Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  And Miles.

  With a hollow feeling in my chest, I pan my eyes across the room. The scattered junk looks indigenous to my office, much of it stuff I’ve sworn a dozen times to throw out, then kept for no defensible reason. But something must not fit this picture.

  There. On the right side of the EROS computer table lies a photo album that belongs in the den with all the other albums Drewe meticulously maintains. But this is no ordinary family album. It’s a portfolio from Erin’s modeling days.

  I cross the room and open the portfolio with a familiar twinge of guilty knowledge and discovery. A few nights over the past three months-since Erin told me the truth about Holly-I have slipped quietly into the den and brought this album back to my office, where I pored over its pages in a state of time dislocation. It is a strange and terrible thing to know your genes have blended with another’s in the person of a beautiful child that can never be acknowledged.

  I know every photograph in the portfolio intimately. The first pages are magazine covers: Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue. Then comes a full-page ad that ran in the French edition of Elle. “Miles,” I murmur, lingering over the seminude lingerie shot. Erin stares up from the page with startling prepossession. How many models have I seen in my lifetime? They stare out from behind glaring type, straining for aloofness, stretching for sincerity and never quite making it. Look at me, they implore. I am a special creature, one of the chosen. Yet with most, a look that lingers longer than the time it takes to check your groceries pierces their transparent glamour.

  Not so with Erin.

  Miles was right, the bastard. The feeling never goes away. It never goes away because Erin is life lived too close to the cycle of birth and sex and death that we in the West have tried to deny for too many centuries. A woman who walks among repressed twentieth-century males projecting the tidal power of the moon and the sexual energy of the harvest is like a human low pressure zone. An eye waiting for a hurricane. And I, like so many others, was sucked into it as inexorably as a palm uprooted from an island shore.

  Paging quickly through the portfolio, I come to an empty plastic sleeve. I know what belongs here, and I find it at the back of the portfolio, torn by a hasty reinsertion. It’s an eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photograph. In it, Erin stands in quarter profile on wet stone steps before an arched doorway. She wears a diaphanous black gown, a silver necklace, and silver earrings. Her hair is gathered upon her head, revealing her graceful neck, bare shoulders, and seemingly virginal bosom. Both arms are extended toward the door, offering a silver chalice to a shadowy figure standing just inside the arch. One pale hand is visible in the blackness, waiting to receive the chalice. The great stones forming the arch suggest a castle or cathedral, and they seem to suck the very light from the air, so that even Erin’s dark skin, hair, and eyes appear translucent, as though limned by some inner radiance. The image is a study in contradiction: the gaze of a saint on the face of a harlot, a black gown on a bridal body, warm light flowing from darkness in a scene of carnal communion. The image projects a timeless power that Miles must have recognized the instant he saw it.

  I let the album fall shut with a sigh.

  My video camera is lying out because Miles used it to reproduce this photograph in digital form. Then he somehow transferred that video image-one frame of it-onto the floppy disk I found in the sculpted coat. He probably had some kind of video-capture device in his computer bag. Miles said his Trojan Horse would be true to its name, and he meant it. The image of Erin is his horse, and hidden inside its seemingly harmless code-as deadly as any Greek army-is whatever program he designed to destroy Brahma.

  A raucous buzzing suddenly fills the office. I drop into a crouch, trying frantically to locate the source of the sound.

  My alarm clock. In the past year I might have set it twice, so its sound is now as unfamiliar as an air raid siren.

  The clock reads 8:59.

  Miles obviously set it so that Brahma’s next log-on wouldn’t pass unnoticed. As if impelled by Miles’s will, I shut off the alarm, then move to the EROS computer and stare at its screen saver, the bust of Nefertiti turning hypnotically in the field of black. The urge to touch the keyboard, to move forward on the path to knowledge, no matter how dangerous, is nearly irresistible.

  “Damn you, Miles.”

  Flexing my fingers like a violinist warming up for a concert, I tap a few keys, killing the screen saver and logging onto EROS as SYSOP. From my bird’s-eye view of the system, I scan the block of private rooms that contains the Blue Room.

  Brahma is there.

  MAXWELL› Erin? The dry earth awaits the rain.

  The nerves in my arms dance needle points on my skin. I feel like I just opened my bathroom door and found a stranger waiting behind the shower curtain. With a quick click of the mouse I log off and sit staring at the black screen.

  Nefertiti soon reappears. She is beautiful but cold. Somehow, across the ages, she whispers to me how trivial is all this, my concern with who lives and who dies. She is another face of the man who awaits me in the Blue Room, and a reckless humour in my blood stirs me to challenge. I stand and walk to the Gateway, pick up Miles’s Trojan Horse disk, set it beside the EROS keyboard, and sit back down.

  “Okay, shithead,” I whisper, pulling on the headset. “Come to papa.”

  With savage pleasure I stab the keys that transform me into “Erin” and take me to the Blue Room, where “Maxwell” ’s prompt still glows softly. I feel a sudden consciousness of the conditioned chill in the house, the dead heat outside, the burning cotton in the fields and Miles crashing through its leaves somewhere, the violated bodies of women lying headless in dry crypts beneath the ground, and Lenz’s pathetic shell of a wife, also dead now, and Rosalind May, who might still be alive and worse off for it. With all this and more coursing through me, I activate the voice-recognition program, speak softly into the microphone, and watch my words appear on-screen:

  ERIN› I am the rain.

  CHAPTER 32

  MAXWELL› I’m so glad you came back.

  Brahma’s digital voice floats from the speakers with chilling familiarity. His previous communications have imprinted it in my memory as indelibly as that of Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m tempted to assign a different frequency to Brahma, but I don’t. The familiarity will help me to visualize him as a man, which of course he is. Somewhere he sits just as I do, facing a glowing screen, preparing to speak his inmost thoughts into a machine. When he does, I follow the letters across the monitor to be sure I do not mistake his meaning.

  MAXWELL› But it’s you who are the dry earth, Erin. _I_ am the rain.

  ERIN› I think the opposite. But I’m not ashamed of need. You may be right.

  MAXWELL› Perhaps I am. Ashamed of need, I mean. I have been lonely for so long. Not alone, but lonely.

  ERIN› The lot of most people, I’m afraid.

  MAXWELL› I am not like most people.

  ERIN› No one ever thinks they are.

  MAXWELL› Soon you will know that I am not.

  ERIN› How?

  MAXWELL› Today I’m going to do something I have never done.

  ERIN› What?

  MAXWELL› Tell my story. And then you will know.

  ERIN› Why do you want to tell me? Because I told you I was beautiful and you believed me?

  MAXWELL› Beauty is important, but it is not enough. Look at the actors and actresses on EROS. Their pathetic fantasies are encyclopedias of insecurity. You said things yesterday that intrigued me. The way you spoke of sin and fate. To find beauty married with character and intelligence is very rare. I possess all these, so I know. Many seek to know me, but I reveal nothing. I live within myself. I believe you do the same. Thus I long to know you. I sense something deep in you. But I shall not ask you to reveal it without also revealing myself. I ask only one favor of you. If the things I tell you shock you too much, tell me. In this way
shall we know we were meant to go no further.

  ERIN› All right.

  MAXWELL› And please forgive me if I take liberties with specifics such as places or names.

  ERIN› Lie about the little things, but tell the truth about the big things?

  MAXWELL› Just so. I must start in a time before you were born. For my destiny began then.

  ERIN› I’m ready.

  MAXWELL› In the latter years of the last century, my paternal grandfather was born into a prominent family in Germany. Call him Rudolf. Rudolf was given a first-class education, and became a distinguished surgeon in Berlin. When he was twenty-five, his parents died in a fire. His elder brother Karl, also a surgeon, was his only surviving relation. Rudolf was a bull of a man, Prussian to his boots, but he married a small, frail woman. She was porcelain pale, with fine features and sea-blue eyes.

  When the kaiser began rattling his saber, my grandfather decided to emigrate to America. Karl begged him to remain during what he called “the Fatherland’s hour of need,” but Rudolf took his inheritance and settled his wife in…

  Here the speakers fall silent, but after a brief delay Brahma picks up again.

  …a large American city and quickly established himself as surgeon to an upper-class clientele. Their first child was a son. We’ll call him Richard.

  Richard was something of a Byronic figure, even as an infant. He’d inherited his mother’s slight bones, pale skin, and blue eyes, but his father’s dark hair, intellect, and relentless will. A year later a daughter was born. Catherine. At that time it was discovered that Richard suffered from hemophilia. His condition was controllable, so long as he was protected from traumatic injury, but his “handicap” completed his Byronic persona.

  Early on, Richard showed signs of genius. He was given a peerless education by private tutors, while Catherine received instruction in music and ballet from the age of four. The family led an idyllic existence until 1929. When the stock market crashed, Rudolf lost his fortune overnight. He could still practice medicine, but suddenly it was a means of survival rather than a lucrative hobby. When several friends committed suicide, he fell into severe depression. His behavior became erratic, he practically imprisoned himself and his family in…

  The speakers are silent again. Unsure of what to do, I finally type:

  ERIN› What’s the matter? Are you all right?

  MAXWELL› Yes. It’s proving harder than I thought to tell the story without giving away too much.

  ERIN› What are you afraid of?

  MAXWELL› When I’m finished, you will understand. I’m under a great deal of pressure just now. I am working on a great enterprise. Certain people would like to stop me. They don’t understand my work.

  ERIN› But you believe I will?

  MAXWELL› You might. I’m not sure.

  ERIN› I’ve got to tell you, I’m under a lot of strain myself. Almost breakdown level, to be honest. Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to, but getting it out might do you some good. I know what it means to keep a secret bottled up for too long.

  MAXWELL› If I go on, you must remember something. Knowledge is a burden. It has a price. Remember the Garden of Eden.

  ERIN› Don’t worry. I’d make a very good Eve. I’d blame Adam or Satan for picking the apple while I made apple wine for God. This is the kind of conversation I subscribed to EROS for in the first place.

  MAXWELL› You actually made me laugh. I shall continue then.

  After losing his fortune, Rudolf practically imprisoned his family in their brownstone in the city. He practiced only enough medicine to keep food on the table. The staple of home life was continuing Richard’s studies, particularly in anatomy and physiology. My grandmother taught Catherine piano on their Bosendorfer. After five long years of depression, both small and capital D, Rudolf locked himself in his study and put a bullet through his brain.

  Richard discovered the body. Though but twelve, he became the psychological head of the family. He wrote to Germany for help, and Uncle Karl obliged with money, stating that Richard should use it to return the family to Berlin. But Richard knew that if he did, his uncle would quickly take his father’s place. He convinced his mother they should try to hold on in America. Doling out Karl’s money like a man rationing water to lifeboat passengers, Richard continued his studies alone, using his father’s magnificent library. He became driven, his solitary goal to regain the status and fortune his father had lost.

  Imagine the scene. A shadowy mansion, empty but for three people. A beautiful boy seated at an oil lamp reading Gray’s Anatomy and Aeschylus until his eyes blurred. A senile mother rapping her daughter’s fingers with a ruler when she made mistakes at her Beethoven, speaking only German, the boy keeping up his sister’s English while the mother slept. Their survival was a miracle. The only food was that which Richard could buy cheaply or steal on the streets, while a city and nation starved outside. Rudolf had taught his son how to manage his hemophilia, how to go to hospitals and clandestinely purchase whole blood, how to give himself transfusions. And the boy did it! He survived! It was within this dark and insular realm that Richard came into his sexual awakening.

  Virtually cut off from outside contact, he turned to his younger sister for comfort. Bereaved by the death of her father and by the emotional withdrawal of her mother, Catherine accepted Richard’s advances, even welcomed them. All the studies tell us incest skyrockets in situations of overcrowding, isolation, or poverty, but I make no excuses. This relationship was a great gift for Richard. His immense powers of concentration were never diverted by petty romances, nor did he risk genetic union with an inferior partner. My grandmother must have known and understood, because the children lived as lovers under that enormous roof, sleeping in the same bed, exploring the limits of physical and spiritual experience.

  Have I shocked you, Erin?

  ERIN› I’d be lying if I said no. But I’m fascinated too. I’ve never heard anything like this before.

  MAXWELL› It’s like reading about young gods, isn’t it?

  ERIN› In a way. But I know what’s coming. Richard left Catherine, didn’t he?

  MAXWELL› Did he? When still quite young, Richard passed the examinations required to enter university. Desperately short of money, he wrote again to Uncle Karl. He blamed Jewish thieves and anti-German persecution for the family’s failure to appear in Berlin. War was looming again, and Karl immediately forwarded funds sufficient for a sea passage. Of course Richard used the money to enter university. He became an academic star, his tuition paid by scholarship. And since his hemophilia exempted him from the draft, he was able to accept a scholarship to medical school three years later.

  During this time, Catherine had begun meeting men outside the family, but no relationships developed. My grandmother discouraged her, saying that this or that suitor could never “measure up to the family standard,” which of course meant Richard. For his part, Richard had several outside relationships, with both women and men. But none supplanted Catherine in his heart.

  ERIN› I feel sorry for Catherine. She never had a chance to find out what she really wanted.

  MAXWELL› She was marked by destiny, Erin. Does that idea make you uncomfortable?

  ERIN› Why don’t you tell me her destiny first?

  MAXWELL› While in medical school, Richard decided for Machiavellian reasons that the time had come to marry, and to marry well. His opportunity arrived in the form of the disgraced daughter of a wealthy professor. I always called her the Gorgon. Pregnant before her first marriage, this woman lost the baby immediately after it, then went through a nasty and public divorce. No longer suitable for men of her own class, she was convinced by her father to give a brilliant medical student a chance. Richard wasted no time. Realizing that his plan would be a shock to his sister, he broke the news gently, stressing his mercenary motives, but to no avail. Catherine was devastated. Over the next two weeks she pleaded madly with him and twice seduced him, telling h
im that no other woman could ever love or understand him as she did. When he refused to yield, she blurted out that no other woman could ever give him the child she could. Richard ignored her and pushed ahead with his plans.

  The day before the wedding, Catherine left the city with all the money Richard had in the world. Worried near to collapse, he told everyone she had gone west to seek relief for fragile lungs. If he had known the truth, he would undoubtedly have followed her. Like a homing bird, Catherine had gone in search of their one blood relative, Uncle Karl. This was during the war, remember. She traveled first to neutral Spain and befriended members of the German emigre community there. With their reluctant assistance, she managed finally to reach Berlin. There, during an air raid, cowering with strangers in the basement of a hospital, she delivered the child she had conceived in America, the child of her brother. It was a son.

  That child was me.

  In the silence that follows these words, my composure begins to fray. During the last few minutes Brahma has told me more about himself than he told Lenz in a dozen conversations. The fantastic character of his story fills me with wonder, and also dread, but I cannot stop to analyze any of it. Time is draining away like water through my hands.

  ERIN› I don’t know what to say.

  MAXWELL› Now you understand my special knowledge of incest. I have gone as far as I will for now. I believe I have earned the right to your story. Or at least part of it.

  ERIN› I’m embarrassed. I don’t have a dramatic family saga like yours.

  MAXWELL› All family histories are dramatic. Freud showed us that. In some families the struggle merely occurs beneath the surface, like battles under primeval seas.

  Brahma has an answer for everything.

  He wants a story. And for days I’ve planned to tell him one. Only now that the moment is at hand, I am paralyzed. How much truth do I tell? How much fiction? Earlier this week, it seemed to me that deception was mostly a matter of facts, with continuity the key to success. Now I see how foolish I was. Successful lies are not based on fact, but instinct. Emotion. If I tell a story that I believe, Brahma must believe too.