Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  When Richard and Catherine were finally alone, Mother confessed the truth. There was never any German soldier. I was Richard’s son, though I did not know it. Half mad from exhaustion, Mother told Richard she’d managed to survive only by vowing to deliver me to him before she died. In her eyes Richard saw the glazed apartness that had lighted his father’s eyes shortly before he shot himself.

  Sweeping aside the Gorgon’s opposition, Richard took us into his home. Tension between the two women grew quickly, and one cold morning Richard found Catherine dead in her bed. She’d taken an overdose of morphine from his medical bag. She lay in state in the house for two days, resting in a bronze coffin, her delicate hands folded across her still breasts like those of a fallen martyr. I did not leave her side except to urinate, and I ate no food at all. Nor did I sleep. When Catherine’s body passed into the crematorium, I collapsed and had to be admitted to the hospital.

  When Richard announced that he would legally adopt his “nephew,” the Gorgon’s lack of opposition surprised him. He didn’t realize that I-without Catherine-was the answer to the Gorgon’s prayers as well as his own. I freed her forever from the pressure to bear a child. Yet things did not turn out quite as she hoped.

  In me, Richard had gained more than a son. For what was I but a genetic reconstitution of himself and his sister? The male and female halves united in one being. I was his father reborn. He educated me in the manner he had enjoyed before the Crash-private tutors focusing on the hard sciences-and I did not disappoint. As I surpassed each new expectation, Richard came to realize that his sister had been right. No other woman could have loved him as she did, or given him such a child. He came to believe that fate was acting through our bloodline to bring about a higher order of humanity. Without even being conscious of it, he began to eulogize Catherine as a saint.

  As the years passed, the Gorgon grew more resentful of me. From the beginning she’d had suspicions too deep to put a name to, and one night, after consuming a staggering amount of gin, she stumbled upstairs to Richard’s private bedroom and confronted him. She disparaged my mother in a long tirade. She’d done this before, but for some reason, on this night, Richard snapped. He told the Gorgon the truth. At first she misinterpreted, shouting that she’d always known I was a bastard, that Catherine’s “dead German soldier” was a lie to hide her whoredom. When she finally comprehended the true state of affairs and began wailing about “that demon child,” Richard lifted her off her feet, carried her to the second floor landing, and threw her over the rail to the marble floor below.

  I was fourteen then, and I saw it happen. The shouting had drawn me to the head of the stairs. Richard was terrified, not that I would report him to the police, but that he might have lost me forever by committing murder before my eyes. I remember my reaction to this day. I said, “It’s about time you did something about that shrew, Uncle.”

  Do you think me cold, Erin?

  In the silence of the hanging question, I force myself to take no position at all, to draw no moral line that might stop Brahma’s flood tide of confession.

  ERIN› It’s almost like a film. I see it all happening in my mind’s eye. Is it real? Really real?

  MAXWELL› Absolutely. That night, Richard took me into his study to try to explain what had happened. For once, he found himself at a loss for words. He realized he had reached the point where he must risk all-either gain a son or lose me forever. He told me the truth. He was not my uncle but my father. Uncle AND father. He told me of the forbidden union between himself and his sister, how through that sacral/ sexual union an immeasurable strength and talent had been created-me.

  We had always felt an intense kinship, partly because we were so similar, but also because of our shared disease. During that hour in the study our bond was consecrated. We vowed to stand together on the matter of the Gorgon’s “accidental” death, and from that moment forward shared a conviction that we were beyond moral constraint. I was reborn that night, Erin. Incest and murder were my nativity.

  ERIN› You were fourteen when this happened?

  MAXWELL› Yes. I had wished this thing to be real for so long, and suddenly it was. It had never seemed possible that I’d been sired by some anonymous German soldier too stupid or unlucky to survive a war. Of _course_ my father was a renowned psychiatrist. If I was a little too ready to see myself as theubermenschRichard claimed I was, fate has proved him right. Three years later I entered medical school.

  Despite my determination to remain calm, I clench my right fist in triumph. Drewe’s theory looks more likely with each passing minute.

  ERIN› So you _are_ a doctor. I had a feeling you were.

  MAXWELL› Yes. But I do not wish to speak about that.

  ERIN› What do you want to say?

  MAXWELL› I have a perverse impulse to tell you of my failings. My wounds. My darkest journeys.

  ERIN› Why focus on your failings?

  MAXWELL› Do you understand the essential difference between man and woman? Woman can simply BE. She gains identity through existence itself, through the biological imperative. She merely waits for completion, as you do. But man must BECOME. He must create himself. He must tear himself away from his mother, sever the umbilical, and project himself into the world BEYOND that wholeness. Man must exile himself from comfort and completion. You see that, don’t you?

  ERIN› I suppose so.

  MAXWELL› It can be a dark journey. I was no normal adolescent, Erin. I saw Elvis Presley as a cartoon Dionysus for bourgeois America. When the Beatles burst on the scene I ignored them. Too chipper, too happy. But then the world changed. The Rolling Stones, the Doors, Hendrix. I immersed myself in the drug subculture. Richard had always been a libertine, and by profession was an expert on pharmacology. He’d traveled down the hallucinogenic highway before Leary ever heard of LSD. He shepherded me in this, as in all things. I was the right age for Vietnam, but my hemophilia disqualified me from the draft, as it had my father before me. I was wealthy, in an Ivy League school, on the fast track for medicine. But in one area I remained unfulfilled. The area which EROS exists to explore.

  ERIN› Sex?

  MAXWELL› Yes. We are all slaves to our childhoods, and I was no exception. Because my hemophilia was my only limitation, it grew to terrifying scale in my mind. I strengthened my body through ceaseless swimming, a sport in which the chance of sustaining a bleeding injury was very low. My mention of Cellini’sPerseuswas no idle comment. It was truly my goal, and through years of swimming I attained it. If you saw me in clothes, you would notice only exquisite proportion. But if you saw me naked, you would understand.

  My body attracted women, but whenever matters progressed to an overtly sexual level, I found myself put off by their carnality, by their very vitality. I felt revulsion, fear, nausea, and did not understand why. My father’s erotic exploits proved that sex was possible for men like us. I masturbated, albeit carefully, and for two semesters in college I had a male roommate who would suck me to climax whenever I needed relief. He disgusted me, but it accomplished the goal. Still, I feared what might happen in the unguarded thrusting and writhing of real sex.

  Then, at a college party, I mistakenly walked into a bedroom where a drunken girl had passed out. As I stared at her closed eyelids, the near-motionless breasts beneath her sweater, I felt my pulse quickening, a twinge of tumescence. I closed the door, moved to her, and pushed my hands clumsily under her sweater as my heart thundered in my chest. Terrified that someone would come in, I groped beneath her clothing for a few moments, soiled my trousers, then fled from the house. It sounds pathetic, doesn’t it?

  ERIN› I’ve heard stranger things.

  MAXWELL› Naturally I found a way to put myself into a similar situation again, only this time I removed the girl’s pants and actually penetrated her. The third time, the chosen girl awakened and I ran. She was unable to identify me, but the experience frightened me enough to make me stop. It also forced me to diagnose my own neuro
sis. All my life, I had been carrying around a psychosexual template of my dead mother in my head. It was my last vision of her, lying motionless in her coffin, pale and perfect, waiting for the flames of cremation. These women I had touched were but gross reflections of the anima in my mind. Of course, diagnosis and cure are different things. An acrophobe who knows he is afraid of heights cannot suddenly shed his fear. My anima remained with me, and it had faces I had yet to perceive.

  ERIN› In four years of college you never once fell in love?

  MAXWELL› Love? My mind was in chains! Whenever I thought I was making progress, another incident would occur. In medical school, seven other students and I were paraded into an operating room where an anesthetized young woman was about to be given a hysterectomy. We were to practice vaginal examinations, using her as our patient. This is common practice in teaching hospitals, if your husband hasn’t told you. As I stood in line, watching my fellow students force their gloved fingers into the pale, still body, I felt fury at the institutional violation of this defenseless woman. But then I sensed a terrific pressure beneath my lab coat. When my turn came to examine her, my hands were trembling. This was so out of character that the attending physician remarked on it. I bumbled through the exam, then raced into a rest room to relieve my distress. As I did, I visualized the anesthetized woman, the most perfect image I had yet encountered of my mother. I knew then that I was not yet free-that I might never be free-of her.

  ERIN› Your father never sensed your problems?

  MAXWELL› Of course he did! Richard blamed himself completely! For eulogizing my mother long after her death. For not having the courage to marry the woman he loved. If he had, he knew, he might have given me the gift he’d been granted-a sister with whom I could share all. Worse, by denying me that sister, he had also crippled the powerful gene line that had been concentrated in me. He begged me to turn outward, to search for someone who might fill the need he had not provided for, and give me heirs worthy of our genes.

  ERIN› Did you?

  MAXWELL› I tried. But I was meant to walk a different path, Erin. Summers during college, I began to travel abroad with my father. I had been to Europe, of course, but never to the East. And the East was Richard’s great passion. He was obsessed with the fertility cults of the Indus Valley cities, the bloody rituals of sex and death around which Indian culture had developed. He’d been raised by an authoritarian father, a paragon of the sky cult of Christianity, which of course had been grafted onto the sky cult of Germanic warrior culture. Yet he had seen his father break, and commit suicide under the stress of bad fortune. Richard sought a greater strength. Thus was he drawn to India, the great fount and faithful preserver of the Mother principle.

  In India my illusions were stripped away. The strong ruled, the weak served or perished. I found women there who would do anything I wished for pitiful sums. The fact that I would be miles away the next day allowed me to overcome my anxieties and couple with them, but always there was a problem. Indian women are dark of skin and hair. They did not fit my template, ethereal Catherine lying in her martyr’s coffin.

  Back in America, my sexual problems continued, but they did not interfere with my academic advancement. I was like a man aflame. Even as my genius was proclaimed from the heights, I was hiring prostitutes to lie passive in white gowns while I gently mounted them. I believe I was going slowly mad. Even those whores, who had seen so much depravity, were frightened by something in me. One lost her composure during the act and attacked me, and I had to be hospitalized for clotting factor therapy. Suicidal thoughts possessed me. It was then that Richard intervened. He stuffed me with amphetamines, whisked me off to India, and changed my life forever.

  ERIN› What was different about that trip?

  MAXWELL› I found someone.

  ERIN› A woman?

  MAXWELL› Yes.

  ERIN› Like your mother?

  MAXWELL› No. I found a woman who was death in life. Do you understand? Christianity preaches eternal life through death, but that is a false and exhausted dream. It is on the road of death that we find life eternal.

  Here we go, I say silently. Jesus Christ.

  ERIN› I’m not sure I understand.

  MAXWELL› You will. On that final trip to India, we crisscrossed the subcontinent in search of rituals and cults which had been outlawed by the British long before, but which rumor claimed still flourished in remote areas. Richard was no Western dilettante. He had friends all over the country, from the teeming cities to the village-dotted plains. At an isolated tribal village we were allowed to see a young boy dragged through the fields while a crowd of farmers hacked the flesh from his body in strips, which they then buried in their fields to ensure fertility.

  From there, we trekked to a high village where a certain Shakti cult was known to practice Tantrism of the Left Hand. Most Indian holy men practice asceticism as the route to what Westerners would call salvation. But Tantrics of the Left Hand Path are adepts. For them, self-denial brings pleasure. Their sacrament requiresbreakingeach taboo in ritual fashion. No Westerner had ever witnessed these rites. Yet Richard, with the help of a guru, gained us admittance. At midnight in a cremation ground, eleven couples were seated in a circle. At their center sat a young woman, nude. There was chanting of mantras, then the woman was sprinkled with taboo substances such as meat and alcohol, which were shared by all. Then the remaining women removed their vests, which were placed by the guru in a box. Each man approached the box and selected a vest. His choice of vest determined the woman with whom he would couple during the ritual. As we stared from without the circle, the participants disrobed and began to copulate around us. No taboo of class or law was observed during this rite. If a man chose the vest of his sister, they made love as strangers, honoring the goddess by their rapture. For my father the experience was an epiphany, a validation of his life history. For me it was electrifying, the spiritual antithesis of a Roman orgy. It was holy sex. When the men and women around us finally began to allow themselves the release of orgasm-which we had believed forbidden-I realized that this journey was not like the others. Time was funneling in upon itself, sucking me toward some great reversal.

  Encouraged by our successes, we pushed farther into the interior. Our only protection in that hard land was our wits, our money, and the strength in our limbs. My father had a very bad time. Hemophilia deteriorates the joints, and Richard’s were failing fast. But like mad white hunters pursuing elephants in search of the mythical ivory graveyard, we trod endless miles of grass and rock in search of the one significant cult of which Richard had found no extant trace. The Thuggee.

  The Thugs were a robber caste which had flourished in India for centuries. They earned their livelihood by falling in with groups of travelers on the roads and then strangling them in their sleep. They stole all money and belongings, then expertly concealed the corpses. Nothing remarkable in that, of course. What made the Thuggee unique was that the murders they committed were part of their religion. They worshiped Kali-the goddess of death and destruction-in her many forms. Kali the Black One, the Betrayer, the Difficult of Approach. For them, murder was a sacrament, and the profit gained their rightful due. The British claimed to have wiped out the Thugs by the end of the nineteenth century, but my father believed no cult which had thrived for centuries could be utterly stamped out in one.

  He was right. After many weeks of following whispered directions bought too dearly and warnings shouted free of charge, we were admitted to the home of a man who confessed that Kali’s cult of murder still existed. After a sleepless night talking to Richard (during which a considerable amount of money changed hands) the man admitted that he himself worshiped Kali and had been trained in the ways of the Thugs. For my father it was the culmination of a life’s work. But as he greedily absorbed the most arcane of Eastern secrets, I was striking up a relationship of my own.

  The Thug had three daughters. Two chattered endlessly, but the middle daughter was si
lent. She was dark-skinned, of course, but also unutterably beautiful. She watched me wherever I went, and I watched her. On the third night she came to my pallet. It was the first consensual sex in my life with a woman who was not a whore. I did not have to speak. The first time she lay as motionless as the dead beneath me. The second, she rose above me like a black goddess and chanted words that cleft my mind like a scimitar: Is Kali, my Divine Mother, of a black complexion? She appears black from a distance, but when intimately known she is no longer so. Bondage and liberation are both of her making. She must always have her way. In that instant this young girl smashed my spiritual chains and brought me to fierce, bursting climax. I was a man transformed.

  In the morning I was amazed to learn that this proud girl spoke English, which was rare in the province. She had been taught it as a way to lull travelers into feeling safe. For three nights she initiated me into wonders I had never imagined, or had been sickened by when I did. I saw that all my life had been an obsessive exercise in compensation. I had been born with an incurable disease, cursed with fragility. I’d watched my delicate mother perish for love, then sought a woman equal to her. But the daughter of the Thug was Catherine’s antithesis. Cold and hard outside, yet soft and fathomless at her core. I had feared unrestrained sex for so long. In my mind the yoni-the opening in the woman-was a crevice through which a man would fall back into the mindless black maw of Nature. The women who had wanted me sought to enslave me, to bear children unworthy of my line. But the daughter of the Thug allayed my fears. She taught me that semen, once ejaculated into the fire of theyoni, could still be arrested and returned. That I would not be dissolved into her but rather purge myself of earthly lust and touch the stars. She was Death rendered tangible in flesh.