Fear itself: a novel (20 page)

Simon shook his head like a man coming out of a trance; he seemed to notice Nelson for the first time. “You think there’s an afterlife, Nellie?”

“Are you talking about heaven and hell, or about…” Nelson couldn’t bring himself to say the word
ghosts.
He never said
witches,
either, or
ghouls
or
spooks
or
vampires,
lest he somehow call them into being. He knew it was only foolish superstition; he also knew that superstition was mankind’s only defense against the supernatural.

“Heaven and hell.”

“Heaven, I’m hoping for; hell I’m sure about. I’ve been living there most of my life. Why?”

“Missy’s dead.”

“I’m
so
sorry,” said Nelson. He’d liked Missy, spoiled brat though she was. But he wasn’t surprised—the way Simon always talked about her, she’d been dying since Nelson had met her. “Her heart?”

“That’s what they’re saying.”

“It was on the news?”

Simon ignored the question. “Where’s the nearest phone?”

“Upstairs—there’s only the one.”

“In the entire house?”

Nelson explained his reasoning as he led Simon up to the bedroom. Originally there’d been a wall phone in the kitchen, but the very first night he’d moved in, Nelson found himself lying awake thinking about a story Simon had told him at one of the earliest Horror Club meetings, the one about the woman who gets a call from a slasher, and the police tell her if he calls again, keep him on the phone and we’ll trace it. He does, and they do—the story ends with the woman learning that the call is coming from her own house, from the downstairs extension. Run, the cop screams over the phone, get out of the house—but of course it’s too late. Next morning, Nelson told Simon, he’d called Pac Bell to have the kitchen phone removed, jack and all.

“I’m extremely flattered,” said Simon, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Did it ever occur to you to buy a cordless?”

“You kidding? Those things give you cancer.”

“Nellie, your continued survival is living proof that Darwin was wrong. Put that cotton back in your ears and wait in the bathroom…No—leave the door open so I can see what you’re up to.”

“Zap, it’s Simon….

“Yes, I know I’m all over the news. Don’t believe everything you hear….

“Yes, well, I hope you understand that if they do, I’ll flip you like a half-cooked hamburger….

“I thought you would. Now, here’s what I need. This FBI man, this E. L. Pender—I want all the information you can get for me….

“Like where he
lives
to start with, who his
friends
are, is he
married?
does he have a
lover?
that sort of thing. Ultimately, I’d like to find out what he fears, but I know that’s not likely to be—

“No, not
feels, fears
—what he’s afraid of…

“Okay, just Google him to start with. If I need you to hack the FBI site, I’ll let you—

“That’s
your
problem, Strummy old boy.
My
problem is, he killed my sister, and—

“Of course that’s not what they’re saying. Trust me on this, though—Missy’s dead and Pender’s to blame,” asserted Simon, with utter conviction. He then went on to embellish what he knew in his heart to be the righteous truth, in order to sound more convincing: Pender had tricked Missy into letting him into the house without a warrant, then attacked Simon; Missy tried to stop him, and there was a scuffle; Simon was forced to flee, but Missy had been alive when he left the house; the struggle with Pender had probably overtaxed her poor heart. By the time Simon had finished, the details of the embellishment had been imbued with the authority of his emotional investment: for a sociopath, there
was
no other truth.

“So how long and how much?” he concluded.

“No,
I’ll
call
you.
And don’t even
think
about—

“I know you wouldn’t. But a man in my position can’t be too—

“Okay, I’ll call you later.”

As he replaced the receiver in the cradle and turned back to Nelson, Simon felt more like himself again. Except for the unaccustomed pangs of grief, of course, but it didn’t take Simon long to discover that grief, unlike guilt or self-doubt or boredom, was bearable, even welcome. It sharpened the senses and focused the mind.

And suddenly Simon realized why he’d been drawn
here,
of all places, in his time of grief.

“Nelson?” he called.

Nelson stuck his head out of the bathroom. “Yes, Simon?”

“I think it’s time for a game.”

They had no business driving, no business operating any heavy machinery, according to the caution labels on their respective pain medications, but neither of them felt right suggesting a motel.

Instead they drank bad road coffee and harmonized on oldies to keep themselves awake—Pender sang a high, sweet tenor and Dorie a ballsy alto—and took turns behind the wheel of the rented Toyota, with Dorie manipulating the automatic gearshift for the one-armed Pender.

Dorie drove the last leg of the two-and-a-half-hour journey. Rounding the Seaside curve on Highway 1 and seeing the twinkling lights of the peninsula circling the great black sweep of Monterey Bay put a coming-home lump in her throat. Pender’s, too, though he’d only been here twice before. Of course, the buzz from the two Vicodins he’d taken before they left might have had something to do with that.

They continued on past Monterey, Pacific Grove, and Pebble Beach; Dorie took the Ocean Avenue exit into Carmel, then a right on San Carlos and a quick left on Fifth; she pulled over into the first available parking space. “I’ll just be a minute,” she told Pender; “there’s something I have to do.”

Dorie was halfway up the block before the big man managed to extricate himself from the little car; Pender caught up to her in front of a women’s clothing store. “What—”

Dorie put a finger to her lips, then pointed to the mannequin in the shop window. It was dressed in a black-and-white-checked hooded robe; a simple black mask covered its eyes.

“Oh,” said Pender, moving back a step.

She stood there for a few minutes, staring at the mask in the window, still as the mannequin save for the gentle rise and fall of her chest; when she turned away, there were tears in her eyes.

“You okay?” Pender asked.

“I think so,” replied Dorie. “It’s just gonna take some getting used to, you know?”

“I can imagine,” said Pender, crooking his good elbow. Dorie slipped her hand through it, and they walked back to the car arm in arm.

Mary Cassatt was parked in Dorie’s driveway when they pulled up to the house. Half a dozen parking citations were stuck under the windshield wiper, along with a note from Wynn Mackey telling Dorie not to worry about them.

“Nice kid,” said Pender.

“Yeah, he turned out pretty good,” Dorie allowed grudgingly. “He was a handful when he was little, though—you never saw such a brat. Last kid in the world you’d figure would have grown up to be a cop. When he was eight, the little bastard rolled a lit firecracker under the bathroom door while I was on the throne.”

“When I was eight, I dropped a cherry bomb down my parents’ chimney,” Pender offered. “Damn near set the house on fire.”

“You were a brat, too?”

“And dumb. I wanted to see it go off, so I stuck my head over the edge of the chimney to watch. Blew off both eyebrows—I spent the worst two weeks of my life with my eyes all bandaged up, waiting to find out whether I’d get my sight back. I’ll tell you, it was the worst fear
I’ve
ever known.”

The front door was locked, with yellow crime-scene tape across the doorway. Pender followed Dorie around the side of the house. They entered through the studio—the door had been closed and sealed with crisscrossed yellow tape, but the lock still didn’t function. Inside, the doorknobs and windowsills still bore traces of the gray carbon dust used to lift latent fingerprints; Dorie winced when she flipped the wall switch in the kitchen and saw the dried vomit on the parquet floor.

“Oh, hell,” she muttered, dropping to her knees. “Now I’ll have to strip all the…all the…Oh, hell.” To her surprise, Dorie found herself weeping uncontrollably, big old honking, snot-snorkling, gut-wrenching sobs.

Pender knelt beside her and began patting her back awkwardly. “It’s okay, it’s only a little stain,” he told her, though they both knew that it wasn’t the parquet she was crying about. “It’ll come right out.”

“You think?” she asked, between hiccups as he helped her to her feet.

“Sure,” said Pender confidently. He was no expert on house-cleaning, as Linda Abruzzi would soon discover, but as hard a drinker as he was, he did know a thing or two about vomit stains.

Seven words were all it took. Seven words to dispel any illusions Nelson might have had about how easy it would be to surrender, to play Simon Says until it was time for Simon to go. Seven words to prove to him that they’d all lied—his parents, his shrinks, his support groups—when they’d assured him that his fears were phantoms and his phobias the products of disordered emotions, not a malevolent universe.

Seven words:
I think it’s time for a game.

“Game? What kind of game?”

Simon, rummaging through his getaway satchel, ignored the question. “C’mon, it’ll be like old times.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Nelson.

Simon looked up sharply. “Why, Nellie, was that a joke? I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Nelson tried another tack. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very…These medications I’m taking…I’m afraid they’re not exactly conducive to…you know….” His voice trailed off miserably.

“Not a problem,” Simon reassured him. “The game’s evolved way beyond that—it’s not about sex anymore.”

Nelson didn’t like the sound of that at all—if the game wasn’t about sex, what
was
it about?—but he’d as soon have sawed off one of his own fingers with a rusty nail file as ask for clarification. “I really don’t think my psychiatrist would—”

“Nellie?”

“Yes?”

“Hush now.”

Nelson hushed.

*   *   *

The game began in the dark for Nelson, blindfolded with one of his own bandannas and locked in his walk-in bedroom closet with his hands tied behind his back. The irony of the situation did not escape him: Nelson had installed external locks on every closet door in the house to allay his own childhood fear of closets as potential hiding places for bogeymen and burglars.

He had no way of telling how long he’d been in there before Simon came for him again. Long enough for two anxiety attacks, the first more acute, the second of longer duration. Pounding heart, vertigo, shortness of breath, hysterical paresis, feelings of dread so intense that a vasovagal syncope would have come as a blessing—unfortunately, Nelson wasn’t subject to syncopes.

During the paretic phase of the second attack, as he lay on the floor of the closet with his hands tied behind him, the muscles of his legs so weak and trembly he might as well have been paralyzed, Nelson’s ears registered the snick of the closet door being unlocked.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” called Simon, cheerfully.

No fucking way.
His legs still too weak to propel him, Nelson dragged himself in the opposite direction, away from the door, away from the voice, humping like an inchworm until he could hump no farther, and curled up hyperventilating in the far corner of the closet, waiting to learn what fresh hell Simon had in store for him.

He would have to wait a little longer, though—the door never opened. Instead he heard footsteps padding across the bedroom carpet—retreating footsteps.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Simon called again, from the hallway this time, and again Nelson told himself no fucking way. But they both knew he’d be coming out eventually—his claustrophobia would see to that.

If there was a more terrifying, more vulnerable feeling than tottering forward through total darkness with your hands tied behind you, Nelson told himself, he’d just as soon not know about it. Every few steps he’d stop, listen. The only sounds in the bedroom were Nelson’s own ragged breathing and the furious pounding of his heart.

All the silence meant, of course, was that Simon was waiting for him elsewhere in the house. But if so, Nelson began to realize, even if Simon was standing right outside the bedroom door, then his old friend had miscalculated for once. Simon must have failed to notice that the bedroom door was reinforced with steel to make it fireproof and furnished with a dead bolt, in the unlikely event an intruder ever succeeded in breaking into the house.

Suddenly Nelson couldn’t get enough air; he felt as if his heart were about to burst inside him, spattering the inside of his chest cavity with blood and shredded muscle. Another panic attack? No—it was hope, a sensation far less familiar to Nelson. All he had to do, he told himself, was get that stout door between himself and Simon, throw the bolt, and there’d be no way Simon could get to him.

Easier said than done. Shuffling out of the closet in what he desperately hoped was the direction of the door, Nelson tried to remember whether the dead bolt was set low enough for him to be able to reach it with his hands tied behind him. There wouldn’t be time to fumble around for it in any case, he realized—he’d have to locate, slam, and bolt the door all in one motion if he was to have any hope of keeping Simon on the other side. Which meant he needed to turn around and back toward it.

Again, easier said than done. As Nelson executed a tentative about-face (turn too far or not far enough, he knew, and he’d be wandering around the bedroom, disoriented, until Simon came to fetch him) and began to inch backward toward the door, it occurred to him that at least he had learned the answer to his earlier question: there was indeed a more terrifying, more vulnerable feeling than tottering
forward
into the darkness.