Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  Missy drew her legs up. Simon reached down and pulled the old-fashioned, rusty-chained, cork-shaped rubber plug.

  “Hey, hey, you braa’,” she barked tonelessly.

  “Take it easy, I’m just letting some of the cold water out, make room for the hot.” He replaced the plug, opened the left tap, swirled the water with his hand to mix the hot in gradually, the way their old nanny, Granny Wilson—Ganny, they called her—would have. Then, splashing his sister playfully: “And watch who you’re calling a brat, you brat.”

  Missy giggled and splashed him back, paddling the water with her chubby hands, which had only a single crease across the palm.

  “Is that better?” Simon asked her, turning off the water and wiping his hands on the bath mat. As he stood up and crossed to the sink to get Missy a washcloth, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and smoothed back his wavy silver hair, which was receding decorously into a handsome widow’s peak.

  “Peedee keem.”Peachy keen.

  “Okay, then.” He tossed the washcloth into the tub. “I have to go back down to the basement. Page me when you’re ready to get out. And don’t forget to wash your whoop-te-do.” That had been Ganny’s collective term for private parts, male or female.

  “Wah yah whoodedo, you braa’!” Missy shouted angrily—after all, she wasn’t a baby—and the washcloth hit the back of the door with a wet thud as Simon closed it behind him.

  4

  Last day on the job. For a secret sentimentalist like E. L. Pender, the whole morning had been fraught with significance. Alarm clock: won’t need you no more, you little bastard. Shaving: why not start a beard now, after all these years? Hide those extra chins, at any rate. Clothes: one last chance to nail down his reputation as the worst-dressed agent in the history of the FBI. Universally loathed plaid sport coat, Sansabelt slacks that had spent the night on the floor, and his most comfortable wash-and-wear short-sleeved white shirt—comfortable because it had been washed and worn to a point just short of decomposition. No tie, of course: odd to think that this was the last time that not wearing a tie would carry any meaning.

  Perhaps the strangest part of Pender’s morning came when he realized that he was strapping on his calfskin shoulder holster for the last time. He’d already decided he wouldn’t be applying for a concealed weapons permit. Not much use for the Glock .40 on the golf course. Anyway, he’d never really bonded with it after the Bureau had taken away his SIG Sauer P226 for display at the FBI museum. It was the shoulder holster that really should have been behind glass, though: Pender was one of the last federal agents to wear one; everybody else had switched to the officially approved over-the-kidney holsters years earlier.

  Like most secret sentimentalists, Pender suspected other people of being sentimental, too. Though he knew that save for Pool, the rest of the old Liaison Support gang were either retired or scattered by the Bureau to the four winds, he’d practiced acting surprised on the drive to work, just in case they had decided to throw a party for him.

  The only surprise, however, had been the discovery that his replacement was a handicapped female who was no longer even a special agent—and even that felt more like the last piece of the puzzle finally falling into place. Obviously the Liaison Support Unit, the assignment for ambitious young agents back in the late seventies, had in its final days become a dumping ground for employees the Bureau didn’t know what else to do with.

  So when Pender told Linda that nobody would give a toasted fart how she spent her time, it was only the unvarnished truth. But when he saw the hurt in her eyes, he quickly added: “That’s the bad news and the good news.”

  “Good how?”

  “You have two and a half months to make whatever you want out of this assignment without Steve Too crawling up your ass.”

  “Steve who?”

  “Steve Maheu, Steve McDougal’s number two. Picture in the dictionary next to holier-than-thou. But with McDougal retiring, Maheu’s too busy scouting a soft place to land to pay any attention to you, so you should be pretty much on your own.”

  “But for what? To do what?”

  “To look for serial killers nobody else is looking for.”

  “Are there any?”

  “It’s a growth market, kiddo.” Pender chuckled. “Now more than ever, it’s a growth market.”

  Then he caught himself, and the laugh faded. “I’m sorry, that was bullshit of me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “When we started Liaison Support over twenty years ago, I promised myself I’d never forget about the victims. Even if I was only going fishing in the MMRs, I told myself I’d never forget what the job was really about. And I just did.”

  Linda looked away, moved by Pender’s passion and commitment; maybe this might not turn out to be such a dead-end assignment after all.

  “So what do we got?” she asked brusquely, when she was sure of her voice again. All Bronx, all business.

  “I want you to take a look at a letter that came in last Friday. It gave me a chill.” He began shuffling through the papers stacked on the desk. “And if there’s one thing I’ve learned on this job…” Now he was back down on the floor again, rummaging through a stack of buff file folders with one hand, trying to keep it from toppling over with the other. “…it’s to trust the chill.” Then, distractedly, still rummaging: “What scares you, Linda—what are you afraid of?”

  “You mean, other than progressive paralysis, ending in death?” Linda tried to soften the bitter words with a laugh. When she’d first decided to fight for the right to keep her job, she had promised herself that if she won, the office would be a no-whining zone.

  And it had been one hell of a battle: FBI regs stated clearly that special agents were required to be in “excellent physical condition with no defects that would interfere in firearm use, raids, or defensive tactics.” In the end, however, the brass agreed to a compromise: reassignment with the bogus job title of investigative specialist, rather than special agent. Badge, no gun, same pay level, desk job, monthly physicals, and, most worrying of all, monthly psych evaluations: first sign of cognitive impairment, a common enough MS symptom, and they would wash her out entirely.

  “I mean before the MS. When you were a kid, say, what was the thing you feared most?”

  “Like a phobia?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s easy, then—snakes.”

  “How severe?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did snakes just give you the creeps, for instance, or were you afraid to walk in the woods, or—”

  “We didn’t have much in the way of woods where I grew up. But I definitely stayed the hell away from the reptile house in the Bronx Zoo. I passed out in front of it on a field trip when I was in college.”

  “Well, if you…Here we go.” Pender had found the envelope he was looking for, and winged it up onto the desk. “If you multiply your fear of snakes by about a thousand, you’ll have some idea what life might be like for Dorie Bell.”

  “Gee, thanks,” said Linda.

  “Don’t mention it. Give me a holler when you’re done—I’ll be down here someplace.”

  5

  Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for Cello Solo has long been considered a benchmark for cellists. Pablo Casals, who at age thirteen stumbled upon the suites in a secondhand sheet-music store near the harbor in Barcelona, practiced them every day for twelve years before he worked up the courage to play one in public, and it would be another thirty-five years before he felt ready to record the entire series.

  Since then, every world-class cellist has had his or her go at the suites, but only the most gifted, the Jacquelines and the Yo-Yos, have even wrestled them to a draw, so it was probably an act of hubris for a twelfth-chair cellist like Wayne Summers to attempt them.

  But Wayne, born poor and black in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, had come late to his instrument, and as his teacher Mr. Brotsky always said, without at lea
st a little chutzpah, a man never knows how good he can be or how far he can go.

  Which was why every day for the past six years, whether he was working a day job, rehearsing with the symphony, or playing chamber music—or all three, as sometimes happened—Wayne made time to practice at least one of the dances from one of the suites. His favorite was the sarabande from the first suite—there was something so damn sweet and hopeful about it.

  That, then, was the piece Wayne, lying in the darkness with his hands cuffed behind his back, chose to practice first, in order to keep himself from going mad. To begin with, he ran through the sarabande in his mind, his left hand twitching the fingering behind him, the muscles of his bowing arm tensing and relaxing rhythmically. Midway through, he began diddle-dumming along, which started the caged birds chirring and singing again. Not the owl though—the owl remained silent.

  When he finished, Wayne heard polite applause—the sound of one man clapping, somewhere across the room. But the Bach had worked its magic on Wayne: his mind felt clearer than it had since he’d first awakened, however many hours ago.

  “Who are you?” he asked into the darkness. “Why are you doing this?”

  No answer—even the birds were silent. But the man was drawing nearer; Wayne could smell him now. He smelled like bubble bath. Cheap, strawberry-scented bubble bath.

  “Are you going to kill me?” Wayne asked. It felt strange to be so calm at such a time.

  “No.” The voice was only inches away.

  Thank you, Jesus. “What, then?”

  “I’m going to let our feathered friends here do it for me—eventually.”

  On the surface, Wayne remained calm, perhaps because beneath the surface something had already died—hope, most likely—leaving him nothing to do but ask the question again: “Why are you doing this?”

  Instead of an answer, a rank smell, then the unpleasant sensation of something cold and clammy being rubbed against his eyelids. It was all so bizarre and incongruous that it took Wayne a few seconds to recognize the odor, and a few more seconds for him to put it all together. Liver—the crazy fuck had just rubbed raw liver into his eyes.

  And even then the significance of what had happened failed to dawn on Wayne until he heard a sound that drove every other thought, every other sensation but pure blind panic from his mind and consciousness: the rattle of the chain that tethered the barn owl to its perch.

  A moment later came the buffeting of silent wings, and the strike. The first blow drove Wayne’s head back violently against the mattress. The pain was indescribable—Wayne rolled over onto his stomach and began thrashing his head from side to side to protect his eyes. The owl, starved and frustrated, half hopped, half flew from one side to the other, stabbing with its beak, trying to get at the liver smell, the blood smell.

  Then it found the ear it had struck accidentally earlier, and contented itself with tearing at that until the man who had brought it to this place hauled it away from its prey and dropped a burlap sack over its head.

  “Who are you?” screamed Wayne again, through the pain.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” came the answer. “You know how people are always saying you have nothing to fear but fear itself? Well, that’s me, buddy—I’m fear itself.”

  6

  Dorie is sitting on a couch somewhere, knees primly together. Across the room a television is playing, but she can’t quite make out what’s on the screen. Behind the television, a window. What floor is this? she asks herself. It makes a difference—if she’s a few stories up, there’s no danger, but if she’s only on the first or second story, she mustn’t look up, mustn’t glance at the window.

  In front of her, on a familiar-looking coffee table, there’s a big, glossy coffee-table book. She leans forward and opens it at random, but she can’t make out the words, can’t quite bring them into focus.

  There are pictures, though. The first one she turns to looks like a bird initially; the picture is the only colored object in Dorie’s black-and-white world, and so vivid it’s almost 3D. Then she leans closer and discovers to her horror that it’s not a picture of a real bird, but of a bird mask—one of those elongated, feathered masks that a medicine man or a witch doctor might wear.

  She quickly closes the book, then hears a tapping at the window. Don’t look up, she tells herself—whatever you do, don’t look up.

  But she does look up. She always does. And sees what she always sees: the face at the window. Or rather, the mask at the window—the eyeholes are empty, there’s no face behind it.

  As always, Dorie Bell awoke from her recurring nightmare with the echo of her own scream ringing in her ears. And as always, there was no way to know whether she’d screamed out loud, or only in the dream. Fortunately, it didn’t matter: she lived alone.

  Of the approximately thirty million Americans who suffer from phobia disorders serious enough to require professional consultation at some point in their lives, forty-two percent are afraid of illness and/or injury, eighteen percent are afraid of thunderstorms, fourteen percent fear animals, eight percent are primary agoraphobics (people who are afraid of public spaces, largely because they fear they will experience a panic attack, sometimes involving a syncope, in public; there is, of course, an element of agoraphobia associated with almost all specific phobias—the fear of having a panic attack is always more debilitating than the fear of whatever inspired the phobia in the first place), a surprisingly small seven percent are terrified of death, five percent fear crowds, and another five percent are afraid of heights; comprising the remaining one percent are the more exotic phobias, such as amathophobia, the fear of dust, siderodromophobia, the fear of railroad trains, and prosoponophobia, the fear of masks.

  Dorie Bell, age fifty-two, of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, had been a prosoponophobe since age three. She had tried everything—prayer, analysis, desensitization therapy, behavior modification, more prayer—but had never been able to uncover either the source for her fear or a cure. The actual sight of a mask still triggered severe panic attacks, fear of accidentally encountering a mask still ruled her daily comings and goings, and mask dreams still haunted her nights.

  And sometimes her afternoon naps as well—she had fallen asleep on the couch in her studio while waiting for Wayne Summers, who was supposed to be driving down from San Francisco that afternoon. They had met the previous spring, in Las Vegas, of all places, where nearly a hundred phobics (or, as they preferred to be called, Persons with Specific Phobia Disorder) had gathered for the PWSPD convention, and the two had become fast friends despite some rather striking differences between them, including age, race, religion, and sexual orientation.

  Still struggling to shake off the psychic tatters of the dream, Dorie left the studio and went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and check the time—there was no clock in the studio, intentionally. She was surprised to discover that it was nearly four in the afternoon, which left her in a minor dilemma, as she was anxiously awaiting a response to her letter to Agent Pender and hadn’t yet dropped by the post office today. (There was no home mail delivery in Carmel, largely because there were no street numbers on the houses; Carmel-by-the-Sea was a town that worked at being quaint.)

  On the other hand, Wayne might be arriving any minute—he was already several hours overdue—and he would absolutely pitch a syncope if he had to wait outside with the jays, crows, thrushes, juncos, and warblers that inhabited the live oak in Dorie’s front yard.

  Black guy passed out on the front lawn: wouldn’t that give the neighbors something to talk about, thought Dorie, hurriedly scrawling a note that read, “Wayne, come on in, back soon, Dorie,” and tacking it to the front door, which she left unlocked for him—you could still do that sort of thing in Carmel. Then she set off at a brisk walk for the post office, an eight-block round trip from there for most people, but twelve for Dorie, who had to take the long way around in order to avoid passing the African masks in the window of the Ethnic and Folk Arts Gal
lery.

  There were, as of October of 1999, ninety-six art galleries and forty-one gift shops in Carmel; of necessity, Dorie had memorized the location of all the ones that displayed, or might display, masks visible from the street, so that she could detour around them. A relatively minor inconvenience, she knew, especially compared to the lengths an ornithophobe like Wayne had to go to avoid his bêtes—as specific phobia disorders go, prosoponophobia wasn’t the worst one to have. Except around Halloween, which, as Dorie was about to learn, had come two weeks early to Carmel that year.

  No one watching Dorie Bell stride confidently down the hill toward the post office would have suspected her of being a phobic. She was a tall woman, broad-shouldered and full-figured, and she walked the walk in her Birkenstocks, paint-spattered overalls, and brown serape—head up, long strides, arms swinging, colorful straw Guatemalan bag swinging, waist-length brown braid swinging, too.

  But as she turned west onto Fifth Avenue, having detoured down San Carlos to avoid the Ethnic and Folk Arts Gallery, she was ambushed. Overnight a faceless white mannequin wearing the medieval costume known as a domino (hooded robe and eye-mask, all the more dreadful to Dorie for its simplicity: black and white, the mask stripped to its essence) had appeared in the window of Verbena, the upscale women’s clothing shop on the corner of Fifth and Dolores.

  Frozen in front of the window, unable to avert her eyes, just as in the dream, Dorie could feel her scalp tingling; bright pin-pricks of color dotted her vision as the blood began to drain from her head. She knew what was happening—her sinoaortic barore-flex arc, the mechanism responsible for the vasovagal syncope, was overcompensating for the sudden increase in blood pressure by dropping the pressure just as suddenly. But she also knew, after all these years, how to take charge, how to reverse the process.