Fear Itself

by Jeff Gelb

  JACK KETCHUM

  The events in “Snakes” are an amplification and rearrangement of real ones which occurred to a very real woman and her dog during a Southwest Florida storm. The recurring dream about the water-snake is, of course, my own—it’s me and not her who’s scared of them. The childhood incident at the ‘gator farm (yes, that kid with his hand in the air was me) is probably the reason. I think that ever since then snakes represent to me the unseen, unnoticed, and unexpected threat that exists in nature and in everyday life—literally the “snake in the grass” you step on right before he bites you—the sudden conscienceless enemy, thoroughly unforseen. You meet him now and then. And he chases you through your dreams.

  PAUL KUPPERBERG

  When I was in my early 20s, on my own for the first time, I went through my starving-artist-in-a-garret phase. I was usually flat broke, hung out with a largely bizarre and often motley crew of people, was not on unfamiliar terms with various altered states of reality, and firmly believed that living somewhere out there on the neurotic, self-destructive edge was the only way to go for a young, creative type.

  Now, years later, my wife and I live in our own house in the suburbs, I hold down a 9-to-5 job, and no longer have the patience for the largely bizarre or for altered states of reality. I’m convinced that there’s as much creativity in happiness as there is out on the edge, but sometimes, when I’m snuggling to make a story work, I feel the smallest bit of panic. The fear that maybe I’ve become too much the “normal” citizen to be able to still hack it. Intellectually I know there’s no connection between self-destructive behavior and creativity … but I haven’t completely abandoned neurosis (we all need to keep a little something of the beast inside us). Just to be on the safe side.

  GRAHAM MASTERTON

  When I was very small, the statues of London had a profound effect on me. They stood in the ruins of the Blitz, dark and menacing but somehow sad, too, as if they contained all the heroism and all the terrible suffering of war.

  There was Winged Victory on top of the arch at Hyde Park Comer, with her chariot and her horses. There was a naked David with a sword, in the brownest and glossiest of bronzes. There was the body of an infantryman from the Great War, covered with his helmet and his cape. To me, they were real. I was sure that they could feel; I was sure that they could speak.

  One night when I was five I had a vivid nightmare that I was being pursued by a mounted statue, and I can remember that feeling of absolute terror even today.

  Statues can be erotic; statues can be heroic. Statues can be disturbing. But there is always the feeling that they are more than metal, more than stone. They have a kind of frozen soul, too.

  I find religious effigies particularly disturbing. The melancholy statues of Christ; the pale madonnas. There is a bronze in the Groeninge Museum in Bruges of three heavily cowled nuns, and to my mind it is one of the most frightening pieces of sculpture ever created.

  There are plenty of other hair-raising sculptures in Bruges, however, and “The Gray Madonna” is one of them.

  TH. METZGER

  We all wear emotional armor—a fragile membrane that protects us from what’s outside and protects the world beyond us from what breeds in our inner darkness. “Pyre” is about the collapse of this armor, the dissolution of boundaries. Emotions are explosive, dangerous; they take us to places we fear to go. “Pyre” is the story of a man who gives in to the emotional chaos inside himself.

  REX MILLER

  “Sewercide” is a twist on the stalker theme, but inside the story are fearsome things I refuse to amplify in print. Folks say putting your mouth on some things can make them happen. I won’t take the chance. Suffice it to say there are elements of the story I won’t articulate.

  THOMAS F. MONTELEONE

  While the fear that underlies this story may be fairly obvious and require little clarification, I think I can comply with your Good Editor’s wishes to come up with something to fill this white space. As the father of three children, I think I’m qualified to speak for most parents when I say there is nothing to strike more terror within me than to enter my child’s room in the middle of the night and find Old Cowl’n’Bones in the shadows. Gilda Radner and Christopher Lee redux—only it’s not for laughs. The death of a child is one of those incomprehensible things to me. Just the thought of it staggers me as I write these words. How anyone survives it is one of life’s greatest mysteries. I honestly don’t know that I could; and I’m the kind of asshole who thinks he can still play ice hockey with twenty-year-olds as I skate along on the wrong side of forty-five. Several of my friends suffered through this scenario, and every time it disturbed me so totally, I was unable to say anything to any of them—other than to say I lacked the vocabulary of grief necessary to deal with such a limitless tragedy. During those moments, I’ve never felt so helpless in my life.

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  It’s night. It has been night for a long time. Hours pass—yet it’s the same hour. I can’t sleep. My mind is fractured like broken glass. Or a broken mirror, shards reflecting shards. I am incapable of thinking but only of receiving, like a fine-meshed net strung tight, mere glimmerings of thought. Teasing fragments of “memory”—or is it “invented memory”?—rise and turn and fall and sift and scatter and rearrange themselves into arabesques of patterns on the verge of becoming coherent, yet do not become coherent. As in a childhood riddle never explained. As in one of those ingeniously intricate childhood puzzle-drawings in which shapes—faces, figures of animals—are superimposed upon one another, obscured by clouds, trees, natural objects. Something wants to speak—but what? This insomniac state is perhaps but the nighttime, and therefore the most obvious expression of a general fascinated bafflement of consciousness, for I have to acknowledge that occasionally—not frequently (which would be madness) but occasionally—such fugue states grip me by day, in public places; I am especially vulnerable while being introduced to give a lecture or a reading, for instance, or, on rarer occasions, while being cited for some honor or award. At such times one must sit gravely listening, one must not be seen to demur, still less to be assailed by gusts of wild hilarity, disbelief. Yes, I think ironically, as an enthusiastic stranger’s voice extols the public achievements erf the largely fictitious “Joyce Carol Oates,” yes but no: you don’t know me. If you knew me, you would not say such outlandish things.

  What should be said in place of these “outlandish things,” I have no idea.

  Yesterday in Manhattan, on the twenty-third, penthouse floor of a Fifth Avenue office building facing Trump Tower, at a lavish luncheon in my honor, in the grip of a powerful fugue state I felt as if I were about to remember something—but could not, cannot. Wanting desperately to reread a certain passage from Pascal’s Pensées, which I have virtually memorized yet can’t trust my memory to replicate with the full dignity and gravity these famous words demand.

  This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance. We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we try to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes forever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereupon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.

  Unless you are more protectively self-deluded than Pascal, this is true for you, too.

  Certainly for me.

  “Joyce Carol Oates”—more helpfully comprehended as an imagination and a writing process, and not an individual—very possibly feels little of this existential anxiety, except in and through her fictitious personae; but I, who encompass, yet am hardly identical with “JCO,” am in the grip of this anxiety whenever the momentum of my life slows, and its surface distractions fade. At such t
imes, like the narrator of my story (its title refers precisely to the “abyss” of which Pascal speaks: a kind of black hole of the spirit) I seem about to remember and to know something—but what?

  The story in this anthology is but one of any number of fictions I’ve created to attempt to comprehend, even in the face of ceaseless failure, this abyss, and the mystery surrounding it. The story is not autobiographical, except emotionally; I stand in awe of the possibility that being hypnotized by is a key to my putative industry.

  At the same time, I think I am probably representative of the legion of people, women perhaps more than men, yet surely there are many men in our ranks as well, who are both fascinated by the contents of the unconscious and in terror of their uncontrolled eruption. The sudden incursion of an unwanted memory in our lives: how can we assimilate it into what we want to believe of ourselves? We build personalities, like “fictions,” to withstand the roiling waters. Or we build fictions, like “personalities.”

  ELSA RUTHERFORD

  This story comes from a fear that manifests itself in a recurring nightmare in which I must dig up dead relatives who, on being exhumed, come back to life. But in varying states of decomposition. I’ve come to understand that the basis of this horrifying dream and the fear it symbolizes is attributable to present-day medical technology. Today life can be prolonged by extraordinary means. It is fast becoming the norm for the elderly, no matter how severely impaired, to live to advanced ages with the aid of medical science. Even the so-called “brain dead” can be kept alive indefinitely. For the first time in history, families are making soul-wrenching decisions concerning the care and quality of life for their elderly and infirm. In some cases, truly life or death decisions. This is a new and profound dilemma raising new and profound fears. Fears that most of us must eventually face: How far will we go to keep family members alive? How much emotional and financial burden can we bear? How will we handle the moral ethics involved? And whatever decisions we. make, how can we be certain those decisions won’t come back to haunt us?

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  Whom can you trust? What if even those you’ve known for years, those intimates whom you think you know, you really don’t know? What if you can’t trust them at all? What if your wife is nurturing a secret psychosis that’s going to bear fruit in your murder some three am as you sleep beside her? What if your best friend is really your profoundest enemy? What if your beloved child hates you and is just waiting for the right moment to show it? Whom can you trust?

  TIA TRAVIS

  I’m twenty-six and don’t have a driver’s license because I’m afraid of killing myself in a car. I’m afraid of physics and pain, afraid of J.G. Ballard’s “brutal, erotic and overlit realm.” I’m afraid that death really is the extinction of the personality and that, ultimately, we have no control over how our lives will end. I’m afraid that death isn’t eternal rest, it’s cerebral silence. No electrical activity in the brain. Not now, not ever. Cerebral silence: The End. Think about that for five minutes and then tell me what you’re afraid of.

  “Shatter” is dedicated to Johnnie.

  SCOTT H. URBAN

  My own death isn’t something I worry about. No matter how prolonged, it’s eventually over. But having to watch a member of my own family terrorized, raped, or even killed—and not being able to do anything about it? I don’t think I could live with that.

  Writing “Victims” was definitely a disturbing experience. I’ve even been pricing burglar alarm systems.

  EDO VAN BELKOM

  I used to work for a newspaper in a city an hour’s drive from where I lived. The route I took was Highway 401— one of the largest and busiest highways in Canada. Needless to say, the weather wasn’t always conducive to driving. One drizzly winter night, I had to stop on the side of the highway to refill my car’s reservoir with windshield washer fluid. While I poured anti-freeze into the reservoir I was forced into a position that placed my back to the highway and my head under the hood—a vulnerable position to say the least. With each semi-trailer that screamed by—at what sounded like breakneck speed—the car shook violently, as if the trucks were passing within inches of it. Well, being forced to remain in that position while the reservoir took forever to fill up, my mind kindly began thinking about all the terrible things that could happen to me.

  GRAHAM WATKINS

  This is, in reality, the only true phobia I can ever remember being troubled by; but, while it existed, it was a true phobia, a source of almost everyday terror. As I look back on it now, it seems to me that it existed from the time of my earliest memories; it was, at times, so bad that it was difficult for me to look at pictures of spiders in a book. Nothing else affected me that way, nothing. I was downright fond of snakes and insects, keeping so many of them as pets that my parents often felt we were living in a zoo.

  If pinpointing the origin point of the phobia is difficult, even attempting to assign some cause is impossible. My family often told horror stories about children bitten by black widows who died in agony, but to many members of my family, all sorts of creatures were deadly; truly dangerous creatures like rattlesnakes and copperheads provoked no fear at all.

  Later, as I became a teenager, I suppose I sort of made an active decision that for me, for my life-style, an arachnopho-bia was impossibly crippling. In an effort to get over it, I actively courted the spiders, studying them, handling them—and to a great extent, my efforts were successful. Still, though, some residue remains; I still jump, I still have an adrenaline rush, when one drops down on me unexpectedly—and, somehow, I always seem to know instantly when it’s a spider as opposed to some insect. It still strikes me as peculiar that some harmless spider like a jumping spider (always, for whatever obscure reason, one of the worst for me) provokes such a reaction when an insect capable of really hurting you—like a hornet, a wheelbug, or a horsefly—engenders no other response than to brush it away.

  One other note: the areas described in the story actually exist in the Red River Gorge area of Kentucky; I’ve actually mapped some of those caves, and the “natural traps” described are real enough too. None that I know of has a small enough chimney to actually trap someone (although the side comments about Floyd Collins are quite true), but the rooms beneath them are, in some cases, just as they are in the story—a gathering place for ambush predators like snakes and spiders. Contrary to the belief of the story’s protagonist, the black widow, uncommon generally in the Gorge, is abundant in those pits. During my collecting days as a Zoology major at the University of Kentucky, I captured exceptionally large specimens of several species of spiders, widows included, from those pits.

  But I never stayed in any of those rooms very long—and the notion, the utterly terrifying notion, of somehow losing my carbide was always in my mind. This memory, perhaps more than any other, was the inspiration for the story.

  Author Biographies

  GARY BRANDNER

  The prolific Brandner is the author of 24 novels, including the famous Howling series, Cameron’s Closet, and Walkers, plus nearly 100 short stories, five screenplays, and six adaptations of his books by others for movies and TV miniseries. Brandner lives in California.

  RICHARD LEE BYERS

  Byers is the author of such horror novels as Dead Time, Dark Fortune, Vampire’s Apprentice, Fright Line ana Death-ward. His short fiction has appeared in Freak Show, Grails, Confederacy of the Dead, and others. The Floridan also writes young adult titles like Joy Ride and Party Till You Drop.

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  Iowa’s Collins is a two-time winner of the “Shamus” Best Novel award for his Nate Heller historical thrillers True Detective and Stolen Away. He is the author of four other mystery series and his novel of the Clint Eastwood film In The Line of Fire was an international best-seller. He scripted the Dick Tracy comic strip from 1977–1993, and his comic book credits include Ms. Tree, Batman, and Wild Dog. His story for Fear Itself, “Mommy,” is soon to be a major motion picture.
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  NANCY A. COLLINS

  Collins’s first novel, Sunglasses After Dark, won Horror Writers and British Fantasy Society awards. She has also been nominated for the Campbell Award and the comic industry’s Eisner award for her work on Swamp Thing. In comics, she is also the writer of Wick, while in books, her latest are Wild Blood and Walking Wolf. The New Yorker is presently working on the third Sonja Blue novel, Paint it Black, and her first collection of short stories, Nameless Sins.

  MICHAEL GARRETT

  Garrett’s first novel, Keeper, has been optioned for a movie. His short stories have been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies. He is an Editorial Associate with Writer’s Digest magazine and is co-editor of the Hot Blood series. He lives in Alabama.

  JEFF GELB

  Gelb, a California resident, is the editor of the Shock Rock anthologies and co-editor of the Hot Blood series. His novel, Specters, was published in 1988. He is an avid comic book collector and a frequent contributor to Comics Buyer’s Guide and other comics magazines.