Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  Two months later, he received another hand-written note from the Trobriand Islands group:

  Dear Second-Papa Russell,

  Mission-peoples say no more U.S.A. dollars from you. This very bad. Goka-Pon say you must be punished.

  Tnen-Ku

  Understandably, Russell was outraged and fired off another letter to the Spare The Child Program, enclosing a photocopy of what he termed an “ungrateful, arrogant, and threatening” letter. He informed the agency that if he received any more correspondence from Tnen-Ku, he would initiate legal actions against the agency.

  A secretary from the Spare The Child offices wrote a perfunctory apology which promised that Russell Southers would not be troubled again, and this seemed to appease both him and Mitzi, until three weeks later, when the cat died.

  Actually, their cat, Mugsy, did not die; it had been killed—strangled and then nailed to Russell’s garage door above a jerkily scrawled inscription which could have been in blood: Spare the Cat?

  It was as though the young girl had sent them more correspondence, although of a different nature. At first, Mitzi was horrified and Russell infuriated. They called the police, who did not seem terribly interested; the Spare the Child agency, which denied any culpability; and Russell’s lawyer, who said that perhaps a flimsy case could be made against the agency but suggested that one of Russell’s friends was most likely playing a very bad joke on him.

  Russell was shocked to see the high levels of indifference and lack of true concern for what was happening to him but felt helpless to do much more than complain himself. He thought of writing a long threatening letter to Tnen-Ku, but something held him back. After all, it was impossible that the child had anything to do with Mugsy’s demise—the island of Kona-Pei was thousands of miles from New Jersey. But what the hell was going on?

  Second-Papa? Second-Papa…?

  Russell was awakened from a deep sleep by the voice. In the first moments of wakefulness, he found himself thinking that her voice sounded very much like he would have imagined it to sound.

  Whose voice!? Bolting straight up, Russell stared down to the foot of the bed and felt his breath rush out of him. His flesh drew up and pimpled and he felt immediately chilled. There was a figure, a young girl, bathed in a shimmering aura of spectral light, facing him. Her hair was long and dark, and her eyes seemed like empty holes in her face. Her thin, bronzed arms were reaching out to him…

  “It can’t be…” whispered Russell, his voice hoarse and full of uncontrollable fear, a fear he had never known.

  Second-Papa, said Tnen-Ku. I would have been happy. I would have been grateful to you forever. I would have come to you…like this…for make you happy…not sad.

  Russell blinked, looked over at Mitzi, who was still sleeping. For an instant, he wondered why she had not heard the child; then he realized that he was only hearing the words in his mind.

  “Why?” he whispered. “What do you mean? Why are you doing this?”

  I would have given you this…

  Russell stared at the young girl, watching her hands move slowly to her waist, to the simple knot which held the wraparound skirt about her body. With a deliberate slowness, Tnen-Ku worked at the knot.

  No! thought Russell, feeling a conflicting rush of feelings jolt him. He wanted to look away from the vision, but something held him. The shining figure had taken on a strangely erotic, yet fearsome aspect, and he was transfixed.

  As the knot loosened, Russell found himself entranced by the deep tan of her flesh, and as the cloth began to slowly fall away, he became fascinated by the suggestion of flaring hips, the roundness of her soon-to-be-a-woman’s belly. He felt himself becoming sexually aroused as he had never in his life, and a fire seemed to be raging in his groin. Tnen-Ku held the fabric of the skirt by a small corner so that it hung limply in front of her, flanked by her naked hips and thighs.

  Russell felt that he would explode from the throbbing pressure inside his trembling body, and watching her fingers release the skirt, he screamed involuntarily.

  Instantly the vision of the girl disappeared, cloaking the bedroom in darkness and the echo of his scream. Mitzi had jumped up, grabbing him.

  “Russell, what’s the matter with you? You’re covered with sweat! What happened?”

  Still trembling, Russell continued to stare at the foot of the bed. “Bad dream,” he said weakly. “Bad dream…I’ll be okay.”

  But he was not okay, and was never okay again.

  For the first few days after the vision of Tnen-Ku, Russell Southers had convinced himself it had not actually happened, that he had witnessed nothing more than a singularly realistic dream of some of his darker subconscious desires. He found he could not rid his mind, however, of the disturbing image of the young girl untying her native skirt. He was thinking of her constantly as though becoming obsessed. While commuting to work, while at the office in Manhattan, and even at home with Mitzi watching TV, Russell was plagued by the vision of Tnen-Ku at the foot of his bed. When he concentrated on it, he could hear her voice calling out his name.

  But that was only the beginning.

  While watching the evening news after his daily martini, while Mitzi prepared dinner, Russell was shocked to see a bulletin teletype-overlay snake across the screen while the commentator spoke of a warehouse fire in Brooklyn:

  TNEN-KU IS WATCHING YOU

  SECOND-PAPA RUSSELL

  “Jesus Christ!” yelled Russell, sitting straight up, staring at the TV screen, waiting for the message to roll across the bottom of the picture again. Impossible! I didn’t see it! But you did see it…He felt a lump in his throat as he sat gripping the arms of his chair, waiting for a repeat of the words which did not come. He thought that he was starting to lose his sanity, and that scared him too. He was thinking about that little sexy brat too much, that was it. Got to stop thinking about it, that’s all.

  Shaken, he watched the news commentator drone on about more local happenings, but he heard little of it. He toyed with the idea of telling Mitzi what had been happening but thought that she would think he was losing his marbles. Mitzi had always depended on him to be strong and pragmatic and rational; he shuddered to think of how she would react to him showing such obvious signs of mental weakness. No, Mitzi should not know anything. Russell was going to have to handle this himself.

  But it did bother him that Mitzi was not sharing in his…his what? His delusions? His guilt? She was blithely rolling along, having totally forgotten the Spare the Child Program in turn for some new, fleeting, but always enjoyable project. And it was Mitzi who had gotten him into the whole mess in the first place. It wasn’t fair, thought Russell…

  That night she returned to him and he sat up in bed, transfixed and captivated by her little brown body, wrapped in a shimmering cloak of light. She held something in her hands, which she slowly placed on the covers of his bed, then quickly disappeared.

  Russell’s throat was so tight that he could not swallow, could not have uttered a sound if he had wanted to. His hands were trembling badly, keeping pace with the thumping of his heart and his ragged breath. His mind was slipping away from him, and he sat in the darkness, resolved to see a psychiatrist the next day. Take the afternoon off and see one of his golf partners, Dr. Venatoulis.

  Then he noticed something on the covers of the bed, something where the image of the girl had placed her hands, and he felt the fear grip him again. Pushing back the sheets, Russell groped about on the softness of the quilt and felt something hard and solid. What the hell…?

  It was a small, hand-carved box with a fitted top that slid open. Shaking it, something rattled inside, and he feared for a moment that the sound might awaken Mitzi. Quickly, Russell slipped out of bed and went into the bathroom, switching on the fluorescent lights around the mirror, and shutting the door. The box, when he opened it, contained scores of small white sticks, about half the size of kitchen matches, of uneven shapes. They seemed to be polished smooth and resembled iv
ory…or perhaps bone. The thought held him for an instant as Russell stared at the box, realizing fully and for the first time the presence of the box was physical proof he was not delusional, that he was not imagining things, and that, somehow, Tnen-Ku had actually been inside his bedroom, ten thousand miles away from her island home.

  No! His mind screamed out the rejection of such a thought. And yet he stared at the evidence with eyes that were starting to water and sting from nervous tension.

  The little white sticks were scattered across the top of the vanity Formica, and as Russell watched them, they began to move. Vibrating ever so slightly at first, tingling as if touched by a slight breeze, the bones—and Russell knew now that they were indeed bones—moved like iron filings over a magnet to form a caricature of a skull.

  Screaming involuntarily, he swept the pieces off the counter scattering them across the bathroom tile. It was getting too crazy, too unbelievable!

  “Russell, is that you…?” Mitzi was knocking loudly at the bathroom door.

  “No!…I mean, yes, it’s me! Who the hell do you think it would be?”

  “Russell, are you all right? What’s the matter with you?” Mitzi tried the knob, but it was locked. “Russell?!”

  “Oh Christ, what?! Yes, Mitzi, I’m all right. Go back to bed, will you please? I’ve got an upset stomach that’s all…”

  “I thought I heard you scream, Russell, are you okay? Why is the door locked? You never lock the bathroom door, Russell.”

  “I’ve got some bad gas pains, that’s all. I—I didn’t want to disturb you, honey. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  He looked down to the floor and saw that the little bones had been moving while he spoke to his wife, gathering themselves together like a small herd of animals. They were arranging themselves into letters, like tiny runic symbols, which at first were indecipherable. But the more Russell stared at the configurations; he could read the message that was forming:

  Punish With Death

  He wanted to scream again, and he held the sound in his throat only by the greatest force of will. He could taste bile at the back of his mouth as he bent down and scooped up all the little white pieces, throwing them into the toilet and flushing it repeatedly, until all the bones were sucked into the small porcelain maelstrom.

  Luckily, when he returned to bed, Mitzi was already asleep.

  He could not bring himself to tell his wife about the delusions he had been suffering, and he was ashamed to call up a psychiatrist, especially someone with whom he played golf on occasion. Since no real, hard evidence, no proof actually existed, Russell had convinced himself that what had been happening to him was the product of an overworked mind, a heavily wracked, guilty conscience, and too much displaced imagination. And so he tried to ignore the messages which Tnen-Ku sent him: the warning headline on the New York Post which disappeared when he picked up the paper from the subway newsstand; the skull-like configuration of the coffee grounds in his cup at Nedick’s in Grand Central; the pair of dark eyes which seemed to be staring at him through the glass of the speedometer of his Monte Carlo; the familiar, half-whispering voice that he thought he could hear in the telephone in between the beeps of the touch-tone dial; the movie marquee he glanced at from the corner of his eye on 56th Street, which for a moment, until he had looked for a second time, had said: “Tnen-Ku Is Coming!”

  Normally Russell Southers would have been greatly disturbed by the portents and omens jumping up unexpectedly from all parts of his everyday life. But he was becoming almost accustomed to the preternatural for one simple reason: he was losing his mind. Simply and totally. He just didn’t care anymore.

  Let her come, goddamn it! he thought as he rode the train home that night. Let her come, ’cause I’m sure as shit ready for her…

  The conductor called out his stop, and he stood up in ritual-commuter fashion, single-filing out of the car and onto the platform with his fellow riders. Descending the staircase to the parking lot below, Russell scanned the amassed cars for his white Monte Carlo where Mitzi would be waiting to pick him up. It was wedged in between a big Ford station wagon and a TR-7, and as Russell approached the familiar vehicle he was shocked to see the dark eyes and long straight hair of Tnen-Ku watching him from behind the wheel. His first impulse was to stop in shock and surprise, but instead he forced himself to walk naturally, even waving and smiling as he approached the car. Better, he thought, to not let the little snit think she had rattled him. He would take the element of surprise and twist it back into her face. Surely the girl would not expect him to act so naturally.

  He tried to keep thoughts of Mitzi from his mind, tried to not think about what that young brat might have done with his wife so that she could be replaced behind the wheel. No, it was better to concentrate on what must be done…

  “Hello, Second-Papa Russell…” she said as he opened the passenger’s side door and slid in beside her.

  She was smiling and leaning forward as though she would like him to kiss her. The little tramp! Russell looked past her face to her slim neck, then reached out and wrapped his fingers around it. As he began to squeeze and he felt her struggle helplessly under his grip, he smiled slowly, feeling a wellspring of elation bubble through his mind.

  “I’ve got you!” he screamed. “I’ve got you now, and you won’t get away this time!”

  Tnen-Ku opened her mouth, no longer a tart, sly curve to her young lips, but a silent circle of panic and pain. Russell tightened his grip on her neck and began to yank her back and forth. His hands and forearms were enveloped in a numbness, an absence of sensation, as though he were watching someone else’s hands strangling the darkly tanned woman-child.

  As her face seemed to become bloated and puffy, the color of her cheeks turning gray and her bottomless eyes bulging whitely, Russell’s other senses seemed to desert him. The lights from the station parking lot grew dim, and he could barely discern the features of the dying face in front of him. He could hear nothing but the pounding of his own pulse behind his ears and was not aware of the excited shouts of people who were crowding around his Monte Carlo. Nor did he feel the strong, capable hands grabbing him, separating him from his dead wife, pulling him from the car.

  Hitting the hard surface of the parking lot, Russell looked up at the ragged oval of faces peering down at him. Someone called for the police as he lay still, feeling the shadows of evening and fear crawl across his eyes. When the sound of the sirens pierced the night, Russell began to scream, spiraling down into the mind-darkness of defeat…

  Somewhere in Manhattan, someone opened to a full-page ad in The Times Magazine.

  My ideas for stories come from all over the place, as we will discover, but very few are based on real-life models. An exception is the next story, which is based on a case study I remember reading in undergraduate school. It was called “Joey, the Mechanical Boy,” and for some reason I never forgot it. Information affects in sometimes strange and wonderful ways and we all respond to it in different ways—sometimes emotionally, at others viscerally.

  As far as this one goes, I have no idea why I carried the images of the little autistic kid around in my subconscious like a brown-bag snack, but I did. It was one of those items I figured I would work into a story sooner or later, and waited patiently for the structure to bubble up to the surface.

  The impetus finally came when my old friend Roy Torgeson asked me for a story for a long-running anthology series he’d been editing called Chrysalis. Back in the Seventies I had sold him several stories for the series that had been decidedly science fiction; and Charlie Grant and I had sold him a dark fantasy called “When Dark Descends,” but I didn’t think he was really looking for the kind of horror and suspense I’d been writing in the early Eighties. So I told him maybe he wouldn’t be all that interested in what I’d been writing lately…

  Roy had this kind of dark chuckle that was very distinctive and he would let it out at just the right moments, and I can recall him doing it then
. “Tom,” he said. “You just write me a story…I know it will be good. I love your stuff.”

  That was all I needed to get me working. When I sat down to my Selectric (I think this was one of the last stories I wrote before getting my first computer…), I wanted to give him something that would satisfy both his need for sf1 and my own for something that investigated the inner, dark regions of the human spirit. You decide whether or not I succeeded.

  Oh yeah, one final note: Roy Torgeson died about ten years ago, and I didn’t hear about it for almost a year after the fact. Somehow it had slipped past me and it bugged me and saddened me. Roy was a brilliant guy, who had established himself as a shrewd book collector and a savvy entrepreneur. In the Seventies be single-handedly helmed a company called Alternate Worlds Recordings, in which he rounded up some of the greatest fantasists of his generation2 and had them read their own works on LP records. He did such an outstanding job; he won a World Fantasy Award.

  By now, many have forgotten him, and his thoughtful, intelligent contributions to the field, so this next one is dedicated to the memory of Roy Torgeson.

  1 standing for “speculative fiction,” which is what science fiction used to call itself when it wanted to be taken seriously.

  2 The list is kind of staggering: Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, and others I can’t remember, but if you ever see any for sale, grab them up. They are what we mean when we use the word “classics.”

  Billy was already awake when the nurse entered his room.

  He was watching her as she approached his bed as morning light danced upon the windowpanes. It illuminated Billy’s “Sleep Machine”—a fantastic array of strings, wires, vacuum tubes, burned-out light bulbs? and other scraps—which surrounded his bed like a cocoon.

  “Good morning, Billy!” she said in a saccharine voice. “Time for breakfast…!”

  As the nurse drew closer to his bedside, Billy stared in growing horror while she blundered into his “main current line”—a piece of thick twine which ran from his bedpost to an imaginary outlet taped to the wall. Her white-stockinged leg caught on the string, yanking it from its mooring, which caused Billy to explode in a frenzy of screams. Panic and outrage bubbled out of him like lava. His eyes bulged, his face flushed, as he writhed about the bed.