Fear itself: a novel (32 page)

“It’s you,” he said to the grim-visaged old man in the mirror.

“It’s you,” Grandfather Childs replied.

It shouldn’t have jarred Simon as badly as it did—after all, he’d been seeing the creepy old face in the mirror for four days now. But not on a double dose of crosstops and phenylethylamine-based psychedelics: this time the entity on the far side of the looking glass seemed to have taken on a life of its own. It wasn’t exactly a hallucination, more like the little girl old Senor Wences used to paint on the side of his hand: you knew she wasn’t real, but you couldn’t help suspending your disbelief anyway.

Simon decided to have some fun with it.

“S’awright,” said Simon, just like Senor Wences.

“S’awright,” said Grandfather Childs simultaneously.

“Shitfuckpisscuntsuck,” said Simon, who never swore.

“Shitfuckpisscuntsuck,” said Grandfather Childs, who never swore either.

“You deserved it, you know,” said Simon.

“You deserved it, you know,” said Grandfather Childs.

“I hate you.”

“I hate you.”

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

“You’re not capable of love.”

“You’re
not capable of love.”

“I loved Missy,” said Simon.

“I
loved Missy,” said Grandfather Childs. “You k—”

Simon knew what his grandfather was about to say; he snatched up a man’s hairbrush from a basket next to the sink and smashed the pewter handle straight into the old man’s face, shattering the mirror. “It was
Pender
who killed Missy, and don’t you forget it,” he said.

“It was Pender who killed Missy, and don’t
you
forget it,” said Grandfather Childs, though his face lay in shards all over the marble counter.

Upon returning to the bedroom, Simon untied Gloria, sat her down in front of her chromed-steel mirrored vanity, and made her watch as Grandfather Childs began to give the pretty looking-glass Gloria a clumsy haircut. From the way both Glorias shuddered when the scissors bit in, Simon knew he was on the right track. He also knew it wasn’t
really
Grandfather Childs in the mirror—Ecstasy didn’t cause hallucinations—but he was starting to learn that sometimes it was a whole lot easier to suspend disbelief than it was to
unsuspend
it.

First pass, they only took a few inches off the bottom. Gloria seemed more angry than frightened, and both emotions were blurred by drugs and trauma—but then, she still didn’t know where he was going with all this. That was a discovery he wanted her to make on her own; he wanted to see the realization dawning in her eyes before he so much as nicked her. And who knows, he told himself: if her initial reaction proved to be intense enough, pure enough, he might not have to mess up that pretty face at all.

In any event, Simon was aware that the longer he stalled, the better. Once he cut her skin—if indeed he even had to—the race for her soul, the race between fear, shock, and pain, would be under way. So he proceeded slowly on the hair, a few snips here and a few snips there, until at last Gloria was shorn like Ingrid Bergman in
For Whom the Bell Tolls.

“There you go.” He rubbed her scalp affectionately—the black stubble was surprisingly soft, like one of Missy’s stuffed animals—and tenderly dabbed away the tears trickling down her cheeks. Or at least, he
felt
affectionate and tender, but when the old man in the mirror did the same for his gal, it looked smirky, and insincere as all get out.

“It’ll grow back,” Simon whispered, helping Gloria to her feet and leading her over to the bed—to tell the truth, he was getting a little tired of seeing his dead grandfather in the looking glass. “Hair grows back.”

Then he’d repeated it, with a slight change of emphasis.
“Hair
grows back.”

Still no reaction—so much for subtlety. “As opposed to lips or noses, that is.”

Bingo. There was no need to disfigure Gloria beyond a few shallow scratches for effect—Simon soon discovered that he had only to bring the single-edged blade of the box cutter he’d found in a kitchen drawer anywhere near Gloria to provoke the fear he craved.

Once he realized that, all that remained was the fine tuning: finding the perfect rhythm, knowing when to press and how hard, when to back off and for how long, learning when a mere threat or feint would suffice to get her attention and when an actual thrust was required: the game might not be about sex, thought Simon, but when it was good, it was an awful lot like making love—or the way making love was supposed to be, for those who didn’t suffer from ejaculatio praecox.

When she found herself feeling kind of punk at breakfast on Wednesday morning, Linda decided to blame it on the Betaseron. Flu-like symptoms were not an uncommon side effect. And if it was more than a Betaseron reaction, if her T-cells
had
decided to go off on another myelin-munching spree, there wasn’t much she could do about it anyway. In the multiple sclerosis sweepstakes, Linda Abruzzi had drawn the booby prize. Unlike relapsing-remitting MS, in which the effects of each episode are only temporary, or secondary progressive MS, in which the symptoms are permanent, but which typically doesn’t develop until a good fifteen years after the onset of the relapsing-remitting course, in the primary-progressive course of the disease, with which she had been diagnosed, the effects of each attack are permanent from the get-go.

Linda’s first episode, nearly six months earlier, had been presaged by a weird, electric tingling in her lower extremities, followed by near-paralytic weakness in her calves and ankles. Still, she knew she was one of the lucky ones. Thanks to an early diagnosis by her doctor in San Antonio, she had been put on a course of Betaseron almost immediately, and to date had suffered no subsequent attacks. Her vision was good, her mind and memory sharp as ever, her pain was bearable, her fatigue generally surmountable, and now that she had her cane to lean on, she was getting around like shit on a wheel—no sense giving in to the bastard now.

Unless—What if—

She tried to stop her mind from finishing the thought, but it was already formed: What if she had an attack while she was driving? Or in the office, or at lunch? Wouldn’t it be better to stay home, make sure of what she was dealing with, rather than risk—

Then it struck her: this was what classic agoraphobia was like, this was what her poor phobics (and she thought of them as hers now, a week and a half into the investigation) went through every day of their lives. It wasn’t going out to the market or the mall or the office that they feared, it was having an anxiety attack while they were out there. Isn’t it better to stay home than risk public humiliation?

The answer, of course, was no. You said no—
fuck no,
if you were from Linda’s neighborhood—and you dragged yourself out into the arena. Because if you said yes, if you gave in to the fear, there would be no going back. The excuse, the cop-out, would be there again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after the day after tomorrow.

Something else they used to say in Linda’s old neighborhood: I shoulda stood in bed. At first, it seemed as if she might as well have, for all the progress being made in the Childs manhunt. Save for one lonely red pin in San Francisco, representing Zap Strum’s apartment, the map on the wall was still embarrassingly blank—no valid Childs sightings to date, though a highway patrolman near Flagstaff had chased and braced a gray-haired attorney driving a silver Mercedes convertible with California plates, who had in turn threatened to hit the state of Arizona with a lawsuit so punishing that its unborn children would die broke.

But a few minutes after ten, Pender called from the coast. “You’re up early,” she told him.

“Your FBI never sleeps, kiddo. I was down in Big Sur yesterday—Dorie and I stopped in to see her old friend Dr. Luka.”

“That’d be the Dr. Luka you promised you weren’t going to try to interview yourself.”

“No interview—just an informal chat.” He gave her the gist of it.

“So where does that leave us?” she asked, when he had finished.

“With a first name and an approximate address for the year1963. How would you go about nailing that down a little more concretely?”

Swell, a pop quiz. “I guess I’d have somebody check the property records. City of Berkeley or Alameda County.”

“That’ll give you the owner’s name. Nelson was a kid.”

“Call me a dreamer, Ed, but I’m guessing he’ll have the same last name as his parents.”

“Good point. But if you do run into trouble—”

“I’m not a
total
rookie, Chief. In the words of one of my favorite T-shirts, ‘quit yanking my ears,’ I know what I’m doing.”

Pender laughed.

“Call me on my cell when you’ve got it—I’m going back to bed.”

“I thought my FBI never sleeps.”

“Who said anything about sleeping?”

Drained, energized, empty, full of himself—Simon never knew how he was going to feel after a game.

This morning it was all of the above, plus a polypharmaceutical hangover. He awoke alone in Gloria’s shiny bed—the headboard was constructed of stacked, polished aluminum rails—after an hour or two of sleep so unrestful that it was only the act of awakening that told him he’d been asleep in the first place. The satin pillowcase next to him was spattered with blood; when he rolled onto his back, he saw Grandfather Childs staring down at him from the mirror on the ceiling over the bed, and when he sat up, the old monstrosity was looking out from the elliptical mirror of that monstrous Moderne vanity table where he’d given Gloria her haircut last night.

Naked, he tottered into the bathroom to empty his bladder. He had to close the shower curtain to block out the sight of Gloria sitting upright in the tub like Marat in his bath—something about the puffy features and the slanted eyes with their drooping lids reminded him uncomfortably of Missy.

But he couldn’t block out the triptych of mirrors set at oblique angles just inside the bathroom door, presumably so the formerly vain Mrs. Gee could view herself from all sides. Spooky as it was to look directly into a mirror and see Grandfather Childs looking back at you, it was spooky cubed to see him out of the corner of your eye, or sense him behind you, then wheel around and see him wheeling around as if to catch you in the act.

Simon hurried out of the bathroom without stopping to wash his hands or brush his teeth at the sink, which in any event was still littered with shards of broken mirror from the night before. Badly rattled—not frightened but rattled (there was a difference, he reminded himself)—he tossed a bedsheet over the oval mirror of the vanity table, brushed Gloria’s hair from the chair with his fingers, hauled his getaway satchel onto the chromed steel counter of the vanity, and began going through his pharmacopoeia in search of remedies both for his jangled nerves and his hangover.

The latter was easy—there wasn’t a hangover in the world couldn’t be cured with a five-hundred milligram Percodan—but the heebie-jeebies, which often presaged a visit by the blind rat, presented more of a challenge. There was Valium of course, in five-, ten-, and fifteen-milligram sizes—on top of the Percodan, though, it might knock him out. There was Xanax—but that sometimes gave him the runs, which after last night’s stinky was something he definitely didn’t need.

Or perhaps he could go in another direction entirely, he told himself. He had certainly enjoyed Gloria’s Ecstasy last night. Surprisingly, it was the first time he’d ever played a game on X—surprising because, now that he thought about it, the empathy drug seemed like a natural fit. The game was all about empathy—fear and empathy.

Ecstasy, then, but at what dosage? He’d taken two last night, and he didn’t remember his own X, which came in pink capsules stamped with little hearts, as being any stronger: he decided to start with two. While waiting for the medication to take effect, with trembling fingers he tore two rolling papers to shreds trying to roll a joint at the vanity, and ended up with one of those lumpy, python-digesting-a-gopher numbers, which he smoked down to the roach before going downstairs in search of a more congenial bathroom in which to shower.

When he saw the contorted figure in the red bikini briefs lying in full rigor mortis on the living room couch, Simon was surprised at its savaged condition—he couldn’t remember having inflicted that much damage. He hurried past it into the guest bedroom. No bodies here, and no American Moderne—just a single bed, a garage-sale dresser, and a few amateurish still lifes on the walls.

So this austere little maid’s room was where the real Skairdykat had slept, according to Gloria. And this little closet of a bathroom was where she had showered. And her name is Linda, and now she lives with Pender. Which means another first for the game: a doubleheader. How convenient, thought Simon. How very…bloody…convenient.

“Not bad for a one-armed old fat man,” declared an exultant, if exhausted, Pender, after a morning of extended lovemaking punctuated by endorphin-drenched naps.

“One-eyed,” Dorie murmured, equally satisfied, but less inclined to crow about it. She did think it was sort of sweet, how boyishly proud Pender was to have collaborated with her on that last, noisy multiple O.

“Hunh?”

“One-
eyed
old fat man—it’s a line from
True Grit.”

Pender shuddered—small wonder he’d misremembered the quote: the thought of losing even one eye filled him with horror. Once that happened, he knew, you were only a sharpened pencil away from total blindness.

Linda called back while Dorie was in the shower. “Nelson Carpenter,” she announced.

Pender checked his watch. “Just a little over three hours—couldn’t have done better myself. I don’t suppose you also came up with a current address?”