The Book of Common Dread

by Brent Monahan

  "Rich's last name?"

  "I don't know."

  DeVilbiss mastered his urge to slap her but could not resist sarcasm. "For someone who is such a good friend to you, you know very little about Simon, don't you?"

  "Yes," Frederika admitted. She seemed to think about the meaning behind his words, found the task too taxing and gave up.

  DeVilbiss sighed. He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat, looking up at Frederika, who stood before him like a schoolchild awaiting discipline. "What Christmas present did Simon buy for his father?"

  For a moment Frederika's eyes went wide and blank, and DeVilbiss feared that Penn had somehow tricked him. Then she said, "A fishing reel. Flycasting reel."

  DeVilbiss merely nodded. His awareness centered instead on the image before him, the angelic-looking woman standing so defenselessly, waiting for his next order. She had not bothered to apply makeup, which only emphasized her natural beauty. Lynn Gellman's near-nude body the night before had ignited his libido. His loins ached for a release that would, at least temporarily, lobotomize him of his fears and frustrations. He sought to mask his impotence over destroying the scrolls with an act of sexual vehemence.

  "Come closer," Vincent commanded. Frederika's eyes narrowed, as if in mistrust. "Come closer I said!" Vincent repeated. When she had, he slid his hands under her skirt and ran them up the outsides of her thighs, luxuriating in the feel of the firm flesh beneath the sensual nylon.

  "Take off your panty hose and panties," he whispered.

  Frederika's hands stayed at her side. The blade of her tongue rose slowly to the roof of her mouth, as if to say "no," but, locked in the hypnotic stare of DeVilbiss's amber eyes, she obeyed in silence.

  Standing, Vincent removed his shirt, unbuckled his belt, opened his trouser clasp and pulled down his zipper. He sat again. "Sit on my lap," he directed.

  "No," Frederika said, in a small, unsure voice.

  Vincent's hand flashed out and grabbed her belt and the top of her skirt. To his surprise, her reaction was almost as quick, taking his hand in both of hers and wrestling with it. As he pulled toward her, she pulled back with astonishing strength. Vincent had forgotten that she now had several doses of elixir coursing through her. With his free hand, he delivered a powerful backhand to her face, stunning her. He ripped her skirt up to her belt and pulled her down onto his lap, so that she straddled him.

  Frederika's hands rose together and descended on his back, raking his flesh with her nails. He screamed in pain as he found both arms and pinioned them behind her back. Then he managed to grab her hair and hold her head steady long enough to catch her eyes with his. She blinked once, then stopped struggling.

  "You will never speak to your father without me," he told her, in a calm voice. "Without me, you will be lost forever. Do you understand?"

  After a long moment, she told him that she did.

  "You need to go into a deeper level of rest. Watch my eyes and relax. You need to find peace. Relax. You will listen to every word I say and obey. Do you understand?"

  Eyelids half lowered, Frederika assured him.

  "Good. Now prove it to me. Move closer!" He sighed with pleasure at her contact. "Now move back and forth, slowly. Good girl, good." Her body and motion were so stimulating that he forgot the continuing pain across his back. Vincent was oblivious to the knowledge that the parallel tracks of claw marks had not only just begun to close, but that blood continued to ooze from the wounds. A week earlier, such scratches would have nearly vanished in the same time.

  Vincent took Frederika's exquisite but blank face lightly in his hands, leaned forward and offered his mouth. Just as she had done on both identical occasions, she averted her lips and nuzzled his ear and the angle of his jaw.

  "You little vixen," Vincent said. Despite being subjected to his most potent hypnotic trance, she still managed to exert some will of her own. He determined to test his will over her, and to learn the reason why she so forcefully and cunningly avoided kissing on the lips. He also wanted the sex to last more than a few strokes. To divert his arousal, he began an intermittent interrogation, to expose not only the cause of her sexual quirkiness but also the secret reasons she had for seeking his alleged necromantic skills. While he hardened and wriggled himself inch by inch inside her, she regressed to the age of five, and the long-closed floodgates were opened. He struggled to expose her innermost thoughts chronologically, but her memories had no order of time. Six and sixteen were stitched side by side by misery and the same haunting, unanswered question. She was becoming again the only child whose parents were so often away and, even when at home, distant from her. She revealed from her child's perspective an uninterrupted stream of primal thoughts: how all too infrequently her handsome father whom everyone obviously loved paid her attention, stroking her hair, hugging her tightly, rubbing her bottom, telling her that she must not kiss others on the lips because of germs but that she could kiss only him since he was her Daddy and she was exactly like him and they shared the same good germs and praised her to the heavens whenever strangers came to parties at their house and other times shoved her peevishly from his study because he had so many important things to do for other children of the world who needed him just as much and screamed at her when she forgot as she frequently did and ran or sang enthusiastically through the house and teased her at breakfast but was never there at night to tuck her in, how her mother tried to hug her often but proved her true self by letting her be stubborn and whiny and willful and capricious and even a thrower of tantrums and a liar, never caring enough to scold or discipline her for her own good, protesting her love for her but always away when she was sick or frightened of lightning and then finally going away for good without even saying good-bye, proving absolutely her nonlove and then, not long afterward, her father telling her that her mother had died and her trying desperately to be good so that her father wouldn't also abandon her so that she would be like Oliver Twist or Heidi or Little Orphan Annie and wanting to hurl herself at her father's knees each time he prepared for a trip, wanting to beg him to take her along but holding it all inside for fear that her whining would drive him away for good like her mother, and when she misbehaved or failed to get a lesson perfect or committed unknown sins which upset her father how he invariably would sigh and say, "No wonder your mother left."

  By the time Frederika had revealed this much, tears streamed down her face, tiny jewels of liquid that made her all the more vulnerable. Vincent could no longer use his questions and her answers to damp his excitement. Circling her back with his forearms, he swung around and deposited her atop the table, stoking furiously into her the instant her weight was supported, sawing back and forth until he was a blur between her bent-back legs, screaming out his climax with abandon and collapsing over her motionless body. When he had regained his breath, he withdrew and cleaned himself with her panties, coaxed her off the table with silent pressure, and placed her standing again before him.

  While he recovered, DeVilbiss guided Frederika back in remembrance. Now, however, her words did not cascade out, but slowed from unending run-on phrases to sounder, discrete sentences. Her body had showed no signs of pleasure during the sex, and yet it seemed as if her mind had experienced a climactic release. She talked on, answering his questions, anticipating them, moving past, but not with the previous urgency. Her eyes were wide, as if she beheld some natural marvel.

  Whenever her father was upset, Frederika repeated slowly, he would invariably sigh and say, "No wonder your mother left," but he never answered what it was about herself that caused her mother and father to act as they had. Her father refused to specify what had ultimately driven her mother away. She spoke deliberately and repeatedly about his words, recalling instance after instance of their use, until DeVilbiss realized that the mystery of her innate and unforgivable infant failings had become a pathetic idee fixe. Finally, in her thirteenth year, she weighed the prospects of loss against insanity and confronted her father, demanding to know
what was wrong with her or what she had done and forgotten that both drove her mother away and made him so harsh and demanding with her. She demanded to know what it was about her that forced him to periodic flight, so that he would not have to leave her forever. He replied that he left her only because of his job and that her difficult nature was something too complicated and technical to explain to a girl just entering adolescence. Instead, he promised faithfully to explain it all three years hence, when she had matured to her sixteenth birthday. Then he had promptly punished her effrontery by packing her off to a private school in Switzerland. He completed her punishment twelve months later by keeling over from a swift, fatal heart attack, fully two years before fulfilling his promise, leaving her spirit and mind imprisoned by an endlessly playing subconscious loop that told her she was fundamentally unworthy of love even from the two people on earth who should by all laws of nature have loved her simply because she was theirs. She spoke in flat, inflectionless tones, mirroring the void she felt. She despaired of joy, found no comfort in the men she conquered with her body and mind and no courage to attempt a platonic friendship, had despaired for so many years that she determined either to rend open the curtain dividing this sphere and the afterworld and demand of her father his answers or, failing that, to commit suicide and confront him face to face.

  "And this is why you want me to reach your father," DeVilbiss said.

  Frederika stared off into space, even though she looked directly into his eyes. "Yes."

  "Enough!" DeVilbiss commanded. His expression was a grimace of distaste. Frederika's eyes and nose were bright pink from the truths she had unburied. Tears still weaved down her cheeks along well-laid channels. He tossed the panties on the table. "Bring me a glass of water, a teaspoon, and that jar filled with yellow powder. Be careful with the jar! And don't say another word! I'm tired of hearing you speak." Vincent had made too many mistakes already; he was not about to have Frederika make some innocent remark about the powder looking exactly like the stuff she was taking, in case Piccolo Niccolo dared daylight and listened as invisible voyeur. He scooped up the panty hose from the floor to clear her path to him, dropping them beside the panties. Frederika set the glass, the spoon, and the jar in front of DeVilbiss. He thumbed the stopper out of the jar.

  DeVilbiss sighed dramatically. "Poor Frederika. Such a difficult youth. You've been seriously damaged. Quel dommage!" He chuckled at his pun. He turned and faced Frederika, who remained obediently silent. He rubbed his forefinger back and forth across her barely parted lips, shaking his head with a grave expression as he did. "Looking at this perfect facade, who would believe how tragically flawed the masterpiece is? But we'll get those scrolls and make it all better, won't we?" He glanced at the wall clock. Ten minutes until Simon Penn called again. "Come with me, ma belle," he beckoned seductively, taking her by the hand when she failed to move. There was just enough time to take care of her before he concluded, revitalized, the bloody business of destroying the scrolls.

  ***

  "That's all of it," Simon told Rich. He sat on the edge of the grad student's unmade bed, staring at the obliterated pattern in the oriental rug under his feet. "Now tell me I'm crazy."

  Rich spat the gum he had been clacking for almost an hour in the direction of the trash basket. It struck a book, a landing place almost assured, since the tiny garret apartment was stuffed from floor to ceiling with reading materials, the sort that spoke in the international language of equations. The few areas of free wall space were covered with posters demanding democracy in mainland China and the famous photograph of the lone Chinese man defying the line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Although he was Amerasian and born in the United States, Rich had a vocal affinity for his ancestral homeland. Everything but the bed, the posters, and the photo was coated with a layer of dust, and everything seemed-despite the torrid dryness of the attic rooms-to be stuck together. Rich adored his squalor.

  "The guy who's crazy is this DeVilbiss," Rich declared. "Maybe he's deluded himself into thinking he's the real vampire from that British book. What he really is is a dangerous man… maybe a killer. He obviously thinks he can force you to help him steal some priceless scrolls by kidnapping your friend, and that's bad enough without bringing the supernatural into it. I'm a scientist, ferchrissake; I can't believe in anything like that."

  Simon picked Willy's translation off the bed and handed it to Rich. "Okay. Well, do me this favor anyway." He dug into his wallet and pulled out two twenty-dollar bills. "Make several sets of photocopies. I don't have the time to dope out who should read them. You'll have to do that. Just mail off a bunch, to philologists, archeologists, people serious about the supernatural and the occult. But make sure one copy goes to Reverend Spencer's superior. I know you're a scientist, but try your best to write a cogent letter of explanation. Will you do all that?"

  "Sure," Rich said, although he looked perplexed.

  Having gotten one concession, Simon said, "I need something else from you."

  The slight, bespectacled physicist set the translation on top of a pile of papers and folded his arms. "What?"

  "In case this guy turns out to be a real monster, I need a surefire way to destroy him. Willy Spencer told me point blank he might not survive the holidays, and he didn't."

  Rich grimaced. "You're willing to murder this guy, on the possibility he's a vampire?"

  "Whatever he is," Simon affirmed, "he needs stopping."

  The physicist scrunched up his face. "No way. I can't help you murder somebody. For one thing, I'm your friend; for the other, I might become an accessory."

  Simon glanced at his watch. "Look, I'm gonna call him in a few minutes and arrange a meeting. Nine chances out often he'll be able to explain the weird stuff."

  "Ten out often," Rich said.

  "I hope so. We've got three minutes to kill. Let's see just how good a physicist you are. Purely hypothetically, if you were faced by a vampire how would you destroy it?"

  Rich signaled his acceptance of the challenge by removing his glasses. "You said 'surefire.' Well… supernatural or not, if he operates in this world he's gotta be subject to physical laws. I'd do him in with thermodynamics."

  "Specifically?"

  "Trap him in a confined space and drop a thermite bomb on him… you know, powdered aluminum and iron oxide. Toss a match and it'll reach a couple thousand degrees in a wink. Flambe the fucker."

  "You're more dangerous than you look. But, just for argument's sake, let's say you could only trap him in a place too valuable to jeopardize with flame. Someplace like Firestone Library."

  "Okay. Then opt for the other extreme: lower his temperature until he crystallizes. You've seen what happens to rubber balls when they're immersed in liquid nitrogen? I'd bathe him in seventy-eight degrees Kelvin for a minute, then whack him with a tire iron and watch him turn into ice cubes."

  Simon stood to stretch his legs, moving to the unapologetically filthy window that looked through a barren oak's branches onto a junkheap of a backyard. "Where do you get liquid nitrogen?" he asked, noting through the window the brutal effects of mere natural cold.

  "You couldn't. But I can. We've got several tanks of it down in the fabrication labs."

  "Are they portable?"

  "Well, sort of. They're heavy, but they're on dollies."

  "But how would you get one out?"

  Rich laughed. He brought his hands down from behind his neck and began gesticulating. He was evidently warming to his own idea. "Are you kidding? Security in the main part of the building is tight, but there's so much going on in the labs at all hours, loading in and out, that the emergency doors are propped open half the time. We let the alarms clang on and on. Campus Security treats us like the boys who cried wolf."

  "It's time to call him," Simon said, unburying the telephone. Rich fixed his attention in a bird-dog attitude while Simon dialed.

  "Vincent DeVilbiss," the plummy voice answered.

  "What's the gift?" Simon asked. />
  "A fishing reel. Flycasting, I believe. Satisfied?"

  "For the time being," Simon answered. "Now, let me understand this with absolute clarity: all you want are the scrolls."

  "What I want is to meet with you in person," DeVilbiss said, pointedly. "No more telephone talk."

  "Then we'd better meet soon," Simon told him. "The library closes tighter than a drum at five o'clock. Nobody but security gets inside after that."

  "I've been outside far too much of late," DeVilbiss said. "The closest place you'd feel safe with me is the Catholic church at the top of my street."

  "St. Paul's. When?"

  "As soon as possible."

  "Ten minutes," Simon answered. "But I warn you: I won't have my key with me."

  "Ten minutes," DeVilbiss confirmed. "You alone. No hidden microphones either. If you involve the police, this will end unhappily for both of us." He disconnected.

  Simon put down the phone and reached for his coat.

  "I think you're wrong, man," Rich said. "I'd call in the cops and let them sweat where Frederika is out of him."

  "Maybe after the meeting. In the meantime, would you get those copies made?"

  "Right." Rich rose from his chair, then hesitated and looked sheepish. "Uh… I haven't been able to find the keys to my truck. Did you return that second set?"

  "Sure. I put them on the windowsill a couple of days ago."

  Rich got down on his knees and began searching through the rubble. "One of them's got to be here."

  Simon slipped silently out the door.

  ***

  St. Paul's pews were empty, but the church reverberated richly with the harmonies of sixteen singers, rehearsing Palestrina's Missa Hodie Christus natus est from the choir loft. A cherubic altar boy moved confidently around the ornate apse, replacing the candles for the Christmas Eve Masses.

  Vincent waited in the shadows at the rear of the nave. His forefinger swished idly over the surface of the holy water filling a wall niche stone basin. His eyes moved not at all, riveted on the ten-foot-high wooden Christ on the central cross. His mind's eye focused on the even larger marble statue of St. Paul just outside the narthex. All the old saints' true features having been lost to the ages, Vincent had observed that their sculpted countenances took on a beatific sameness. And yet, eerily, the stone face of St. Paul looked identical to that of the St. Joseph that had spoken to him in the Vatican, as if in seeing this second sculpture he had finally come full circle. He assumed that this unnerving coincidence was responsible for the cold sweat he found himself bathed in.