The Face of Fear

by Dean Koontz

  Patting the windowsill, he said, “Sit up here.”

  She sat facing him, her back to the wind and snow.

  He pushed the thirty-foot rope out of the window; and the loop of slack, from the post to Connie’s harness, swung in the wind. He arranged the forty-five-foot length on the office floor, carefully coiled it to be certain that it would pay out without tangling, and finally tied the free end around his waist.

  He intended to perform a standing hip belay. On a mountain, it was always possible that a belayer might be jerked from his standing position if he was not anchored by another rope and a well-placed piton; he could lose his balance and fall, along with the person whom he was belaying. Therefore, a standing belay was considered less desirable than one accomplished from a sitting position. However, because Connie weighed sixty pounds less than he, and because the window was waist high, he didn’t think she would be able to drag him out of the room.

  Standing with his legs spread to improve his balance, he picked up the forty-five-foot line at a point midway between the neatly piled coil and Connie. He had knotted the rope at his navel; now, he passed it behind him and across the hips at the belt line. The rope that came from Connie went around his left hip and then around his right; therefore, his left hand was the guide hand, while the right was the braking hand.

  From his anchor point six feet in front of her he said, “Ready?”

  She bit her lip.

  “The ledge is only thirty feet below.”

  “Not so far,” she said weakly.

  “You’ll be there before you know it.”

  She forced a smile.

  She looked down at her harness and tugged on it, as if she thought it might have come undone.

  “Remember what to do?” he asked.

  “Hold the line with both hands above my head. Don’t try to help. Look for the ledge, get my feet on it right away, don’t let myself be lowered past it.”

  “And when you get there?”

  “First, I untie myself.”

  “But only from this line.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not from the other.”

  She nodded.

  “Then, when you’ve untied yourself—”

  “I jerk on this line twice.”

  “That’s right. I’ll put you down as gently as I can.”

  In spite of the stinging cold wind that whistled through the open window on both sides of her, her face was pale. “I love you,” she said.

  “And I love you.”

  “You can do this.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I know. ”

  His heart was pounding.

  “I trust you,” she said.

  He realized that if he allowed her to die during the climb, he would have no right or reason to save himself. Life without her would be an unbearable passage through guilt and loneliness, a gray emptiness worse than death. If she fell, he might as well pitch himself after her.

  He was scared.

  All he could do was repeat what he had already said, “I love you.”

  Taking a deep breath, leaning backward, she said, “Well ... woman overboard!”

  Bollinger returned to the elevator and pressed the button for the twenty-seventh floor.

  33

  The instant that Connie slipped backward off the windowsill, she sensed the hundreds of feet of open space beneath her. She didn’t need to look down to be profoundly affected by that great, dark gulf. She was even more terrified than she had expected to be. The fear had a physical as well as a mental impact on her. Her throat constricted; she found it hard to breathe. Her chest felt tight, and her pulse rate soared. Suddenly acidic, her stomach contracted sickeningly.

  She resisted the urge to clutch the windowsill before it was out of her grasp. Instead, she reached overhead and gripped the rope with both hands.

  The wind rocked her from side to side. It pinched her face and stung the thin rim of ungreased skin around her eyes.

  In order to see at all, she was forced to squint, to peer out through the narrowest of lash-shielded slits. Otherwise, the wind would have blinded her with her own tears. Unfortunately, the pile of climbing equipment in the art director’s office had not contained snow goggles.

  She glanced down at the ledge toward which she was slowly moving. It was six feet wide, but to her it looked like a tightrope.

  He dug in his heels.

  Judging by the amount of rope still coiled beside him, she was not even halfway to the ledge. Yet he felt as if he had lowered her at least a hundred feet.

  Initially, the strain on Graham’s arms and shoulders had been tolerable. But as he payed out the line, he became increasingly aware of the toll taken by five years of inactivity. With each foot of rope, new aches sprang up like sparks in his muscles, spread toward each other, fanned into crackling fires.

  Nevertheless, the pain was the least of his worries. More important, he was facing away from the office doors. And he could not forget the vision: a bullet in the back, blood, and then darkness.

  Where was Bollinger?

  Overhead, the main rope was twisting and untwisting with lateral tension. As the thousands of nylon strands repeatedly tightened, relaxed, tightened, she found herself turning slowly in a semicircle from left to right and back again. This movement was in addition to the pendulumlike swing caused by the wind; and of course it made her increasingly ill.

  She wondered if the rope would break. Surely, all of that twisting and untwisting began where the rope dropped away from the window. Was the thin line even now fraying at its contact point with the sill?

  Graham had said there would be some dangerous friction at the sill. But he had assured her that she would be on the ledge before the nylon fibers had even been slightly bruised. Nylon was tough material. Strong. Reliable. It would not wear through from a few minutes—or even a quarter-hour—of heavy friction.

  Still, she wondered.

  He was beginning to feel that he was trapped in a surreal landscape of doors; hundreds upon hundreds of doors. All night long he had been opening them, anticipating sudden violence, overflowing with that tension that made him feel alive. But all of the doors opened on the same thing: darkness, emptiness, silence. Each door promised to deliver what he had been hunting for, but not one of them kept the promise.

  It seemed to him that the wilderness of doors was a condition not merely of this one night but of his entire life. Doors. Doors that opened on darkness. On emptiness. On blind passages and dead ends of every sort. Each day of his life, he had expected to find a door that, when flung wide, would present him with all that he deserved. Yet that golden door eluded him. He had not been treated fairly. After all, he was one of the new men, superior to everyone he saw around him. Yet what had he become in thirty-seven years? Anything? Not a president. Not even a senator. Not famous. Not rich. He was nothing but a lousy vice detective, a cop whose working life was spent in the grimy subculture of whores, pimps, gamblers, addicts and petty racketeers.

  That was why Harris (and tens of millions like him) had to die. They were subhumans, vastly inferior to the new breed of men. Yet for every new man, there were a million old ones. Because there was strength in numbers, these pitiful creatures—risking thermonuclear destruction to satisfy their greed and their fondness for childish posturing—held on to the world’s power, money and resources. Only through the greatest slaughter in history, only in the midst of Armageddon, could the new men seize what was rightfully theirs.

  The thirtieth level was deserted, as were the stairs and the elevator shafts.

  He went up one floor.

  Connie’s feet touched the ledge. Thanks to the scouring wind, the stone was pretty much free of snow; therefore, there had been no chance for the snow to be pressed into ice. She wasn’t in any danger of sliding off her perch.

  She put her back to the face of the building, staying as far from the brink as she could.

  Surprisingly, with stone under her feet, s
he was more impressed by the gulf in front of her than when she was dangling in empty space. Swinging at the end of the rope, she had not been able to see the void in the proper perspective. Now, with the benefit of secure footing, she found the thirty-eight-story drop doubly terrifying; it seemed a bottomless pit.

  She untied the knot at her harness, freed herself of the main line. She jerked on the rope twice, hard.

  Immediately Graham reeled it up.

  In a minute he would be on his way to her.

  Would he panic when he got out here?

  I trust him, she told herself. I really do. I have to.

  Nonetheless, she was afraid he would get only part of the way out of the window before he turned and fled, leaving her stranded.

  34

  Graham took off his gloves, leaned out of the window, and felt the stone below the sash. It was planed granite, a rock meant to withstand the ages. However, before the icy wind could numb his fingertips, he discovered a tiny horizontal fissure that suited his purpose.

  Keeping one hand on the crack in order not to lose it, he took the hammer and a piton from the tool straps at his waist. Balanced on the sill, leaning out as far as he dared, he put the sharp tip of the steel peg into the crack and pounded it home.

  The light he had to work by was barely adequate. It came from the aircraft warning lights that ringed the decorative pinnacle of the building just thirty feet above him; it alternated between red and white.

  From his upside-down position, the work went more slowly than he would have liked. When he finished at last, he looked over his shoulder to see if Bollinger was behind him. He was still alone.

  The piton felt as if it were well placed. He got a good grip on it, tried to wiggle it. It was firm.

  He snapped a carabiner through the eye of the piton.

  He snapped another carabiner to the center post of the window, above the one that secured Connie’s safety line.

  Next, he pulled the knots out of the belaying rope. He took it from around his waist and dropped it on the floor by the window.

  He closed one of the tall, rectangular panes as best he could; the carabiners fixed to the center post would not permit it to close all the way. He would attempt to shut the other half of the window from the outside.

  He hurried to the draw cords and pulled the green velvet drapes into place.

  Eventually, Bollinger would come back to this office and would realize that they had gone out of the window. But Graham wanted to conceal the evidence of their escape as long as possible.

  Stepping behind the drapes, he sidled along to the window. Wind roared through the open pane and billowed the velvet around him.

  He picked up an eleven-yard line that he had cut from another hundred-foot coil. He tied it to his harness and to the free carabiner on the window post. There was no one here to belay him as he had done Connie, but he had worked out a way to avoid a single-line descent; he would have a safety tether exactly like Connie’s.

  He quickly tied a figure-eight knot in one end of the forty-five-foot line. Leaning out of the window once more, he hooked the double loops of rope through the carabiner that was linked to the piton. Then he screwed the sleeve over the gate, locking the snap link. He tossed the rope into the night and watched to be sure that it hung straight and unobstructed from the piton. This would be his rappelling line.

  He was not adhering strictly to orthodox mountain climbing procedure. But then this “mountain” certainly was not orthodox either. The situation called for flexibility, for a few original methods.

  After he had put on his gloves again, he took hold of the thirty-foot safety line. He wrapped it once around his right wrist and then seized it tightly with the same hand. Approximately four feet of rope lay between his hand and the anchor point on the window post. In the first few seconds after he went through the window, he would be hanging by his right arm, four feet under the sill.

  He got on his knees on the window ledge, facing the lining of the office drapes. Slowly, cautiously, reluctantly, he went out of the room backward, feet first. Just before he overbalanced and slid all the way out, he closed the open half of the window as far as the carabiners would allow. Then he dropped four feet.

  Memories of Mount Everest burst upon him, clam-ored for his attention. He shoved them down, desperately forced them deep into his mind.

  He tasted vomit at the back of his mouth. But he swallowed hard, swallowed repeatedly until his throat was clear. He willed himself not to be sick, and it worked. At least for the moment.

  With his left hand he plucked the rappelling line from the face of the building. Holding that loosely, he reached above his head and grabbed the safety rope that he already had in his right hand. Both hands on the shorter line, he raised his knees in a fetal position and planted his boots against the granite. Pulling hand over hand on the safety tether, he took three small steps up the sheer wall until he was balanced against the building at a forty-five-degree angle. The toes of his boots were jammed into a narrow mortar seam with all the force he could apply.

  Satisfied with his precarious position, he let go of the safety tether with his left hand.

  Although he remained securely anchored, the very act of letting go of anything at that height made the vomit rise in his throat once more. He gagged, held it down, quickly recovered.

  He was balanced on four points: his right hand on the shorter rope, now only two feet from the window post; his left hand on the line with which he would rappel down; his right foot; his left foot. He clung like a fly to the side of the highrise.

  Keeping his eyes on the piton that thrust up between his spread feet, he jerked on the rappelling line several times. Hard. The piton didn’t move. He shifted his weight to the longer line but kept his right-hand grip on the safety tether. Even with a hundred and fifty pounds of downward drag, the piton did not shift in the crack.

  Convinced that the peg was well placed, he released the safety tether.

  Now he was balanced on three points: left hand on the long line, both feet on the wall, still at a forty-five-degree angle to the building.

  Although he would not be touching it again before he reached the ledge, the safety rope would nevertheless bring him up short of death if the longer line broke while he was rappelling down to Connie.

  He told himself to remember that. Remember and stave off panic. Panic was the real enemy. It could kill him faster than Bollinger could. The tether was there. Linking his harness to the window post. He must remember ...

  With his free hand, he groped under his thigh, felt behind himself for the long rope that he already held in his other hand. After a maddening few seconds, he found it. Now, the line on which he would rappel came from the piton to his left hand in front of him, passed between his legs at crotch level to his right hand behind him. With that hand he brought the rope forward, over his right hip, across his chest, over his head, and finally over his left shoulder. It hung down his back, passed through his right hand, and ran on into empty space.

  He was perfectly positioned.

  The left hand was his guiding hand.

  The right hand was his braking hand.

  He was ready to rappel.

  For the first time since he had come through the window, he took a good look around him. Dark monoliths, gigantic skyscrapers rose eerily out of the winter storm. Hundreds of thousands of points of light, made hazy and even more distant by the falling snow, marked the night on every side of him. Manhattan to his left. Manhattan to his right. Manhattan behind him. Most important—Manhattan below him. Six hundred feet of empty night waiting to swallow him. Strangely, for an instant he felt as if this were a miniature replica of the city, a tiny reproduction that was forever frozen in plastic; he felt as if he were also tiny, as if he were suspended in a paperweight, one of those clear hemispheres that filled with artificial snow when it was shaken. As unexpectedly as it came, the illusion passed; the city became huge again; the concrete canyon below appeared to be bott
omless; however, while all else returned to normal, he remained tiny, insignificant.

  When he first came out of the window, he had focused his attention on pitons, ropes and technical maneuvers. Thus occupied, he had been able to ignore his surroundings, to blunt his awareness of them.

  That was no longer possible. Suddenly, he was too aware of the city and of how far it was to the street.

  Inevitable, such awareness brought unwanted memories: his foot slipping, harness jerking tight, rope snapping, floating, floating, floating, floating, striking, darkness, splinters of pain in his legs, darkness again, a hot iron in his guts, pain breaking like glass in his back, blood, darkness, hospital rooms....

  Although the bitterly cold wind pummeled his face, sweat popped out on his brow and along his temples.

  He was trembling.

  He knew he couldn’t make the climb.

  Floating, floating ...

  He couldn’t move at all.

  Not an inch.

  Forty-five minutes of time, he thought angrily. That bastard has made a fool out of me. Forty-five minutes. But not one goddamned minute more.

  He pushed the button for the fortieth floor.

  Twice as far as he had fallen on Everest.

  And this time there would be no miracle to save him, no deep snowdrift to cushion the impact. He would be a bloody mess when the police found him. Broken. Ruined. Lifeless.

  Although he could see nothing of it, he stared intently at the street. The darkness and snow obscured the pavement. Yet he could not look away. He was mesmerized not by what he saw, but by what he didn’t need to see, transfixed by what he knew lay below the night and below the shifting white curtains of the storm.

  He closed his eyes. Thought about courage. Thought about how far he had come. Toes pressed into the shallow mortar-filled groove between two blocks of granite. Left hand in front. Right hand behind. Ready, get set ... but he couldn’t go.