Very Bad Deaths

by Spider Robinson

  His voice…are you old enough to have ever fooled around with imitating the speaking voices of the Beatles? Do George—then keep the adenoidal glottal stop, but lose the Liverpool accent, change it to American West Coast Generic, and raise the pitch a full tone. The net effect is a man wearing a necktie pulled way too tight. That was Allen’s voice. For some reason I pictured a boy being strangled by his father, and wondered if the image actually had anything to do with his life, or was just my frantic brain clutching at straws. I still do.

  When you’re desperate, and have nothing at all to bargain with, make extravagant promises. Why not? They cost nothing, and fill time, with not-pain.

  I looked him square in the eye, reached deep into memory, and pulled out the face I had first used back in 1970 to solemnly assure the Dean of Men I didn’t have the faintest idea where to go to obtain marijuana, on or off campus. After five minutes’ exposure to it, the Dean had blinked, shaken his head, and said, with sneaking respect, “You know, if I didn’t know for a fact that you’re lying…I’d believe you. You’re good.” It had been my earliest evidence that I might have the makings of a journalist, or writer, or lawyer, or some other kind of bullshit artist. I knew there was no chance of it lasting five minutes with this Allen. But I hoped for two.

  I told him, “In the hope of establishing good will and mutual respect as the basis of our relationship from the very outset, I am absolutely willing to tell you anything you want to know whatsoever, without reservation, fully and in detail, if you’ll just tell me one thing.”

  “How I backtracked you.”

  “Jesus, you’re fast,” I said, hoping the real dismay in my voice would make the flattery sound sincere.

  I wish I could say he burst out laughing. He burst into giggles. “Jesus, you’re lame.”

  I glanced down at my unenviable condition. “Well, obviously.” To my horror, I giggled.

  He studied me, measuring something. Finally he decided the effect of a few more minutes of despairing suspense would be beneficial. Or perhaps only interesting. Or maybe just fun.

  “When I was a kid, reading books,” he said, “I always hated the part where the evil genius has Simon Templar tied up with a gun to his head…and then he stops to explain how smart he is, for just long enough for the Saint to slip his bonds or be rescued. What kind of genius blows everything for the sake of his ego? What’s the point of impressing meat?”

  That last sentence was so awful I had to say something, anything. “How else is the writer supposed to fill in the holes in the plot?” I asked.

  When a human being holds up one fingertip like that, it means, now, you’ll have your turn. When he did it it meant, if you interrupt me again I will touch you with this. I made a determined effort to pressure-weld my teeth together.

  “Once I started to experience such situations in life rather than in fiction, however,” he went on, confident of the floor now, “I began to understand the appeal. It’s like the old joke about the priest God hated so much, he gave him a hole-in-one on a Sunday—who can he tell? I’ve done it literally dozens of times, now, whenever I felt my victim was intelligent enough to appreciate good irony, and I can report that so far, not once has it worked out badly for me. It was reasonably clever of me to have tracked you to your lair so quickly, and it was reasonably stupid of you not to have foreseen it, and who else will I ever be able to boast to, or rub it in on? Certainly no one who’d appreciate the irony as sharply as you will.”

  Brilliant. He was on a roll. Poker face—

  “Furthermore, I know a secret: there is no risk. In real life, as opposed to fiction, nobody ever slips his bonds, or has a knife strapped to his forearm, or gets the villain to light his exploding cigarette for him. Nobody escapes, and there are no rescues. Ever. The cavalry never comes, SWAT never rolls. Not once, not even at the last possible moment. I’ve watched hundreds of people beg mercy, of every god there ever was, including me. Doesn’t happen. When you’re fucked, you’re fucked. And you’re fucked.

  “So I have no problem playing Rayt Marius to your Simon Templar. Sadly, it will be a disappointingly short digression. It did not take anything like a Rayt Marius to outsmart you. ‘I know the Saint, Senator, and you’re no Saint…’”

  The most infuriating damn thing: I actually figured out the answer myself, about two and a half seconds before he explained it to me! Swear to God. I just didn’t dare interrupt.

  “All that time you were trying to case the area around the mouth of my private driveway with that ridiculous consumer vidcam of yours…did it ever occur to you that someone might be observing you, with infinitely better equipment? Did you think I would leave my rural hideaway unguarded? Did you think video security systems were at all expensive, or in some way difficult to set up, conceal, or monitor? You do know how I’ve made my living, right? I find it curiously difficult to pin down the precise magnitude and scope of your ignorance; your stupidity masks it.”

  My heart was already in my stomach, and my stomach was in my shoes. Now the whole mess dropped into the basement crawl space, where a trillion spiders lived. I wasn’t just doomed, I was so God damned dumb I deserved to be. I think I mentioned, I have a particular horror of looking stupid in retrospect. This was undoubtedly my masterpiece.

  I saw the thing whole, in an instant. But my bloodstream probably contained every drop of adrenaline in my body. I’ll lay it out for you step by step, as best I can:

  In the city, even in the suburbs, electronic surveillance would surely have occurred to me, later if not sooner. What had made me assume that it became impossible, or even particularly difficult, in a remote rural setting?

  I keep tripping over my age, thinking in terms of technological limits that were overcome long ago. In my wildest dreams, I may have imagined that somewhere down at the far end of the dirt road I was looking for, there might be some sort of alarm system, on the order of trip wires or an electric eye. If I had bestirred myself to contemplate a rural video surveillance setup right alongside the Sea to Sky Highway, I would probably have pictured a little grey box the size of a pound of butter, on a tripod in some sort of sheltered blind, and wires somehow waterproofed and camouflaged over hundreds of yards, leading to a moisture-sealed VCR whose tape had to be changed every six hours, labeled, and stored—and dismissed the idea as way too much trouble, the sort of thing an army base or an embassy might use, but not a private individual.

  In fact, a good color camera and wireless transmitter, motion-activated or heat-activated or sound-activated or any combination thereof, could nowadays probably be tucked into something the size of a pinecone without straining—no reason for it not to look like one as well. Its destination hard drive might be solar-powered, look like an empty can of mixed nuts, and hold a year’s worth of false alarms, instantly searchable, before it had to start writing over the oldest ones. If you were a wealthy technophile psycho, you’d probably knew several competing brands, which was the good one, and where to get the best price.

  So you could afford to use very broad parameters for what constituted a suspicious event, give free rein to your paranoia. It didn’t have to be anything as drastic as a personal incursion, as specific as a moving heat source within a certain distance. A car going by significantly slower than the rest of the traffic might be enough to start the camera rolling. Hell, for all I know, maybe if you were a clever enough computer guy, you could program your pinecone camera to recognize another camera lens looking back at it.

  Maybe, if you were paranoid enough, and smart enough, you could program the fucking thing to e-mail you video every time it was awakened, wherever you happened to be on the planet at the time.

  And if you placed it close enough to the highway, you would have not just the face of, but at minimum the make, model and plate number of the car driven by whoever was annoying you. With luck and the right lighting you might even get a look at any companions he happened to have as well.

  If you were even a moderately competent
hacker, car and license number gave you…shit, everything. Legal name. Correct current address. Marital status. Citizenship. Color head shot photo. Vehicular history, which is the skeleton of life history. Registration leads you to financial history. Insurance leads you to driving record and medical history. I’m no celebrity or anything, but I Google up pretty good. I’m a columnist, so I piss people off, so they have to tell each other how odious I am, so more than a little of my past, including the parts I tend to stress least when recounting my life story to a woman in a bar, can be found on the internet by any amateur with a laptop and a browser. Somebody like Allen…it was a safe bet he now knew my blood type, bank balance, taste in porn, every password or PIN number I’d ever used including the ones I’d forgotten, and the total contents of the file that the CSIS keeps doggedly insisting it is not maintaining on me. For all I knew he could write my DNA sequence out longhand.

  Whereas the most he could conceivably know about Nika for certain was that she was close to my height and blonde.

  Was that of any imaginable help to me? Suppose I could remake myself in an instant, find moral strength in my last hour, compress my courage to diamond hardness—suppose I reversed my whole life and became the kind of brave son of a bitch who could stand up under torture. Suppose, purely as a thought experiment, I could keep Allen from prying one single bit of information about Nika out of me for, say, an hour. Or even indefinitely.

  What the fuck good would it do me?

  Sooner or later Nika was going to call me, and then he would have her. No matter what message she left, her phone number in the call display would be enough to end her life too. I already knew Allen well enough, on short acquaintance, to know that it was probably not going to alarm him unduly when he did learn she was a cop. It was probably going to excite him. She would not be the first law officer he’d killed…but she might be his first female. He would be so disappointed when he learned she wasn’t a lesbian.

  It was going to be much the same for Zandor Zudenigo. Similar, anyway.

  Sooner or later, he would call me to discuss his analysis of the tape. Within the first ten or fifteen seconds of his message he would say enough to seal his fate. He would have no warning; telepathy doesn’t work over the phone. A normal human or even a cop would not be able to trace him back to Coveney Island from a cell-phone call, but I believed Allen would find it at worst an invigorating challenge.

  It probably didn’t even matter: the simple possibility that he might track him down was as good as the deed. Once Zudie knew that Allen was aware of his existence, and disapproved, his best option was to cut his own throat. Or whatever it took; beat himself to death with a rock if necessary. There was no way he could hide from a man like Allen, no chance he could fight him, no hope he could outrun him, and just about any death would be kinder than what Allen would give him. His very existence—the nature of the talent he could not help having—would enrage Allen to incandescence, if not Cherenkov glow. The concept of another human being able to see into his private skull would, for him, be God’s most unforgivable insult yet, a kind of cheating—violating a rule even Satan himself respected. The only thing that might make it remotely bearable for him would be the unmistakable agony it caused Zudie. At last, a knowledgeable audience!

  In a sudden horrid flash, I intuited what Allen might find a suitable punishment for someone who invaded his castle. Pull up the drawbridge. Make him stay. Rub his face in horror and depravity until he suicides.

  No, by God, it was even worse. I wasn’t thinking it through. If it had been in Zudie to kill himself, he’d have done so decades ago. He just couldn’t, the way some people just can’t bring themselves to stick a finger down their throat even though they know it would make them feel better.

  So all Allen had to do for ultimate revenge was put Zudie on a twenty-meter leash. It would always be taut. And it would never be long enough.

  I pictured Allen, fascinated in a cold intellectual way by the absorbing technical question of which was ultimately more painful for Zudie to endure: the remorseless thoughts of Allen, or the despairing thoughts of his victims? Was it possible to construct a good double-blind experiment to settle the matter? Or was the phenomenon necessarily subjective? Perspiring minds want to know.

  My God. I’d had it just backwards. Allen wouldn’t kill Zudie. Allen would love Zudie, cherish him, keep him alive as long as possible. If you want your victims to suffer as much as possible, you just can’t beat total knowledge of all their deepest secrets and private thoughts. Allen obviously had an instinctive gift for intuiting such things…but Zudie could read them like print.

  Allen would love the fact that he couldn’t help it.

  Yes, that was the way of it. I hadn’t just given the Beast three more victims, or even three unusually tasty ones. Clever me: I had handed him a prize greater than any he had ever thought to possess, a more interesting toy than the Marquis de Sade had ever dreamed of, a sadist’s ideal applause-meter. Someone you could hurt merely by approaching. He was going to treat Zudie like a freshman treats his first sports car: run him flat out until he ruined him, throw horror after horror at him just to determine scientifically the precise point at which it caused his mind to melt.

  He would be glad, for instance, to finally have empirical confirmation of something he’d always wondered and theorized about: exactly how long, after a heart stopped beating and lungs stopped pumping, did an entity persist that was still capable of suffering. Did anguish end with brain-death? Did the soul find oblivion, and if so did that occur before, when, or at some point after the last neuron fired? Had he been missing a bet all these years, by ceasing to torment his victims merely because they were dead?

  Oh yeah, no question, in the end, Allen was going to love me. I had brought him the best gift since his mother.

  The trouble was, I was pretty sure I was in for a long period of horrid pain before I’d have a hope in hell of making him believe that. God, he’d probably double-think me, waste at least half an hour in the firm belief that I was trying to run a particularly stubborn would-I-stick-with-such-a-crazy-story-if-it-weren’t-true? con on him.

  “Oh, that is a sad face. Bleak. Even given your situation, I mean, and its being your own stupid fault.”

  I tried to sigh, but could not take in enough air. “In years to come,” I said hoarsely, “you will remember me with great fondness. You’re going to bless the day you met me.”

  “So?” His little cupid mouth smiled slightly, like a puckering anus. “That is sad. How awful for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I was applauding. How exactly will you thus exhilarate me?”

  “That’s the hell of it,” I told him. “I may not live to see your eyes light up.”

  The anus irised open slightly, revealing brilliant white teeth. “I wouldn’t worry about that, Russell, old fossil. I’m going to tell you something now that will make you twice as frightened as you are already. Do you believe I can do that?”

  I thought it over. “I know I’ll probably regret saying this, but I honestly doubt it.”

  He nodded. “Listen. Here is how badly you have annoyed me. I have half a mind not to kill you.”

  Hitchcock was truly amazing. When all the blood drains from your head at once, you really do hear something very like the shrieking violins from the shower scene in Psycho.

  There was also a faint, repeated plosive sound, like spaced shots from a silenced handgun in the next room. Gradually I realized it was my own voice, trying doggedly but unsuccessfully to marshall enough air to start the word “Please.”

  His lips were now dilated so far his entire overbite emerged, like a prolapsing white hemorrhoid. “Oh, what the hell. I’m not vindictive. I will allow you an opportunity to beg for your death. But I doubt you’ll succeed.”

  Why wasn’t I fainting again? Or at least dry-heaving? I found that I wished I could.

  He made a little moist bubbling sound, as if he wanted to giggle but was too
mature. “Don’t bother trying to pass out.” I followed his fat pointing finger to my coffee table, where I saw an empty hypodermic needle. “You can’t. That door is closed to you.” Another liquid snort. “And I know you’re nauseous, but I’m afraid you can’t barf. And it wouldn’t make you any less nauseous if you did.” The giggle escaped. It was even worse than I’d expected. “In just a few more minutes, you’ll start to notice that things hurt more than they should. Only about twice as much. We’re just starting.”

  I started to cry.

  “Now tell me why I’m going to be glad I met you instead of annoyed. If I believe you, I promise to kill you.”

  All sentience was gone. Words fell out of my mouth without intention. “You will anyway. You have no idea how fragile I am.”

  “Yes, I do. I’ve read your Bellevue records, Russell. I’ve seen X-rays of your chest.”

  Jesus. I didn’t shake my head, but my head was shaking. “Doesn’t matter. Truth is so fuckin’ crazy, you’ll have to half kill me before you believe it—and half killin’ me will kill me.” No: the room was spinning, that was what it was. “And I’m pret’ sure you’ll be sorry you killed me. Pret’ sure? Shit sure. I am your goddam triumph, nome sane? Most ashamed son of a bitch you’re ever going to meet. All my fault, see? Death way too kind. Keep me round, see what I did. Round f’rever, on ice, like Sylvester—”

  Give me a challenge, go on. Tell me I can’t lose consciousness. Maybe I can’t, motherfucker—but I can damn well outrun it for a while, even if I’m only running in circles inside my head.

  Random images from my past flashed by as I ran. One of them had just reminded me of the only human being I had ever known who’d been as utterly helpless, as perfectly bankrupt, as I felt now. Sylvester…

  Flashback:

  1968

  Postoperative ICU Ward