Fear Itself

by Jeff Gelb

  For that was exactly what it was: a jellyfish. Each of us had one, in our bowls. Warm and pulsing with life and fear radiating from it like raw nerves.

  * * *

  flicking toward me, slivers of blindness. Unless fissures in the air itself?—fibrillations like those at the onset of sleep the way dreams begin to skid toward you—at you—into you—and there is no escape for the dream is you.

  Yes I would like to cease my memoir here. I am not accustomed to writing, to selecting words with such care. When I speak, I often stammer but there is a comfort in that—nobody knows, what comfort!—for you hold back what you must say, hold it back until it is fully your own and cannot surprise you. I am not to blame, I am not deserving of hurt neither then nor now but do I believe this, even if I cannot succeed in making you believe it.

  How can an experience belong to you if you cannot remember it? That is the extent of what I wish to know. If I cannot remember it, how then can I summon it back to comprehend it, still less to change it. And why am I shivering, when the sun today is poison-hot burning through the foliage dry and crackling as papier-màché yet I keep shivering shivering shivering if there is a God in heaven please forgive me.

  After Sunday dinner we were to go sailing. Uncle Rebhorn had a beautiful white sailboat bobbing at the end of a dock, out there in the lake, which was a rich deep aqua-blue scintillating with light. On Lake St. Clair on this breezy summer afternoon there were many sailboats, speedboats, yachts. I had stared at them in wondering admiration as we’d driven along the Lakeshore Drive. What a dazzling sight like nothing in Hamtramck!

  First, though, we had to change our clothes. All of us, said Uncle Rebhorn, have to change into bathing suits.

  Audrey and I changed in a dark cubbyhole beneath a stairway. This was Audrey’s room and nobody was supposed to come inside to disturb us but the door was pushing inward and Audrey whimpered, “No, no Daddy,” laughing nervously and trying to hold the door shut with her arm. I was a shy child; when I had to change for gym class at school I turned my back to the other girls and changed as quickly as I could. Even showing my panties to another girl was embarrassing to me, my face burned with a strange wild heat. Uncle Rebhorn was on the other side of the door, we could hear his harsh labored breathing. His voice was light, though, when he asked, “Hmmrnm—d’you naughty little girls need any help getting your panties down? Or your bathing suits on?” “No, Daddy, please,” Audrey said. Her eyes were wide and stark in her face and she seemed not aware of me any longer but in a space of her own, trembling, hunched over. I was scared, too, but thinking why don’t we joke with Uncle Rebhorn, he wants us to joke with him, that’s the kind of man he is, what harm could he do us?—the most any adult had ever done to me by the age of eleven was Grandpa tickling me a little too hard so I’d screamed with laughter and kicked but that was years ago when I’d been a baby practically, and while I had not liked being tickled it was nothing truly painful or scary—was it? I tried to joke with my uncle through the door, I was giggling saying, “No no no, you stay out of here, Uncle Rebhorn! We don’t need your help no we don’t!” There was a moment’s silence, then Uncle Rebhorn chuckled appreciatively, but there came then suddenly the sound of Aunt Elinor’s raised voice, and we heard a sharp slap, and a cry, a female cry immediately cut off. And the door ceased its inward movement, and Audrey shoved me whispering, “Hurry up! You dumb dope, hurry up!” So quickly—safely—we changed into our bathing suits.

  It was a surprise, how by chance Audrey’s and my bathing suits looked alike, and us like twin sisters in them: both were pretty shades of pink, with elasticized tops that fitted tight over our tiny, flat breasts. Mine had emerald green seahorses sewn onto the bodice and Audrey’s had little ruffles, the suggestion of a skirt.

  Seeing my face, which must have shown hurt, Audrey hugged me with her thin, cold arms. I thought she would say how much she liked me, I was her favorite cousin, she was happy to see me—but she didn’t say anything at all.

  Beyond the door Uncle Rebhorn was shouting and clapping his hands.

  “C’mon move your sweet little asses! Chop-chop! Time’s a-wastin’! There’ll be hell to pay if we’ve lost the sun!”

  Audrey and I crept out in our bathing suits and Aunt Elinor grabbed us by the hands making an annoyed “tsking” sound and pulling us hurriedly along. We had to push our way out of a small doorway—no more than an opening, a hole, in the wall—and then we were outside, on the back lawn of Uncle Rebhorn’s property. What had seemed like lush green grass from a distance was synthetic grass, the kind you see laid out in flat strips on pavement. The hill was steep down to the dock, as if a giant hand was lifting it behind us, making us scramble. Uncle Rebhorn and Darren were trotting ahead, in matching swim trunks—gold trimmed in blue. Aunt Elinor had changed into a single-piece white satin bathing suit that exposed her bony shoulders and sunken chest; it was shocking to see her. She called out to Uncle Rebhorn that she wasn’t feeling well—the sun had given her a migraine headache—sailing would make the headache worse—could she be excused?—but Uncle Rebhorn shouted over his shoulder, “You’re coming with us, God damn you! Why did we buy this frigging sailboat except to enjoy it?” Aunt Elinor winced, and murmured, “Yes, dear,” and Uncle Rebhorn said, snorting, with a wink at Audrey and me, “Hmmm! It better be ‘yes, dear,’ you stupid cow-cunt.”

  By the time we crawled out onto the deck of the sailboat a chill wind had come up, and in fact the sun was disappearing like something being sucked down a drain. It was more like November than July, the sky heavy with clouds like stained concrete. Uncle Rebhorn said sullenly, “—bought this frigging sailboat to enjoy it for God’s sake—for the family and that means all the family.” The sailboat was lurching in the choppy water like a living, frantic thing as Uncle Rebhorn loosed us from the dock and set sail. “First mate! Look sharp! Where the hell are you, boy? Move your ass!”— Uncle Rebhorn kept up a constant barrage of commands at poor Darren who scampered to obey them, yanking at ropes that slipped from his fingers, trying to swing the heavy, sodden main sail around. The wind seemed to come from several directions at once and the sails flapped and whipped helplessly. Darren did his best but he was clumsy and ill-coordinated and terrified of his father. His pudgy face had turned ashen, and his eyes darted wildly about; his gold swim trunks, which were made of a shiny material like rayon, fitted him so tightly a loose belt of fat protruded over the waistband and jiggled comically as, desperate to follow Uncle Rebhorn’s instructions, Darren fell to one knee, pushed himself up, slipped and fell again, this time onto his belly on the slippery deck. Uncle Rebhorn, naked but for his swimming trunks and a visored sailor’s cap jammed onto his head, shouted mercilessly, “Son, get up. Get that frigging sail to the wind or it’s mutiny!”

  The sailboat was now about thirty feet from the safety of the dock, careening and lurching in the water, which was nothing like the painted-aqua water I had seen from shore; it was dark, metallic-gray and greasy, and very cold. Winds howled about us. There was no cabin in the sailboat, all was exposed, and Uncle Rebhorn had taken the only seat. I was terrified the sailboat would sink, or I would be swept off to drown in the water by wild, frothy waves washing across the deck. I had never been in any boat except rowboats with my parents in the Hamtramck Park lagoon. “Isn’t this fun? Isn’t it! Sailing is the most exciting—” Aunt Elinor shouted at me, with her wide fixed smile, but Uncle Rebhorn, seeing my white, pinched face, interrupted, “Nobody’s going to drown today, least of all you. Ungrateful little brat!”

  Aunt Elinor poked me, and smiled, pressing a finger to her lips. Of course, Uncle Rebhorn was just teasing.

  For a few minutes it seemed as if the winds were filling our sails in the right way for the boat moved in a single unswerving direction. Darren was holding for dear life to a rope, to keep the main sail steady. Then suddenly a dazzling white yacht sped by us, three times the size of Uncle Rebhorn’s boat, dreamlike out of the flying spray, and in its wake Uncl
e Rebhorn’s boat shuddered and lurched; there was a piercing, derisive sound of a horn—too late; the prow of the sailboat went under, freezing waves washed across the deck, the boat rocked crazily. I’d lost sight of Audrey and Aunt Elinor and was clutching a length of frayed rope with both hands, to keep myself from being swept overboard. How I whimpered with fear and pain! This is your punishment, now you know you must be bad. Uncle Rebhorn crouched at the prow of the boat, his eyes glittering in his flushed face, screaming commands at Darren who couldn’t move fast enough to prevent the main sail from suddenly swinging around, skimming over my head and knocking Darren into the water.

  Uncle Rebhorn yelled, “Son! Son!” With a hook at the end of a long wooden pole he fished about in the sudsy waves for my cousin, who sank like a bundle of sodden laundry; then surfaced again as a wave struck him from beneath and buoyed him upward; then sank again, this time beneath the lurching boat, his arms and legs flailing. I stared aghast, clutching at my rope. Audrey and Aunt Elinor were somewhere behind me, crying, “Help! help!” Uncle Rebhorn ignored them, cursing as he scrambled to the other side of the boat, and swiping with the hook in the water until he snagged something and, blood vessels prominent as angry worms in his face, hauled Darren out of the water and onto the swaying deck. The hook had caught my cousin in the armpit, and streams of blood ran down his side. Was Darren alive?—I stared, I could not tell. Aunt Elinor was screaming hysterically. With deft, rough hands Uncle Rebhorn laid his son on his back, like a fat, pale fish, and stretched the boy’s arms and legs out, and straddled Darren’s hips and began to rock in a quickened rhythmic movement and to squeeze his rib cage, squeeze and release! squeeze and release! until driblets of foamy water and vomit began to be expelled from Darren’s mouth, and, gasping and choking, the boy was breathing again. Tears of rage and sorrow streaked Uncle Rebhorn’s flushed face. “You disappoint me, son! Son, you disappoint me! I, your dad who gave you life—you disappoint me!”

  A sudden prankish gust of wind lifted Uncle Rebhorn’s sailor cap off his head and sent it flying and spinning out into the misty depths of Lake St. Clair.

  I have been counseled not to retrieve the past where it is blocked by like those frequent attacks of “visual impairment” (not blindness, the neurologist insists) but have I not a right to my own memories? to my own past? Why should that right be taken from me?

  What are you frightened of, Mother, my children ask me, sometimes in merriment, what are you frightened of?—as if anything truly significent, truly frightening, could have happened, or could have been imagined to have happened, to me.

  So I joke with them, I tease them saying, “Maybe—you!” For in giving birth to them I suffered slivers of too, which for the most part I have forgotten as all wounds heal and pain is lost in time—isn’t it?

  What happened on that lost Sunday in July 1969 in Uncle Rebhorn’s house in Grosse Pointe Shores is a true mystery never comprehended by the very person (myself) who experienced it. For at the center of it is an emptiness black rectangular emptiness skidding toward me like a fracturing of the air and it is ticklish too, my shivering turns convulsive on the brink of wild leaping laughter. I recall the relief that my cousin Darren did not drown and I recall the relief that we returned to the dock which was swaying and rotted but did not collapse, held firm as Uncle Rebhorn cast a rope noose to secure the boat. I know that we returned breathless and excited from our outing on Lake St. Clair and that Aunt Elinor said it was too bad no snapshots had been taken to commemorate my visit, and Uncle Rebhorn asked where the Polaroid camera was, why did Aunt Elinor never remember it for God’s sake, their lives and happy times flying by and nobody recording them. I know that we entered the house and once again in the dark cubbyhole that was my cousin Audrey’s room beneath the stairs we were changing frantically from our bathing suits which were soaking wet into our dry clothes and this time Aunt Elinor, still less Audrey, could not prevent the door from pushing open crying “Daddy, no!” and “No, please, Daddy!” until I was crying too and laughing screaming as a man’s rough fingers ran over my bare ribs bruising the frizzy-wiry hairs of his chest and belly tickling my face until what was beneath us which I had believed to be a floor fell away suddenly dissolving like water I was not crying, I was not fighting I was a good girl:

  see? waking then like floating to the surface of a dream as again the tiny pink pebbles exquisite as seashells were being thrown up beneath the chassis of the shiny black car, and Uncle Rebhorn rosy-faced and fresh from his shower in crisp sport shirt, Bermuda shorts and sandals drove me the long long distance back to Hamtramck away from Lake St. Clair and the mansions like castles on their grassy hills, on this return ride nobody else was with us, not Audrey, not Aunt Elinor, not Darren, only Uncle Rebhorn and me, his favorite niece he said, beside him in the passenger’s seat in the air-conditioned cool inside the tinted windows through which, at the foot of the graveled drive, as the wrought iron gate swung open by magic, I squinted back with my inflamed eyes at the luminous sandstone mansion with the latticed windows, the portico covered in English ivy, the slender columns like something in a children’s storybook, it was the most beautiful house I had ever seen up close, or was ever to enter in my life. And nothing would change that.

  Story Backgrounds

  GARY BRANDNER

  This is as close to autobiographical as anything I have written. Allowing for some juggling of time sequences and dramatic structuring, Billy Bobbick’s story is my story. The scene on the merry-go-round is as accurate as I can remember it. My ticket phobia continues to this day. The ending, let us hope, is completely fictional.

  RICHARD LEE BYERS

  What scares me the most is simply the human propensity to treat other people cruelly for the silliest reasons imaginable, or for no reason at all. To put it another way, as my protagonist discovers too late, spite, ignorance, prejudice, and shortsightedness are the true powers of darkness, and they can destroy any one of us. The story was inspired by events in real life. I live in a subrural (an odd term that means more rural than suburbia, but more residential than honest-to-God farmland) subdivision, and, because of my involvement in fantasy, I have fundamentalist neighbors who think I’m a Satanist. I do take evening walks through the neighborhood, and twice I’ve had people stop me and ask in all seriousness if I’m a devil worshipper.

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  My biggest fear doesn’t have a name. It is tied to a character trait of mine—or possibly flaw—perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that I still live in the small town I was bom and raised in, forty-some years ago, and that at age twenty, I married my childhood sweetheart to whom I am still blissfully wed.

  Possibly the best term for this form of dread is fear of change. It’s a fear that my world will be taken out from under me—that my lifeline will be cut, my security will be lost. It is this fear that makes us cower before sadistic, unreasonable bosses—the parental figures of our careers.

  And, so, it all goes back to that truly primal fear: fear of your parents. Fear of the punishment, the wrath of those who gave you life, those who sheltered you, shaped and controlled you. Or even worse, the fear of losing them….

  You don’t have to have been abused (and I certainly wasn’t—I was if anything pampered) to understand this basic fear. If there wasn’t some truth to what I’m saying, then who among the grown-ups reading this anthology has never shared with a mate or a confidant the startling news that one or both of your parents is driving you crazy.

  NANCY A. COLLINS

  I moved to Manhattan—to be more precise, the Lower East Side, the “Mean Streets” of Scorsese fame—in the summer of ‘92. The most unrelentingly urban of American inner cities. Everyone has commented on how well I’ve adapted to my environment. Maybe that’s because by the time I got to New York, I already had a career and a name for myself. I didn’t have to wrestle this anaconda of an urban center on a day-to-day basis to just get by, like so many others are forced to. The fact that hundreds—perh
aps thousands—of people move to this city every year without any job or housing prospects never ceases to amaze me. All the situations related in “Avenue X” are true, although fictitious. ?l’ Blue Eyes was right—if you can make it here, you can make it any-where. But if you can’t make it, the city will grind you up like a chicken bone in a spiralling corkscrew disposal unit.

  MICHAEL GARRETT

  I have, unfortunately, been on both sides of the desk in the “Unfinished Business” scenario and am all too familiar with the volatile emotions and stress that accompany both firing and being fired. I fear that violence in the workplace will worsen before it ever improves.

  JEFF GELB

  My mother’s death in 1991 was a life-altering event in ways I am still exploring and will continue to do so until my own death—and hopefully, beyond. It seems to have lessened my own fear of death, which was The Big One for me prior to Mom’s “dropping her body.” But it also pointed out that family is truly what counts in life. To lose my family would be akin to losing my reason to live, and so it has become my greatest fear.

  “Home Again” is dedicated to my mother.

  STEPHEN GRESHAM

  After I published my second horror novel, I suffered through several agonizing months struggling with a question: could a horror novel impact a reader in such a way as to “trigger” psychotic behavior? The question haunted me in a most intimate and soul-wrenching manner. Most frightening of all, the question generated other questions, other issues, leaving bloody tracks on my psyche. I’ve followed those bloody tracks, and what continues to haunt me is that … I haven’t answered the question.

  RICK HAUTA1A

  Remember that old gem of college bathroom graffiti wisdom: “Death is the biggest trip of all—that’s why they save it for last!” Well, I think it’s probably safe to say that most horror writers write what they do because—bottom line—they’re afraid of death. But I want to clarify a small point about my contribution to Fear Itself. At first I was going to say that I’m not so much afraid of death as I am afraid of dying, but it’s even more subtle than that. I think my biggest fear—the one that leaves me bathed in a cold sweat in the middle of the night—is the terrifying subjectivity of the death experience. Imagine when you finally “check out”—as we all must—what you will experience, and the worst thing is, you won’t be able to describe it to anyone! I have no doubt that all of my writing, perhaps even the source of my inspiration to write, is this fear of the subjective experience of death. Certainly all of my novels and most of my short stories have been driven by this fear, but “Perfect Witness” was written with it clearly in mind … staring me right in the face.