Feelings of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  They turned into a steeply-sloping driveway in Bel Air. Automatic wrought-iron gates opened, and they drove inside. On top of the hill ahead of them, surrounded by flowering shrubs, stood a huge white Italianate house with a red-tiled roof. Lights shone from every window.

  “Welcome to my humble abode,” said Jack, and gave Susan’s thigh the lightest of strokes.

  He was waiting for her on the bed when she came out of the bathroom. He was wearing nothing but black silk pajama bottoms and a black bandana. He was watching one of his own movies on a television the size of a small building.

  “I switched it on and there it was,” he told her. “The Cloud Riders. It must be an omen.”

  She was wrapped in his black silk bathrobe. She approached the bed and knelt beside him, watching him. The bedroom was all white: white carpets, white drapes, white lilies in white vases on top of white-painted tables. A large original oil-painting hung on the wall opposite the bed – a white-skinned girl with bone-white hair. Her thighs were wide apart and the only color in the room was a single brushstroke of fuchsia pink.

  Jack switched off the television’s sound but not its picture. On the screen he was riding a horse across the spine of a mountain-range in Montana. On the bed he reached up with his left hand and unfastened the loose silk tie around Susan’s waist. Then he sat up and slid the robe off her shoulders, so that she was completely naked.

  Her skin was almost as pale as the girl in the painting, apart from the blue tracery of veins in her breasts and her nipples the color of fallen rose-petals in a rainswept garden. Her blonde curls shone in the lamplight.

  Jack pulled her down beside him and kissed her. It had been so long since she had been kissed by another man that she found it deeply disturbing, but electrifying, too, and she could feel that she had almost immediately become wet. Jack turned her on to her back and knelt beside her, taking his erect penis out of his black silk pajamas. It was enormous, much bigger than Jeff’s, with a swollen purplish head and a hole that gaped at her like a landed trout.

  He took his penis in his hand and massaged it against her nipples, around and around, until they stiffened. Then he guided it into her armpits, and around her shoulders and her neck. Teasingly, he ran it across her lips, so quickly that she hardly had time to lick it. But then he lifted himself up higher, so that he was straddling her. He opened her mouth with both thumbs and forced his penis down her throat, so that she couldn’t help gagging.

  “How do you like that?” he said, looking down at her triumphantly. “Now you can tell Jeff that you almost choked on Jack Amberson’s dick.”

  For some reason, his roughness excited her even more. When he tried to take his penis out of her mouth, she took hold of it and pushed it even further down her throat, even though it was so huge and hard that it almost suffocated her. When he tried to take it out, she sank her teeth into it, until he yelped in pain.

  He grew even more aroused. He knelt over her face and rammed himself into her mouth, again and again. She took hold of his black silk pajamas and tore them open, tore them down to the knees. Then she gave his penis one last ferocious suck and started to bite and suck at his balls, almost as if she were determined to wrench them off. She bit his thighs and clawed with her fingernails at the cheeks of his ass, until they bled. Then she thrust two sharp index fingers into his anus.

  “Goddamnit!” he shouted, and so she pushed her fingers in even harder.

  He swore at her. He called her everything that he could think of. Cunt, whore, bitch. They were both out of control. He was enraged because no woman had ever dared to suck him and scratch him like that. She was frustrated and furious and drunk. Not only that, she was actually in bed with Jack Amberson the movie star but she wanted to show him that she was only there because she wanted to be, and not because he had decided he had to have her.

  He forced her on to her back, spread her legs, and thrust himself into her. She kept on struggling and kicking and scratching, but although he was short he was very fit and very strong. He rammed into her again and again, cursing her with every stroke. She panted with excitement. She had never known a cock so big. She thought that she had never met a man she despised so much. She gripped his hair and pulled it so hard that some of it came out by the roots.

  It was then that he lost his temper completely. But when Jack was really angry, he didn’t shout and he never swore. His eyes unfocused and a terrible calm came over him.

  He drew himself out of her and climbed off the bed, his penis still erect. He walked across to the mirror over the dressing-table and spent over a minute examining his scalp, patting it to make sure that he could cover up the bald patch that she had given him. Even then she didn’t fully understand what she had done. She didn’t realize that he was a star. The physical pain of having his hair torn out was nothing. What he cared about was his looks.

  She lay back watching him. Slowly she drew the sheet up over herself. She could sense his fury and it began to frighten her.

  “So that’s what you like?” he asked her. His voice sounded like fingernails scratching a brick. “You like living on the edge.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Oh, you didn’t hurt me. Nobody can hurt Jack Amberson, sweetheart. He just likes to know what game he’s playing.”

  He walked over to the closet and opened it up. Inside were rows and rows of coats, Armani and Versace and Commes des Garcons, all arranged according to shade. But Jack pulled out a drawer below the coats and took out a black nylon cord and a black plastic bag.

  He came back to the bed holding up the cord in one hand and the bag in the other. There was an expression on his face which made Susan shiver. Still calm, still slightly unfocused, as if he were looking right through her.

  “I think I’ve made a mistake,” she said.

  “Whoa, no, darling. I don’t think so. The fun has only just begun.”

  “Please, I’m sorry I hurt you. I was angry, that’s all. I’m not used to drinking so much champagne.”

  But Jack leaned right over and said to her, “When you came into this bedroom, you had a choice. You could have been sweet. You could have been pliant. You could have let me take you to the moon. But you chose something else, didn’t you? You chose to make a little war out of it. Getting your revenge on men, were you? Or was it something else?”

  “I’m leaving,” said Susan, decisively, and climbed out of bed.

  Jack immediately seized hold of her left arm and twisted it behind her back. Then he caught hold of her right arm, too. He pushed her face-down on the bed and clambered on top of her, pinning her down with his knee.

  “Get off me!” she demanded, in a breathy scream.

  “Whoa, no. You made your choice. This is what you wanted and this is what you’re going to get.”

  With that, he lashed her wrists together with the black nylon cord, quickly and expertly, like a yachtsman. Then he took the black vinyl bag and pulled it over her head, twisting it into a knot around her neck. The cord was painfully tight. It bit into her skin and forced her arms so far back behind her that her shoulders ached. Inside the bag she was totally blind and it took only three or four panicky breaths before the vinyl was wet with moisture and clinging to her face.

  “Take this off me! Jack! Take this off me! I can’t breathe!”

  “Your rules, sweetheart,” said Jack. He kept her prone on the bed while he dragged open her thighs. She tried to wriggle, and let out a series of muffled shouts, but with every shout the vinyl bag was sucked closer to her face, until Jack could actually see her eyes and her nose and her mouth as she desperately tried to breathe.

  “You’re going to love this, baby,” he told her. He pulled apart the cheeks of her bottom. Then he leaned forward and pushed himself into her, hurting her as much as he could, really hurting her.

  The vinyl bag crackled rhythmically against her face as she sweated and struggled and fought for air. On top of her, his expression cold and
calm, Jack Amberson quietly grunted in his throat as he tried to force himself into her further and further. It took him almost a minute before he was completely buried, and his black hairy balls hung between her cheeks like exotic but uneatable fruits.

  Susan felt as if the whole world were collapsing all around her. She tried to suck in air but all she could suck in was wet vinyl. She could feel Jack’s penis inside her, and the pain was intense. But she began rhythmically to push her hips down, and to squeeze her muscles. She was trying to survive. The quicker Jack reached a climax, the sooner he would take the bag off her head.

  She pushed faster and faster. She tried not to breathe too deeply, but every now and then she gasped for oxygen, and the bag stuck to her face like a second skin. She felt that she was suffocating but at the same time the sexual feeling was overwhelming.

  Jack shouted out, “Oh, shit!” and ejaculated deep inside her. Susan climaxed, too – an orgasm like nothing that she had ever experienced. It effervesced inside her, from her feet upward, and then a dark explosive force turned her whole existence inside out.

  She thought for one moment that she had fallen out of the universe. She thought that she was someplace else, where the skies were eternally black, and the stars never shone.

  Jack climbed unsteadily off the bed. He staggered two or three steps sideways, and then he sat down next to Susan and started to rip off the vinyl bag.

  Her blonde curls were stuck together with sweat. Her lips were turquoise. Jack lifted one of her eyelids with his thumb and her eyes stared at nothing at all.

  “Susan?” he said. He shook her, but her head lolled against the pillow like a puppet’s. “Susan? Come on, Susan, don’t start fucking me around here, Susan.”

  He shook her, and then he slapped her cheek, in exactly the same place that Jeff had slapped her. “Susan, this isn’t fucking funny, all right?” He slapped her again, and then again.

  He untied the black nylon rope that bound her wrists, and turned her over so that she was lying on her back. He pressed his ear against her bare breast but he couldn’t hear her heart beating. He touched his fingertips against her carotid artery, the way that the Los Angeles Police Department advisor had shown him in Deadly Heart.

  He was still sitting beside her when his Chinese manservant Heng came into the bedroom to ask him if he wanted his usual nightcap. There was blood between her legs, and he had dipped his finger in it and daubed a cross on his forehead.

  “She’s dead,” said Jack. “She’s fucking dead, and I don’t even know who she is.”

  The trial lasted five weeks and two days. Jeff sat in the public gallery every single day and every single day was another step toward Calvary. He didn’t shave. He barely washed. He sat through thirty-one hours of hearings with his head bowed, folding and unfolding the same piece of paper. It was a message from Susan: Don’t forget the Roach Motel. The last message she had ever sent him.

  They check in he thought. But they don’t check out.

  Jack Amberson was unanimously acquitted of manslaughter. The jury had been persuaded by his attorney that Mrs Susan Pearce had gone to his house voluntarily and enthusiastically taken part in a sexual act which she must have known to carry a high element of risk.

  “Restricting breathing during intercourse is known to intensify sexual feelings,” said Jack Amberson’s principal defense counsel. “Mrs Pearce enjoyed those intensified feelings with Mr Amberson – of that, there is no doubt. But regrettably, she paid the price. My client deeply regrets what happened, but his conscience is clear.”

  Outside, on the courtroom steps, Jeff saw Jack Amberson surrounded by newspaper reporters and TV cameras. He elbowed his way through the crowd and snatched hold of Jack’s sleeve.

  “You bastard! You liar! My wife never did anything like that! You killed her! You murdered her!”

  Jack gave him a look of deep, stagey sympathy. “I’m sorry for what happened, Mr Pearce. I really am. But it was something that your wife wanted to try … and, well, I tried to talk her out of it, but she insisted. You know yourself what a strong-willed woman she was.”

  “You killed her,” said Jeff, quaking with loathing.

  “Whoa, no. I didn’t kill her. No way. You know who killed her?” – and here he leaned close so that the jostling press couldn’t hear him. “She was killed by the husband who slapped her and sent her out into the night looking for somebody who cared about her. I’ll tell you something, Mr Pearce: if anybody should have stood trial these past five weeks, it should have been you.”

  Jeff swung at him, but Jack turned away, as if he knew for certain that the blow would never connect. And it didn’t, because Jack’s blond-haired bodyguard hit Jeff so hard in the chest that Jeff lurched back down the steps, missed his footing, and fell all the way down to the sidewalk. He lay there in agony, two ribs cracked, the cuff of his pants torn open.

  A Carmelite nun came up to him and said, “Are you all right, sir?”

  Jeff said nothing, but regurgitated a half-chewed Denver omelet all over the sidewalk in front of her.

  “Kill him?” said Lenny. “You can’t be serious.”

  “How else am I going to see justice done?”

  It was ten after eight in the morning at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Lenny had invited Jeff for a breakfast meeting to discuss publicity for the Creature series. He was horribly sharkish to look at: with upslanted sunglasses and dyed-black slicked-back hair, and he had a fondness for white unstructured suits that billowed around him when he walked, but he knew everybody who was anybody, and almost as many people who weren’t anybody yet, but soon would be, and Jeff respected his opinion on almost anything concerned with the movie business. He had made only one error of judgement that Jeff could remember: he had raved about Ishtar.

  Lenny said: “You have to understand that a man like Jack Amberson is almost bullet-proof when it comes to the law. What a lovable rogue, what a star, what an institution. You say that your Susan was murdered. But how many women would willingly die if the last thing they were doing on this earth was balling Jack Amberson? I heard some blue-rinsed woman outside the courtroom, and do you know what she said? ‘What a way to go!’”

  Jeff pushed aside his plate of fruit. “I warn you, Lenny. I’m going to kill that son-of-a-bitch and I don’t care who knows it.”

  Lenny shook his head. “You’ll never get near him. Not a hope.”

  “I managed to grab hold of him outside of the courtroom. If I’d had a gun—”

  “If you’d had a gun, I wouldn’t be having breakfast with you, I’d be dropping a handful of dirt on your casket. Jack Amberson’s bodyguards all have permits to carry concealed weapons and they were all trained to blow off Bette Midler’s earrings at fifty paces. Not that that’s too difficult.”

  “There must be some way. Maybe I could pick him off at home.”

  Lenny said, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, but he has security that makes most Bel-Air properties look like open house. You can’t do it, Jeff. They took Amberson to court and they tried him and they found him not guilty. However bad you feel about it, maybe he’s telling the truth.”

  “The truth? You’re trying to tell me that Susan would agree to having her hands tied and a plastic bag put over her head, and then be forcibly sodomized? In all the time we were married we didn’t do that, not once.”

  “Some women have needs that they don’t like to tell their husbands about. Same way with men.”

  “Oh, come on, Lenny. Susan and I were close, we were close. We could tell each other anything.”

  “I don’t know, Jeff. I don’t want to criticize. It’s not my place. But Susan called me a couple of months ago and told me that she was very upset about all the time you were spending away from home. She even asked me if you had another woman.”

  “Another woman? How the hell did she think I had time for that?”

  “Because you didn’t involve her, Jeff. You got carried away with what you were doing and you forgot
to take Susan along with you.”

  “So you agree with Amberson? Susan died because of me?”

  Lenny picked up his spoon and ate the chocolate flakes from the top of his cappucino. “I didn’t say that, Jeff. All I said was, you shouldn’t try to kill the guy, and I don’t want you to die trying.”

  Jeff said, “I wouldn’t mind that.”

  “What are you talking about? You wouldn’t mind what?”

  “I wouldn’t mind dying, if I could be sure of killing him.”

  Lenny looked at him for a long while, and then he said, “Eat your eggs. You want to starve yourself to death before you die?”

  He waited in the shrubs opposite the entrance to Jack Amberson’s house for over three-and-a-half hours. He was wearing a black Adidas tracksuit and dark glasses, and a black woollen hat on his head. Inside his half-zipped top he was carrying a Colt .45 automatic that he had bought yesterday afternoon from Phil Forlenza, the movie armorer. He felt conspicuous and absurd, as if he was playing the killer in an episode of New Columbo. He was hot, and impatient, and the gun was much too heavy. But he was determined that Jack Amberson wasn’t going to get away with suffocating Susan, even if she had wanted it.

  He bitterly regretted the way that he had treated her. Jack Amberson had said that he was guilty and he believed that he was. But Jack Amberson should have taken care of her. Even if he had made love to her, he should have taken care of her.

  Jeff was almost ready to call off his vigil and go home when a black Lincoln appeared around the bend in the road and pulled up outside Jack Amberson’s gates. It happened so quickly that he didn’t really know what to do. But as the gates began to swing open, he thought: This is your chance. This is your only chance. And this is for Susan.

  He came out of the bushes and strode across the road. The sun was as bright and hot as an arc lamp. He took the automatic out of his track-suit top and cocked it. Then he circled around the back of the car, holding the gun in both hands. The windows were all blacked out, so that he couldn’t see anybody inside. All the same, he fired four times into the offside back window. The noise was deafening and the Colt kicked back like a mule. The glass shattered, and he saw an arm flap up. Then – before he could fire again – the Lincoln screeched up the driveway toward the house and the wrought-iron gates began to close.