Fear itself

crave a companion, it certainly wasn’t averse to one that smelled like coffee and pumped out heat at a steady 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Humans are not without instincts of their own. The coral didn’t make any noise, it didn’t give off any warmth, and it wasn’t actually touching her skin, only her wool bathrobe, but Linda sensed its presence. She wanted to crawl away, but it had taken her too long to achieve her current position, lying on her side, her knees drawn up in front of her as far as the rope permitted, with a jagged-edged chunk of brick behind her, wedged into place between the wall and her bound wrists.

But humans, as opposed to snakes, can talk themselves into going against their instincts. Linda told herself it was nothing-nothing! — and went back to sawing at the rope. It was hard work, with barely perceptible progress-she could saw for only a minute or so at a time, then had to rest her arms and shoulders for an equal period of time.

During one of these rest periods the nothing! squirmed more tightly against her, until it was an undeniable something. If Linda hadn’t just had an up-close-and-personal encounter with the coral, it would have taken her much longer to identify just what that something was, pressing against her so quietly and insistently. Instead, a concrete visual image came to her sight-starved mind almost immediately. The black snout, the flickering tongue, the round pupils, the muscular writhing beneath the shiny tricolored bands. She moaned into her fuzzy flannel gag-but only once, and softly, before her sense of humor, or at least irony, came into play. What’s next? she asked herself. What’s fucking next, the thuggees of Kali?

Linda had drawn back in spite of herself. The rope tautened against the brick; the coral wriggled closer. To her surprise, Linda found its presence at least tolerable.

She had been afraid of snakes her whole life, she really had-Gloria had been with her the day their anthro class came all the way up to the Bronx Zoo primarily to see the primates (the other primates, their instructor had emphasized), when Linda had passed out at the door of the reptile house-but she was afraid of them no longer. Must have worked through it when Childs was thrusting the coral into her face. She’d read about that happening, on phobia.com.

Flooding, they called it: the most extreme and successful form of counterphobic programming. And of course some good old-fashioned information hadn’t hurt: Childs said it hadn’t wanted to bite Gloria; and it certainly hadn’t bitten her even when she yanked it violently from Childs’s grasp.

But even if she wasn’t in any real danger from this serpent, Linda reminded herself, there was still the other snake, the human one, pacing the floor directly overhead. Quickly she went back to work. Freeing her hands might not help-she was still weaponless-but it sure wouldn’t hurt.

Then it struck her-she wasn’t weaponless. Or rather, she wouldn’t be, if only she could get her hands free before Childs returned for her, or before the coral slithered away, whichever came first.

12

Simon hadn’t thought about Halloween since he’d bought the masks for his game with Dorie a week and a half ago. But unable to sleep, and with the blind rat closing in on him, he wandered into the living room, poked up the fire, and channel-surfed the larger TV there until he found a pre-Halloween-weekend-horror-thon on one of the Turner channels. Cat People, with Simone Simon-“She was marked with the curse of those who slink and court and kill by night!”-was just ending and Curse of the Cat People, the quasi-sequel, was about to come on. A real stinker, as Simon remembered it from the Horror Club days. No curse, no cat people-it hadn’t even scared Nervous Nellie.

The film proved to be a lot more enjoyable on Ecstasy, but not good enough to stay awake through. Eventually exhaustion and serotonin trumped the crosstops: Simon fell asleep in the Barcalounger. Not surprisingly, Nelson featured prominently in his dream. They were kids again-or kids still, however it works in dreams. They were bicycling through Tilden Park, as they often had. Nelson skidded to a stop, pointed to something in the bushes by the side of the trail. It was a body. A man’s body, nude, face-down. Nelson ran away, leaving Simon alone with the body. Simon wanted to run away, too, but he knew somehow that Grandfather Childs was waiting at the head of the trail-he’d get a beating if he went running out like that scaredy-cat Nelson. He rolled the body over, brushed the mud, the damp leaves and clinging leaf mold, from the face.

“Who’s that?” Grandfather Childs had somehow materialized, and was standing over him.

“It’s Nelson, sir,” said Simon. “That’s what he looks like now.” Simon had also turned into his present, grown-up, self, and the body was now in the tub of the master bathroom of 2500.

“Did you kill him?”

“Sort of. Sir.” An adult now, Simon was no longer cowed by the old man-he just wanted to show him how he could do everything by the book.

“Sort me no sort of s, boy. You either did or you did not.”

“Indirectly, sir. I glued him to the bathtub, but he turned on the water by himself.”

“Going to bury him in the basement with the others?”

“You know about the others?”

“Of course I know about the others. Don’t be stupid. And, boy?”

“Yes, sir?”

“While you’re at it, dig yourself a hole this time.”

“I’ll see you in H E double L first,” said Simon.

“Yes,” said the old man in the dream. “Most likely you will.”

In the basement, Linda was sure he’d left the horror movies on to torment her. The screams, the spooky organ music-it had to have been deliberate.

But it was also pointless. What kind of wusses does he take us for? she asked the coral, rhetorically. By now, she was as glad for its companionship as it seemed to be for hers, and as she went back to sawing at the rope binding her wrists, she would have been willing to stake her life-she was, in fact, staking her life-that at this point in their relationship, the coral was no more likely to bite her than she was to bite it.

By morning, however, that would all change.

Tinsman’s Lock 1

A cold snap had swept in overnight; when the breeze came up just before dawn, Simon could hear the brittle autumn leaves whispering to each other. A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand tiny conversations, all on the same subject: frost coming, death, a great falling.

Until then, enjoy the show, thought Simon, standing on the back porch with a blanket drawn over his bare shoulders. And what a show it was: the sun rising behind him; the dew sparkling on the brightly colored leaves and the grass, and turning even the cobwebs into strings of diamonds; the sunlight glinting off the still, dark green water of the canal; the dawn mist rising.

But on his way back into the house, Simon was startled from his reverie by the sight of a reflection in the glass door: tottering toward him, clutching a blanket around its shoulders like a refugee, was an unshaven, haggard scarecrow with eyes like two pee-holes in the snow. He winked at it; Grandfather Childs winked back. Shaken, Simon reached for the door handle; so did Grandfather Childs.

The last strands of the rope parted around dawn. There were no windows in the cellar, no visible cracks in the plank flooring overhead, but enough light had seeped in from somewhere for Linda to be able to make out the