Fear Itself

by Jeff Gelb

  Dean looked down and saw the market-square. He saw horse-drawn carriages and cars and people walking in every direction. He heard the air whistling in his ears.

  He clung to the gray madonna because that was the only solid thing he had to cling to. He emBruced her as he fell. Hardly anybody saw him falling, but those who did lifted up their hands in horror in the same way that serious burn victims lift up their hands.

  He dropped and dropped the whole height of Bruges Belfry, two dark figures falling through the fog, holding each other tight, like lovers. Dean thought for one illogical instant that everything was going to be all right, that he was going to fall forever and never hit the ground. But then suddenly he saw the rooftops much closer and the cobbles expanded faster and faster. He hit the courtyard with the gray madonna on top of him. She weighed over half a ton, and she exploded on impact, and so did he. Together, they were like a bomb bursting. Their heads flew apart. Stone arms and flesh arms jumped up into the air.

  Then there was nothing but the muffled sound of traffic, and the echoing flap of starlings’ wings as they resettled on the rooftops, and the jangling of bicycle-bells.

  Inspector Ben De Buy stood amongst the wreckage of man and madonna and looked up at the Belfry, cigarette-smoke and fog-vapor fuming from his nose.

  “He fell from the very top,” he told his assistant, Sergeant Van Peper.

  “Yes, sir. The girl who collects the tickets can identify him.”

  “And was he carrying the statue with him, when he bought his ticket?”

  “No, sir, of course not. He couldn’t even have lifted it. It was far too heavy.”

  “But it was up there with him, wasn’t it? How did he manage to take a life-size granite statue of the Virgin Mary all the way up those stairs? It’s impossible. And even if it was possible, why would he do it? You might need to weight yourself down to drown yourself, but to jump from the top of a belfry?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “No, well, neither do I, and I don’t think I really want to know.”

  He was still standing amongst the blood and the broken stone when one of his youngest detectives appeared, carrying something grayish-white in his arms. As he came closer, Inspector De Buy realized that it was a baby, made of stone.

  “What’s this?” he demanded.

  “The infant Jesus,” said the officer, blushing. “We found it on the corner of Hoogstraat, up in the niche where the stone madonna used to stand.”

  Inspector De Buy stared at the granite baby for a while, then held out his arms. “Here,” he said, and the officer handed it over to him. He lifted it over his head, and then he smashed it onto the cobbles as hard as he could. It shattered into half-a-dozen lumps.

  “Sir?” asked his sergeant, in puzzlement.

  Inspector De Buy patted him on the shoulder. “Thou shalt worship no graven image, Sergeant Van Peper. And now you know why.”

  He walked out of the Belfry courtyard. Out in the market square, an ambulance was waiting, its sapphire lights flashing in the fog. He walked back to Simon Stevin Plein, where he had left his car. The bronze statue of Simon Stevin loomed over him, black and menacing in his doublet and hat. Inspector De Buy took out his car keys and hesitated for a moment. He was sure that he had seen Simon Stevin move slightly.

  He stood quite still, right next to his Citroën, his key lifted, not breathing, listening, waiting. Anybody who saw him then would have believed that he was a statue.

  The Highway

  Edo van Belkom

  Darryl Bedard struggled in the dark to find the windshield-wiper control switch. As he leaned forward, his left hand fumbled with a half-dozen different knobs, none of which controlled the wipers. The car’s interior light came on, then the headlights went out. The horn blew, then he signaled for a right-hand turn.

  Splat!

  The semi-trailer ahead and to the left of him had driven through a deep trough in the highway, throwing gallons of dirty water and slush across his windshield.

  Momentarily blinded, Darryl panicked. He grabbed at the steering wheel with both hands, sending the car swerving into the empty lane to his left.

  When he regained control of the Japanese rental car, he again searched for the wiper control. At last he found it and the wiper blades immediately began clearing off the windshield.

  Darryl leaned back in the driver’s seat and breathed a deep, long sigh. Even though his job as a salesman required him to travel tens of thousands of miles each year, he hated driving, especially in bad weather.

  He turned on the radio in the hopes that some music would help settle his nerves. Instead of music however, there were endless reports of canceled events and services, and repeated pleas by announcers to stay indoors. He tried another station, same story. He turned the radio off and listened to the rhythm of the wipers as they hummed and squeaked across his windshield.

  Normally he would have flown to Detroit, but flights over half the continent had been canceled and many planes caught in the air by the sudden storm were still struggling to find places to land.

  Even so, Darryl wished he were in the air. Flying, after all, was infinitely safer than driving, even in the middle of what the radio called the worst snow storm since the second World War. Better still, Darryl would have liked to have put the trip off until the weather had cleared and a flight had become available. Unfortunately, this was a business trip unlike any other; this one could not be postponed. Darryl was on his way to the annual general meeting of company executives and salesmen from both sides of the border. If he ever wanted to move up within the company, to get a position that didn’t require a lot of traveling, this was the place to shmooze and press some flesh.

  But knowing that didn’t make driving any easier. In fact, it made it more stressful. If he wanted to be in Detroit in time for the company chairman’s dinner, he’d have to keep his speed up around fifty-five; no mean feat considering he couldn’t see more than twenty feet of highway in front of him, but not impossible since the highway had recently been plowed.

  He glanced at the speedometer, noticed it slipping below fifty and gently pressed his foot down on the gas.

  As the car’s numbered LCD readout slowly climbed back up to fifty-five, Darryl noticed flashing red and white lights in his rearview mirror. He turned around to look behind him and, through the falling snow, could just make out a fire truck pulling across the three-lane highway, blocking it off. He eased up on the gas and prepared to pull over, then turned around for another look. He saw what looked to be the flashing strobe lights of an ambulance or some other emergency vehicle coming to a stop next to the fire truck. He pulled into the right-hand lane and glanced back one more time. The lights were now little more than soft pulses in the snow-shrouded darkness. Obviously, the emergency vehicles were stationary. Whatever the problem was it had to be behind him since he hadn’t even been able to see it through the storm.

  “Well, that’s a lucky break,” Darryl said under his breath.

  If he’d been caught behind a pile-up on the highway—or even worse, involved in one himself—who knew what time he’d end up making Detroit. It was just one more little data point that reinforced his belief that flying was always safer than driving, no matter what the conditions.

  He pressed down on the gas and carefully piloted the car back up to speed.

  Just then, the car’s front end received a terrific jolt—

  “What the …”

  —and the entire car began to shudder.

  Darryl held tightly onto the vibrating steering wheel as he eased up on the gas and tried to guide the car onto the shoulder. He was able to control the car well enough to bring it to a stop a few hundred feet down the road. As he sat in the car, breathing hard and fast, his heart pounding against his chest like an angry fist, he realized the car was listing forward and to the left.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said in a voice that bordered on a scream. “Who the hell gets flat tires, anymore?”<
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  He rolled down his window and stuck his head out into the storm to inspect the damage. As he’d feared, the front left tire was little more than a shredded black rubber husk.

  He quickly fell back into his seat, his head already cold and wet from the storm, and rolled up the window. After a moment’s reflection upon his situation … he began pounding on the steering wheel with both hands.

  “Why did I agree to a Japanese car?” he cried. “Why didn’t I hold out for made in the U.S.A.?”

  He slammed his fists against the wheel for several more seconds. When they began to ache, he tucked his battered hands under his armpits and rocked back and forth in his seat.

  He wasn’t so much upset about the car as he was about having to change the flat. While he detested driving in bad weather, he was absolutely terrified by the prospect of having to step out onto the highway. After all, the side of a major highway was a dangerous enough place at the best of times. In the dark, and in the middle of a snow storm, stepping out of the car would be like thumbing your nose at the Grim Reaper.

  Again, Darryl thought about how much safer it was to fly.

  He glanced at his watch. If he changed the tire in less than thirty minutes, he might still make the dinner in time for dessert. It would make a great entrance, he thought. I’d have a great story to tell, too. Wouldn’t hurt to show them all how dedicated to the company I am, either … provided I don’t get killed out on the highway.

  The last thought made him shudder.

  He did his best to clear it from his mind, then buttoned his trenchcoat and wrapped his silk scarf tightly around his neck. He picked his gloves off the seat next to him and slipped them on, then flipped up the collar of his coat to protect the back of his neck from the wind and snow.

  He had no hat. And his black loafers would be little more than house slippers in the heavy wet snow that had piled up on the highway’s shoulder, but they’d have to do.

  After taking a deep breath to strengthen his resolve, he shut off the engine. He searched a moment for the control for the car’s hazard lights, then switched them on. He listened to the lights tink on and off for several seconds, then pulled his gloves tight on his hands, and got out of the car.

  He was immediately hit by a sharp blast of cold. It pierced his coat and clothes as if they weren’t even there, and the snow collected on his head and shoulders like a bad case of dandruff.

  Doing his best to ignore the cold’s bite, and the fear that was rising up within his chest, Darryl started toward the back of the car.

  He was halfway there when the ear-splitting blast of a gas horn suddenly ripped through the air like a dull knife blade. Darryl looked up … and saw the lights.

  It took him a moment to realize there was a semi-trailer heading straight for him. He tried to move out of the way, but his shoes slipped on the snow and he fell to the ground. By the time he was back on his feet, the truck was on him. He dove toward the car, landing on the trunk lid.

  The truck roared past as quickly as it had come and before Darryl could get off the car and back onto his feet, it was gone.

  For a few moments, Darryl’s whole body trembled, so numbed with shock that he no longer felt the cold. Then, with each snowflake that fell on his body, the trembling eased and the cold crept back in, masking his fear like an icy blanket and prodding him to carry on.

  With his heartbeat settling down into a heavy thud, he lifted the trunk lid. Although it was dark inside the trunk, and he was unfamiliar with the placing of the spare and its jack, he was able to find them both fairly quickly.

  He set the spare up against the car’s rear bumper, then looked back down the highway for the longest time. Confident it was safe, he carried the jack around front. Then being careful not to kneel on the snow-covered highway, he placed a gloved hand on the ground to support himself and tried to slide the jack into place behind the ruined left front tire. After several tries, Darryl realized there was no delicate way to change the tire. His coat was already wet and it was obvious that everything else he was wearing would be drenched by the time he was done. “To hell with it,” he said, and lowered both knees down onto the dirty brown snow.

  He elevated the jack until it was tight between the car and the ground, then set about removing the tire’s four lug nuts.

  As he worked on the first nut, he felt wetness creeping up his pant leg, spreading the cold and damp evenly to every part of his body. Snowflakes fell onto the back of his neck, melting instantly upon contact with his warm skin and sending ice-water trickling down his back.

  A shiver ran the length of Darryl’s spine. When the shiver reached the base of his skull, he began thinking about all of the things that could happen to him while he changed the tire by the side of the highway.

  He remembered hearing about a guy who got killed by a spare tire that had fallen off a semi-trailer. The guy was changing a flat by the side of the road when he got creamed by this huge spare tire rolling down the highway at fifty miles an hour. The guy didn’t see it coming and never knew what hit him.

  Darryl suddenly felt incredibly vulnerable, almost naked against the fierce, chill wind. He shook off a shiver and got back to work on the tire, unscrewing the first nut, putting it in his pocket, and setting to work on the second.

  Then he remembered another story about a guy who got killed by a hubcap that had come off a 1985 Buick doing seventy-five on the interstate. The guy had heard the hubcap rattling down the highway at him and turned to take a look. Then, while the guy’s wife and two kids sat in the car watching, the thing hit a bump in the road, became airborne and just about sliced the guy’s head in two.

  He adjusted his scarf and the collar of his coat, nervously pulling them tight around his cold, wet neck.

  He unscrewed the second nut, put it in his pocket along with the first and began working on the third. For a few moments it wouldn’t move, then ever-so-slowly it began to turn.

  As he loosened the nut, he remembered hearing about people stopped by the side of the road who’d been mowed down by truck drivers asleep at the wheel. One woman in Quebec, he recalled, had been dragged along for half a mile before the driver even heard her screaming.

  Despite the cold, Darryl felt himself sweating beneath his clothes. He took a quick glance over his shoulder at the highway behind him. He couldn’t see a thing. The falling snow was like an impenetrable white veil drawn across the road. But he did hear a jet flying high above the storm and guessed he was closer to Detroit than he realized, at least close enough to be along the airport’s flight path. Again, he wished he were up there, sitting in a warm and comfortable first-class seat where his most difficult task would be deciding which wine he preferred with his meal—the red or the white.

  “Fuck it!” he said.

  He unscrewed the third nut, dropped it into his pocket, and began working on the fourth and final nut.

  After several seconds it became apparent that the nut refused to budge.

  “There’s always got to be one!” he shouted, swinging the tire iron against the wheel in frustration. “And it always has to be the last one!’Doesn’t it?”

  The question went unanswered. His words were torn from his lips and immediately carried away by the wind.

  “Doesn’t it?”

  He pounded the tire iron against the wheel a few more times before standing up to take a break. He looked up and down the highway, and saw nothing but darkness and falling snow. He heard another jet overhead, this one closer. Maybe the storm’s easing up, he thought, shaking his head in misery.

  He knelt down and attacked the last nut with renewed vigor. He grabbed the tire iron with both hands, and lifted with as much leverage and force as he could muster.

  Crack!

  The nut moved slightly, then again and again until it was loose and spinning freely.

  “Thank you!” he sighed under his breath.

  Before he removed the nut, Darryl jacked up the car until the flat tire was several inch
es off the ground. Then he unscrewed the final nut, placed it in his pocket and removed the tire.

  He glanced at his watch. He was making excellent time. He just might make the dinner in time for the main course.

  For the first time since he stepped onto the highway, he was able to relax.

  He carried the flat tire to the trunk and threw it inside. He began rolling the spare towards the front of the car, but after a couple of revolutions the wheel wobbled wildly to the left and rolled out into the middle of the highway.

  As the tire fell onto its side and fluttered like a quarter at the end of its roll across a table top, Darryl’s eyes opened wide and his jaw fell slack. “I don’t fucking believe it!” he screamed, pressing his open hands against the side of his head. “What else can go wrong?”

  He stood silent for a few seconds, seriously thinking about getting back into the car, turning on the heater and waiting out the storm.

  But he knew he couldn’t.

  If someone ran over the spare tire lying in the middle of the highway, he’d be up on all sorts of charges of criminal negligence causing bodily harm, maybe even death. And even if he could wait out the storm inside the car, how long would it be until help arrived? Or until a snow plow came along and pushed the car over the shoulder and into the ditch?

  The thought of it made Darryl’s knees weak. He became aware of how wet and heavy his clothes had become and began to feel faint. He wrapped his arms tightly around his body, then let them fall to his sides in defeat.

  There was no way around it. He’d have to venture out into the middle of the highway to retrieve the tire.

  Reluctantly, he looked down the highway, squinting his eyes in an attempt to penetrate the snow-shrouded night.

  He couldn’t see anything but snowflakes and darkness.