Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  The thought of the annual income made him smile, despite his nervousness. He took a final drag off the Marlboro and pushed it out the window into the slipstream. In doing so, he glimpsed a flash of light in the side-view mirror.

  Even though the roads were still slick-lethal, he pushed down on the accelerator and his Chrysler New Yorker surged forward. Despite this, the headlights grew larger and more distinct, filling the rear-view mirror. The oncoming vehicle slipped out into the left lane of the Interstate, getting ready to pull alongside.

  His hands grew moist, his heartbeat jumped up towards the fibrillation end of the scale. The glare of the other car’s lights filled the rear-view mirror, a white, cool explosion of light reflected into John’s face.

  This was the one. The marrow in his bones sang out with conviction.

  The other car’s tires were keening in the rain, whirling at high-speed, sucking up the wet asphalt, almost hydro-planing. It became a roar, a scream in his left ear as he heard it, pulling abreast of him. His New Yorker was starting to drift back and forth across the right lane, losing traction, and still he pushed his speed higher.

  But the other car continued to accelerate, gaining, overtaking him in the night, wanting only to keep pace for a single, final instant.

  No!

  The single word bounced around in an empty room in his mind.

  The car was in the blind spot of his side-mirror. In another moment it would be next to him.

  John Sheridan knew that he must turn his head to the left. Maybe then it would be all right…

  The idea that looking at the other car, actually looking into its dark glass, might end the craziness was appealing to him. For months now, he had been too terrified to even think of it, but suddenly, it seemed like the only solution.

  To look over and see a normal human being would be all the proof, all the cure, he would require.

  And so, as the dark shape pulled abreast of him, seeming to hang motionless for an instant, he recalled how all the craziness had started. John turned to regard the vehicle in the fast lane…

  …he had been driving back from a 10-day selling spree through Western Maryland. The hour was late and the traffic on Interstate 270 heading south from Frederick was practically non-existent. He had purchased the New Yorker, and despite his endless smoking the new smell of the interior had not yet worn away. The in-dash stereo was blowing some electronic music by a Japanese guy named Kitaro, and John was leaning back, enjoying the powerful, gliding ride of the big Chrysler as he cruised the fast lane.

  As he cleared a slight rise in the highway he was abruptly aware of a vehicle ahead on his right in the slower lane. Squinting out into the night, he could see a big, heavy car—a shapeless hulk, slicing through the darkness. John pushed down on the accelerator, moved to slip past the other vehicle. But as he pulled alongside, the other driver jammed on his brakes, slipped back in behind him in a crazy, erratic piece of driving. John thought nothing of this as he returned his gaze to the road ahead. And then the other car was pulling out on the left, jumping onto the shoulder and moving abreast of him.

  As this happened, John felt the eyes of something staring at him. The skin on the back of his neck seemed to ripple as a coldness entered him. It was a very bad feeling—the empty bore of unknown eyes looking at you, through you.

  The other car was still there, pacing him along the shoulder like a predatory beast. Without thinking, John looked over and saw that the other car’s window was down, and that out of the darkness within, there came a black cylinder, pointed at him.

  In that instant, he recognized it as the business-end of a gun barrel. It seemed to grow larger in his mind’s eye—until it was like staring down the mouth of a bottomless well.

  He may have screamed at that point, he could not remember, but suddenly the New Yorker was swerving sharply to the left. His tires definitely screamed and the heavy sedan lurched dangerously close to the car on the left, which had also swerved to avoid him. As John fought with the wheel to gain control, the other car accelerated and raced ahead into the darkness.

  He was left breathless as his body thumped with the shock of adrenaline, which now ebbed out of his bloodstream. The crazy bastard had tried to kill him!

  He couldn’t believe it even as he watched the other car’s taillights dwindle to tiny red specks on the horizon ahead. And yet it was true. John didn’t know what to do first. Should he chase the guy down? Stop and call the police?

  He realized that he hadn’t caught a license number. In fact, had not even seen the guy’s face—the end of the gun had seemed so big to obscure all else. The thought of pursuing the other car was not appealing. He didn’t want to think about what he might do if he actually caught up with him. Better to just get it together, pull off at the next exit where there might be a phone, and report the incident to the State Police.

  He drove on for another few minutes, gathering his thoughts and his composure. No other cars passed him. It was very late and few vehicles were still out on a weeknight. In the distance, on the shoulder of the Interstate, he could see the blood-red glow of taillights.

  Cautiously, he eased off on the gas and approached the other car. As he drew closer, he could see from the configuration of the lights that this vehicle had not been the one which had attacked him. This car was sluiced off the road at a bad angle, had cleared the shoulder, and was tilted up onto a grassy bank.

  An accident, maybe. He pulled in behind the other car and stopped, studying it for a moment in the wash of his headlights. He couldn’t see anyone in the car, and he wondered if they had left the car to go for help. A crazy thing to do, especially if they had left all their lights on.

  Leaving his own lights on, John left the car and walked slowly to the derelict. For some reason, he felt defenseless and naked in the cold play of his own headlights. With each step forward, he felt worse about the entire scene. Something was wrong here. The feeling hung over everything like a foul odor; you couldn’t miss it. And as John approached the driver’s side, he saw the bullet-hole in the side window, and the fear-thought not allowed now capered madly through his mind.

  Through the fractured glass, he could see a body, a formless shape lying on the front seat. Fighting back the panic, he reached for the door handle and depressed the latch. He didn’t want to see what awaited him, but he had no choice. As the door swung open, he heard a woman’s voice moaning in pain, trying to speak.

  When he leaned in to pull her up into his arms, he saw that she was a young woman in her twenties. He could also see the blood on her cheeks, and the hole in her skull where her eye had been. (He would later learn from the doctors that the bullet had entered her left eye, and in one of those crazy, life-saving quirks of fate, had exited through the sinus cavity under her right eye without damaging the brain.) The visual effect was so unnerving, so unreal; she looked like she wore a cheap mask.

  He carried the victim to his car, and drove her to the nearest hospital where they saved her life, but not her eye. Her description of her attacker was as vague and yet as similar as John’s, and he knew that the bastard would not be found, would not be caught.

  And that meant that he was still out there somewhere, running the highways, ready to try again. As time passed, the incident did not grow less vivid in his mind, but more so. When he could sleep, his dreams were filled with visions of the dark his sedan. When awake, he could not get the single obsessive thought from mind—that the driver would eventually find him, and complete the job unfinished…

  …John Sheridan peered through the dark glass of the other car, and for an instant saw his own reflection, which masked the face of the driver. But that no longer mattered.

  It was him. He could feel a reptilian chill in his certainty of this.

  And this time, there would be no panic. This time John was prepared, and in a long-planned maneuver, he jammed on his brakes for an instant. The effect was startling, as the ear on the left seemed to hurtle forward.

&nb
sp; Cutting the wheel hard, John slipped in behind the predator, tail-gating him crazily. The driver of the other car seemed confused with the sudden turn of events. John kept his New Yorker close behind the sedan as it weaved from side to side in the fast lane. Reaching beneath the driver’s seat, John pulled out the .38 caliber special he had purchased in the sporting goods store in Springfield.

  Now the sonofabitch would know what it felt like…

  He cut the wheel to the left and slipped his heavy car onto the shoulder, to the left of the fast lane. His worn tires whistled and scritched as they purchased on the loose gravel, but he accelerated anyway. A touch of his finger lowered his right window and the howling dampness of the night leaped in.

  Lurching crazily, the New Yorker raced along the shoulder, gaining on the dark sedan, pulling alongside with an inexorable movement. The other car could not escape now. Looking over, John picked up the gun and sighted along its short length. The car in the fast lane was drifting into view through the open passenger’s window.

  The night rushed by, the windstream ripping and tearing at him. His forward speed was close to ninety as he kept the pace, and suddenly he was abreast of the predator. Forgetting about the road ahead, he looked to the right, aimed the gun.

  Through the dark glass, he could see the vague shape of a face in profile, looking straight ahead. As the two cars plunged into the night, side by side, he waited and watched until the face turned to look at him. He wanted the bastard to stare down the bottomless well of the gun barrel. And then, as if on cue, the other driver turned—

  —and John Sheridan faced himself.

  It was a single slice of time, a solitary instant that exploded like a photographic flash in his mind. Impossibly, John stared at his other self, his doppelganger in the other car. And in that strobe light of recognition, he felt the acid burn of deja vu as the other car swerved dangerously close to him.

  Things happened quickly then. He grabbed the wheel tightly, crushed down the accelerator, and jumped back into the fast lane as he tore quickly away from the other car. He was confused now, but he kept thinking about how easy it would have been to have pulled the trigger.

  He continued at high speed until he advanced upon another car in the tight lane. It was a woman, alone, looking straight ahead. Slowing, he pulled alongside, raised the gun, and waited for her to turn her face…so he could look her in the eye.

  As with most of the tales in this volume, the origin of the next one has an interesting history. It started the same way many do: an editor called me who was doing an anthology of original stories and asked me—being one of most Usual of Suspects—to contribute a story. This time, the editor was Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and the book was to be called the singularly unbeguiling name of Pulphouse, and would not be a “theme” anthology, which meant I could write my story about anything I wanted.

  Okay, cool, I thought…so ah, what am I going to write about?

  So I check my list of ideas, and I see a note that says: Mike’s strange date. More mental shorthand, this one intended to jolt my memory of a real-life event that happened to an old pal of mine named Mike M. The true incident was one of those things so… odd that I had never been able to get it out of my mind. It was one of those things I’d always felt had the makings of a truly bizarre tale and that’s exactly what I eventually wrote.

  But wait, there’s more!

  We must climb into my Time Machine and jump ahead about 8 months—after I’d sent the story to Kris Rusch and she accepted it, and it finally appeared in print. It was the first volume of the Pulphouse anthology series, and as I looked over the book and read the stories therein, several thoughts arose primary. One, it got my vote as the Most Ugly Tome I’d ever seen. The print was so muddy, it looked like photocopy from a Xerox machine knock-off from Azerbaijan; the pages were bound in the cheesiest line of what they call “pleather;” and the overall effect was the quality of those Gideon bibles we’ve all found in our hotel nightstands. But Secondly, as I read the stories I noticed a disproportionate number of them were written for, or at least played to, a very specific theme: the usual and now-very-familiar feminist credo: I am woman, hear me roar.

  I groaned loudly and resisted a sudden urge to throw the book across the room.

  Not because the stories were badly written (most of them were quite well crafted, actually), but for a far more personal, ego-driven (and therefore more important) reason. You see, my story, “Nobody’s Perfect,” just happened to have a female protagonist, and with a little psycho-socio-shoehorning, some readers could force it into the feminist-mold.

  And why is that so bad? you might ask…?

  Because I have spent almost thirty years of writing in strict avoidance-mode of any fiction that smacked of sucking-up to whatever was the latest trend, social conformity, or politically correct bullshit. Because I don’t think I have ever couched a social diatribe or supra-moral tract in the guise of fiction. If I have a socio-political statement to make, I prefer to just toss it into a column1 and as they say in my family: fuggheddabouddit. I guess I didn’t like the idea that people would read my story in Pulphouse Volume 1 and think I was pandering to what was obviously (to me, anyway) an editorial bias, hot-button, hobby-horse, or whatever you want to call it, because I basically HATE that kind of bullshit in fiction.

  Yeah, that’s it. “Nobody’s Perfect” was not written with any political ax a-grinding in the background. I’d rather have my fingernails yanked off with a pair of needle-nosed Craftsman pliers than have to cop to that nonsense. It was basically a fictional exploration and jump-off point based on what happened to my friend when his date opened the door to greet him. And need I add: he was nothing like the character named Salazar, okay?

  1 I’ve been writing it for more than 25 years and it’s called The Mothers And Fathers Italian Association, and it contains some of my most brilliant, outrageous, and downright funny non-fiction I’ve ever done. It has been running in Cemetery Dance magazine for around ten years now, and if you’ve never read it, go grab a copy of the magazine and do yourself a big favor. As they say in the commercials: you’ll be glad you did!

  Lydia thought she might be able to like this guy. He seemed different from all the others. There was something mysterious about him, something exotic, and her intuition told her to expect an interesting evening.

  ⟡

  Salazar noticed her…aberration as he sat in her living room, watching her. She stood in the kitchen struggling to open the twist-off cap of a Michelob bottle.

  He smiled just slightly. Odd he had not observed the deficiency previously…

  Not that it mattered much, if at all. If anything, it somewhat intrigued him. He would still dispose of Lydia like all the others, and he was confident that her meat would steam with exquisite flavor.

  Salazar allowed himself a small, anticipatory smile. He was not certain what excited him the most, what provided him with the most pleasure—the initial search for suitable prey, the stalking-time when one had been selected, or the final act of consummation? There was a grandness about it all which inspired him, drove him with a fervor that religious zealots would envy.

  The ritual was so wonderful, and the meat always so utterly tasty…

  …It had been a Saturday two weeks earlier when Salazar fixed upon The City Paper’s classifieds ad for volunteers. He had been scanning the “Personals,” which had proved to be a good place to find prey—although he had been careful not to establish any patterns which the police might notice—when his eye drifted down to the “Help Wanteds” and read:

  VOLUNTEERS needed to read and record literature.

  Books For The Blind. For details call 344-8899

  For some reason, he re-read the listing, and a familiar wave of heat rippled his body, exciting him in an almost sexual way. In that single instant he knew the Fates were reaching out to him, directing him to his next mission.

  This would be perfect, he thought with a thoughtful nod of the head. Vision
s of young, single women—most of them probably single, unattached, and bookish—burned in him. Young women with time on their hands. Soulful and naive do-gooders. Yes. This set-up would be perfect.

  He called the number and was given an address downtown near the bohemian section of the city. It was a waterfront neighborhood which had recently enjoyed a renaissance in the form of countless new bars with catchy off-beat names, art galleries, little theatres, antique shops, and several alfresco restaurants. Yes, Books For The Blind was open on Saturdays, and yes, they would be glad to have him come down for an audition.

  ⟡

  It was not unusual for Lydia to spend her Saturday doing volunteer work. She found it a pleasant change of pace from her week-day position as a Systems Analyst for Westinghouse, and since she liked to read anyway, the Books For The Blind situation seemed ideal. The day had turned out to be bright and crisp, suggesting better weather still ahead.

  As Lydia walked through the quaint, neighborhood of Fells Point, she did not, as she often did, let herself dwell upon all the pain in the world, all the discomfort and sadness, the injustice and the plainly cruel. Sometimes, when she reflected upon the daily horror in the world, it affected her physically as well as mentally—tiny needles of pain would tingle up the right side of her body, as if a precursor to a special kind of heart failure. Throughout her young life, she had probably absorbed more than her share of the world’s pain, but it had left her undaunted, making her even stronger and more positive in the long run.

  ⟡

  “You’ll do just fine,” said Mr. Hawthorne, a reed-thin nobly-balding gentleman, who looked to be in his late fifties. He sat opposite a folding table, wearing headphones which were connected to an ancient, boxy, reel-to-reel recorder.

  “That is wonderful,” said Salazar. “When do I start?”

  Hawthorne looked at his watch. “If you can wait until four or so this afternoon, we’re going to have an orientation class for all the volunteers we’ve selected today.”