Fear Itself

by Duffy Prendergast

  Melanie did try to reason with Amber, asking her to back-off out of friendship and to let us be a happy couple, but Amber had responded in her catty fashion with the suggestion that the three of us ‘get it on’ together. I suppose any normal woman would have left me under those circumstances; would have turned me in and tossed me to the hounds. But Melanie was a damaged human-being and I was her first male lover. But she grew less intolerant with each passing week. I couldn’t understand why Melanie stood by me throughout the whole ordeal because to be truthful her logic defied me. Had our situations been reversed, had she been the one who was forced to sleep with another man, I could not have stood by her. I would have gone insane with jealousy. It is beyond my comprehension that she tolerated my confederation with Amber; which is why I first suspected her when I woke up to find Amber dead in my bed.

  On the night she was murdered, Amber, for the first time since we had been sleeping together, had arranged to spend the night with me by telling her husband that she was spending the night at her sister’s house.

  I suspected that Amber had chosen to spend the night with me because she knew that it would cause Melanie a great deal of emotional pain. To give me up for a few hours a week for a physical encounter was one thing but to spend the night with me suggested a more intimate involvement. Amber knew that it would get under Melanie’s skin which lent credence to my suspicion that Melanie had killed Amber. And given the bloody nature of the crime it seemed likely that Amber’s assassination was an act of rage. Amber’s throat had been slit, saturating the mattress and the bed sheets completely, and then the knife had been thrust downward into the area where her heart would have been had she been born with one. It was only natural that my first inclination was to think that Melanie had killed her; but that she did so while I slept on the very same bed spoke volumes about the indignation that she must have realized and the animosity that she felt towards me as well. And who could have blamed Melanie for killing Amber (except perhaps a jury of her peers). Amber had trifled Melanie beyond the human threshold and when Amber decided to spend the night with me, coveting an intimacy that she had to that point not demanded, Melanie had simply snapped. She had brooded, back in her home, like a festering volcano until her imagination got the best of her and she popped a rivet. She stormed over in the middle of the night, used the key which I had long ago given her, to sneak into the house, took a knife from the kitchen drawer and stealthily crept into my room and sliced Amber’s throat where she slept. Like I said before, if our roles had been reversed I would have been a jealous mess. I might have done the same. And the worst of it was that I was the one who stood to lose the most. I would, of course, be blamed; I would be labeled a serial-killer; a repeat offender, tried, convicted and put to death. Once the beast has tasted human blood…

  But given the weapon of choice, a serrated knife plucked from the kitchen silverware drawer, I should have known right away that Sarah had done the evil deed. The knife was the very same knife (we only had one large knife in the house with a serrated edge) that Sarah had pointed threatingly toward me the night that I came home drunk from Melanie’s house. Amber, in the midst of a sound sleep, would have been an easy victim even for Sarah.

  Sarah had chosen to stay home with me that night rather than stay with Melanie at her house. It was one thing, I suppose, for Sarah to be apart from me until the early hours of morning, but another thing altogether to be apart from me for the entire night. The interesting verity of the matter was that despite the fact that Melanie regularly spent the night in my bed Sarah didn’t seem to have any animosity at all towards Melanie. They were the best of friends. I suppose that Melanie recognized the close relationship which Sarah and I shared and she made pains to let Sarah know that she would not interfere with our kinship; that she posed no threat to her. Melanie, unlike either Catherine or Amber, went out of her way to involve Sarah in every aspect of our relationship except for sex. Melanie welcomed her in our bed in the morning and at night before bedtime and made her the “pickle in the middle”. Melanie and I did not date. If we went to a movie Sarah came too. If we went to a restaurant so did Sarah. Melanie included her in everything we did. Amber, on the other hand, on the nights she would stop by, used every manipulation to get Sarah to go to sleep so that she could have me to herself. Sarah’s resentment of this was no secret. Sarah grew wise and she forced herself to stay awake as long as her little body would let her so as to interfere with Amber’s ambitions. Sarah would deliberately take naps (something she normally refused to do) so that she would be well rested when Amber arrived; and this tactic sometimes resulted in reducing our copulations to one per encounter depending on Sarah’s endurance and resolve.

  That Friday night before Melanie left for the shelter of her home we had a miserable argument. I had just come home from work and apparently Melanie had only moments previously answered the phone when Amber called.

  “Tell Mathew that I’ll be spending the whole night tonight dear.” Amber had said as though Melanie were the maid.

  “Fuck you.”

  “So you’ve finally come to your senses! You’re going to join us then?”

  Melanie hung up the telephone as I stood across from her in the kitchen covered from head to toe in soot from a hard days work. “That was your slut!” her eyes were red with rage, “She’ll be spending the night tonight.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, she invited me to join the two of you. I bet you’d like that wouldn’t you?”

  I walked up to her and tried to comfort her but she pushed me away, “I’m sorry. What am I supposed to do? Tell her no?”

  “Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to tell her that you can’t fuck her anymore. That’s what any loving boyfriend would do.”

  “Any loving boyfriend who wasn’t facing life in prison maybe!”

  I stormed into the bathroom and ran my bath while I washed the grime from my hands and face while cursing under my breath. Sarah came into the bathroom and tried to hug my leg. “Ah ah! I’m covered in dirt honey. You’ll get it all over your clothes. Wait until I clean up and then we’ll hug, okay?”

  “I don’t like it when you fight with

  Melanie.” She looked up at me with sad eyes. “It’s okay honey. It’s just a little disagreement. We’ll be fine.”

  Sarah hugged my leg despite my dirt and looked up at me with a smudged face.

  “Let me get ready now, okay honey?” “Okay.”

  By the time I got out of the tub Melanie had left. Her absence at dinner left me with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. I would have liked to have resolved our differences before she left but I supposed that that was not possible. It was the first time we had quarreled with such conviction. I worried that she might not return. I couldn’t blame her for being angry. Amber was deliberately provoking her and I had been weak and impotent.

  Sarah and I ate a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs which Melanie had prepared before I got home from work. Sarah had the table set and dinner served by the time I walked into the kitchen fresh from my bath. Sarah also had lit two white candles which she had positioned in glass candleholders molded into doves.

  “Birds of peace.” I said out loud with a hint of sarcasm.

  “That’s what Melanie said.” Sarah smiled at me from across the table, “Do they really bring peace?”

  “Apparently not, but they look pretty.” “Why does Amber have to come over again tonight? She always ruins everything.”

  I didn’t want to sour Sarah towards Amber any more than she instinctively had been predisposed since I was sure that we would have to endure her visits for the foreseeable future. “Be nice. Amber has helped us a lot more than you know. If it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t have a place to live.”

  “We could live with Melanie at her house.”

  “You liked living there did you?”

  “Yes. Her house is pretty. Ours is ugly.”

  “Well you’re just go
ing to have to get used to our ugly house and to Amber coming to visit because we’re kinda stuck here for a while.”

  “What if she dies?” “She’s not going to die.”

  “I know, but if she did she wouldn’t come over anymore.”

  “No I suppose not. Eat your supper. I brought home a new movie to watch tonight. It’s an old scary movie, but you have to eat your supper or you’ll miss the beginning because I’m going to put it in when Amber gets here.”

  When Amber arrived she was carrying her black leather satchel filled with sex toys.

  She smelled like a flower garden and she had dressed deliberately sexy in her short red skirt with a low-cut top that revealed the better part of her tanned cleavage. I was washing the dishes and Sarah was clearing the table.

  “Hello lover.” She whispered more loudly than she had intended; apparently loud enough for Sarah to hear because when she said it Sarah turned her head and scowled at Amber.

  We turned down the lights and sat on the couch. Amber sat close to me but Sarah climbed up and wedged herself between us.

  We watched “The House on Haunted Hill” and then we watched “Psycho”. But just after Anthony Perkins was preparing to slash Janet

  Leigh into a puddle of blood Sarah’s eyes began to twitter. She fought a courageous fight but her eyelids soon won the battle and she drifted off to sleep. I tucked her in on the sofa and Amber and I retired to the bedroom where, among other things, Amber tied me up and, with a strap-on prosthesis (and despite my fervent protestations while tied and gagged), anally raped me.

  Afterwards Amber untied me and I curled up in the fetal position and pulled the blanket overtop of me. Amber climbed into the bed behind me, nudging me to the opposite side of the bed, and she spooned with me and cupped my breast as though I were the woman. I felt completely emasculated. When I woke up the next morning I was covered in blood and Amber was lying flat on her back next to me as cold and grey as a headstone. Her eyes were wide open as though she were staring at the spidery crack in the ceiling. Her face was splattered with a fine mist of blood as if she had caught the stray sprits from a garden hose. Her throat was ripped apart as if someone had taken a large bite out of her neck and the serrated kitchen knife with the black wooden handle was sticking straight up from her chest. How I didn’t wake up during the attack I really don’t know. Sarah must have been particularly stealth in her approach and I must have been sound asleep. I was probably in the midst of a good nightmare reliving my last sexual experience with Amber; after the abuse I had endured I was certainly exhausted enough to sleep through a cyclone. I don’t know. I only know that I woke up, my own naked body smothered in Amber’s juices, to a gruesome scene that caused me to rush to the bathroom and vomit.

  I was panicked and my heart was pounding like a snare-drum and my image in the mirror was horrifying; the hair on my naked body was matted down by the thin basting of blood that covered me from head to toe. I looked as though I had bathed in a tub of claret.

  I crawled from the toilet to the tub and I put the rubber stopper in the drain and I turned the handle to the hot water on full. I got to my feet and I stumbled to the kitchen, steadying myself on the bathroom doorframe, and then grabbed a large black garbage bag from under the kitchen sink and I scrambled back to my bedroom and latched the door from within. The knife made a blood-curdling meaty noise

  (like the sound of a large chilled shrimp as you bite into it) when I pulled the knife from Amber’s chest. I rolled her body up in the blood-soaked blanket that covered the bed and I pushed her onto the floor (to the side of the bed opposite the door) with a low thud so that the whole mess would be hidden from view should Sarah enter the room (at that point I thought that Melanie had committed the murder). I flipped the mattress over on the bed-frame and I pulled some clean linen from my dresser and I made the bed up with a fresh blanket. I wrapped the pillows into the bed sheet and I bundled them and stuffed them into the garbage bag and I pulled the yellow drawstring and tied it shut. I took a brand new quilt, a thick dark blue comforter still wrapped in cellophane, from my closet and I stretched it out on the bedroom floor. I rolled Amber’s body, bloody quilt and all, into the clean blue comforter and I shoved it up against the bed once again on the side opposite the door.

  Back in the kitchen I found a bottle of citrus cleaner and a roll of paper towels. I returned to the bedroom and I wiped the blood from the bed frame and the wall and the nightstand and the alarm clock which showed the time, in red boxed LED letters, to be eight twenty-seven in the morning. I sprayed the kitchen knife with the citrus cleaner and I wiped the blood from the blade and the handle and then I wiped the hardwood floor from my bare footprints at the bed and through the hallway and the living room and the kitchen and all the way to the bathroom, around the toilet and over to the tub. The whole house smelled like a citrus grove.

  I went back to the bedroom and closed the door and I slipped back into the bathroom and fell into our tiny tub and I tried to soak the death from my body and melt the stress that was balled up in my abdomen. The water turned red as soon as I sank myself into the balmy stew. I washed my hair and scrubbed my skin with a soapy washcloth and I ground my fingernails into the green bar of soap to loosen the blood that had seeped beneath them. But I still didn’t feel free of the death so I drained the tub and drew a new bath and I washed myself all over again.

  I knew that no matter how many baths I took that the feeling was not going to leave me. It wasn’t the blood on my skin that was causing the wretched feeling in my stomach, it was the death; the second death in my own bed in twelve months time. Death was following me. I felt like Angela Lansbury in an episode of “Murder She Wrote”. Death was waiting for me at every turn. I began to wonder if the demons that haunted me in the dark might not be real. I wondered if I was cursed. I wondered what it was that I had done to provoke my god to torture me so.

  This is going to sound a bit cold- hearted, but there was a rather urgent problem I needed to solve. As I sat soaking the death from my body I also thought about more pressing practical issues like what I was going to do with Amber’s body. I couldn’t keep it. It wasn’t the sort of thing one kept lying around and it would have begun to decompose in a few days and the smell would have become unbearable. I could have buried it, I supposed, but buried bodies always seemed to pop up out of the ground and bring policemen trailing behind them and that wouldn’t do either. Same thing went for dumping the body in the river. I could have dumped it on Melanie’s doorstep and let her deal with her own mistake, but that would not have been chivalrous and it would ultimately have led the police to me anyway. I could have buried it in the basement but the other tenant might wonder why I was jack- hammering the concrete in the basement floor. I was stuck with Amber even after she was dead. The bitch just wouldn’t let me be.

  And then it came to me like a cold crystalline flake of snow drifting slowly to the ground; a faint wisp of an idea. An insane thought, I supposed, but it was the only semi- logical idea I could summon. I would return her, like an unwanted gift. I would deliver

  Amber back to where she had come. I would give her back, anonymously of course, to her husband. I would drive her home.

  Looking back on the idea, it was a ludicrous solution. But I was under an incredible amount of stress. My life was at stake. My thinking wasn’t all that lucid. In hindsight I should have buried her in the basement or wrapped her up and encased her inside of a concrete wall. But even though things were rather sour towards the end, and even though she used me like a blow-up doll, we did sleep together as lovers before our relationship evolved into the twisted affair that it ended up to be. I just couldn’t bring myself to disrespect her remains in such a way. And her family; her children, deserved closure. Besides, I figured if they had a body they wouldn’t come looking for her in my house.

  The knot in my stomach didn’t disappear altogether, but the twisting in the base of my gut, like the wringing of water from a wet shirt, had stopped
wrenching tighter. My idea was so ludicrous that I thought it might actually work. If I returned the body from where it came they wouldn’t know where she had been killed. There was, of course, the chance that Amber had told her sister where she was going, but probably not specifically. My house was addressed to Melanie. And Amber didn’t likely have anything with my address on it. And then again Amber might not have told her sister anything at all. In any event my options were limited and I had little to lose in the effort.

  Having resolved the issue, in my mind at least, I arose from the tub with the energy garnered from discerning a clear plan of action.

  I realized that as disturbed as I was by Amber’s death, not to mention having slept with her bloodied body next to mine for god knows how many hours, that the knot in my stomach was more the product of my indecision and fear than the horror of the event. I felt more than just a little bit liberated. I even began to feel flattered that Melanie had killed Amber on my behalf. She had killed out of jealousy as I saw it, and no matter how ugly a beast jealousy can be, let me tell you that it can have a powerful affect on the subject’s ego. I was actually lifted emotionally. Through all of the misery I had experienced over the previous six months I had been relieved of an extraordinary burden with Amber’s death and I had a lover in Melanie who would kill for me. I actually started to whistle happily as I dressed and despite the smell of death that still thickened the air I cooked a hearty breakfast of French-toast, potato pancakes and fried ham and eggs.