The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

  Had I actually beaten this thing that had dogged me so long and given me so much misery? Could it be as easy as that—three nights of “exposure therapy”? Hope engulfed me like a warm, velvety bath, so much so that even my current situation didn’t seem quite as awful as it had been, and I turned on my side to settle myself into sleep.

  BUT for once, the expected après-panic coma didn’t arrive, headed off by the abrupt, highly unwelcome comprehension that I was in a lot more trouble than I’d thought. I’d suddenly remembered a report I’d read a couple of years earlier.

  Lyle Harvey, a psychologist colleague at Odysseus, had done a psychological profile of Paris based on the various dribs and drabs of information that were known, or thought to be known, about him. The man we called Paris, Lyle had surmised, was a single, white male in his thirties or forties, who’d had a troubled childhood, who possessed a certain ingratiating charm, who had a grandiose sense of selfworth, who was reasonably well educated, etc., etc.—in other words, your everyday psychopath/sociopath/serial killer. Unfortunately for me in particular, however, there was more.

  Paris also showed evidence of borderline paranoia, which meant, as Lyle explained to me over coffee after I’d read his profile, that Paris tended to filter every event, every encounter, through a lens that imbued it with significance for him and him alone. Not quite the aliens-are-sending-me-coded-messages-on-the-backs-of-Wheatiesboxes kind of paranoia, but close enough. He found cause for grievance where there was none, and magnified his fertile sense of injustice where there was. And he had no inhibitions about settling accounts. At least two of the five murders he was known to have committed had been prompted by personal grievances, real or imagined; not, as Lyle had smilingly pointed out, that it made much difference to the victims one way or the other. Oh yes, and Paris was also an exception to those statistics that said mutilation was often threatened but rarely resorted to. This was a guy who followed through on his threats.

  So how could I have failed to remember all this until after I’d added yet another grievance against me, as if the old one wasn’t already enough to get me killed and dismembered (hopefully in that order)? All I can say is that it had taken me this long to really get it through my skull that the beef-headed Camano from so long ago and the “brilliant” Paris I’d been reading about for years really were one and the same.

  There was something else that came back to me only now. “I trusted you” had been his last words to me at the trial, but not his last gesture. As they prodded him toward the exit, he had raised his arm, straightened it, and leveled his right forefinger at me. No, not with the traditionally raised thumb to emulate the cocked hammer of a revolver, but with clear enough meaning all the same.

  I’ll get you for this.

  Jesus. Well, I sure wasn’t going to sit around waiting for him to kill me in what he had implied to be a particularly unpleasant way (“you’re just making it worse for yourself in the end”). I had to find a way to get myself out of there, and I had no time to waste in doing it. I had to . . . but now sleep caught up to me. My eyelids slipped down again.

  Chapter 31

  An electrifying flashback popped them open a minute later. Camano had failed to zip up the entrance flap! He’d batted fussily at it when it had gotten in his way as he’d stomped out, and he’d just kept on going. The flap had fallen back into place, and that had been it. No zzzzzziiippp had followed, then or later, and no one else had come in since then. So, unless somebody had checked while I was asleep, it was open right now. And yes, I could see even from the cot that the zipper hadn’t been pulled around. With my heart pounding once more, but for a very different reason, I sat up, taking care not to clink the chains. I considered trying to get to my little peephole in the mesh window to see what was going on at the guard station, but I didn’t want to chance alerting the guard with any unnecessary noise.

  Besides, I knew that it didn’t make any difference whether he or she was asleep or awake or in the chair or out of it: I was going to make my move now, tonight. I had to; what were the chances of them ever leaving the tent unzipped again?

  I removed the blankets from the cot, but left the mattress—additional protection against the glass—and, with excruciating care, folded the cot up, holding my breath most of the time and going stone-still whenever there was the tiniest clink of chain or creak of metal. It took a long time, during every second of which I expected someone to look in to see what was going on. But that didn’t happen. With my ears on high alert, the only sound I heard from outside was the occasional slither of a turning magazine page. That and the occasional clearing of a throat, a man’s throat. Stig? Yes, when I listened harder I recognized his voice. So it was him in the chair. Gullveig or Camano would have been my preference, but it was what it was. Stig would have to do.

  I hefted the cot one way and then another to come up with the most secure grip, and settled on wrapping my arms around it, clasping my hands, and hugging it to my chest. That would expose my forearms to the shattering glass, so I stuffed some paper towels inside my sleeves for padding. I supposed more padding would have been a good idea, but I was afraid to use up any more time than absolutely required. No one had checked on me for hours. How much longer could it be before one of them decided I was due for some hassling?

  Getting the cot noiselessly into my arms was tricky, and shuffling in tiny steps toward the entry without clanking was even trickier. I curled the chains around my fists to take up the slack, but not enough (I hoped) to trip me up. Even so, in negotiating around one of the cartons I caught the leg chain and created a distinct clink. I did the best I could to cover it by coughing, then clearing my own throat, then emitting what I hoped were the grunty, snorty noises a sleeper makes when he turns over in the middle of the night and rearranges himself.

  There was a piercing, pregnant silence from the guard station for several seconds—I imagined Stig, head alertly up, listening keenly—and I set myself to throw my body at him, metal cot foremost, the instant I saw the flap begin to lift. But it didn’t lift, and eventually there was the sound of a page turning again. I waited another second, then took a dozen more baby steps to cover the final foot and a half to the entry. Because the window and the guard chair were off to the left of the tent, and not directly in front of the tent opening, I shuffled off a few more feet to the right so that I could break out of the tent on the diagonal, and not have to manage a right-angle turn after I got through the opening.

  The cot was starting to get uncomfortably heavy, so I lowered myself to a squatting position to let my thighs take the weight and give my arms a rest for a minute. The whole while I was down, my ears strained to pick up any sounds. I knew a window was open because I heard an owl hoot, and in the distance the same steady traffic I’d heard before. But from indoors, nothing. It was, in fact, so preternaturally, pregnantly quiet that I began to wonder if they were just playing along; if they were on to me and there was a welcoming committee waiting out there. I suppose I could have shuffled over to the peephole I’d made in the mesh window, but it would have taken minutes for me to wobble my way there and back. Besides, I was afraid that my luck at keeping the noise down wouldn’t hold—that I’d stumble over something or catch one of the chains again.

  So this was it; time to go. I outlined my route in my mind: Two running steps would get me out of the tent, with three more to go to reach the window. Where exactly Stig was sitting I didn’t know. If he was more than two or three feet from the window, my guess was that I’d be through it before he could stop me. But if he was closer, he’d have to be dealt with. If he was to its left, I’d try to clip him with the left side of the bed frame as I went by; if to the right, then with the right side of the frame. And if he were sitting right in front of the window, blocking my way? Then he was coming with me.

  I stood up, bent down enough to make it through the five-foot-tall entry, reminded myself to watch out for the strip of fabric across the bottom of the opening . . . and charged o
ut into the room.

  The window was indeed open a few inches at the top, as before. The up-from-the bottom shade covered the lower three-quarters of the window, as before. Out the top I could see the spindly tree branches, as before. It was dark, but in the gleam of a street lamp I could see a sleety rain falling. The chair had been placed a few inches to the left of the window. In it was Stig, minus the hood and fittingly rat-faced, with the open magazine on the arm of the desk. At the moment I burst into the room he was checking his wristwatch, but when this clanking, shrieking apparition (me) erupted from the tent and bore down on him, his face came up, openmouthed.

  There was an instant’s paralysis, and then he tried to jump to his feet, but the lap desk on the chair got in his way and sat him down again. By that time I was on him and, following the plan, I swung the left side of the metal bed frame at him, catching him in the forehead with a solid, immensely satisfying thunk that sent both Stig and the chair over sideways and out of the way. Without breaking my stride—or rather, my lunge—I lifted the cot to shield my face and rocketed myself at the window.

  Through it I went in an explosion of glass, taking the crackling window shade with me and grateful for its protection. As I smashed through, I caught a glimpse of the terrain I was heading for out of the corner of my eye. I’d hoped that the existence of the tree signified a planting border around the building, and that a supple, squashy, thornless bush—rhododendron or box elder would have been nice—would be there to break my fall. Or at least that I’d land on soil and not on concrete. But no such luck. There was a five- or six-foot border in front of the building, all right, but it was gravel. Better than concrete, but not what I’d had in mind. Also, I had assumed the window was about four feet off the ground. Six was more like it.

  I tried to keep the cot in front of me as a shock absorber, but somehow I got spun around and came down flat on my back—hard—with the damn cot landing heavily on my chest and the icy rain spattering my face. I think it was the weight of the cot, and not the fall itself, that knocked the wind out of me, but whatever it was, it scotched my plan to start yelling. Instead, I was busy gasping and flopping around, trying get my lungs going again.

  It took a good twenty seconds to get enough air back into me to attempt to get to my knees—I still couldn’t speak, let alone shout—and by that time, here they all came, running hard through the sleet, without their hoods: Camano, Stig, and a pudding-faced young woman who had to be Gullveig. I looked wildly around. Surely someone must have heard the commotion, but, no, even in those few apartments that were lit, the windows remained vacant. Somehow I made it to my feet and steeled myself to face them, wrapping the chains more securely around my fists to use as weapons.

  I didn’t have a chance.

  Still gasping and convulsed, I was roughly forced down onto my face. I did what I could to struggle, but a second later, there was that now-familiar sharp jab in the hip. When I twisted my head, I could see Stig bent over me, and I managed to swing backhanded at his arm. It knocked the hypodermic out of his hand and out of me, but too late. I could feel the fluid burning into me. My head was already swimming.

  Ah, God.

  Chapter 32

  I came awake to find myself, as so often before, tearing with both hands at the metal collar encircling my neck. But this time . . . this time it didn’t melt away. The metal was real—cold and gritty against my fingers. Without knowing it, I’d already torn a couple of nails scrabbling at the thing.

  It was pitch black; I could see nothing, not even my own arms, but I knew I was no longer in the tent. The air was cold, dank, flinty . . . a cave? As the coming panic swelled and coiled inside me, I searched with my fingers, trying to make sense of things. Attached to the collar was a chain. Shaking, I jumped up and followed the links hand over hand over a rough, stony floor, my blood turning more into icy sludge with every step. Five steps in all, to where the chain was hooked through a ring bolt embedded in the rock wall. On its own, a moan began to build up steam in my chest, but as I crossed over the border from sanity to craziness it morphed into a hooting, strangled laugh, the hoo-hoo-hoo of a matted-bearded lunatic who had been locked up in some dark cellar for decades. I heard it—I hated it—but I couldn’t do anything about it.

  It seemed to go on for a long time, that stupid, chimplike hooting, and then, suddenly, I was in the grip of a panic attack like nothing I’d ever been through before. The mother of all panic attacks. I couldn’t even begin to describe it. I wouldn’t want to begin to describe it. My “victory” of the previous night was a bad joke. My memory of the attack is fuzzy now, thank God, but I know that I gibbered and whinnied and rolled around on the floor, and hoo-hoo-hooed, and that at one point I was on my knees, banging my bloodied head against the wall, trying to blot myself into oblivion—to kill myself—so I wouldn’t be around when my head exploded and my heart shredded.

  But eventually a new thought, a coherent thought, broke through: This had been going on for however long—twenty minutes, thirty minutes—and here I still was. It hadn’t killed me. My head hadn’t exploded. My heart hadn’t burst out of my chest. The worst possible thing I could imagine, the thing that had tracked and terrified me for decades, that I was more afraid of than anything else in the world, had actually happened to me—not just in my mind, but really—and I’d outlasted the damn thing.

  This wasn’t just Zeta’s self-limiting phenomenon; I hadn’t merely outlasted it, I’d gotten the better of it, because I knew now that it didn’t have the terrifying power it had pretended to have. What was it Zeta had said about overcoming a fear of elevators? You grit your teeth and get on one and ride it up and down and up and down until you’re over it, and by the time you get out you might be sweating, but you’ve pretty much got it licked. Well, what do you know, it was true, not that I could take the credit for it. After all, I hadn’t volunteered for the experience, and the truth was that I hadn’t even really believed in it. But that didn’t seem to make any difference. Damned if it didn’t work anyway. It was like physicist Niels Bohr’s apocryphal reply to the visitor who asked him whether he truly believed the horseshoe nailed over his door brought him luck: “Of course I don’t, but I’m told it works even if you don’t believe it.”

  However it worked, I knew that I’d just had my last panic attack, doozy that it was. Over the next couple of minutes I routed the remnants of the now-retreating tumult out of my head altogether. I don’t know how else to put it other than that I simply set my jaw and willed it gone. And it went. I’d made it back into the real world, and I wasn’t ever again setting foot in that other one.

  There was just this one little problem: The real world now looked suspiciously like the one I’d just scrambled out of. I was alone in a dank, pitch-black cave, chained by a rusty metal collar around my neck to a ring bolt sunk in the rock.

  And I actually, unbelievably, told myself a lame little joke: “All you need to make this complete,” I said, “is an iron mask.”

  I snickered, I sighed, and I fell into the usual post-panic-attack swoon.

  THE next time I woke up, the blackness was no longer absolute. I was looking at a lichen-crusted rock wall glistening with moisture, with some thin frost or snow in some of the deeper crevices. So I was really in a cave. And the collar was real too, sitting heavily on the base of my neck. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and somewhat fearfully did one of those self-assessment things but, to my enormous relief, there was absolutely no sense of panic there. Well, nothing worse than anybody would feel: not exactly on top of the world, but a long, long way from the horror of all-out panic. A metal collar around the neck, it turns out, is nowhere near as fearful as the fear of a metal collar around the neck.

  I hurt in a lot of places: my split upper lip, my wrists and forearms—which had some blood-crusted scrapes and cuts on them from going through the window—and my ribs, front and back, which had taken a terrific knock when I hit the ground. And I’d bruised my forehead banging it against t
he walls during the night. I was also cold, but not freezing; they had put me back in my parka and gotten my shoes back on. All in all, I could have been in a lot worse shape.

  I found that I was lying on the gray plaid mattress that had been on the cot and was now laid directly on the floor of the cave. Except for the cot, the other supplies and materials that I’d had before seemed to be here as well; even the toilet, I was relieved to see. The tubelike cave was about eight-feet high and twelve-feet wide, and the pallid light came from a grated opening to the outside, about forty feet upslope from where I was. I couldn’t tell whether the grate was locked or not, but even if it was, it was only chest-high, with plenty of room to clamber over it. Getting to it would be the problem.

  Which reminded me that a closer look at my constraints was in order. My fingers quickly told me that the collar around my neck was a hinged affair made of two arched pieces. Where the two ends came together they overlapped, and a hole in the end of the upper segment fitted securely over a U-shaped bar welded to the other, much the way a hasp lock fitted together. It was through the opening in the U that the rusting chain was threaded, its final link padlocked so it couldn’t fit back through. The oversized link at the other end of the chain was in the form of a ring bolt that had been embedded in the rock wall. The whole thing was about ten feet long. They sure seemed to have access to a lot of chains, these people.

  I went to the ring bolt and tugged on it, of course, jerking it every which way, but it didn’t give a millimeter. I suppose it might have been possible to chip away at the rock surrounding its base if I’d had something to chip with, but the only possibilities were those paper sporks, and I doubted that they were up to it. There were loads of hand-axe-sized rocks on the floor that might have been used for the job—or as weapons—if I could get to them, but the area within my reach had been swept clean.