The Face of Fear

by Dean Koontz

  “What about it?”

  “It’s the best, isn’t it?”

  “The best, or close to it.”

  “We’d be perfectly outfitted.”

  “If we try it, we’ll die.”

  “We’ll die if we stay here.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “I think so. Absolutely.”

  “There has to be an alternative.”

  “I’ve outlined them already.”

  “Maybe we can hide from him.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. But—”

  “And we can’t hide for seven hours.”

  “This is crazy, dammit!”

  “Can you think of anything better?”

  “Give me time.”

  “Bollinger will be here any minute.”

  “The wind speed must be forty miles an hour at street level. At least when it’s gusting. Fifty miles an hour up this high.”

  “Will it blow us off?”

  “We’d have to fight it every inch.”

  “Won’t we anchor the ropes?”

  He turned away from the window. “Yes, but—”

  “And won’t we be wearing those?” She pointed to a pair of safety harnesses that lay atop the pile of equipment.

  “It’ll be damned cold out there, Connie.”

  “We’ve got the down-lined jackets.”

  “But we don’t have quilted, insulated pants. You’re wearing ordinary jeans. So am I. For all the good they’ll do us, we might as well be naked below the waist.”

  “I can stand the cold.”

  “Not for very long. Not cold as bitter as that.”

  “How long will it take us to get to the street?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must have some idea.”

  “An hour. Maybe two hours.”

  “That long?”

  “You’re a novice.”

  “Couldn’t we rappel?”

  “Rappel?” He was appalled.

  “It looks so easy. Swinging out and back, dropping a few feet with every swing, bouncing off the stone, dancing along the side of the building...”

  “It looks easy, but it isn’t.”

  “But it’s fast.”

  “Jesus! You’ve never climbed before, and you want to rappel down.”

  “I’ve got guts.”

  “But no common sense.”

  “Okay,” she said. “We don’t rappel.”

  “We definitely don’t rappel.”

  “We go slow and easy.”

  “We don’t go at all.”

  Ignoring him, she said, “I can take two hours of the cold. I know I can. And if we keep moving, maybe it won’t bother us so much.”

  “We’ll freeze to death.” He refused to be shaken from that opinion.

  “Graham, we have a simple choice. Go or stay. If we make the climb, maybe we’ll fall or freeze to death. If we stay here, we’ll sure as hell be killed.”

  “I’m not convinced it is that simple.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  He closed his eyes. He was furious with himself, sick of his inability to accept unpleasant realities, to risk pain, and to come face to face with his own fear. The climb would be dangerous. Supremely dangerous. It might even prove to be sheer folly; they could die in the first few minutes of the descent. But she was correct when she said they had no choice but to try it.

  “Graham? We’re wasting time.”

  “You know the real reason why the climb isn’t possible.”

  “No,” she said. “Tell me.”

  He felt color and warmth come into his face. “Connie, you aren’t leaving me with any dignity.”

  “I never took that from you. You’ve taken it from yourself.” Her lovely face was lined with sorrow. He could see that it hurt her to have to speak to him so bluntly. She came across the room, put one hand to his face. “You’ve surrendered your dignity and your self-respect. Piece by piece.” Her voice was low, almost a whisper; it wavered. “I’m afraid for you, afraid that if you don’t stop throwing it away, you’ll have nothing left. Nothing.”

  “Connie ...” He wanted to cry. But he had no tears for Graham Harris. He knew precisely what he had done to himself. He had no pity; he despised the man he’d become. He felt that, deep inside, he had always been a coward, and that his fall on Mount Everest had given him an excuse to retreat into fear. Why else had he resisted going to a psychiatrist? Every one of his doctors had suggested psychoanalysis. He suspected that he was comfortable in his fear; and that possibility sickened him. “I’m afraid of my own shadow. I’d be no good to you out there.”

  “You’re not so frightened today as you were yesterday,” she said tenderly. “Tonight, you’ve coped damned well. What about the elevator shaft? This morning, the thought of going down that ladder would have overwhelmed you.”

  He was trembling.

  “This is your chance,” she said. “You can overcome the fear. I know you can.”

  He licked his lips nervously. He went to the pile of gear in front of the photographic backdrop. “I wish I could be half as sure of me as you are.”

  Following him, she said, “I understand what I’m asking of you. I know it’ll be the hardest thing you’ve ever done.”

  He remembered the fall vividly. He could close his eyes any time—even in a crowded room—and experience it again: his foot slipping, pain in the chest as the safety harness tightened around him, pain abruptly relieved as the rope snapped, breath caught like an un-chewed lump of meat in his throat, then floating and floating and floating. The fall was only three hundred feet, and it had ended in a thick cushion of snow; it had seemed a mile.

  She said, “If you stay here, you’ll die; but it’ll be an easier death. The instant Bollinger sees you, he’ll shoot to kill. He won’t hesitate. It’ll be over within a second for you.” She took hold of his hand. “But it won’t be like that for me.”

  He looked up from the equipment. Her gray eyes radiated a fear as primal and paralyzing as his own.

  “Bollinger will use me,” she said.

  He was unable to speak.

  “He’ll cut me,” she said.

  Unbidden, an image of Edna Mowry came to him. She had been holding her own bloody navel in her hand.

  “He’ll disfigure me.”

  “Maybe—”

  “He’s the Butcher. Don’t forget. Don’t forget who he is. What he is.”

  “God help me,” he said.

  “I don’t want to die. But if I have to die, I don’t want it to be like that.” She shuddered. “If we’re not going to make the climb, if we’re just going to wait for him here, then I want you to kill me. Hit me across the back of the head with something. Hit me very hard.”

  Amazed, he said, “What are you talking about?”

  “Kill me before Bollinger can get to me. Graham, you owe me that much. You’ve got to do it.”

  “I love you,” he said weakly. “You’re everything. There’s nothing else for me.”

  She was somber, a mourner at her own execution. “If you love me, then you understand why you’ve got to kill me.”

  “I couldn’t do it.”

  “We don’t have much time,” she said. “Either we get ready for the climb right now—or you kill me. Bollinger will be here any minute.”

  He went to the south stairs.

  Those too were deserted.

  He looked at his watch. 10:38.

  Running some of Blake’s verses through his mind to calm himself, he went to the elevator.

  31

  Well-made boots are essential to a serious climber. They should be five to seven inches high, crafted from the best grade of leather, lined with leather, preferably hand-sewn, with foam-padded tongues. Most important of all, the soles should be hard and stiff, with tough lugs made of Vibram.

  Graham was wearing just such a pair of boots. They were a perfect fit, more like gloves than footwear. Although putting them on and l
acing them up brought him closer to the act that he regarded with terror, he found the boots strangely comforting, reassuring. His familiarity with them, with climbing gear in general, seemed like a touchstone against which he could test for the old Graham Harris, test for a trace of the courage he’d once shown.

  Both pairs of boots in the pile of equipment were four sizes too large for Connie. She couldn’t wear either of them. If she stuffed paper into the toes and along the sides, she would feel as if she were wearing blocks of concrete; and she would surely misstep at some crucial point in the climb.

  Fortunately, they found a pair of klettershoes that fitted well enough. The klettershoe—an anglicization of Kletterschuh, German for “climbing shoe”—was lighter, tighter, more flexible, and not so high as standard climbing boots. The sole was of rubber, and the welt did not protrude, making it possible for the wearer to gain toeholds on even the narrowest ledges.

  Although they would have to serve for want of something better, the klettershoes weren’t suited for the climb that lay ahead. Because they were made of suede and were not waterproof, they should be used only in the fairest weather, never in a snowstorm.

  To protect her feet from becoming wet and from the inevitable frostbite, Connie wore both socks and plastic binding. The socks were thick, gray, woolen; they came to mid-calf. The plastic was ordinarily used to seal up the dry food that a climber carried in his rucksack. Graham had wrapped her feet in two sheets of plastic, securing the waterproof material at her ankles with rubber bands.

  They were both wearing heavy, bright red nylon parkas with hoods that tied under the chin. Between the outer nylon surface and the inner nylon lining, his jacket was fitted with man-made insulation, sufficient for autumn climbing but not for the cold that awaited them tonight. Her parka was much better—although he hadn’t explained that to her for fear she would insist that he wear it-because it was insulated with one hundred percent goose down. That made it the warmest garment, for its size and weight, that she could have worn.

  Over the parka, each of them was wearing a Klettergürtel, a climbing harness, for protection in the event of a fall. This piece of equipment was a great improvement over the waistband that climbers had once used, for in a fall the band sometimes jerked so tight that it damaged the heart and lungs. The simple leather harness distributed the pressure over the entire body trunk, reducing the risk of a severe injury and virtually guaranteeing the climber that he would not turn upside down.

  Connie was impressed by the Klettergürtel. As he strapped her into it, she said, “It’s perfect insurance, isn’t it? Even if you fall, it brings you up short.”

  Of course, if she didn’t just slip or misplace her foot, if instead the rope broke, and if she was on a single line, the harness would not stop her fall. However, Connie didn’t have to worry about that, for he was taking extraordinary safety measures with her: she would be going down on two independent lines. In addition to the main rope, he intended to fix her to a second which he would belay all the way to the street.

  He would not be so well looked after as she was. There was no one to belay him. He would be descending last—on a single line.

  He didn’t explain that to her. When she got outside, the less she had to worry about, the better her chances were of coming out of this alive. Tension was good for a climber; but too much tension could cause him to make mistakes.

  Both harnesses had accessory loops at the waist. Graham was carrying pitons, carabiners, expansion bolts, a hammer, and a compact battery-powered drill the size of two packs of cigarettes. In her harness loops, Connie had a variety of extra pitons and carabiners.

  Besides the equipment hung on their harnesses, they were both burdened with rope. Connie had hundred-foot lengths of it at each hip; it was heavy, but so tightly coiled that it did not restrict her movements. Graham had another hundred-foot coil at his right hip. They were left with two shorter lengths: and these they would use for the first leg of the descent.

  Last of all, they put on their gloves.

  At every fifth floor, he looked not only into the corridor but into the stairs and the elevator shafts as well. On the first twenty floors, four elevator shafts served the building; from the twentieth to the thirty-fifth floors, two shafts; and from the thirty-fifth to the forty-second, only one shaft. In the first half of his vertical search, he wasted far more time than he could afford, opening the emergency doors to all of those shafts.

  At ten-fifty he was on the fifteenth floor.

  He had not found a sign of them. He was beginning to wonder if he was conducting the search properly.

  However, at the moment he was unable to see any other way to go about it.

  He went to the sixteenth floor.

  Graham unlatched the center window. The two rectangular panes wouldn’t budge at first, then abruptly gave with a squeal, opened inward like casement windows.

  Wind exploded into the room. It had the voice of a living creature; its screams were piercing, demonic. Snowflakes swirled around him, danced across the top of the conference table and melted on its polished surface, beaded like dew on the grass-green carpet.

  Leaning over the sill, he looked down the side of the Bowerton Building. The top five floors—and the four-story decorative pinnacle above them—were set back two yards from the bottom thirty-seven levels. Just three floors below, there was a six-foot-wide ledge that ringed the structure. The lower four-fifths of the building’s face lay beyond the ledge, out of his line of sight.

  The snow was falling so thickly that he could barely see the street lamps on the far side of Lexington Avenue. Under the lights, not even a small patch of pavement was visible.

  In the few seconds he needed to survey the situation, the wind battered his head, chilled and numbed his exposed face.

  “That’s damned cold!” As he spoke, breath pluming out of him, he turned from the window. “We’re bound to suffer at least some frostbite.”

  “We’ve got to go anyway,” she said.

  “I know. I’m not trying to back out.”

  “Should we wrap our faces?”

  “With what?”

  “Scarves—”

  “The wind would cut through any material we’ve got handy, then paste it to our faces so we’d have trouble breathing. Unfortunately, the magazine didn’t recommend any face masks in that buyer’s guide. Otherwise, we’d have exactly what we need.”

  “Then what can we do?”

  He had a sudden thought and went to his desk. He stripped off his bulky gloves. The center drawer contained evidence of the hypochondria that had been an ever-growing component of his fear: Anacin, aspirin, half a dozen cold remedies, tetracycline capsules, throat lozenges, a thermometer in its case ... He picked up a small tube and showed it to her.

  “Chap Stick?” she asked.

  “Come here.”

  She went to him. “That stuff’s for chapped lips. If we’re going to be frostbitten, why worry about a little thing like chapped lips?”

  He pulled the cap off the tube, twisted the base to bring up the waxy stick, and coated her entire face-forehead, temples, cheeks, nose, lips and chin. “With even a thin shield of this, the wind will need more time to leech the warmth out of you. And it’ll keep your skin supple. Loss of heat is two-thirds of the danger. But loss of moisture along with loss of heat is what causes severe frostbite. The moisture in bitterly cold air doesn’t get to your skin; in fact, subzero wind can dry out your face almost as thoroughly as desert air.”

  “I was right,” she said.

  “Right about what?”

  “There’s some Nick Charles in you.”

  32

  The window frame was extremely sturdy, not cold-pressed and not of aluminum as were most of the window frames in buildings erected during the past thirty years. The grooved, steel center post was almost an inch thick and appeared to be capable of supporting hundreds of pounds without bending or breaking loose from the sash.

  Harris hooked
a carabiner to the post.

  This piece of hardware was one of the most important that a climber carried. Carabiners were made of steel or alloy and came in several shapes-oval D, offset D, and pear or keyhole-but the oval was used more often than any of the others. It was approximately three and a half inches by one and three-quarter inches, and it resembled nothing so much as an oversized key ring or perhaps an elongated chain link. A springloaded gate opened on one side of the oval, making it possible for the climber to connect the carabiner to the eye of a piton; he could also slip a loop of rope onto the metal ring. A carabiner, which was sometimes referred to as a “snap link,” could be employed to join two ropes at any point along them, which was essential when the ends of those lines were secured above and below. A vital-but not the only-function of the highly polished snap links was to prevent ropes from chaffing each other, to guard against their fraying through on the rough, unpolished eye of a piton or on the sharp edge of a rock; carabiners saved lives.

  At Graham’s direction, Connie had stripped the manufacturer’s plastic bands from an eighty-foot coil of red and blue hawser-laid nylon rope.

  “It doesn’t look strong,” she said.

  “It’s got a breaking strength of four thousand pounds.”

  “So thin.”

  “Seven-sixteenths of an inch.”

  “I guess you know what you’re doing.”

  Smiling reassuringly, he said, “Relax.”

  He tied a knot in one end of the rope. That done, he grasped the double loop that sprouted above the knot and slipped it through the gate of the carabiner that was attached to the window post.

  He was surprised at how quickly he was working, and by the ease with which he had fashioned the complex knot. He seemed to be operating on instinct more than on knowledge. In five years he had not forgotten anything.

  “This will be your safety line,” he told her.

  The carabiner was one of those that came with a metal sleeve that fitted over the gate to guard against an accidental opening. He screwed the sleeve in place.

  He picked up the rope and pulled it through his hands, quickly measuring eleven yards of it. He took a folding knife from a pocket of his parka and cut the rope, dropped one piece to the floor. He tied the cut end of the shorter section to her harness, so that she was attached to the window post by a thirty-foot umbilical. He took one end of the other piece of rope and tied it around her waist, using a bowline knot.