Fear Itself

by Jeff Gelb

  “Is Mom Okay?”

  Whenever his brother called, Newland assumed it might concern his mother’s health.

  “Oh, not too bad,” said Roger, “considering she won’t take her high blood pressure pills. She claims they make her see things—green footballs and pink and blue rainbows. I don’t know. She says she wants to change doctors.”

  “Don’t let her.”

  Roger coughed and cleared his throat. Newland detected something odd in his brother’s manner. He seemed nervous and ill at ease.

  “Everything all right on your end?” Newland asked.

  “Sure, yeah. Fine. How’s, uh … how’s Trisha and Clay?”

  Newland felt an icy trickle of saliva inch down his throat. Roger never, never asked about Trisha and Clay. The conversation thrumped and bumped along like an engine running with a couple of blown pistons. Newland waited for his brother to swerve metaphorically into a ditch.

  After ten or fifteen minutes, he did.

  “We had something weird happen yesterday,” he began. As a police dispatcher, it was hardly unusual for Roger to relate bizarre occurrences. But as Newland listened, he could feel his heart quicken.

  Roger continued. “Yeah, it was in north Wichita. You remember the 53rd Street area, don’t you?”

  “Of course. God damn, Roger, we lived there for two years.”

  “Yeah, I know … well, you see … they found a body. Found this little girl’s body. Well, and she’d … been strangled.”

  “Jesus.”

  Newland had been standing at the kitchen phone. He sat down. He was suddenly shivering as if it were twenty below zero in the room.

  Roger’s voice clicked. He gave a sharp, sudden, nervous start of a laugh. “Jesus is right. I mean, this was really horrible, you know … and I heard our chief detective talking about it. About what they found.”

  Roger was stalling.

  And Newland didn’t know why. Not precisely.

  “Roger? What the hell are you … what did they … there some special reason for telling me this?”

  “No, I mean … well, in a way, I guess, yeah. Coincidence. Just … just the damndest coincidence, you know.”

  Newland took a deep breath. The terror which had seized him was a razor poised a millimeter from slicing into his rapidly beating heart. He thought maybe he could anticipate his brother’s news.

  “Roger? Did they, uh, did they find tape across the girl’s mouth? If that’s it, then I can tell you—from all the research I’ve done—I can tell you that’s sometimes part of the murder profile. So you see, that explains it.”

  In a feathery soft voice, Roger said, “Yeah. Yeah, there was tape across her mouth, but … I mean, you remember in your book how the guy, how Macready wrote stuff on the tape?”

  “Sure. God damn, of course. I wrote the fucking book. Macready would take a magic marker and he’d write, ‘Children should be seen and not heard.’“

  “Yeah, I know,” said Roger. “I got out my copy of your book, and I went back through to check … and then I double checked with our detective and … but I never said anything. I haven’t told anybody else—not a soul—what I’m, you know … wondering.”

  For Newland, the room disappeared. A huge, nebulous blackness sucked him into a timeless void. How long he was there he couldn’t say. Coming out of that void he could hear his brother, a buried voice, frightened, wanting to but failing to reassure.

  “Coincidence. Just the damndest coincidence,” it said. Again and again.

  Three days passed in which Newland was on fire with fear.

  And what he dreaded most, a cosmic dread, was a phone call. A very particular kind of phone call. A phone call from the parent of a strangled child.

  For an excruciating run of evenings, Newland cringed whenever the phone rang. He discouraged Trisha from responding, saying that he was expecting an important call. But then he often delayed long enough so that his answering machine would be activated and he would have an opportunity to listen carefully to the messenger. Did the caller sound like a distraught parent?

  Reason did not enter the circle of his raging fear.

  That such a phone call was improbable mattered little. That it was highly unlikely for a connection to be made between his novel, a work of pure fiction, and an actual murder also mattered virtually not at all.

  What his brother had passed along wounded Newland deeply, a wound inflicted by the sharp point of suggestion and implication and coincidence. But was it coincidence?

  Children should be seen and not heard.

  What were the odds that a psychotic killer would choose those words? Precisely those words? Was it so difficult to imagine that such a killer had read the kind of book which he knew would stimulate him?

  A book about his own kind.

  Maris Macready would be the hero of such a monster.

  And every child became a potential victim.

  Even a little boy like … Clay.

  That thought sent Newland on a more irrational mission than ever. He tracked down as many stores in the east Alabama, west Georgia area that sold paperback novels as time and energy permitted. And he bought every copy of Sometimes Darkness he could locate. Several dozen before he completed his fear-crazed mission.

  At the Goldsmith mall, he spent part of nearly every afternoon camped out on a bench in front of Bookland to survey the horror section. What was he watching for? The man in the khaki jumpsuit, of course. Not sighting the man in Bookland, Newland would move to the fountain area or to the food court—once he even brought along his camera to snap shots of the would-be psycho.

  But the man never appeared.

  At home, Trisha grew concerned about him, but he dismissed his fits of anxiety by claiming that he had a virulent case of “writer’s block.” She reluctantly believed him. Then one evening as Newland sat before the blank screen of his computer, Clay stole into the room and wormed onto Newland’s lap.

  “I miss Greenbeard,” he whispered.

  And when Newland looked down at his son’s angelic face, all he could see was a sudden projection of an innocent body, strangled, a piece of tape placed over the mouth. With writing on the tape.

  Children should be seen and not heard.

  Newland began to shadow Clay’s every step to school and back. Trisha couldn’t help noticing his paranoia and voiced her concern.

  “John, what’s wrong? Honey, what is it?”

  He read her questions as doubts about his emotional stability.

  “Nothing’s wrong. Nothing,” he responded, his manner strained and tense. “You can’t be too careful these days. You read about the worst kind of things. Things happening to kids. Better safe than sorry.”

  The platitude tasted more than bitter.

  So he kept to his overly protective routine.

  The stream of his writing had dwindled to a trickle.

  This is not the legacy of Granny Ruth.

  He emBruced his own fearful thoughts.

  And waited.

  Spring was in high gear when something finally occurred.

  When the darkness sank its fangs into him.

  It was early one Saturday morning. Trisha and Clay were still asleep when Newland decided to call his brother in Wichita. What he learned from his brother was that the child-strangler had not been caught. He had, indeed, killed a second time, same type of killing as before. Four weeks had passed since the second killing. No one had pressed the improbable connection between the killings—Children should be seen and not heard—and Newland’s novel.

  “Thanks, Roger.”

  “Hey, big brother, this is really bothering you, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Like nothing else in my life ever has.”

  “But, hey, I mean … you don’t really believe …?”

  “Not sure what the hell I believe. All I know is … this whole business is eating me alive—can’t sleep, can’t write. Scared to let my son out of my sight.”

  “John …
take it easy, will you?”

  “Yeah … I’ll try.”

  Newland sat in the empty kitchen at the empty table and then got up and made himself some coffee. While it was brewing, he decided to check the mail. Sometimes it came early on Saturdays. The outside air which greeted him was already humid, promising a hot day. The summer would likely be vintage Alabama—white haze, smotheringly hot.

  Walking to the mailbox, Newland perked up. Every writer, he reasoned, has a special relationship with his or her mailbox. For that homely, prosaic object often houses the communications which signal either acceptance or rejection. From another angle, a writer’s mailbox is a sacred place, a temenos, the repository of one’s hopes and dreams, of one’s frustrations and nightmares. Of one’s fragile ego.

  So it was fitting that Newland’s mailbox should contain a manifestation of his darkest projections. What he found in his mailbox was this: a cover from a copy of Sometimes Darkness; it had been ripped free of the book. That seemed odd in itself. Then Newland noticed the back of the cover. There, in black magic marker letters, was written the following: “Children should be seen and not heard.”

  He wanted to call the police.

  Decided against it because, more than likely, this was a harmless prank. He tried to think of potential jokesters—but came up with none.

  The new horror which gripped him was not knowing for certain.

  Who’s out there?

  Who’s watching? Waiting?

  He floated through the rest of the day in a bubble of terror. He spent much of the time alone in his study. Just thinking. Digging through an attic of memories which might explain something slightly beyond his mental reach. He thought about Granny Ruth reading Stevenson to him. Those wonderful tales. Kidnapped and Treasure Island and one she had read to him only once: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a tale which had never released its hold upon him.

  Why didn’t I mention that one to Katie Doyle?

  Near evening he looked again at the cover he had found in the mailbox, at the writing on the back.

  Then Trisha called him to dinner.

  Where he heard his son complain, “Why can’t I go to Jurassic Park?”

  “It’s too intense for someone your age,” said Trisha.

  “But Todd got to go and he’s the same age I am. So why can’t I go?”

  “I just explained why.”

  “But Todd—.”

  Suddenly Newland had Clay’s elbow and was lifting him from his chair, and in a silent fury he sent his son to his room.

  Back at the table he said to Trisha, “Children should be seen and not heard.”

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into him,” she said.

  And after they finished dinner, Newland volunteered to help with the dishes. Trisha rewarded him with a kiss. She would wash; he would dry.

  Then she slipped on a pair of plastic gloves.

  And Newland found, quite suddenly, that he couldn’t breathe.

  “I have to go,” he muttered. “Have to … get away from here.”

  “Honey?”

  But he was out the back door and walking across the lawn toward the street, not bothering to explain, not allowing himself to slow down.

  He believed he was looking for someone.

  When he returned ten minutes later, Trisha had just finished the dishes.

  “That was good timing,” she teased. “I’m going to get in bed and read. Are you coming up?”

  “No, go on without me. I’ll be there in a little while,” he told her.

  He brushed aside her look of concern, and she left him sitting alone at the kitchen table; he tried not to glance at the dishes standing in the drainpan drying. He was restless. His walk hadn’t turned up anyone. From behind a bottle of liquid shortening on the counter he retrieved a pencil and notepad, the notepad they always used to make out the week’s grocery list. On a fresh sheet of notepaper he wrote, “Children should be seen and not heard.” He studied it a moment, and then he got out the book cover which had been left in his mailbox, turned it over, and compared the two hands.

  He sighed heavily.

  He thought about a killer somewhere in the Wichita area. He thought about the man at the mall. Dark twins?

  There’s so many of us.

  The thought surprised him. He sighed again.

  And surrendered wholeheartedly and wholemindedly to the truth. It was like giving in to the rush of inevitability a writer sometimes encounters in the midst of a narrative.

  He took the plastic gloves from atop the drying dishes. He put them on. They squeaked like a frightened animal.

  So many of us.

  Just waiting for the right trigger.

  Then he went upstairs to say goodnight to his son.

  And the boy looked into his father’s eyes and saw the day’s final light slip away.

  Home Again

  Jeff Gelb

  Bruce awakened crying. He turned onto his back, grimacing at the feel of the sweat-soaked sheets. His heart was slamming against his chest.

  He stared at the darkness of the ceiling. It was a darker night than usual for L.A.; normally he could make out the wooden beam bisecting the room above his head; tonight there was no sign of it in the Stygian darkness.

  As his heartbeat struggled to reclaim its normal pace, he realized he had been dreaming. And what a terrifying nightmare it had been:

  He was at work selling advertising for “Radio & Records,” the music industry trade publication, when his phone rang. It was his son, Franklin, light of his life and the best gift of his marriage to Hope, his wife of thirteen years. Franklin’s voice sounded upset, on the verge of tears.

  “Dad, I have something to tell you, but don’t be mad.”

  Bruce frowned. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, but …”

  Bruce could hear the fear in his son’s voice, a foreign element that soured Bruce’s stomach. It was 4:40 in the afternoon; Franklin was at a summer day-camp program. Had he scraped his elbow roller-blading? Or was it something worse?

  It all poured out in a rush of words: “See, we were playing at the park, and we were making a fort in these bushes off the trail, and my friend found this syringe—”

  Bruce gasped involuntarily. He’d never heard his son use the word syringe before. The boy was only nine; Bruce and Hope had always considered Franklin too young to have a talk about AIDS and other diseases that could be communicated through things like dirty needles. He felt sweat rolling down his shirt sleeve.

  “—and the needle was bent so I couldn’t see it, and I accidentally poked my finger.”

  Bruce gasped. “Did it draw blood?”

  “Yes, Dad, a little, but I’m gonna be okay, aren’t I? The kids said I’m gonna get AIDS now. Am I gonna die, Dad?”

  Bruce felt like the office had gained twenty degrees of heat in the last second. “Jesus Christ. What did you do?”

  Franklin started sobbing.

  “Honey, it’s okay, you’re going to be okay. Tell me what you did.”

  Franklin cried, “I brought the syringe to the counselor and she threw it away.”

  “Did you wash off your finger?”

  “Yeah, Dad, but am I gonna die? Am I?”

  Then, as dreams do, his jumped ahead months to the day his pediatrician had gotten back the AIDS test results, and their worst nightmares had been confirmed. Against all odds, the needle had, in fact, just been used by an infected person, and it was still fresh enough to transmit the deadly germs to their son.

  Another dream jump and he was at his son’s hospital bedside, the boy now just a hollow shell of his former vibrant self, fighting for each breath, unable to speak. Bruce and Hope, devastated by this brutal act of an incomprehensible God, were mopping his forehead with a wash cloth and speaking softly to him, telling him it was okay to drop his body and move into the light. And finally, with a pitiful shudder, he had done so.

  At the dream’s funeral, Bruce told his parents he felt the ent
ire event was his fault. If he had only warned Franklin of the dangers of syringes. How could Bruce live with the knowledge that his negligence had caused his own son’s death?

  As if unable to handle the pain of the realization, his brain woke Bruce up. He felt warm tears running down his cheek as he remembered the dream. Thank God it wasn’t real. He was embarrassed that his subconscious would even dredge up such a nightmare, and he cursed himself for it. He loved his son; how could he have dreamed such a horrifying thing? What the fuck had brought it on? The chocolate cake he’d had just before bed? He silently promised himself that would be the end of midnight snacks.

  Eyes still slick with tears, he struggled to see the lit numerals of the bedside clock. But they were invisible in the darkness. Frustrated, Bruce reached for the switch of the bed-lamp, but his hand hit a wall. Where was the lamp? Had the cats knocked it over?

  “Hope?” he whispered into the darkness, his voice shaky. But of course, she was doing a fill-in overnight airshift at an L.A. radio station, and wouldn’t be home till about six a.m.

  Bruce fell back on the wet bedsheets, cursing the dream and the darkness, then remembering his son, who, even at nine, still crept into their bed in the middle of the night. Bruce reached over but felt only rumpled sheets and blankets.

  He bolted out of bed, suddenly aching with the need to see his son, hold him, kiss his moist forehead, listen to his soft breathing. Bruce stumbled around the room, knocking his shin against something, hissing at the sharp pain. What the fuck was that? He couldn’t recall any hard-edged furniture in this part of the spacious bedroom of the home he and Hope loved so much.

  His hands lashed out blindly, searching for a lamp, a light switch, finding picture frames, book shelves. Had he gone blind? No, there was a tiny sliver of light falling across the dresser he’d had as a kid, and …

  He stopped in his tracks. What was that dresser doing there? It should have been 3000 miles away in upstate New York in his old bedroom, now a guest room in his parents’ home. What the fuck?