half darkness of the elevator shaft, Jamie was hanging with the noose tight around his neck. His arms were spread wide, his toes were pointed, like a ballet dancer. His head was thrown back in ecstasy. The rope creaked, and paused, and creaked, and paused.

He opened his eyes and looked up at me, and his face was triumphant and grey with oxygen starvation. He had done it. He had done it to me, after all these years. I had worried about him and cared for him and promised to save him, and he had made me the instrument of his own terminal hanging.

Jamie tried to speak, tried to mock me, but the noose was clutching his larynx too tight. He twisted around and around, and as he twisted, I could see his penis rising, pulsing with every heartbeat. His eyes bulged. His tongue suddenly slopped out from between his lips, fat and grey.

I had a simple choice: I could hold on to my end of the rope, hanging him, or else I could let go. In which case, he would drop four stories down the elevator shaft.

I waited, and clung on to the rope, and as I clung on to the rope, it all became clear to me. What is any saviour, in the long run? What is any devoted friend? We do nothing except delay the inevitable, for our own selfish ends. We are nothing less than executioners-in-waiting.

I had been so unctuous. I had cared so much. In fact, I had prolonged Jamie's agony.

I should have let him hang himself in high school. Better still, his mother should have let him smother himself in his own pillow.

Thirty feet below me, he twisted and twisted; and then he let out a high, thin cry that was like nothing I have ever heard, before or since. It was pitiful, saintly, ecstatic, sad. Sperm jumped from his penis, two, three, four times, and dropped down the elevator shaft.

I leaned over. I said, “God damn you, Jamie.” I don't know if he heard me.

Then I let him go.

New York City

My very first horror novel,
The Manitou
, told the story of Misquamacus, the legendary Native American medicineman, and how he tried to return from the dead to wreak his revenge on the white man. He was reborn as a hideous lump on the neck of a young girl called Karen Tandy – an experience which she only just managed to survive.

Misquamacus reappeared in
The Revenge of the Manitou
and
Burial
, in which he attempted to revive the Ghost Dance, a religious ritual with which the desperate North American Indians tried to beat back the encroaching settlers.

Now he tries to return one more time, using an arcane spell which was devised by Cheyenne wonder-workers in order to bring back the spirits of those who were unable to reach the Happy Hunting Ground.

It takes place in the New York of today, but also in the New York of many years ago, when the island was a rocky wilderness. This face of fear has many sides to it; but more than anything else, it is the face of hatred and the face of unbridled revenge.

I was waiting in the hallway to collect Lucy from nursery school when her teacher came up to me and said, “Mr Erskine? Do you think we could have a private word?”

Immediately, I felt guilty. It was ridiculous, but teachers still have that effect on me, even today. Especially this one, Ms Eisenheim, a thin domineering hawklike woman in a grey two-piece suit. She was young and she was actually quite attractive, if you're into thin domineering hawklike women. I could imagine her in black stockings and a black basque, whipping me soundly for forgetting to scour the bathtub.

All of the other parents gave me sympathetic smiles as I followed Ms Eisenheim to her office. All of the other parents were women. Their husbands were doctors or lawyers or Wall Street analysts, which meant that I was the only man who had the time to come to Lennox Nursery School every lunchtime to collect his child. At first the mothers had treated me with deep suspicion, especially since I find it difficult to dress really smart. I mean my tan leather jacket coat is just about as soigne as it gets. But after a while they began to realize that I wasn't a down and out or a potential child-molester, and they began to include me into their gossip. After the first term I was almost an honorary mother.

Ms Eisenheim led me along the echoing, wax-polished
corridor until we reached a small stuffy office, its walls pinned with maps and graphs and a reproduction of George Washington crossing the Potomac. Through the window I could see the asphalt play-yard, its wire-mesh fencing snagged with curled-up yellow and grey leaves.

“Please close the door,” said Ms Eisenheim.

“Is there a problem?” I asked her.

“I'm afraid there is. I tried to call you earlier, but you weren't in. There was an incident during recess today and I'm afraid we were obliged to separate Lucy from the rest of her class.”

“An incident? What kind of an incident?” (Instantly shirty and defensive reaction of overprotective father toward his special little sugar plum fairy.) “She's only four years old, for God's sake.”

“There was a scuffle, of sorts, in the play-yard. Two little children were badly hurt.”

“How badly?”

“One of them suffered a sprained ankle and the other had a deeply-grazed knee.”

“So what are you trying to tell me? That
Lucy
did it?”

Ms Eisenheim pursed his lips. “I'm afraid there were witnesses, Mr Erskine, and not just children. Ms Woolcott saw what happened, too.”

“And what
did
happen? Come on, Ms Eisenheim, this is very hard for me to believe. Lucy has the sweetest nature of any child I ever knew. We're talking about a little girl who walks around
ants.
”

“Well, I have to say, Mr Erskine, that up until now, that was our experience of Lucy, too. Today's outburst was quite uncharacteristic, but you can understand that we had to take steps.”

“You had to lock her up? What is this, Attica?”

“Please don't get upset, Mr Erskine. Lucy wasn't locked up. She was simply made to stay in a room away from the other children. One of our young teaching assistants has been reading to her.”

“What's she been reading? ‘You have the right to remain silent, but anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law?' Listen, Ms Eisenheim, I want to see Lucy now, if you don't mind. I can't believe that you're treating a four-year-old girl like a hardened criminal just because two kids couldn't manage to keep their balance in the schoolyard.”

Ms Eisenheim slapped her hand on her desk. “Mr Erskine! This wasn't a case of anybody losing their balance! This wasn't even a scuffle! Lucy threw Janice Mulgrew right across the yard and into the fencing, and she pushed Laurence Cullen face-first into a brick wall. She knocked down seven other children and then it was all that Ms Woolcott could do to restrain her.”

I stared at her; and for the first time I couldn't think what to say.

“This was nothing to do with
balance
, Mr Erskine! This was a wild and deliberate attack of extraordinary ferocity. I'm going to have to ask you for a psychiatic evaluation before we can allow Lucy to spend another day here.”

“She
threw
Janice Mulgrew right across the yard?” I repeated. “Am I right, and is Janice Mulgrew that big, fat kid with the ginger braids?”

“Janice does have russet hair, yes. And, yes, she is a little challenged by her weight.”

“A little challenged? Have you seen the size of her? I couldn't even lift her feet off the ground, let alone throw her anywhere. And you expect me to believe that
Lucy
threw her?”

“Five or six feet, yes. There were witnesses.”

“Witnesses saw a skinny little kid like Lucy throw a barrel of lard like Janice Mulgrew five or six feet? What are you putting in their milk, Ms Eisenheim?”

“You can say what you like, Mr Erskine. Lucy will still have to undergo psychiatric tests before we can think of allowing her back.”

I found Lucy sitting alone in a small classroom at the back of the building. The grey fall light made her look very small and pale and vulnerable, and her eyes were still red from crying. A young blonde-haired assistant teacher was sitting at the next desk, reading a story about a girl who fell in love with a bear, and gradually changed into a bear herself.

“Look, Lucy,” said the teacher, closing her book. “Daddy's here.”

Lucy climbed of her chair and came slowly toward me. She tried not to cry at first, but then her face collapsed into painful sobbing. I picked her up and held her tight. “Come on, now, sweetheart; Daddy's here. Everything's going to be fine.”

“I didn't mean to,” she wept. “I didn't mean to.”

“Sure, sweetheart, I know you didn't. Come on, hush now. We'll go home to see mommy now, shall we?”

The teacher said, “She's very upset. I did what I could to cheer her up.”

“What's that story you've been reading her?”

“Oh, that. It's an old Navaho legend. We do try to raise the children's awareness of Native American culture.”

“Well, I'd rather you didn't try it on
my
kid, okay?”

The teacher looked taken aback. “I'm sorry you feel that way,” she said. “We like to think that it's enriching.”

I didn't bother to argue with her. My own encounters
with Native American culture had been dangerous frightening, and often tragic; but it would have taken too long to tell her about them, and I doubt if she would have believed me anyway. She looked like one of those bright young college girls with plenty of moralistic opinions and no experience whatever. I just wondered how she would have reacted if
she
had been faced with the Lizard-of-the-Trees, or the hunched and shadowy shape of Aktunowihio, the dark presence that drags people down to the so-called Happy Hunting Grounds.