Festival of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  Of course, I knew what it was. I took her out to 25 Degrees on Thursday evening for hamburgers. We sat in one of the black, leather-upholstered booths, which I thought would be romantic. It’s incredible what a reasonably supple person can get up to, in a black, leather-upholstered booth. But she was unusually preoccupied, and she kept fiddling with her fork, around and around, and when our orders eventually arrived, she said, ‘I’ve been thinking, Bob.’

  ‘You’ve been thinking that you should have ordered the three-cheese sandwich instead of the turkey burger?’

  ‘No, not that.’

  ‘Let me see. You’ve been thinking that you hate this loose-weave sport coat I’m wearing? No, I don’t believe that’s it. Aha! I know what it is. You’ve been thinking that you and I should stop seeing each other because Jack has called you and asked you out on a date. A threesome. Him and you and the houndess from hell.’

  She looked at me sideways and there was genuine remorse in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re sorry because Jack has called you and asked you out on a date, or you’re sorry you waited until our food arrived before you told me about it? Because I can’t possibly eat a twelve-ounce cheeseburger while my throat is all choked up.’

  ‘I’m just sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

  ‘Nobody ever does, Kylie. Nobody ever does. But I shall have my revenge. Jack may be good looking and he may be able to charm the turkey buzzards out of the trees, but you will very soon discover that Jack suffers from premature ejaculation and because of that, your love-making will last for no more than nanoseconds. Don’t ever sneeze when Jack’s making love to you, because you might miss it.’

  Kylie looked away. ‘As a matter of fact, Bob, he’s very good. He’s tender, and he’s creative, and he can keep it up for hours.’

  I sat up very straight with my chin tilted upward and I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what upset me the most: the fact that she had already gone to bed with him, and that he was obviously better in bed than I was, or the Australian way she said ‘tinder’ instead of ‘tender.’

  Eventually, I shuffled my butt sideways out of the booth, and stood up. The waiter came up to me and said, ‘Something wrong, sir?’

  ‘Yes. This isn’t what I wanted, none of it.’

  He frowned, and flipped back his notepad. ‘I think you will find that you have everything you asked for, sir.’

  I shook my head. It isn’t easy to argue when you’re trying to stop yourself from crying.

  ‘You’re going, sir? Who’s going to pay?’

  ‘The lady will pay,’ I told him. ‘She – ah—’

  ‘Bob,’ said Kylie. ‘Don’t let’s end it like this. Please.’

  ‘How else do you want to end it? You want violins? You let me take you out for hamburgers and you’d already gone to bed with him?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Good,’ I told her. ‘Have a nice life. Jack and you and that bitch of his. Hope he can tell the difference between you.’

  I shouldn’t have said that, but I had fallen for Kylie in a way that I had never fallen for any girl before. It wasn’t only her fabulous looks, and the way that other men swiveled around and stared at her whenever we walked past together, although of course that was part of it. It was her utter simplicity, the way she trusted the world to take care of her, and her genuine surprise when it didn’t. It was the way she propped herself up on one elbow when we were lying in bed, and stroked my hair, as if she couldn’t believe I was real.

  She was magical, in every sense of the word. And that evening, after she had told me that she and I were through, all I could do was creep back to my apartment like a wounded animal and lie with my face buried in her pillow, smelling her perfume.

  The phone rang. After a long while, I heaved myself off the bed and answered it.

  ‘Bob? It’s Jack.’

  ‘Jack? Not my best friend Jack? Not my old med school buddy? Both for one and one for both?’

  ‘Bob . . . I don’t know what to say to you.’

  ‘I have a good idea. You could say, “Bob, I’m going to go to the top story of Century Park East and I’m going to jump off”.’

  ‘Please, Bob. Don’t joke.’

  ‘Who the fuck is joking? You think I’m joking? I put a curse on you, Jack! I swear to God! You and your fucking Great Dane! I curse you!’

  There was a lengthy pause. Eventually, Jack said, ‘Can’t say I blame you, buddy. Stay well. Don’t be a stranger forever.’

  I hung up. There was so much I could have said, but most of it would have been obscene, and what was the point?

  Six weeks and three days later my curse worked.

  It was a Saturday morning and I was driving east on Olympic, on my way to see my friend Dick Paulzner for a game of squash. I pulled up at the intersection of Western Avenue and who should be waiting at the traffic signal right ahead of me but Jack, in his fancy-schmancy Porsche Cayenne SUV. Sitting much too close to him, with her fingers buried in his hair, was Kylie, in a pink baseball cap; and hunched up in the back seat like somebody’s Hungarian grandma was Sheba.

  My Jeep was burbling away like it always did, on account of a sizeable hole in its muffler, and it wasn’t long before Jack checked his rear-view mirror and saw that it was me. He said something to Kylie and Kylie turned around and gave me a little finger-wave.

  I ignored her. But then she took off her baseball cap and waved it wildly from side to side, and I could see that she was laughing.

  I could go to confession three times a day for the rest of my life and still not be forgiven for what I did next. I saw scarlet. All of the hurt and all of the rejection and all of the anger, they all boiled up inside of me, and I went temporarily mad. That was supposed to have been my life, sitting in that SUV in front of me. That was supposed to have been my happiness. Instead of that, I was sitting alone in the vehicle behind, being laughed at by the girl of my dreams.

  I pressed my foot down on the gas, and rear-ended the Cayenne with a satisfying bosh!

  I could see that Jack and Kylie were both jolted, and Sheba was knocked right off her seat and on to the floor.

  Jack and Kylie turned around and shouted at me, although I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I shrugged, as if I didn’t understand what they were shouting for, and then I pressed my foot down on the gas again. There was another bosh! and the Cayenne was shoved forward three or four feet.

  Now Jack was really mad. He climbed out of the driver’s seat and came storming toward me swinging Sheba’s metal-studded leash. Just to annoy him one more time, I slammed my foot down and rear-ended the Cayenne again.

  This time, though, there was no loud impact. Jack’s foot was no longer on the brake pedal and he must have left the Cayenne in neutral. My Jeep barely nudged its rear fender, but it rolled forward another ten or twelve feet, well past the traffic signal.

  Without any warning, a huge red Peterbilt semi came bellowing across the intersection and struck the passenger side of the Cayenne. The collision was so devastating that the SUV was pushed all the way across Olympic and on to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, demolishing a mailbox.

  Even today, I can’t recall the noise of that crash. It must have been deafening, but the way I remember it, there was no noise at all, only the silent crumpling of metal and the glittering explosion of glass.

  When my hearing suddenly returned, however, I heard the screaming of twenty-two tires on the blacktop, and Jack screaming, too, as if he were trying to drown them out.

  I jumped down from my Jeep and ran across the road, dodging around the traffic. The truck driver was climbing down from his cab, too – a heavily-built Mexican in a red T-shirt and baggy green shorts, and a Dodgers cap screwed on sideways. He stared at me with bulging brown eyes, and said, ‘There wasn’t a damn thing I could do, man. I stood on everything, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do.’

  The passenger door of Jack’s Cayenne had been
crushed in so far that it had bent the steering wheel. The tangle of metal and plastic was almost incomprehensible, but I could see blonde hair and blood and one of Kylie’s hands reaching out from a gap in between the door and the front wheel-arch – unmarked, perfect, with silver rings on every finger – as if she were reaching out for help.

  ‘Kylie!’ Jack was begging her. ‘Kylie, tell me that you’re OK! Kylie!’

  He climbed up on to the side of the SUV and tried to wrench open the passenger door with his bare hands, but it was wedged in far too tight.

  ‘Somebody call an ambulance!’ he screamed. ‘For Christ’s sake, somebody call an ambulance!’

  Of course, somebody already had, and it was only a few minutes before we heard the whooping and scribbling of a distant siren. Jack stayed where he was, leaning against the smashed-in door, pleading with Kylie to still be alive.

  ‘I stood on everything,’ the truck driver repeated. ‘There wasn’t a damn thing I could do.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, and gave him a reassuring pat on his big, sweat-soaked shoulder.

  Two squad cars arrived, and then an ambulance, and then a fire truck, and the police made all of us spectators shuffle across to the other side of the street. The fire crew started work with cutters and hydraulic spreaders, trying to extricate Kylie from the wreckage. I could see sparks flying and hear the arthritic groaning of metal being bent.

  Jack was sitting on the back step of the ambulance, with a shiny metallic blanket around him. A paramedic was standing beside him, with one hand raised, as if he were giving him the benediction.

  ‘I can’t afford to lose my license, man,’ said the truck driver. ‘I got all new carpets to pay for.’

  But I wasn’t listening. Instead, I was frowning off to my left, further along Olympic. About fifty yards away, I could see Sheba, Jack’s Great Dane. She was standing by the side of the road, quite still, more like a statue of a dog than a real dog.

  Looking back at the smashed-up Cayenne, I could see then that the rear offside door had burst open in the collision, and that Sheba must have either been thrown out, or jumped out. I was just about to tell one of the police officers that she was loose when Jack turned around and saw her, too, and sent the paramedic off to bring her back.

  Two police officers came over to us. One of them shouted out, ‘Anybody here witness this accident? If you did, I want to hear from you.’

  I was interviewed twice by two highly disinterested detectives from the Highway Patrol, one of whom should have had a master’s degree in nose picking, but after the second visit I received a phone call from my attorney telling me that there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution. Nobody had clearly witnessed what had happened, not even Jack, and the truck driver had been estimated to have been traveling at nearly forty miles an hour in his attempt to beat the traffic signals.

  I wrote Jack a letter of condolence, but I think I did it more for my benefit than for his, and I never sent it. Kylie’s casket was flown back to Australia, to be interred at the church in Upper Kedron, near Brisbane, where she had been confirmed at the age of thirteen.

  Occasionally, friends of mine would tell me that they had run across Jack at medical conventions, or in bars. They all seemed to give me a similar story, that he was ‘more distant than he used to be, quieter, like he has his mind on something, but he’s pretty much OK.’

  Then – in the first week of October – I saw Jack for myself. I was driving home late in the evening down Coldwater Canyon Drive, after attending a bar mitzvah at my friend Jacob Perlman’s house in Sherman Oaks. As I came around that wide right-hand bend just before Hidden Valley Road, I saw a jogger running along the road in front of me. My headlights caught the reflectors on his shoes, first of all, and it was just as well that he was wearing them, because his track suit was totally black.

  I give him a double-bip on my horn to warn him that I was behind him, and I gave him a very wide berth as I drove around him. I wasn’t drunk, but I was drunk-ish, and I didn’t want to end up with a jogger as a hood ornament.

  As I passed him, however, I saw that he wasn’t running alone. Six or seven yards ahead of him was a Great Dane, loping at an easy, relaxed pace. I suddenly realized that the Great Dane had to be Sheba, and that the jogger had to be Jack. He lived only about a half-mile away, after all, on Gloaming Drive.

  I pulled into the side of the road, and slid to a stop. Maybe I would have kept on going, if I had been sober. But Jack and I had been the Two Musketeers, once upon a time, both for one and one for both, and don’t think I hadn’t been eaten up by guilt for what I had done to Kylie.

  I climbed down from the Jeep and lifted both arms in the air.

  ‘Jack!’ I shouted. ‘Is that you, Jack? It’s me, Bob!’

  The jogger immediately ran forward a little way and seized the Great Dane’s collar. I still wasn’t entirely sure that it was Jack, because he and the dog were illuminated only by my nearside tail-light, the offside tail-light having been busted earlier that evening by some overenthusiastic backing-up maneuvers.

  ‘Jack – all I want to do is talk to you, man! I need to tell you how sorry I am! Jack!’

  But Jack (if it was Jack) didn’t say a word. Instead, he scrambled down the side of the road, his shoes sliding in the dust, and the Great Dane scrambled after him. They pushed their way through some bushes, and then they were gone.

  I could hear them crashing through the undergrowth for a while, but then there was nothing but me and the soft evening wind fluffing in my ears.

  ‘That had to be Jack,’ I told myself, as I walked back to my Jeep. ‘That had to be Jack and I have to make amends.’

  I didn’t really care about making amends, to tell you the truth, but I did care about absolution. Like Oscar Wilde said, each man kills the thing he loves, and I may not have done it with a bitter look or a kiss or a flattering word, but I had done it out of jealousy, and maybe that was worse. I needed somebody to forgive me. I needed Jack to forgive me. Most of all, I needed me to forgive me.

  I took the next left into Gloaming Drive, and drove slowly down it until I came to Jack’s house. It was a single-story building, but it was built on several different levels, with glass walls and a wide veranda at the back, with a view over the city. At the front, it was partially shielded from the road by a large yew hedge, and I parked on the opposite side of the street at such an angle that – when he returned from his jog – Jack wouldn’t easily be able to see me.

  I waited over twenty minutes. Two or three times, I nearly dozed off, and I was beginning to sober up and think that this was a very bad idea, when Jack suddenly appeared in his black track suit, jogging down the road toward me. Sheba was close behind him, running very close to heel.

  Jack ran up the front steps of his house, and still jogging on the spot, took out his keys and opened the front door. He and Sheba disappeared inside.

  There was a short pause, and then the lights went on.

  OK, I thought. What do I do now? Ring the doorbell and say that I want to apologize for killing Kylie? Ring the doorbell and say, here I am, you know you want to hit me, so hit me? Ring the doorbell and burst into tears?

  I thought the best thing to do would be to let Jack wind down from his run, give him time to take a shower and pour himself a drink. Maybe he’d be more receptive, when he was relaxed. So I waited another fifteen minutes, even though my muscles were beginning to creak.

  Eventually, I eased myself out of the Jeep and closed the door as quietly as I could. I crossed the street until I reached the yew hedge. Looking through the branches, I could see Jack standing in his living room, wearing a tobacco-brown bathrobe, with a cream towel wound around his neck. He was holding what looked like a tumbler of whiskey and he was talking to somebody.

  No, this wasn’t the right time to ask him for forgiveness, not if he had company. I waited for a while longer and then I skirted my way around to the other side of the yew hedge, to see if I could make out who he wa
s talking to, but I couldn’t.

  I looked around, to make sure that no nosy neighbors were watching me, and then I quickly crossed the lawn in front of the house and went down the side passage, where the trash bins were stored. It was completely dark here, and I was able to climb up on top of one of the bins, and heave myself over the wooden fence into the back yard.

  There were cedar-wood steps leading down from the veranda into the yard. I mounted them cautiously, keeping my head low, until I could peer over the decking into the softly lit living room.

  Jack was pacing up and down in front of a large brown leather couch. A woman was sitting in the couch, a blonde, although I couldn’t see her face. Her hair was feathery, rather like Kylie’s, but it was longer than Kylie’s used to be.

  The sliding door to the veranda was a few inches ajar. I couldn’t distinctly hear what Jack and the blonde were saying to each other, but I stayed on those steps for almost twenty minutes, watching Jack talking and drinking and stalking up and down. He appeared to be angry about something, and frustrated. Maybe he was angry because he had seen me, and frustrated that the law had never punished me for causing Kylie’s death.

  At one point, however, the blonde woman said something to him, and he stopped, and lowered his head, and nodded, as if he accepted that she was right. He approached the couch and kissed her, and tenderly stroked her hair with the back of his knuckles. If the look in his eyes wasn’t the look of love, it was certainly the look of like-you-very-much.

  He was halfway through pouring himself a second whiskey when his phone warbled. He picked it up, and paced out of sight, but when he came back he said something to the blonde woman and screwed the top back on the whiskey bottle. Then he disappeared.

  I waited, and waited. After about ten minutes Jack reappeared, and now he was dressed in a pale blue shirt and black chinos. He gave the blonde woman another kiss, and then he walked out again. I heard an SUV start up, around the front of the house, and back out of the driveway, and turn northward up Gloaming Drive.