Fear itself

“Exactly.”

“That’s easy, then-snakes.”

“How severe?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did snakes just give you the creeps, for instance, or were you afraid to walk in the woods, or-”

“We didn’t have much in the way of woods where I grew up. But I definitely stayed the hell away from the reptile house in the Bronx Zoo. I passed out in front of it on a field trip when I was in college.”

“Well, if you…Here we go.” Pender had found the envelope he was looking for, and winged it up onto the desk. “If you multiply your fear of snakes by about a thousand, you’ll have some idea what life might be like for Dorie Bell.”

“Gee, thanks,” said Linda.

“Don’t mention it. Give me a holler when you’re done-I’ll be down here someplace.”

5

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for Cello Solo has long been considered a benchmark for cellists. Pablo Casals, who at age thirteen stumbled upon the suites in a secondhand sheet-music store near the harbor in Barcelona, practiced them every day for twelve years before he worked up the courage to play one in public, and it would be another thirty-five years before he felt ready to record the entire series.

Since then, every world-class cellist has had his or her go at the suites, but only the most gifted, the Jacquelines and the Yo-Yos, have even wrestled them to a draw, so it was probably an act of hubris for a twelfth- chair cellist like Wayne Summers to attempt them.

But Wayne, born poor and black in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, had come late to his instrument, and as his teacher Mr. Brotsky always said, without at least a little chutzpah, a man never knows how good he can be or how far he can go.

Which was why every day for the past six years, whether he was working a day job, rehearsing with the symphony, or playing chamber music-or all three, as sometimes happened-Wayne made time to practice at least one of the dances from one of the suites. His favorite was the sarabande from the first suite-there was something so damn sweet and hopeful about it.

That, then, was the piece Wayne, lying in the darkness with his hands cuffed behind his back, chose to practice first, in order to keep himself from going mad. To begin with, he ran through the sarabande in his mind, his left hand twitching the fingering behind him, the muscles of his bowing arm tensing and relaxing rhythmically. Midway through, he began diddle-dumming along, which started the caged birds chirring and singing again. Not the owl though-the owl remained silent.

When he finished, Wayne heard polite applause-the sound of one man clapping, somewhere across the room. But the Bach had worked its magic on Wayne: his mind felt clearer than it had since he’d first awakened, however many hours ago.

“Who are you?” he asked into the darkness. “Why are you doing this?”

No answer-even the birds were silent. But the man was drawing nearer; Wayne could smell him now. He smelled like bubble bath. Cheap, strawberry-scented bubble bath.

“Are you going to kill me?” Wayne asked. It felt strange to be so calm at such a time.

“No.” The voice was only inches away.

Thank you, Jesus. “What, then?”

“I’m going to let our feathered friends here do it for me-eventually.”

On the surface, Wayne remained calm, perhaps because beneath the surface something had already died- hope, most likely-leaving him nothing to do but ask the question again: “Why are you doing this?”

Instead of an answer, a rank smell, then the unpleasant sensation of something cold and clammy being rubbed against his eyelids. It was all so bizarre and incongruous that it took Wayne a few seconds to recognize the odor, and a few more seconds for him to put it all together. Liver-the crazy fuck had just rubbed raw liver into his eyes.

And even then the significance of what had happened failed to dawn on Wayne until he heard a sound that drove every other thought, every other sensation but pure blind panic from his mind and consciousness: the rattle of the chain that tethered the barn owl to its perch.

A moment later came the buffeting of silent wings, and the strike. The first blow drove Wayne’s head back violently against the mattress. The pain was indescribable-Wayne rolled over onto his stomach and began thrashing his head from side to side to protect his eyes. The owl, starved and frustrated, half hopped, half flew from one side to the other, stabbing with its beak, trying to get at the liver smell, the blood smell.

Then it found the ear it had struck accidentally earlier, and contented itself with tearing at that until the man who had brought it to this place hauled it away from its prey and dropped a burlap sack over its head.

“Who are you?” screamed Wayne again, through the pain.

“I’ll give you a hint,” came the answer. “You know how people are always saying you have nothing to fear but fear itself? Well, that’s me, buddy-I’m fear itself.”

6

Dorie is sitting on a couch somewhere, knees primly together. Across the room a television is playing, but she can’t quite make out what’s on the screen. Behind the television, a window. What floor is this? she asks herself. It makes a difference-if she’s a few stories up, there’s no danger, but if she’s only on the first or second story, she mustn’t look up, mustn’t glance at the window.

In front of her, on a familiar-looking coffee table, there’s a big, glossy coffee-table book. She leans forward and opens it at random, but she can’t make out the words, can’t quite bring them into focus.

There are pictures, though. The first one she turns to looks like a bird initially; the picture is the only colored object in Dorie’s black-and-white world, and so vivid it’s almost 3D. Then she leans closer and discovers to her horror that it’s not a picture of a real bird, but of a bird mask-one of those elongated, feathered masks that a medicine man or a witch doctor might wear.

She quickly closes the book, then hears a tapping at the window. Don’t look up, she tells herself-whatever you do, don’t look up.

But she does look up. She always does. And sees what she always sees: the face at the window. Or rather, the mask at the window-the eyeholes are empty, there’s no face behind it.

As always, Dorie Bell awoke from her recurring nightmare with the echo of her own scream ringing in her ears. And as always, there was no way to know whether she’d screamed out loud, or only in the dream. Fortunately, it didn’t matter: she lived alone.

Of the approximately thirty million Americans who suffer from phobia disorders serious enough to require professional consultation at some point in their lives, forty-two percent are afraid of illness and/or injury, eighteen percent are afraid of thunderstorms, fourteen percent fear animals, eight percent are primary agoraphobics (people who are afraid of public spaces, largely because they fear they will experience a panic attack, sometimes involving a syncope, in public; there is, of course, an element of agoraphobia associated with almost all specific phobias-the fear of having a panic attack is always more debilitating than the fear of whatever inspired the phobia in the first place), a surprisingly small seven percent are terrified of death, five percent fear crowds, and another five percent are afraid of heights; comprising the remaining one percent are the more exotic phobias, such as amathophobia, the fear of dust, siderodromophobia, the fear of railroad trains, and prosoponophobia, the fear of masks.

Dorie Bell, age fifty-two, of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, had been a prosoponophobe since age three. She had tried everything-prayer, analysis, desensitization therapy, behavior modification, more prayer-but had never been able to uncover either the source for her fear or a cure. The actual sight of a mask still triggered severe panic