The darkness held him like a fist, and although he had not reached out to touch the walls of the coffin, he knew the prison of its wood loomed terribly close. He wished he had his watch with its luminous dial, just to check the time. But that would be against the rules.
The bastards, he thought with amusement. They’re all probably jowl-deep in their Wall Street Journals by now, but Gordon knew at least one of them would be monitoring the simple control panel Huntington had designed for this particular little adventure.
That was one of the conditions—someone would always be monitoring both of them in case there was either (a) an emergency, or (b) capitulation.
Gordon Kingsley cleared his throat, wondering if the sound was loud enough to arouse whoever might be listening. No, that’s right; they couldn’t hear him unless he flicked on the mike. He thought about turning on the light, but that would enact one of the other conditions—for every minute you kept your light on, one was subtracted from your total time.
No, he thought. For now, I’ll just lie here in the dark and think about why I’m here…
Murder is always murder. So is theft.
Gambling, however, is one of those fascinatingly odd pastimes that wears the clothes of its practitioner. If you’re tuxedoed to the nines at Barclay’s Casino in Soho, playing roulette and baccarat all night, you’re the jaunty gentleman. But if you’re throwing dice behind the YMCA or getting toasted at Aqueduct’s two-dollar window, you’re the biggest scumbag in Manhattan. There is something elegant about betting with bankers and industrialists, but altogether tatty when you do it with steamfitters and housepainters. Gambling carries both its own social stigmata and imprimatur. It’s not what you do; it’s whom you do it with.
And so it was with the members of The Colonial Club—the oldest men’s club in New York, dating back to the earliest days of New York’s inclusion into the original thirteen colonies. Gambling among its brethren was as natural as hand-rolled cigars or imported sherry. To hear a wager being offered or taken in the Club’s drawing room was as acceptable as a market price being quoted. Topics ranged from the most mundane of sporting events to personal boasts of prowess to the outcomes of political and financial futures. Amounts ranged from paltry dinner tabs to portfolio items. In all, the Colonial Club found gambling to be a delightful pastime.
But sometimes, a wager could take on a new level of meaning, of competition, and perhaps an even sinister nature.
This kind of bet was rare, and usually only witnessed between men who were sworn adversaries. There are certain types of men who require a personal nemesis to give them the energy needed to live life most fully. Men such as these are resolutely bored with the usual challenges in life; they have met these impediments and have vanquished them. In other words, they have made their fortunes, raised their children, divested themselves of sour marriages, traveled the world, and proved their manhood in all the other customary ways.
To truly enjoy their jaded lives, men such as these need a personal demon, someone to hate, someone they can best at all costs, someone whose misfortune will make them feel good.
The Colonial Club stabled men such as these—J. Gordon Kingsley and Henry Pearce Huntington being the most notorious.
Gordon had taken an instant disliking to Huntington the moment he’d met him. The Huntington family had only come into their wealth during the Thirties. Before that, they’d been a loose circle of laborers and railroad louts. The worst part of this history was that Huntington continually blared out his nouveau riche status, as though he were proud of the fact that his grand-father swung from the back of a caboose. He may as well have declared that his ancestors swung from trees. Gordon was certain that if he searched through the Huntington genealogical record, he would find more than one Irishman in the woodpile, and that would more than account for the lack of Henry Pearce’s manners and general sense of decorum.
At fifty-five, Henry Pearce Huntington was in remarkably good shape, boasting at the amount of exercise in which he indulged. Despite his suspected mongrel status, Huntington sported the finely-chiseled features of true nobility. This too irritated Gordon Kingsley, who had allowed himself to grow soft and weak as time and gravity stepped up their assaults. Indeed, everything about Huntington grossly annoyed Gordon Kingsley. Gordon found himself actually studying the man, watching his every move and hanging on his every word, searching for ever more reasons to loathe this poseur to true American aristocracy.
And so, Gordon Kingsley never let an opportunity pass wherein he might embarrass, chide, or challenge Henry Huntington. Not that the former had any trouble carrying on his end of the unspoken agreement; it seemed that Huntington found Kingsley’s neo-Tory arrogance and his corpulent presence an equally hated target. If these men had lived in the age of dueling, they would have both carried more slugs than an Uzi’s magazine. Neither man could hurl enough insults at the other. They were the Ford and Chevy of their social set; the oil and water; the yin and the yang.
Tensions between them became the norm at the Colonial Club, and their tête-à-têtes became legendary sources of interest and amusement. A wager between the two men invariably meant bravado, guile, and a certain amount of spectacle.
The latest engagement, however, had no equal.
Huntington had been sitting in the lounge sipping, contemplating the onion in the depths of his martini, when Gordon had entered the room. Feeling flushed from the victory of their last showdown—a marathon poker game in which one or the other would clean out his opponent’s $100,000 table stakes, Gordon had let loose on Huntington.
“So, Henry Pearce, how’s it feel to be a hundred thousand lighter these days?”
Huntington forced a smile to his lips, enacted a shrug dripping with ennui. “A straight flush beats a full house every time, Gordon. I can live with that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Only that any baboon can draw cards to his hairy belly,” said Huntington, warming to the call to combat.
“I’m not sure I follow you, old man,” said Gordon.
Huntington smiled. “Really? Well, follow this: don’t start bragging about luck. Your winning hand had nothing to do with your skills or abilities—unless you’ve got a talent for leger de main?”
“Are you accusing me of cheating?” Gordon Kingsley’s voice ascended the octave range.
One could almost hear the collective attention of everyone in the lounge shift to the molten core of their conversation.
“How declasse,” said Huntington. “Of course not, enemy mine. What I mean is this: a reliance on luck cheapens the contest, don’t you think?”
“Cheapens!?”
“Just so. However, I’ve been considering a wager that depends upon nothing but the sheer, tensile strength of our wills, Kingsley.”
“How’s that?”
“Have you ever read Poe’s ‘Premature Burial’?”
“It’s been a long time—at Andover, but yes, of course. Why?”
“Ever think about what it must have been like for any of those poor bastards who woke up in their coffins, sunk six feet in black dirt?”
“What’s the game, Huntington?”
“Ever think about what it would be like if you woke up in your coffin?”
Gordon paused, hesitant to say something, anything he might later regret. He didn’t like the gist of their conversation. Something lurked beneath its polished surface. Something dark and slippery. Something dangerous. What the hell was his nemesis getting at?
“Earth to Kingsley…are you there, Gordy?”
“Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, I’ve thought about it. Haven’t we all?”
“I would think so,” said Huntington. He sipped his martini with a measured precision, then stared at his adversary.
This made Gordon uncomfortable but he forced himself to look directly into Huntington’s eyes. Something was going on behind them, dark and slick as Timkin bearings, and he had to fathom it out. He could let his sw
orn enemy think he might be getting the best of him.
“Is that it, then?” asked Gordon. “I mean, come on now, Henry—what’s the point of all this? All this talk of the dead and their coffins…?”
Huntington smiled. “Hold on! No one said anything about the dead…”
“No, I suppose you didn’t. But what of it? What’s the game, Huntington?”
Henry Pearce Huntington, that living monument to the nouveau riche, grinned like a Cheshire. “Simply this: do you think you could (1) stand to be buried in a coffin wide awake, and (2) stay down there longer than me?”
The silence that punctuated his question hung heavy in their midst. The eavesdroppers seemed to hold their breath as one. Could he be serious? Had he gone too far this time? What kind of a mind could even conceive of such a proposition?
Gordon scratched his nose, cleared his throat. A quick glance about the room confirmed the stolid gazes of his fellow Colonials—each one trying to seem less interested than the next, but attentive as hungry dogs nonetheless.
“What kind of a question is that?” he said, his words seeming to actually boom throughout the room.
“Just what it sounds like,” said Huntington. “I’ve offered you the terms of a wager, Gordy. Are you man enough?”
“You’re insane,” said Gordon.
“Most likely. But I’ve got another hundred thousand that says I can stay down longer than you.”
“What?!”
A soft murmur colored the room.
“If we both stay down for 30 days, we call it a draw.” Huntington smiled. “What do you say?”
Again, the weighty silence enclosed as the room itself seemed to take anxious pause. They were all listening, all waiting to see what kind of a man he was. Kingsley had agreed to the sky-diving and the bungy-jumping and even the William Tell reenactment, but this latest escapade, this one danced upon the wall of true madness. Gordon had always believed he was a touch claustrophobic, and just the thought of being in that kind of tight space made him shudder.
“Well, what’s your answer, old sport? Have I finally called your game, or what?”
“Can I assume that you’ve already worked out all the details? And that you’ve put together a set of conditions?”
Huntington grinned. “After all this time, all the wagering we’ve done, how could you even ask such a question? But yes, I thought I might call them ground rules, eh?” He laughed at his small pun.
Gordon nodded, swallowed hard. “All right then…let’s hear them.”
“Does this mean you’re on?”
Gordon hesitated only for an instant. “I’m game. One hundred thousand.”
Someone coughed; the tension in the room spidered and cracked like an old windshield. Exclamations of shock and encouragement, salted with the odd deprecation, filled in the empty spaces between his thoughts. What the hell had he just agreed to? What came next?
Huntington smiled broadly, bringing together his hands in a steeple. “All right, Gordy. Here’s the way I envisioned it. If something offends you terribly or strikes you as unworkable, just raise your hand and stop me. We can talk about it, okay?”
“Go on…”
Huntington hunched closer across the bar, warming to the subject. His eyes grew brighter, the voltage of his imagination having been stepped up a few notches. “Okay, here’s the way I see it. Two coffins, buried side by side, you in one, me the other. I have a game preserve in Hansford, Connecticut. Plenty of land, we can do what we want there without any interference or prying of the locals. Anyway, we outfit them with some special equipment and supply lines.”
Gordon raised a hand, feeling foolish for acting so obediently. “What kind of special equipment?”
“I think we’d want an intercom, and maybe a lamp of some sort. Then there’s air, food, water, getting rid of waste. A system of buried tubes and cables should do it just fine.”
Gordon shuddered again. The thought of being down there long enough to want to eat, to have to take a piss…who could last that long?
“And you solved these problems?”
Huntington nodded. “I’d say so. Studies confirm we could live on nutrient-enriched liquids for months if necessary. And we don’t have to worry past thirty days, right? A catheter and a simple pump will take care of liquid waste, and there wouldn’t be any solids—a good nutritionist could see to that.”
Again the image of actually being in the coffin slammed into his thoughts like a left jab to his jaw. It was madness! No one could go through with it, he thought. And perhaps that was the rub—this was an elaborate joke on Huntington’s part. An attempt to show him up, make Gordon look silly.
“What’s the matter, Kingsley? Having second thoughts? I know what you’re thinking, and I had a hard time getting used to the idea myself. All that dark earth on top of you, all around you, and that little tight, dark space for a home. The Brits have a name for coffins, you know—narrow houses! I’d say they’re right, eh?” Huntington laughed, tossing back his head dramatically like the villain in a bad Thirties film. Gordon watched him, thinking he looked more than a little mad. “No light, no sound. Just the hammerfall of your own pulse in your ears, and of course the faint burrowing of the worms, trying to get through to you!”
Again a murmur suffused the lounge. The Club members were getting their money’s worth this day.
“Yes, I’ve thought about it,” said Gordon, running his fingers through his pale, thinning hair, “and as bad as it sounds, I know I can outlast a loudmouthed showman like you.”
“Well, we’re going to see about that,” said Huntington. “Any last questions?”
“Only one,” said Gordon. “When do we start?”
…and so went the preamble to what now transpired.
Gordon stared upward in the darkness, noticing for the first time how he was already losing sense of spatial orientation. Were it not for the insistence of gravity, he wouldn’t know which end was up. It made him think of a study he’d read somewhere—the Smithsonian or some other pop-science magazine—about subjects who underwent sensory deprivation tests. Seems that when you put someone in a special chamber that canceled all sense of smell, taste, hearing, feeling, or seeing, you were pretty well sure of pushing them off the edge of rational thought and experience. What usually happened, the researchers discovered, was that when a person cannot receive any sensory input from outside himself, he will create his own. Subjects reported seeing strange creatures, hearing bizarre music, etc.
Would that eventually happen to him?
And what of Huntington? If he went mad, how would he know Gordon had bested him?
Stop thinking about it. Just lay here and take it like a man. Right. Easy to say. Gordon had kept reminding himself that the best way to handle the situation was to try not to think about where you really were. Yes, of course, but that would be—
“I say, old sport, are you there?”
The voice was canned, electronically flavored, but achingly familiar. It poured from a speaker near Gordon’s head. What was going on now?
“Kingsley, are you there? Don’t tell me you’ve had your overdue coronary and we can just leave you down here?”
“Fuck you, Henry.”
“Ah…! There you are! Good to hear your usual self.”
“Would you mind telling me what the hell’s going on?!” Gordon tried to sound most outraged, but honest to tell, he welcomed the human contact, even from a fool like Huntington.
Laughter filtered into the narrow house. “Did I forget to tell you we’d be connected by the intercom system too?” Huntington paused for effect. “Yes, Gordy, just a little extra bonus I thought up at the last minute. And, it’s on its own channel, so anybody on the monitoring equipment can’t hear us. Just you and me, buddy.”
“You never cease to amaze me with your boldness, Henry.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean, why? What’s this for? To irritate me? To amuse yourself? Isn’t it a violati
on of your own rules?”
“Of course not! No contact with the surface, remember? We’re both down here. Nothing said or agreed that we can’t talk amongst ourselves…”
“Henry, I’ve known you too long. What gives?” There was a bad smell to things already. Gordon felt himself tensing up, he fought the urge to push upward on the solid lid just inches from his face. At any moment everything could just collapse in on him.
Soft laughter.
Then silence.
Henry Pearce Huntington was obviously going to play psych-warrior. Well, fuck him. Gordon could play too. Don’t give him the satisfaction of a reply.
Seconds ticked past him like gnats crawling on his arm.
Finally the speaker crackled: “You know, Gordy, I’d bet it’s never occurred to you that you’ve been had…”
Don’t answer him. Ignore the nonsense he was suggesting.
“I mean, how do you know, really know that I’m down there with you, old sport? Sure you saw me get sealed in, just like you. But did you see my coffin get lowered into the ground and the dirt piled on…?”
How could that be? Impossible. The Colonials…there were witnesses…
“And don’t think I’m not beyond paying off a member or two…or that there aren’t larcenists in our little Club that are down on their heels enough to take a bribe or a little blood money…”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” The words escaped him like air from a ruptured bellows. He hadn’t wanted to sound so out of control.
Again soft laughter. “Is it, old sport? Well, you’d better hope so…”
Gordon waited for more, but there was only a deadly silence. The closeness of his prison suddenly gripped him, even in the absolute darkness. He thought about the PVC airshaft ever flushing the chamber with fresh oxygen, suddenly realizing what a totally fragile connection to the surface that tube represented. How easily it could be interrupted or sealed off with something as silly as a sock or as intentional as a cupped palm.
Huntington wasn’t that crazy. Murder could not be explained away…
“We’re an influential lot, we Colonials. A police inspector would be told to listen closely to whatever we said, Gordy. We—”
Fearful Symmetries Page 26
