Fear Itself Read online

  Corey, too, got to his knees on the other side. Together, it almost looked as if they were praying front of my wife. Corey lowered his gun beside his knee and began kneading Maureen’s left breast.

  “You know,” said Fist, “I think her tits’d look better without these nipples. What do you think?”

  Corey grinned and nodded.

  Maureen heaved against her bonds. “No!” she shrieked. Her voice sounded deafeningly loud in the bedroom. Why doesn’t someone hear her? I wondered. Why don’t they call the cops?

  “Oh yeah,” said Fist reassuringly. “This is where it gets fun.”

  He had the nipple of Maureen’s right breast hard in a little erection. “Here.” He maneuvered himself slightly to the side. “I want Dan to watch while we do this.” Fist lowered the mächete’s blade to the top of Maureen’s areola. “You hold her tit up and pull her nipple out while I cut.”

  “Jesus, don’t …” I hadn’t spoken for so long that my voice sounded strange to my ears. “Don’t do that … go on and cut me,” I offered. “Cut my dick off. I don’t care. But please don’t hurt her …”

  They paid no attention to me. Maureen’s legs seized and released. I heard a trickle hit the carpet. She, too, had lost control of her bladder. Fist pulled the mächete toward him. The sharp edge drew a thin red line across a tiny section of her breast. A wail came from deep inside Maureen’s throat. Fist’s and Corey’s breathing quickened in the presence of another’s pain.

  I almost didn’t see Heather out of the corner of my eye.

  I thought she was still huddled against the wall. I had prayed she would rock herself away to some world where nothing could touch her. But as the two intruders began to mutilate my wife, Heather, without making a sound, crossed the several feet from the wall and plucked their guns from the floor. Fist and Corey didn’t notice; they were concentrating on my wife’s torture.

  I shook my head. I was on the verge of telling her, “No”— I don’t know why. I suppose I was afraid that if she failed and one of them got hold of her, her agony would never end.

  Heather put the Smith and Wesson’s muzzle to the back of Fist’s head.

  I started to cry out—

  —Corey turned and began to raise his hand—

  —and Heather pulled the trigger.

  Fist’s head slammed against Maureen, tipping her chair backwards. Since her arms were bound behind her, she couldn’t pull them out of the way. Two of the fingers on her left hand were bent backwards and broken. Thankfully she was unconscious at this point.

  The bullet must have caromed inside Fist’s skull for at least a second. We later found out it exited the left side of his head and lodged in the bedroom wall. I know the brain itself has no nerve endings—it can’t feel pain. But I continue to hope he was aware, in that last second, that his brains were being whipped into grey matter froth. He slumped to the side, his head a ruined orb leaking blood from all its openings.

  Heather shoved herself with her feet until her back was Bruced against the wall. She held Fist’s gun in her two trembling hands. Corey’s gun was at her side.

  Corey was in a half-crouch. His arms were stretched out toward Heather, but they weren’t moving. A drama played itself out in the next few seconds, silently, wordlessly. Corey was looking into Heather’s eyes—measuring, gauging. Would she do it again? Could he deflect her arms? Could he make it to his gun? Heather didn’t look away, didn’t even blink. Corey was waiting for her to glance at me; in that half-second he would have been on her like a falling boulder.

  The gun shook in her hand but didn’t waver. It seemed as if the moment wore on for hours, glacially slow, but in reality it could only have been several seconds.

  He must have made up his mind. He took a step—and was gone. He moved so fast I couldn’t see him go down the hall. It was almost as if he had never been there at all.

  Heather kept her gun on the door. She must have sat there, immobile, for at least half an hour. I didn’t say anything. I waited until her eyes flicked up at me, and then back to the door. She watched the doorway for another ten minutes. Then she looked at me again.

  “Dad … Daddy?”

  I nodded at her. I hurt too much to say anything. I knew my voice would collapse into sobs if I tried to talk.

  She went behind me and started to untie the twine. It took a long time. She wouldn’t put down the gun.

  “Sorry to hear about you and your wife,” said the police lieutenant as he set down the ink-smeared Styrofoam coffee cup. He was trying to be sympathetic, but I knew I was only one more face in a long line of misery he would deal with before the end of the day.

  I looked down awkwardly, uncertain how to respond. “Thanks.” It still hurt to think I wouldn’t sleep next to her anymore. “She says … she can’t look at me without thinking about that night. She says she understands I couldn’t have done anything … but I think she still blames me for not saving all of us.”

  “If there’s anything I can do …” He opened a file in front of him. “I asked you to come down to give you some good news. I’ve also learned some things I want to share with you.”

  He belched into his fist. “First, you knew we caught Corey after he left your house that night. He was apprehended switching stolen cars two counties over from yours. We’ve had him in custody ever since. Well, last night he hung himself in his cell. You won’t have to go through a trial.”

  I collapsed against the back of the seat. “Oh thank God. Thank God. “ I could feel the tension draining from my form.

  “Now. We’ve learned quite a bit more about your home-wreckers. Do you want me to tell you?”

  I nodded. “Please. I’ll go to bed every night wondering if you don’t tell me now.”

  “All right,” he said, loosening his belt a notch. “Fist’s real name was Lester Donnelly. He wasn’t a low life. His father’s an industrialist on the east coast. Owns a pharmaceutical company and has his fingers in some other pies. Lester himself had a good education, a college degree, and had worked for three years as a stock broker.

  “Corey’s real name was Eustis Banks. He ain’t no slouch either. His parents are divorced. But his father is a professor of Black studies at some liberal arts college. His mother sculpts and paints—goes from school to school as a visiting artist.”

  I shook my head, uncomprehending. “Why would two men … with those kinds of backgrounds … do … what they did?”

  The cop shrugged. It must have been only another mystery he would never solve. “I don’t know …”

  “Usually,” I persisted, “people who do things like that … They’ve been abused in the past, or they have a history of mental illness, or … something. I mean, ordinary people don’t just go on killing sprees.”

  The lieutenant reached over and put a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t have the answers, Mr. Brandis. We don’t know how these two hooked up or what made them decide torturing people was fun. With your testimony, we’ve been able to tie them to eight murders in six states. We can thank God they won’t hurt any more innocent people.”

  “But what they did … that’s not going to go away … maybe not ever … Jesus, they turned my daughter into a killer!”

  “I understand how you feel. Mr. Brandis, pardon my saying this, but you’re goddamned lucky to be alive. If your daughter hadn’t pulled the trigger, your entire family would be dead now—or dying. Those other eight people … They didn’t die quickly. You don’t want me to tell you what Lester and Eustis did to them before they died.

  “It had to end the way it did. They weren’t looking for money or your belongings. They didn’t want drugs. They wanted to kill until they got caught and were killed themselves. That was enough for them. That’s all they wanted.”

  Maureen promises she’ll think about what I’ve said, but I can already tell her mind is made up. I finish the mug of coffee and put it by the sink. I stop in Heather’s studio one last time. She’s fallen asleep on her drafting table
. I lean over and kiss her lightly on the cheek. If she were awake, I wouldn’t be able to do that. She murmurs something drowsily but doesn’t awaken.

  At the door Maureen and I face each other. We never used to say goodbye, so we’re not very good at it now. She reaches up tentatively and touches my cheek.

  “Please be careful.”

  “I will.”

  “Can you wait outside … until I lock up?”

  I nod. I step through the door and stop. Maureen slowly, cautiously, shuts the door in my face. I won’t walk to my car until I hear her secure all the locks.

  When the deadbolt slides in place, it sounds like a nail being hammered into a coffin.

  Here There Be Spyders

  Graham Watkins

  “You think you can reach her?” Tony asked, concern evident in the tone of his voice.

  Down on my hands and knees, I shined my light down into the blackness of the pit. Far down below, near the effective limit of the powerful halogen beam, a pair of equally worried blue eyes looked back up at me. I sighed and shook my head. “Yeah,” I told him. “I can get down there. I’m not sure what I’m going to do once I get there, though. How the hell did this happen, anyway?”

  His jaw twitched, his cheek bouncing. “It looked to us like it was big enough,” he told me. “We were pretty sure we could see a big room down there at the bottom of the shaft. Carol wanted to go down first, and she found out the shaft narrowed—it was real deceptive from up here. We—”

  I gave him a cold look. “So why’d you try to force it?” I snapped, cutting him off.

  He bristled. “We didn’t! She didn’t, I mean! She told me it was too narrow, she was coming back up—then the rope slipped—slipped or something, I don’t know—up here. She only dropped a few feet, it shouldn’t have been a big deal. But—”

  “But now she’s stuck.” I stood up, gazed blankly for a moment out over the steep rocky slopes of Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, listened to the river clatter over the rocks down below the outcropping where we were standing. “From what I can see, she has her hips wedged in the hole. She’s in a hell of a fix.”

  “Can you get her out?” he asked again. “I dropped a line down to her and we both pulled—well, she tried, she’s only got one arm free—but she can’t move. She’s really jammed in.”

  I fingered my ropes and my rappeling gear and wondered why I had to be the first one to come across this potential tragedy. I wasn’t a member of an organized rescue team, just an amateur—if experienced—spelunker out for a pleasant Saturday, a Saturday to be spent exploring and mapping some of the myriad caves that honeycombed these mountains. Instead, I’d blundered across a frantic man whose girlfriend was stuck thirty feet down in a hole in the hillside. Naturally, he hadn’t wanted to leave her while he went for help; also naturally, when he’d seen me walking along the trail carrying ropes and tackle and wearing a hard-hat with a carbide lamp hanging on it, he’d assumed I too was a spelunker—and, unfortunately for me, he’d been right.

  Now, I was responsible—or at least, that’s the way I felt. “I gotta figure out how,” I muttered. “Getting to her isn’t hard—getting her out, that’s another matter. It’s a goddamn Floyd Collins situation here, we might have to—”

  I stopped speaking; the man who’d so far identified himself only as “Tony” had turned utterly white. Obviously, he knew the story of Floyd Collins—the locally famous spelunker who’d tried to map the system of caves now named for him and who’d gotten himself so tightly wedged in a passage that his would-be rescuers could not free him. The Floyd Collins who had, while men worked feverishly to reach him and the national media looked on, died a slow and lingering death in one of these Kentucky caves.

  “We’ll find a way,” I said hurriedly, peering down into the hole again and hoping the trapped girl hadn’t heard my ill-advised remarks. “All I was about to say was, I might have to go for help. Get a full rescue team in here.”

  “How long would that take?” he asked over my shoulder.

  I shrugged; I had only a passing experience with such things. “I dunno. We’re a good two hours’ hike in here—it’s that just back to the road, then a thirty-minute drive to a phone. Rescue comes out of Campton, that’s an hour away. They get right on it, I’d say four hours. But they never get right on it—they’ve got to track their volunteers down—so, I guess, maybe six is more realistic. But, if they use their chopper, well, that’ll cut it back down to four. So, well—”

  “I don’t think,” he said, his voice low and very close to my ear, “that we have that long. She says a rock’s pushing into her chest. She says it’s hard to breathe.”

  Moving my head slowly, I looked back around at him; he hadn’t shaved for a day or two, and each of his whiskers looked like a tiny nail stuck in his increasingly pallid face. “How long,” I asked him, my voice carefully controlled, “has it been since she fell?”

  He bit his lip. “At least, uh, three hours—maybe more—”

  Wiping my hand down over my face, I said nothing; I turned back to the pit. “Carol!” I called. “Carol, can you hear me?” There was a little clattering of stones that indicated she’d moved, but no voice answered.

  “She, uh, she hasn’t been able to speak for about the last hour—” Tony offered helpfully.

  I rolled away from the pit and onto my feet. “Shit,” I mumbled with passion as I stripped off my backpack. “Shit, shit, shit!” Tony was asking me something else; I ignored him as I ripped open my pack and jerked out a handful of paper.

  “What’s that?” Tony demanded as I unfolded one and began studying it.

  “Maps of the caves around here,” I told him. “I made a lot of them myself—I’ve never tried this particular chimney, but there’s a lot of them around here, and I was hoping that maybe there was a passage around to the base of—yes!” I smacked the paper with my fingertip, so hard I almost tore it. “Yes, I’ve been in—I’ve been in—”

  Staring at my map, I fell silent. While Tony’s eyes followed my every movement, I stood up and surveyed my surroundings again; my delight at finding a passage that might lead me up under the trapped girl was tempered by what I’d seen, in my own almost illegible handwriting, scrawled across my partial diagram of the room and chimney.

  As I looked, my heart felt like it was sinking down, down toward my groin; at the same time, something uncomfortably cool popped into existence in my stomach. I shivered, even though the day was warm.

  The chimney was—again, unfortunately for me—the one I’d first identified it as on the map. The opening at the top—the opening through which the girl had unwisely tried to descend—was in the center of a large bowl-shaped depression in the surrounding landscape; the steepness of the depression increased with proximity to the hole. It was thus a natural trap; all sorts of small wildlife, ground-living insects especially, would fall into it from time to time. No disaster for most of them, for the most part they could easily climb out.

  Except for the fact that the local predators had long since understood the situation and taken full advantage of it. I’d looked into that chamber, the “big room” this pair of cavers had seen from the top, looked in from down below. There were bats in there, as might be expected; there were also rattlesnakes, fat and satisfied rattlesnakes that lay coiled down there waiting for field mice and such to drop in.

  The rattlesnakes, dangerous though they might be, didn’t bother me. What I’d marked on the map did. Old seafarers used to mark their maps “here there be tygers” to indicate dangerous islands, islands to be avoided; in similar fashion, I marked my maps, “here there be spyders.”

  You might think it strange that a person like me—an arach-nophobe—would enjoy spelunking. But, normally, spiders weren’t a big problem; except for the pale and gangly cave spiders, they tended to make their appearance only near a cave’s mouth, and to disappear quickly as one moved into the interior darkness. This pit was different; all sorts of bugs fell in here, all th
e time, just like unwary spelunkers. Like the rattlesnakes, the spiders had taken up residence at the bottom in a big way; worse, the larger ones tended to eat the smaller ones—a natural selection process that favored giants. I felt another cold chill as I remembered my one and only look into that room, several years back; I never intended to go there again, ever.

  “Well?” Tony demanded impatiently. “Is there a way?” He stared at the map, pointed toward my warning. “What’s this mean?”

  “Never mind,” I almost moaned. I was about to suggest that he might go instead of me, that I might just show him the way; but a glance at his feet, which were clad in thin sneakers instead of boots, suggested that this was hardly a good idea. Anyone so unaware of the dangers presented by rattlesnakes and copperheads among these rocks as to wear sneakers wasn’t going to be able to deal with the real dangers of that room, the rattlesnakes.

  Quickly, I explained about the other passage, the entrance down near the river, and I outlined a plan whereby Tony would stay at the top and try to pull Carol out once I had—hopefully—pushed her free from below. We tossed a rope down to her; thankfully, she still retained enough strength to grab it with her free hand. After warning Tony that she might suffer a broken bone or two as a result of my pushing—and that she’d almost certainly suffer the loss of some skin—I took off down the slope, headed for the riverside entrance.

  I was trembling already; for a while, I wasn’t at all sure I could even get down the hillside. Trying to tell myself that my fear was wholly psychological, that the only truly dangerous spiders in this part of the country, the black widow and the brown recluse, were not really likely to have taken up residence in that hole, I struggled on down over the rocks.