Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  So as he made his way back to the kitchen, Simon reassured himself that he’d gotten his money’s worth out of the coral with Gloria. And as for that pitiful creature crawling across the kitchen floor, dragging her legs behind her? Useless—that was a good word for her. Blame it on the disease—knowing that she was dying anyway rendered her unfit for the game.

  But there was always Pender’s game. Pender would make it all worthwhile, thought Simon, striding across the room and dragging Linda back from the counter—she was trying to pull herself up, probably hoping to climb through the tiny window over the sink. She turned, raked at his face with blunt and bitten nails. He caught her wrists, bent her arms back, leveraged her down to her knees.

  “Do you know what I’m going to do to you?” he asked, kneeling in front of her, looking into her eyes. He saw white-hot anger, but not a blessèd trace of fear.

  “No, and I don’t give a rat’s ass,” she said. She’d have spat in his face, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of watching her trying to work up some saliva.

  “I’m going to let you live,” he said quietly. “I’m going to make you watch while I blind your friend Pender—slowly, one eye at a time—and then I’m going to let you both live.”

  “We’ll dance on your grave,” Linda snarled back. “If I have to lead him there and he has to hold me up, we’ll dance on your fucking grave.”

  10

  Darkness. Smell of dank cement, old brick and old timbers, damp cardboard and laundry soap, and the faintest whiff of decay from the far corners, the unexplored reaches of the cellar where generations of rodent corpses had long since crumbled to dust.

  Linda was lying on her side with her hands behind her back and her wrists tied to her ankles with a length of clothesline; Childs had gagged her with the belt of her flannel bathrobe. She could hear a television overhead, somewhere off to her right. Sounded like Childs was listening to CNN.

  Linda held her breath, straining to make out the words. Media coverage, she knew, was a two-edged sword for law enforcement in these situations—every piece of information broadcast to warn the public would likewise inform the fugitive. So if the arson investigators had figured out that the body in 5-B wasn’t Childs, he would learn it along with everybody else. Then she could expect footsteps descending the basement steps, a bright light piercing the darkness, the resounding boom of a Colt.45 in an enclosed space.

  On the other hand, if they still hadn’t discovered that Childs was alive, there wasn’t much hope of anybody calling to check on her. So either way, Linda told herself, she was screwed. And unless she could think of something between now and tomorrow afternoon, so was Pender.

  After the big story—double murder in Georgetown, six dead in Atlantic City, including the fugitive serial killer—the sports came on. Something about the Redskins. In this day and age, how could you call a sports team the Redskins? It was not only demeaning, thought Simon indignantly, it was inaccurate. Native Americans were no more red than Gloria was yellow. She was ivory, that’s what she was. Beautiful antique ivory.

  Thinking about Gloria, Simon felt a stab of regret. Not over killing her, but over losing her. Naked, terrified, pliant, in the bed or in the bath, she’d been his, completely and entirely his—a relationship like that, you just naturally miss it when it’s over.

  Simon switched off the bedroom TV, lay back on Pender’s bed. Underneath the gloss of the dexedrine he was dull and exhausted—he hadn’t slept since Wednesday morning—but whether exhaustion would be soporific enough for someone with a snootful of crosstops and a history of sleep disorders was highly questionable.

  On the other hand, he didn’t want to knock himself out with one of his few remaining Halwanes. It seemed unlikely that in the space of three hours the cops would not only figure out he was still alive, but trace him here as well—but if they did come, he didn’t want to be taken while he slept. Not without a fight—and not alive, either.

  But he did have one of Zap’s Ecstasy capsules left. He swallowed it dry, and while waiting for it to take effect he kept the blind rat away by thinking about the upcoming game. Pender’s game. Searching the house earlier, after stowing Skairdykat in the cellar, Simon had learned that the information he’d failed to extract from her had been right in front of his nose the whole time, or at least the whole time they were in the kitchen. A note, stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a banana: P: United 970, dep SFO 7:50a, Thu, 10/28—arr Dul, 4:07 p.

  Four-oh-seven. Simon went over it in his head again. Dulles wasn’t that far over the Virginia border. If the flight was on time, if Pender didn’t check his baggage and the traffic wasn’t horrendous, then the earliest he’d be arriving would be five; five-thirty or six more likely. Still daylight. Simon would wait inside—the vestibule would screen him from Pender.

  But if for some unforeseen reason Pender decided to go around, to enter the house via the back porch, there was no cover in the living room—Simon would have to hide in that first bedroom and wait for him there. Either way, the Colt would be cocked and ready. If Pender ignored the order to freeze, Simon would kneecap him; if he obeyed it, Simon would secure him—the man was a cop: there had to be a pair of cuffs around here someplace—and the game would begin.

  The only other question was whether to bring Skairdykat upstairs or Pender down to the cellar. Simon decided to play that by ear. Or by eye, he thought with a chuckle. Then we’ll see who dances on whose grave.

  11

  The natural habitat of the eastern coral snake is varied, from scrublands to woodlands to swamp verges, but the species is rarely found north of the thirty-fifth parallel: they don’t much care for cold. And this particular individual had been born and raised under the lights of the reptilarium: he or she had no yearning for the wide open spaces, not when there was food under the house.

  The coral had never hunted before, but neither had it ever been hungry before. (The instinct was programmed, anyway—nature’s plan for reptiles didn’t involve Mommy or Daddy Snake spending a lot of quality time with the young’uns, teaching them how to fend.) The mice under Pender’s house were well fed (everything in Pender’s house but the ficus in the living room was well fed) and had never been hunted by anything as fast and deadly as a coral snake before. Mus musculus v. Micrurus fulvius fulvius wasn’t much of a contest.

  Afterward, another programmed instinct kicked in, a thermal tropism: find warmth. The warmest place in the cold cellar was on the floor between the furnace and the water heater, but no sooner had the coral settled down than the thermostat on the furnace kicked in with a full-throated, percussive roar even a deaf snake could feel.

  Once again, nurture affected nature’s plan. The coral had been raised, and more important, fed, by humans; it had no fear of them—quite the opposite. And the next warmest place in the cold cellar was across the room, next to the human. For all the snake knew, there might even be more food by the human, after the mouse had been digested. And perhaps there was also a conditioned reflex at work: this human smelled like coffee; coffee was the first thing the coral smelled every morning when the humans arrived to turn on the warm lights, and feed it, and clean its cage.

  Or maybe it was just lonely. If snakes even get lonely—they are among the most difficult of creatures to anthropomorphize. It was true, though, that this one had never lived alone—never even been alone until the scarlet king had made good its escape. And even if the coral didn’t crave a companion, it certainly wasn’t averse to one that smelled like coffee and pumped out heat at a steady 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Humans are not without instincts of their own. The coral didn’t make any noise, it didn’t give off any warmth, and it wasn’t actually touching her skin, only her wool bathrobe, but Linda sensed its presence. She wanted to crawl away, but it had taken her too long to achieve her current position, lying on her side, her knees drawn up in front of her as far as the rope permitted, with a jagged-edged chunk of brick behind her, wedged into
place between the wall and her bound wrists.

  But humans, as opposed to snakes, can talk themselves into going against their instincts. Linda told herself it was nothing—nothing!—and went back to sawing at the rope. It was hard work, with barely perceptible progress—she could saw for only a minute or so at a time, then had to rest her arms and shoulders for an equal period of time.

  During one of these rest periods the nothing! squirmed more tightly against her, until it was an undeniable something. If Linda hadn’t just had an up-close-and-personal encounter with the coral, it would have taken her much longer to identify just what that something was, pressing against her so quietly and insistently. Instead, a concrete visual image came to her sight-starved mind almost immediately. The black snout, the flickering tongue, the round pupils, the muscular writhing beneath the shiny tricolored bands. She moaned into her fuzzy flannel gag—but only once, and softly, before her sense of humor, or at least irony, came into play. What’s next? she asked herself. What’s fucking next, the thuggees of Kali?

  Linda had drawn back in spite of herself. The rope tautened against the brick; the coral wriggled closer. To her surprise, Linda found its presence at least tolerable.

  She had been afraid of snakes her whole life, she really had—Gloria had been with her the day their anthro class came all the way up to the Bronx Zoo primarily to see the primates (the other primates, their instructor had emphasized), when Linda had passed out at the door of the reptile house—but she was afraid of them no longer. Must have worked through it when Childs was thrusting the coral into her face. She’d read about that happening, on phobia.com.

  Flooding, they called it: the most extreme and successful form of counterphobic programming. And of course some good old-fashioned information hadn’t hurt: Childs said it hadn’t wanted to bite Gloria; and it certainly hadn’t bitten her even when she yanked it violently from Childs’s grasp.

  But even if she wasn’t in any real danger from this serpent, Linda reminded herself, there was still the other snake, the human one, pacing the floor directly overhead. Quickly she went back to work. Freeing her hands might not help—she was still weaponless—but it sure wouldn’t hurt.

  Then it struck her—she wasn’t weaponless. Or rather, she wouldn’t be, if only she could get her hands free before Childs returned for her, or before the coral slithered away, whichever came first.

  12

  Simon hadn’t thought about Halloween since he’d bought the masks for his game with Dorie a week and a half ago. But unable to sleep, and with the blind rat closing in on him, he wandered into the living room, poked up the fire, and channel-surfed the larger TV there until he found a pre-Halloween-weekend-horror-thon on one of the Turner channels. Cat People, with Simone Simon—“She was marked with the curse of those who slink and court and kill by night!”—was just ending and Curse of the Cat People, the quasi-sequel, was about to come on. A real stinker, as Simon remembered it from the Horror Club days. No curse, no cat people—it hadn’t even scared Nervous Nellie.

  The film proved to be a lot more enjoyable on Ecstasy, but not good enough to stay awake through. Eventually exhaustion and serotonin trumped the crosstops: Simon fell asleep in the Barcalounger. Not surprisingly, Nelson featured prominently in his dream. They were kids again—or kids still, however it works in dreams. They were bicycling through Tilden Park, as they often had. Nelson skidded to a stop, pointed to something in the bushes by the side of the trail. It was a body. A man’s body, nude, face-down. Nelson ran away, leaving Simon alone with the body. Simon wanted to run away, too, but he knew somehow that Grandfather Childs was waiting at the head of the trail—he’d get a beating if he went running out like that scaredy-cat Nelson. He rolled the body over, brushed the mud, the damp leaves and clinging leaf mold, from the face.

  “Who’s that?” Grandfather Childs had somehow materialized, and was standing over him.

  “It’s Nelson, sir,” said Simon. “That’s what he looks like now.” Simon had also turned into his present, grown-up, self, and the body was now in the tub of the master bathroom of 2500.

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Sort of. Sir.” An adult now, Simon was no longer cowed by the old man—he just wanted to show him how he could do everything by the book.

  “Sort me no sort of s, boy. You either did or you did not.”

  “Indirectly, sir. I glued him to the bathtub, but he turned on the water by himself.”

  “Going to bury him in the basement with the others?”

  “You know about the others?”

  “Of course I know about the others. Don’t be stupid. And, boy?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “While you’re at it, dig yourself a hole this time.”

  “I’ll see you in H E double L first,” said Simon.

  “Yes,” said the old man in the dream. “Most likely you will.”

  In the basement, Linda was sure he’d left the horror movies on to torment her. The screams, the spooky organ music—it had to have been deliberate.

  But it was also pointless. What kind of wusses does he take us for? she asked the coral, rhetorically. By now, she was as glad for its companionship as it seemed to be for hers, and as she went back to sawing at the rope binding her wrists, she would have been willing to stake her life—she was, in fact, staking her life—that at this point in their relationship, the coral was no more likely to bite her than she was to bite it.

  By morning, however, that would all change.

  Tinsman’s Lock

  1

  A cold snap had swept in overnight; when the breeze came up just before dawn, Simon could hear the brittle autumn leaves whispering to each other. A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand tiny conversations, all on the same subject: frost coming, death, a great falling.

  Until then, enjoy the show, thought Simon, standing on the back porch with a blanket drawn over his bare shoulders. And what a show it was: the sun rising behind him; the dew sparkling on the brightly colored leaves and the grass, and turning even the cobwebs into strings of diamonds; the sunlight glinting off the still, dark green water of the canal; the dawn mist rising.

  But on his way back into the house, Simon was startled from his reverie by the sight of a reflection in the glass door: tottering toward him, clutching a blanket around its shoulders like a refugee, was an unshaven, haggard scarecrow with eyes like two pee-holes in the snow. He winked at it; Grandfather Childs winked back. Shaken, Simon reached for the door handle; so did Grandfather Childs.

  * * *

  The last strands of the rope parted around dawn. There were no windows in the cellar, no visible cracks in the plank flooring overhead, but enough light had seeped in from somewhere for Linda to be able to make out the outline of the coral. Thank you, God, she whispered: of all the factors beyond Linda’s control over the course of the long night—the cold, the thirst, the pain, basically everything except the fear and the endless sawing—the one she’d spent the most time talking to God about was the coral. Please, God, let it be there when I’m ready.

  And it was, coiled loosely and still sound asleep, to all appearances. Maybe it’s hibernating, she told herself hopefully, as she drew her right arm from behind her back, slowly, so as not to alert the snake, and in stages, because that’s the only way her stiff, sore shoulder would move. Maybe it’s hibernating and it will just lie there all day.

  Yeah, right. Hope springs eternal. For your fucking throat. Frankly, Linda wasn’t sure whether the feat she had in mind could be accomplished even by a strong, healthy individual, but she was relatively certain that her chance of grasping the coral behind the head and hanging on to it until Childs returned was better than the chance that it would remain where it was.

  As she waited for feeling and mobility to return to her right hand and arm—the fingertips of the left were an uncomfortable combination of numb and pins-and-needles—Linda thought about all the ways this could go bad on her. She’d seen how fast the coral could
move; she knew she’d only get the one shot at it. If she missed, it would certainly escape; if she grasped it incorrectly, it might turn on her. She thought of Gloria. Unimaginable, to die that way, in pain, alone, gasping for air.

  And even if she grasped it correctly, how long would she be able to hold on? If it were angry, if it thrashed in her grip? If she fell asleep, if her attention wavered for a—

  No! She caught herself. This is where you came in, Abrootz. You can go around on that merry-go-round until Childs comes for you, or you can grab the bull by the, I mean the snake first catch the snake then worry about holding on to it but what if oh fuck just do it you sound like a Nike ad just do it oh fuck oh fuck oh—

  2

  One thing about insomnia: it made getting up at four-thirty in the morning seem like the lesser of two evils.

  Despite her threat, Dorie had let Pender sleep. She also let him drive—all she had to do was shift the lever into “R,” then into “D” once they were out of the driveway, and it was beddy-bye in the backseat for Dorie; he wouldn’t need her again until they turned the car in at the airport.

  Pender didn’t miss the conversation. Instead of turning on the radio, Pender went over the Childs case in his mind as he drove. Still unaware of the events of the previous evening, he was trying to put himself in Childs’s place. Where does he go when he leaves Concord? A man with his money, wouldn’t Childs have bought himself a hideaway somewhere? Possibly in another country. Mexico was closest, of course. Canada, however, was more reluctant to extradite prisoners who faced the death penalty.