The Face of Fear

by Dean Koontz

  She was not merely plunging into her Earth Mother role again. Unquestionably, she did have a tendency to overwhelm her men, to be so excessively affectionate and understanding and dependable that she smothered their self-reliance. However, this affair was different from all the others. She wanted to depend on Graham as much as he depended on her. This time she wanted to receive as much as she gave. He was the first man to whom she had ever responded in quite that fashion. She wanted to make love to him in order to soothe him, but she wanted to soothe herself as well. She had always had strong, healthy sexual drives, but Graham had put a new and sharper edge on her desire.

  She carried the glasses of Remy Martin into the den. She sat beside him on the sofa.

  After a moment of silence, still staring at the fire, he said, “Why the interrogation? What was he after?”

  “Prine?”

  “Who else?”

  “You’ve seen his show often enough. You know what he’s like.”

  “But he usually has a reason for his attacks. And he’s always got proof of what he says.”

  “Well, at least you shut him up with your visions of the tenth murder.”

  “They were real,” he said.

  “I know they were.”

  “It was so vivid... as if I were right there.”

  “Was it bad? Bloody?”

  “One of the worst. I saw him ... ram the knife into her throat and then twist it.” He quickly sipped his brandy.

  She leaned against him, kissed him on the cheek.

  “I can’t figure this Butcher,” he said worriedly. “I’ve never had so much trouble getting an image of a killer.”

  “You sensed his name.”

  “Maybe. Dwight.... I’m not entirely sure.”

  “You’ve given the police a fairly good description of him.”

  “But I can’t pick up much more about him,” he said. “When the visions come and I try to force an image of this man, this Butcher, to the center of them, all I get are waves of ... evil. Not illness, not an impression of a sick mind. Just overwhelming evil. I don’t know how to explain this—but the Butcher isn’t a lunatic. At least not in the classical sense. He doesn’t kill in a maniacal frenzy.”

  “He’s chopped up nine innocent women,” Connie said. “Ten if you count the one they haven’t found yet. He cuts off their ears and fingers sometimes. Sometimes he disembowels them. And you say he isn’t crazy?”

  “He’s not a lunatic, not by any definition we have of the word. I’d stake my life on it.”

  “Maybe you don’t sense mental illness because he doesn’t know he’s sick. Amnesia—”

  “No. No amnesia. No schizophrenia. He’s very aware of his murders. He’s no Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I’ll bet he’d pass any psychiatric examination you’d care to give him, and with flying colors. This isn’t easy to explain. But I have the feeling that if he is a lunatic, he’s a whole new breed. No one’s ever encountered anything like him before. I think—dammit, I know— he’s not even angry or particularly excited when he kills these women. He’s just—methodical.”

  “You’re giving me the shivers.”

  “You? I feel as if I’ve been inside his head. I’ve got a chronic case of shivers.”

  A coal popped in the fireplace.

  She took hold of his free hand. “Let’s not talk about Prine or the killings.”

  “After tonight, how can I not talk about them?”

  “You looked wonderful on television,” she said, working him away from the subject.

  “Oh, yeah. Wonderful. Sweating, pale, shaking—”

  “Not during the visions. Before them. You’re a natural for television. Even for movies. Leading-man type.”

  Graham Harris was handsome. Thick reddish-blond hair. Blue eyes, heavily crinkled at the corners. Leathery skin with sharply carved lines from all the years he had spent in an outdoor life. Five-ten; not tall, but lean and hard. He was thirty-eight, yet he still had a trace of boyish vulnerability about him.

  “Leading-man type?” he said. He smiled at her. “Maybe you’re right. I’ll give up the publishing business and all this messy psychic stuff. I’ll go into the movies.”

  “The next Robert Redford.”

  “Robert Redford? I was thinking maybe the next Boris Karloff.”

  “Redford,” Connie insisted.

  “Come to think of it, Karloff was a rather elegant-looking man out of makeup. Perhaps I’ll try for being the next Wallace Beery.”

  “If you’re Wallace Beery, then I’m Marie Dressler.”

  “Hi, Marie.”

  “Do you really have an inferiority complex, or do you cultivate it as part of your charm?”

  He grinned, then sipped the brandy. “Remember that Tugboat Annie movie with Beery and Dressler? Do you think Annie ever went to bed with her husband?”

  “Sure!”

  “They were always fighting. He lied to her every chance he got—and most of the time he was drunk.”

  “But in their own way they loved each other,” Connie said. “They couldn’t have been married to anyone else.”

  “I wonder what it was like for them. He was such a weak man, and she was such a strong woman.”

  “Remember, though, he was always strong when the chips were down: right near the end of the picture, for example.”

  “Some good in all of us, huh?”

  “He could have been strong from the start. He just didn’t respect himself enough.”

  Graham stared at the fire. He turned the brandy snifter around and around in his hand.

  “What about William Powell and Myrna Loy?” she asked.

  “The Thin Man movies.”

  “Both of them were strong,” she said. “That’s who we could be. Nick and Nora Charles.”

  “I always liked their dog. Asta. Now that was a good part. ”

  “How do you think Nick and Nora made love?” she asked.

  “Passionately.”

  “But with a lot of fun.”

  “Little jokes.”

  “That’s it.” She took the brandy glass out of his hand and put it on the hearth with her own snifter. She kissed him lightly, teasing his lips with her tongue. “I bet we could play Nick and Nora.”

  “I don’t know. It’s such a strain making love and being witty at the same time.”

  She sat in his lap. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him more fully this time and drew back and smiled when he slid a hand beneath her sweater.

  “Nora?” he said.

  “Yes, Nicky?”

  “Where’s Asta?”

  “I put him to bed.”

  “We wouldn’t want him interrupting.”

  “He’s asleep.”

  “Might traumatize the little fella if he saw—”

  “I made sure he’d be asleep.”

  “Oh?”

  “I drugged his Alpo.”

  “Such a smart girl.”

  “And now we belong in bed.”

  “Such a very smart girl.”

  “With a lovely body,” she said.

  “Yes, you’re ravishing.”

  “Am I?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Ravish me, then.”

  “With pleasure.”

  “I would hope so.”

  5

  An hour later he was asleep, but Connie was not. She lay on her side, studying his face in the soft glow of the bedside lamp.

  His experience and attitudes were stamped on his features. His toughness shone through clearly, yet there was the boyish quality too. Kindness. Intelligence. Humor. Sensitivity. He was a deep-down good man. But the fear shone through as well, the fear of falling, and all of the ugly things that had grown from it.

  During his twenties and early thirties, Graham had been one of the best mountain climbers in the world. He lived for the vertical trek, for the risk and the triumph. Nothing else in his life mattered half so much as that. He had been an active climber from the age of thirte
en, year by year setting higher and more difficult goals for himself. At twenty-six he was organizing parties to scale the most taxing peaks in Europe, Asia and South America. When he was thirty he led an expedition up the South Col route of Everest, climbed the West Ridge to traverse the mountain, and returned down the South Col. At thirty-one he tackled the Eiger Direct with an Alpine-style single push up the hideously sheer face without using fixed ropes. Accomplishments such as these, his good looks, his wit, and his reputation as a Casanova (exaggerated by both his friends and the press) made him the most colorful and popular figure in mountaineering at that time.

  Five years ago, with only a few challenging climbs remaining, he put together a team to assault the most dangerous wall of rock known to man, the Southwest Face of Everest, a route that had never been taken to the top. Two-thirds of the way through the climb, he fell, breaking sixteen bones and suffering internal injuries. He was given first aid in Nepal, then flown to Europe with a doctor and two friends at his side in what everyone assumed would conclude as a death watch. Instead of adding one more outstanding achievement to his record, he spent seven months in a private Swiss clinic. However, the ordeal was not at an end when he left the hospital. This Goliath had not been beaten, and had left this David with a warning: Graham limped.

  The doctors told him he could still scale easy cliffs and ridges as a weekend sport if he wished. With sufficient practice he might even learn to compensate for his partially game right leg and move on to more ambitious climbs. Not Eiger. Not Everest, by any route. But there were hundreds of lesser palisades that should interest him.

  At first he was convinced that he would be back on Everest within a year. Three times he tried to climb, and three times he was reduced to panic in the first hundred feet of the ascent. Forced to retreat from even the simplest climbs, he quickly saw that Everest or anything remotely like it would most likely scare him to death.

  Over the years, that fear had undergone a metamorphosis, had grown and spread like a fungus. His fear of climbing had become a generalized fear that affected every aspect of his life. He was convinced that his inheritance would be lost in bad investments, and he began following the stock market with a nervous interest that made him the bane of his broker. He started his three low-circulation, high-priced mountain-climbing magazines as a hedge against a collapse of the market; and although they were quite profitable, he periodically predicted their demise. He began to see the dread specter of cancer in every cold, case of flu, headache and bout with acid indigestion. His clairvoyance frightened him, and he attempted to deal with it only because he could not run from it. At times the fear intruded between him and Connie in the most intimate moments, leaving him impotent.

  Recently he had sunk into a depression far deeper than any that had come before it, and for several days he had seemed unable and unwilling to claw his way out of it. Two weeks ago he had witnessed a mugging, heard the victim’s cries for help—and walked away. Five years ago he would have waded into the fight without hesitation. He came home and told Connie about the mugging, belittled himself, called himself names and argued with her when she tried to defend him. She was afraid that he had come to loathe himself, and she knew that for a man like Graham such an attitude would lead inevitably to some form of madness.

  She knew that she was not particularly qualified to put him back together again. Because of her strong will, because of her competitive and fiercely self-sufficient nature, she felt that she had done more harm than good to her previous lovers. She had never thought of herself as a women’s liberationist and certainly not as a ball breaker; she simply had been, from the age of consent, sharper and tougher and more self-reliant than most men of her acquaintance. In the past her lovers had been emotionally and intellectually weaker than she. Few men seemed able to accept a woman as anything but an inferior. She had nearly destroyed the man she lived with before Graham, merely by assuming her equality and—in his mind, at least—invalidating the male role he needed to sustain himself.

  With Graham’s ego in a fragile state, she had to modify her basic personality to an extent she would have thought impossible. It was worth the strain, because she saw the man he had been prior to the accident. She wanted to break his shell of fear and let out the old Graham Harris. What he had once been was what she had hoped for so long to find: a man who was her equal and who would not feel threatened by a woman who was his match. However, while trying to bring that Graham back to life, she had to be cautious and patient, for this Graham could be shattered so very easily.

  A gust of wind rattled the window.

  Although she was warm under the covers, she shivered.

  The telephone rang.

  Startled, she rolled away from Graham.

  The phone was strident. Like the cry of a halidon, it echoed eerily in the room.

  She snatched up the receiver to stop the ringing before it woke him. “Hello?” she said softly.

  “Mr. Harris, please.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Ira Preduski.”

  “I’m sorry, but I—”

  “Detective Preduski.”

  “It’s four in the morning,” she said.

  “I apologize. Really. I’m sorry. Sincerely. If I’ve wakened you ... terrible of me. But, you see, he wanted me to call him immediately if we had any—major developments in the Butcher case.”

  “Just a minute.” She looked at Graham.

  He was awake, watching her.

  She said, “Preduski.”

  He took the receiver. “Harris speaking.”

  A minute later, when he was finished, she hung up for him. “They found number ten?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s her name?” Connie asked.

  “Edna. Edna Mowry.”

  6

  The bedclothes were sodden with blood. The carpet at the right of the bed was marred by a dark stain like a Rorschach blot. Dried blood spotted the wall behind the brass headboard.

  Three police lab technicians were working in the room under the direction of the coroner. Two of them were on their hands and knees beside the bed. One man was dusting the nightstand for fingerprints, although he must have known that he would not find any. This was the work of the Butcher, and the Butcher always wore gloves. The coroner was plotting the trajectory of the blood on the wall in order to establish whether the killer was left-handed or right-handed.

  “Where’s the body?” Graham asked.

  “I’m sorry, but they took it to the morgue ten minutes ago,” Detective Preduski said, as if he felt responsible for some inexcusable breach of manners. Graham wondered if Preduski’s entire life was an apologia. The detective was quick to take the blame for everything—and to find fault with himself even when he behaved impeccably. He was a nondescript man with a pale complexion and watery brown eyes. In spite of his appearance and his apparent inferiority complex, he was a highly respected member of the Manhattan homicide detail. More than one of the detective’s associates had made it clear to Graham that he was working with the best, that Ira Preduski was the top man in the department. “I held the ambulance as long as I could. You took so much time to get here. Of course I woke you in the dead of night. I shouldn’t have done that. And then you probably had to call a cab and wait around for it. I’m so sorry. Now I’ve probably ruined everything for you. I should have tried to keep the body here just a bit longer. I knew you’d want to see it where it was found.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Graham said. “In a sense, I’ve already had a firsthand look at her.”

  “Of course you have,” Preduski said. “I saw you on the Prine show earlier.”

  “Her eyes were green, weren’t they?”

  “Just as you said.”

  “She was found nude?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stabbed many times?”

  “Yes.”

  “With a particularly brutal wound in the throat?”

  “That’s right.”

>   “He mutilated her, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Awful thing,” Preduski said. “I wish I didn’t have to tell you. Nobody should have to hear it.” Preduski seemed about to wring his hands. “He cut a plug of flesh out of her stomach. It’s almost like a cork, with her navel in the center of it. Terrible.”

  Graham closed his eyes and shuddered. “This ... cork...” He was beginning to perspire. He felt ill. He wasn’t receiving a vision, just a strong sense of what had happened, a hunch that was difficult to ignore. “He put this cork... in her right hand and closed her fingers around it. That’s where you found it.”

  “Yes.”

  The coroner turned away from the blood-spattered wall and stared curiously at Graham.

  Don’t look at me that way, Graham thought. I don’t want to know these things.

  He would have been delighted if his clairvoyance had allowed him to predict sharp rises in the stock market rather than isolated pockets of maniacal violence. He would have preferred to see the names of winning horses in races not yet run rather than the names of victims in murders he’d never seen committed.

  If he could have wished away his powers, he would have done that long ago. But because that was impossible, he felt as if he had a responsibility to develop and interpret his psychic talent. He believed, perhaps irrationally, that by doing so he was compensating, at least in part, for the cowardice that had overwhelmed him these past five years.

  “What do you make of the message he left us?” Preduski asked.

  On the wall beside the vanity bench there were lines of poetry printed in blood.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Recognize the poet?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I.” Preduski shook his head sorrowfully. “I’m not very well educated. I only had one year of college. Couldn’t afford it. I read a lot, but there’s so much to read. If I were educated, maybe I’d know whose poetry that is. I should know. If the Butcher takes the time to write it down, it’s something important to him. It’s a lead. What kind of detective am I if I can’t follow up a lead as plain as that?” He shook his head again, clearly disgusted with himself. “Not a good one. Not a very good one.”