Her Every Fear

by Peter Swanson

  Henry entered Corbin’s dark apartment, or Kate’s apartment, since it was now hers. He removed his shoes in the kitchen, wrapped them in one of the plastic bags he’d brought, and put them in his backpack. He knew the apartment well, and had already decided that the best place for him to hide would be in the north-facing guest room, the larger of the two guest rooms. There was a relatively deep closet; one side had shelving that held linens and towels, but the other side was recessed slightly, and empty. Two suits, in plastic garment bags, hung on the closet rod, and if he positioned them carefully he’d be able to stand in the recess and be hidden, so long as no one moved the suits.

  The guest bedroom was mostly covered by a large pile rug, beige and with a fleur-de-lis pattern. The bed was a four-poster with about two feet of clearance underneath. Henry thought he could comfortably sleep under the bed. He stashed his backpack in the closet and walked through the entire apartment, automatically picking out quick hiding places—behind curtains, a walk-in pantry—that he could use if he had to. He wasn’t too worried about it.

  He went into Corbin’s obscenely large bedroom. He studied the framed pictures on top of the low bureau, even though he’d looked at them before. There were many of Corbin when he’d been young, and some of him when he was college age, the age when Henry had first met him. The pictures were almost humorously upper class; most were on boats, and the blond, tanned inhabitants were all holding gin and tonics and wearing the half-amused expressions of people so rich that they could hardly be bothered to smile completely for a picture.

  After looking at the pictures, Henry searched the bedroom for signs of Kate; she’d barely unpacked. Her toiletries were spread around the bathroom, but a large duffel on the carpeted floor was still filled with clothes, some spilling out. The bed had been slept in, then half made again, the sheets and duvet pulled up, but not tucked in or smoothed. Henry pressed his face against the sheets and breathed in deeply through his nostrils. They smelled of detergent and not much else. He dropped to the floor to look under the bed; there was only about a foot and a half of space, enough to get under if he needed to, but not very comfortably.

  There was a book under the bed with a black faux-leather cover. Henry opened it. There was a charcoal sketch of a man’s face, a perfect rendering of the man that Henry had nearly bumped into on Bury Street earlier. Who was that man, and why had Kate—this had to be Kate’s sketchbook—drawn him? He flipped over a page and there was a sketch of Kate herself, stunningly real, her wary eyes staring out at Henry as though she could see him. On the next page was Henry’s own face, his name under it—jack ludovico (she’d spelled it right)—and today’s date. It wasn’t a bad drawing, and Henry found himself mesmerized, as though he was looking at himself through someone else’s eyes. She’d drawn him with his head angled down, his eyes with a touch of sadness behind the lenses of his glasses. It was exactly what he’d been trying to convey, and she’d gotten it perfectly. He felt proud of himself, as he always did when someone entirely believed the mask that he was wearing.

  He wondered if Kate tried to sketch everyone she met or just those people that she was interested in, people who affected her in some way. If that was the case, then who was this neighbor on the first page—alan cherney, she’d written—and why was he walking behind her this evening? Had he been following her?

  Almost unconsciously, Henry touched his tongue to the tip of his index finger and brought it down within an inch of the charcoal sketch. He very badly wanted to smudge the man’s eyes, alter him somehow, maybe just enough to freak Kate out when she looked back at the sketchbook. What he really wanted to do was smudge the eyes entirely. He thought back to his sister’s Tiger Beat magazines and how he used to meticulously go through them, whiting out the eyes of all her favorite boy bands, making the Hanson brothers look like eyeless zombies. Sometimes he’d get a red pen and draw blood coming from their eyes and mouths. After he’d done it to his sister’s middle school yearbook, his mother made him go see a therapist—the only therapist in Stark, New York, a fat middle-aged woman who was so stupid that Henry was able to convince her that his sister had been the one tormenting him, and that he was only defending himself. He was eight years old at the time. His sister was twelve. The therapist must have gone to his mother and suggested that Mary was the problem, because all Henry knew was that he didn’t have to go see Nancy the therapist anymore, and that his sister had started to go. Henry stopped mutilating Mary’s things, but he did find ways to torture her that were never tracked back to him. Easy ways. He started rumors about her that wrecked her friendships. He got her fired from her first job at the pharmacy by making it look like she was stealing. For a time he added tiny amounts of antifreeze to her Gatorade, till she was hospitalized for over a week. She dropped out of high school junior year and left town with the local drug dealer. They had one postcard from Mary five years later—Greetings from San Diego—and that had been it.

  It had been so long since he’d thought of his family, and as always, it filled him with a combination of amusement and shame in their mediocrity. His parents were still together, living in the same ranch house in Stark. On the few occasions when he spoke with them, he sometimes lied and told them that he’d hired a private detective to track down his sister, and they’d thanked him, and prayed that wherever she was she’d found peace. He could hear in their voices that they actually didn’t want to find her, that they’d already accepted a life without their children. They didn’t want him back. He knew that much. He hadn’t laid eyes on them for ten years.

  Henry refocused on the sketch in front of him. He decided not to smudge the eyes, as temping as it was. It would probably be too much; Kate would call the police, probably leave the apartment. Instead, he turned to the picture she’d drawn of him and used his finger to smooth out some of the lines that defined his face, then he allowed himself to dab at the charcoal eyes with a moistened finger, altering them just enough so that they looked out of focus. Satisfied, he shut the book and slid it back under the bed, wondering how long he’d been sitting there. Disoriented suddenly, he stood, the room swimming a little in his vision. He was hungry, and he went to the kitchen to see if there was enough food that he could take some. If not, his backpack was filled with granola bars.

  Kate came home around eight that night. Henry was in the guest room, sitting in the dark. He didn’t bother to hide. If she came looking, he’d have enough time to duck into the closet while she was turning on the light. And if he didn’t, and she spotted him, well, Kate would have to die. Henry wondered how Corbin would react to that. Would it be more personal because she was family, his blood, or less personal because he’d never fucked her? Either way, it would flush Corbin out from his hiding place in London. He’d have to return to Boston. Henry was pondering this when the white cat he’d seen in the basement trotted into the bedroom and stared at him, eyes glowing yellow in the dark. Henry hissed and the cat cocked its head, then turned and left the room.

  He waited and listened. He heard the front door open and close, and wondered if Kate had left, but somehow he doubted it, and he stayed where he was. Fifteen minutes later, she came padding down the hall, heading for the media room, or whatever Corbin called that dark-paneled man cave with the overstuffed leather sofa. Henry let five minutes pass, then stepped out into the hall. The lamp by the leather sofa was on, and even though its back was to Henry, he could see the crown of her head and hear the dry flicking sound of a page being turned. She was reading. Henry stayed where he was, still as he could be, waiting for another page to turn. She must be a slow reader, he thought, then he heard the book clunk to the floor and Kate shift on the sofa. She’d fallen asleep.

  He stood behind the sofa. She was half covered by a lumpy duvet, one of her hands turned so that the palm faced outward and the knuckles rested on her cheek. He watched her for a while, amazed that people were held together by something as fragile as skin. Even in the dull light from the lamp, he could see the blood m
oving beneath it. Her jaw moved, and with it, the delicate tendons of her neck. She began to snore, then shifted, her eyes squeezing shut as though trying not to see whatever it was that her dreams were showing her. Henry backed away, then turned and walked to the kitchen, where he drank milk directly from the bottle. Just to amuse himself, he thought of sleeping in Corbin’s bed. There was a good chance Kate was going to stay all night on the sofa. No, he thought. He was having too much fun and didn’t want it to end. He’d sleep under the bed in the guest room. It was the safest place.

  He put the milk back in the refrigerator, then heard a soft scratching sound on the door that led to the basement. He opened the door and let in that idiotic cat. It actually rubbed up against his leg. He bent and picked it up, turning it over and holding its skull, not quite the size of a tennis ball, in his hand. The cat purred. Could he crush its head with just his hand? He thought he probably could. He began to squeeze, then decided against it and dropped the cat to the floor, where it scampered off toward the living room, unaware how close it had been to death. It would be more fun for Kate to find the cat in the house again and have her wonder how it got back in.

  Henry returned to the guest room, slid under the bed, and closed his eyes. He wasn’t tired, but long ago he’d figured out how to get himself to fall asleep at almost any moment. He imagined himself floating down an enormous river. In front of him were all the people he knew who’d been born before he was, growing older as they floated, and sinking one by one below the surface as time, or disease, or just bad luck, caught up with them. Around him were the people his age, the sheep he’d gone to high school with in Stark, the entitled kids from college who acted like they’d live forever, his workmates and clients, all of them treading water hard in the middle of their lives, just trying to stay afloat. And behind him were those younger than him, the ones being born, new bodies trying to enter the slipstream, growing more multitudinous as the people in front of him thinned in their ranks. Once the image was clearly in his mind—a phalanx of human bodies with Henry in the middle, moving constantly toward the front—he allowed himself to sink below the surface of the water so that all he saw were the legs churning in the froth of the moving river. And like a snapping turtle that pulls a baby duck down underneath the surface of a pond, Henry knew that he could take hold of someone’s legs and bring them down to the dark, cold river bottom, where he could breathe but they could not.

  Thinking this, he’d fall asleep. And never dream.

  Chapter 33

  Henry stayed under the bed until Kate left the apartment. It was around noon.

  Kate had gotten up early, before dawn. The reappearance of the cat had clearly freaked her out. She’d yelled “Hello, there!” into the apartment; then, a little later, she’d turned the lights on in the guest room for ten seconds. He had held his breath, wondering if he was going to see her head dip down below the bedspread, but it hadn’t happened. She turned the light back off, and for a few hours Henry could hear her moving through the apartment.

  Then it was quiet for a while, and Henry wondered if she’d gone back to sleep, or maybe even left. Then voices—someone was at the door. Kate’s distinctive, accented speech, and another woman’s. An older woman with a raspy bark. He worried briefly that it was a detective, that Kate had called to have the place searched, but then the voices stopped, and shortly afterward, he heard the front door close. He was pretty sure Kate had left. Sure enough to slide out from under the bed.

  He stood, knees popping, then swung his arms around to get the joints working properly. He rolled his head on his shoulders, then slipped from the room. He was fine. Kate was gone. He could sense it in the air of the apartment.

  He washed his face in the guest bathroom, then changed his shirt, making sure to apply an extra amount of odor-free antiperspirant. If he was going to live here with Kate for a while, it was important that he smelled as neutral as possible. In the kitchen, on one of the top shelves, Henry found a half-filled box of Rice Chex. He filled a bowl, then covered them with the small amount of Kate’s skim milk that he felt he could get away with stealing. The cereal was stale, but reminded him of Corbin. The last time he’d had Rice Chex had probably been their weekend together in New Essex, years and years ago. He hadn’t had any since.

  He washed out the bowl and returned it to its place, then wandered the apartment, forming a plan. He went to look at Kate’s sketchbook, wanting to study the picture she’d drawn of him again, but it wasn’t under the bed. She’d taken it with her.

  He remembered the storage unit down in the basement. Even though he had his lockpicks, he went to the kitchen drawer where he knew Corbin kept spare keys. He grabbed the one with the label that said storage and went down to the basement. He entered Corbin’s unit, pulling the door shut behind him, and used his penlight to search the small space. There was box after box of comic books, neatly organized. There was a barbecue grill, and there were several framed posters, the type of posters someone in their early twenties might hang on a dorm-room wall or a first apartment. Car posters. Girlie posters. He wondered why Corbin had kept them. One of the posters was a large framed album cover: Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese. A woman’s torso, the bottoms of her meaty breasts hanging below a cutoff top. Henry felt for his pocketknife. He decided to do some surgery on the poster.

  Kate was back for some of the afternoon, Henry hiding in the guest room, but she left again. He went to the bedroom, where her shucked jeans were on the floor, still a little warm. He sniffed at them, detecting almost nothing of her scent, just a faraway whiff of baby powder. Where had she gone that she needed to change out of her jeans? He looked in the bathroom; her toothbrush was recently used, still wet, and he put it in his mouth, sucked the minty taste out of the bristles.

  Ever since cutting the poster, Henry, instead of feeling pleased, was agitated and anxious. He wanted something to happen, for Corbin to return or for the police to come, or even for Kate to discover him hiding in her closet, the pocketknife conveniently held between his fingers. He did his stretching exercises, then found a fresh bottle of vodka and cracked its seal, pouring half a tumbler’s worth over crushed ice. Hours later, Kate was still gone, and Henry, his face numb and tingling from drinking the vodka, was pacing the apartment, hungry and annoyed. He decided to leave, stashing his backpack in the guest room closet and heading out into the night through 101’s back entrance. Before he left, he returned the storage key to the drawer, but pocketed one of the other unlabeled keys, assuming it was a spare for the apartment, plus a key that was labeled am—Audrey Marshall’s apartment, probably. He had the picks, but they took time, and it was always better to have actual keys. He walked across the Commons to a dark bar he liked called the Proposition, ate two orders of wings, and drank several Heinekens.

  “You’ve been away,” the bartender said.

  He looked at her, and it took him a moment to realize they’d talked before, but then it all came back. Samantha. Bay State College undergrad. She had to take a semester off from school because her grandmother had been paying her tuition but now her grandmother was in an expensive nursing home, and she hadn’t squared away her financial aid package yet. Henry also remembered the things he knew about Samantha that she hadn’t told him. The bulimia she’d been fighting on and off for years, evident by the puffiness of her face and the loss of enamel on her teeth. The way she’d sleep with any guy who was halfway nice to her, and plenty who weren’t. How bad she felt about herself most of the time.

  “Not away, just trying to eat better,” Henry said.

  “I hear you,” Samantha said, and ended the conversation. Henry wondered if she sensed he didn’t want to talk, and found himself annoyed that she probably had. He hated being read by anyone, even by stupid female bartenders. He cracked a chicken bone between his teeth and sucked at the marrow.

  Henry returned to Bury Street, studied Corbin’s windows from the sidewalk, and decided that Kate wasn’t back. Or if she was back, she’d go
ne straight to sleep. He’d risk it, either way. He entered the basement, which was empty except for the cat that was always around. “Here, kitty, kitty,” he said, pushing his fingers underneath its chin. The words sounded a little slurred in his own ears, and he wondered if he’d had too much to drink, if maybe he should just head home to the South End and sleep it off. He rubbed the cat’s twig-like jawbone. It didn’t purr, and when he pulled his hand away, it latched onto his forearm with both paws, its claws sinking into his flesh. Henry, shocked, pulled back, feeling his skin tear, and the cat hissed viciously, then turned and bolted before he had a chance to stamp it to death. He looked at the wound, the skin already beginning to puff up and little pinpricks of blood appearing, like condensation on a glass. He sucked at the wound, tasting his own salty blood. It was beginning to itch.

  Instead of going up to Corbin’s apartment, Henry went up the stairs that led to Audrey Marshall’s place. He hadn’t been there since the night he’d killed her. He picked the lock of the door and entered. The curtains of the apartment were open and the night was light enough that he could maneuver through the apartment. There were marks on the floor from the crime scene investigators, taped areas on the kitchen tile where he’d left Audrey’s body. Had they noticed how her hand had been positioned, pointing with an index finger toward Corbin’s apartment? Henry smiled at the memory. Arranging Audrey had been the most fun he’d had in years, the most fun he’d had since Corbin and he had killed Claire in the cemetery. After Audrey was dead, and he was free to arrange her as he wanted to, he’d contemplated trying to actually cut her in half, find a way to saw through her spine, but decided against it. Still, the image of it, the thought of her actually in two pieces—a perfect half of her for each of them—almost made him giddy. One day he could do it, but he didn’t think he could do it alone.