Never Fear

by Heather Graham

  ***

  Am I insane? Indeed not--I am quite sane and normal in other aspects of my life. Of course they say insane people don’t know they are insane, but no one has ever intimated that they thought I was crazy. Batty maybe, but not crazy--yes, pun intended again. Am I obsessed? Perhaps to this one degree; no normal person would go to the extremes that I have to cure a phobia. Any rational person would consider my last visit as proof enough that I have accomplished the cure. Am I driven? Indubitably. Driven with the need to become one with the bats. I must. I started out just to cure my phobia, but in doing so, my life’s mission has become clear to me. I cannot succeed in my calling with anything less. So, call me driven, but not insane. The world will soon form its own opinion of me. Am I evil? I don’t think so, but my victims might think I am. Good and evil are often subject to interpretation. Insane? Driven? Obsessed? Evil? Maybe I do deserve to be called a little bit of each.

  ***

  Back down in the cave and the bats are again swarming. I feel no fear. I grab one and stare in its eyes, and just to show it who is boss, I bite its head off. Others I fling into the walls in my disdain. I crunch many under my feet.

  Of course, I wake up and realize it was another dream. Not a nightmare, just a dream. I am in control, not the bats. I am their lord and master. They will do my bidding…

  ***

  It is time. Valuable time is being wasted. There is so much to be done. I need to finish my trial now. I head back into the cave for the last time. No flashlight. It is not needed. The darkness is part of me. Also, my eyesight has gotten excellent in the dark after all the times down here. I enter the cavern of the bats and open up my pack. I pull out the siren. I pull out a net. I pull out some telescoping poles. I pull out my lunch and a small folding cot. I put the poles around the cavern exit, the tunnel that the bats must use to escape. I affix the net to the poles so that the exit is partially covered. This way many of the bats can get out, but others will become entangled in the net. That is where I will be. This must be the ultimate test, so I undress. Now there is no protection from the bats. I stand in the net and ready the siren. Goosebumps break out on my arms but that is only due to the coolness of the cave, not apprehension. I am at peace with this. I need this. I take a deep breath. I set off the siren…

  ***

  The siren is a new sound, so the response is immediate. Thousands of bats streaming toward the exit. Some get out, but many are ensnared in the net. Where I am. I hold out my arms and stand there with the bats covering me. Any chiropterologist might call me insane, but I know there is nothing here to harm me. No rabies. No infections. No disease. They cover my entire body, sometimes two or three deep as they try to escape. I reach down and turn the siren off. I talk to them. I pick up one after the other and stroke each one gently for a second, then reach around the netting and let them out. Is it my imagination, or are they calming down? I continue my ritual. Stroke and talk. Talk and stroke. They are definitely getting calmer. Some just hanging on the net or on me. Not trying to escape. I get my lunch out and start eating. Not insane. I just want to be totally at ease with my new friends. I share my lunch with many of them. Some eat a little, some don’t. They are not used to this type of food but, when I carefully put little bits into their mouths, they chew. Some swallow. I keep talking. Talking and stroking and releasing. The bats are settling in on the netting and a few are still on me. They have accepted my presence. I sit down and continue my mantra. Most are going back to sleep, no longer trying to escape. The only sounds are a few bats scrabbling and my own voice. Soothing. Reassuring. Now I lie down on the cot and close my eyes. My breathing is normal, my pulse slow and steady. My voice starts to drift off. I sleep. With the bats.

  My internal clock wakes me up after about fifteen minutes--I dare stay no longer as bat guano can create a mold, which when inhaled in large quantities can lead to a fatal respiratory disease. Makes me wonder why women’s mascara can contain bat guano.

  Everything is pretty much as it was when I fell asleep. I no longer have any bats on me. They are all hanging upside down. Many are on the net still, but most must have settled back on the cavern ceiling. I gently whisper to each bat as I pull it off the net and send it on its way. Soon the net is clear and all is quiet. No more trips down here will be needed. I am at peace. I feel like I belong to the family of bats and they belong to me. I don’t want to leave and go back to the upper world. But I must. Too much to do. I send them a telepathic thank you and a telepathic goodbye. Who knows if they hear me or understand?

  ***

  Nothing could happen to me now. I have too much to do with my life. I have no fear. I have done it. It took years, but the fear of bats no longer controls me. Now I control it. Now it is time to get to work. Time to make others afraid. Make them pay. Let my strength become their fear. But I can’t do my work as myself. No one would be afraid of me. I need to inflict them with fear as great as my former terror of bats, so I need to become someone else. I need another persona. That will be easy. I can wear a mask. Then they will fear the mask. I need the disguise. No one would be afraid of Bruce Wayne…

  11

  tHANTOPHOBIA

  FEAR OF LOSING SOMEONE

  Thomas F. Monteleone

  Your children are not your children.

  For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

  which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

  —Kahlil Gibran

  I’m not sure how much longer I can hold the son-of-a-bitch off.

  For the past few days, I’ve seen more signs of his arrival. Each time I enter Becky’s room, I think I smell the faintest of scents--a grim, olfactory wake of his passage.

  He’s so bold, coming here flirting with my daughter, thinking I have no sense of it. And yet, it is the driving force in my life. There is nothing that will give me more strength than to have the chance to beat him. He knows now that I keep an old Little League aluminum baseball bat in the pantry, but he also knows I am not afraid to use it.

  It began the day Rhonda and I brought her home from the hospital. There is nothing more fragile than a newborn child--something I had never realized till that moment. I admit, being a cost accountant for Proctor & Gamble all my adult life, had perhaps kept me somewhat removed from the mainstream of life. When I brought a new life into the world, it was like getting slapped in the face.

  The very first night, Rhonda kept her in a bassinet in our bedroom. I questioned the need for it until darkness fell over everything and the house had shut down to the point of the occasional creak of an old foundation. I could hear my wife’s breathing at my ear, a signature of her exhaustion and a final release of tension, anxiety, and fear.

  Little did I realize that mine had just begun.

  I never slept that first night. An endless stretch of black time wherein I lay listening to what seemed like breathing of the most labored sort. I had no idea a tiny, living human could make such scary noises and survive till morning. Wheezing, coughing, rattling, mucous throttled sucking were only a few of the horrible sounds through which I suffered that night. It was so intensely awful, I became quite certain we would lose Becky before dawn.

  But we didn’t.

  The bassinet remained in our bedroom another three or four weeks before I allowed my wife to have the baby sleeping in a crib so far away from us--her own bedroom down the hall. I had grown accustomed to the travail of her breathing, and it measured out the nights as a metronome of life itself.

  It was just about that time when I was watching the Game of the Week (the Orioles against the Blue Jays, I think), and I saw the commercial. Actually, it was probably one of those Public Service Announcements, and what it was doing shoehorned among the endless array of beer and razor commercials I could not imagine.

  (Of course, I now know the message was placed there by Divine Intercedence. It was important that I receive the message when I did.)

  The message? Oh yes, it was important all right. Have you eve
r heard of SIDS?

  Neither had I! Imagine my shock as I sat there in my Laz-Z-Boy to see that there is this hideous phenomenon known as Crib Death or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Newborns, up to the age of six months, are suddenly found dead in their cribs, and no one has the foggiest notion as to how or why.

  How come I’ve never heard of this? I ask myself. How come I’ve never seen anything about this terrible syndrome until now, until the very moment I have my own little baby who may be victim to this horrible thing?

  This was positively incredible to me. But stunned though I may have been, I remained lucid enough to realize I had been given a Sign, a celestial memorandum so to speak, to be ever vigilant.

  As the months ticked past, I took it upon myself to nightly approach the crib and listen for Becky’s sweet breath. When my wife discovered my habit, she chided me for being so overprotective, and for a moment, I became suspicious of her. Surely, she could not be in league with any forces that would harm my daughter. In short order, I banished such thoughts from my head.

  Well, at least I tried to…

  Time continued its work, and Becky not only escaped the critical period of SIDS frequency, but she weathered bouts of commons colds, influenzas, chicken pox, measles, and mumps. It seemed like I blinked my eyes and she was four years old. She had been such a healthy baby and toddler, that I think I became lulled into a false sense of security during those years. We rarely allowed her to leave the house, other than to roam about our fenced-in yard. Whenever other children came over to play with her, I always watched them with a careful eye. I saw this movie once about a six-year-old serial killer…

  When it came to protecting your daughter, you couldn’t be too careful.

  It wasn’t until Becky started pre-school that I began to realize how foolish, how lax I had actually been. There were so many ways she could be in danger, at first I had a hard time tracking everything--until I took a page from my accountant’s training and logged everything in a wonderful ledger with cross-referencing column and rows. Once I inflicted some order on the situation, I began to feel better about everything.

  I didn’t allow her to ride the school bus until I’d completed a dossier on the driver and had the vehicle inspected. The dossier thing worked so well that I used the same P.I. to work up files on everyone at the pre-school, my neighbors, and even Louise Smeak, the Sunday school teacher at St. Albans Episcopal. I wanted to have total control over everyone who would have any contact with my daughter.

  You could never be too careful…

  I heard his radio talk show where this guy who called in had postulated that many fatal diseases were actually transmitted by those plastic “sporks” they give out at fast-food eateries. I had never thought much about this, but it certainly made sense if you stopped to consider everything.

  And then somebody told me that peanut butter is a major killer of small children. People feed it to them on the end of spoon and it gets lodged at the intersection of the esophagus and the bronchial tubes or something like that. It’s so dangerous that even the Heimlich maneuver doesn’t work, and of course there is always the truth that a spoon is pretty damned close to a spork. But can you imagine, that Death hides even in a peanut butter jar?

  Well, you can bet that my Becky didn’t eat any more of that stuff.

  The years slipped away from me; I had risen through the ranks at P&G until I was the Chief of the entire financial division. Sure, I had plenty of time on my hands, but still not enough to administer to Becky’s needs as well as I would like. Retirement was still many years off and my wife did not seem to share my over-riding concern for my daughter’s welfare.

  In fact, I was beginning to realize that perhaps Rhonda was not the ally I’d always supposed.

  Becky turned ten, and that meant a whole new ledger, a whole new set of variables that I would have to start tracking. She was a very pretty girl and despite my efforts to discourage contact with other people, lots of the kids in her class wanted to be her friends. More dossiers. More money. But what did I care? I was being a good parent.

  It was also around this time that Rhonda actually turned against me. It started slowly and with much subtlety, but I recognized it early on because I’d sensed it coming. She told her sister I had too much pressure at my job--which I was not adjusting well to Becky’s pre-teen years, and worst of all, that I needed a hobby. Can you imagine such foolishness? I could have gotten very angry, but I knew how outward displays of domestic unrest can be harmful to children. An article in the International Enquirer said depression and teen suicides tended to be caused by bad parenting, so by remaining tranquil, I was being a wise and caring father.

  I knew that I would eventually discover a solution to the problem Rhonda was becoming. If I remained patient and vigilant, I would be given a sign, an answer. And it came to me the day I realized that Mr. Death had changed his tactics. I mean, it was no secret he’d been after Becky since we’d brought her home from Cook Memorial Hospital. It was only through my stalwart efforts she’d remained as safe as she had.

  But Mr. Death is slick and he took to impersonating regular people that might come in contact with Becky. That’s why I had to cancel all her dental visits and of course there would be no more examinations by Doc Wilson. The biggest problem were those unexpected situations that could not be planned. For example, when Becky answered the door one after-school day to admit the meter reader for the local gas and electric company, I almost lost my usual composure.

  (Where was her mother? you might ask--as I certainly did. How could she allow the child to do something as dangerous as answer the door? The answer lay ahead, as you shall see.)

  You can already imagine how horrible it could have been if the gas-man had actually been The Gas-Man--if you get my meaning…

  Yes, I realized I must learn from this experience. And learn I did indeed. After pulling Becky from her school, I arranged to have her education continued at home under the care of a carefully checked-out tutor. The young boys who had already begun sniffing around the hems of my daughter’s skirts received stern warnings from me to simply Stay Away. I reinforced my messages with letters to all the boys’ parents.

  That seemed to help matters very much until a man in a charcoal suit with a red tie knocked on the door. He said he was from the State Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and that he wanted to ask me a few questions. He also said he had a warrant to inspect my premises. He showed me some ID that said his name was Silverstein and some papers with official seals and notary stamps on them. He didn’t know I recognized his true identity, and therefore misinterpreted my smile as I led him into the kitchen. I directed him to a chair at the dinette where I offered him a cup of coffee. He said yes and asked him what kind of questions he had for me. I was going to grab my aluminum baseball bat right away, but I was curious as to what Mr. Death would want to ask me. Didn’t he already Know Everything? And so I poured two cups of Maxwell House and sat down to listen.

  He said a few things right up front about Becky that made me very angry. I almost reached for the baseball bat twice, and both times, I thought maybe I should listen a little longer, even though it was making me very angry.

  “After reading copies of the letters you sent the Wizniewski and Harrison boys, I decided to contact you directly,” said Mr. Death. “Initially, I spoke to your wife, and she told me about your… tendency to… ah, go on at length about your daughter.” I asked him what exactly Rhonda had said.

  “Exactly? Well, sir, she said that she is very much afraid of you. Did you know that?”

  I told him no. Anything else, I asked.

  “She said that she had decided a long time ago she would tolerate your behavior--”

  “Tolerate?”

  “Yes, as long as it remained within the family, she figured it was safer, better for everyone involved.”

  Safer… yes, I see, I told him. But then, why are you here, Mr. Silverstein? (I needed to allay any suspicions he migh
t have that I knew his true identity.)

  “Well, it’s hard to explain, but we’ve received a petition to have your case examined by a state psychiatrist,” he said. “We have statements by neighbors and relatives and parents at Holbrook Elementary, plus an interesting letter from a private investigator, Lucius Mallory. It was forwarded to us from Lieutenant Karsay at the 3rd Precinct.”

  I moved away from the table, close to the pantry door where my aluminum buddy awaited my touch. “And what do these statements and letters have to do with me?”

  Mr. Death almost chuckled. Can you imagine his audacity? “I think you know what this is all about. Your daughter, Rebecca, is dead, sir. She died when she was three months old from SIDS. More than nine years ago.”

  I think that’s when I lost it--when he mouthed such a cruel lie, a heinous blasphemy in my house. I screamed something about what a liar he was and how I knew his true identity and how I would stop him from taking my daughter away from me.

  He went down like a dumb palooka from the first impact to the base of his skull. As his life fluids seeped across the tiles of the kitchen floor, I realized I’d made a mistake. This man, Silverstein, was a mere mortal. Another of Death’s clever tricks, no doubt. I checked my watch, and knew I had little time. Rhonda would be due home from her part-time job at the neighborhood library at any moment.

  There was no need to clean up the mess, however. None at all.

  It has been a long weekend. The scent of death I mentioned earlier is getting heavy in here. The crowds of neighbors and police cars that have surrounded my little bungalow have been a terrible distraction, and I fear that Mr. Death will get in while I am forced to deal with the foolish meddling of those outside. The television says there is a dangerous hostage situation here. I think it is a good thing they don’t know about Silverstein and Rhonda. They probably think I might do harm to Rebecca, which reveals them to be the fools they are.