In The House Of Secret Enemies

The last resistance went out of him like air whooshing from a crushed lung. He stared at me helplessly. 'All right, Frederickson. Perhaps you are due some money. Say, as a 'counseling fee.''

'You can call it anything you want. Just get the money up front. Now.'

'Perhaps we could negotiate the exact-'

'Shut up, Mueller!' Boise's voice came from behind me. I didn't bother to turn; I could feel the barrel eye of a.38 staring at my spine.

It looked as if the game wasn't over yet. I had counted on Boise calling, but I hadn't counted on his actually being here for the meeting. I was out of cards, and someone had unplugged the slot machine.

'You're a fool, Mueller,' Boise said calmly. Now the cold barrel was pressed against my temple as Boise's free hand flew expertly over my body until he found what he was looking for. He yanked the tape recorder out of my pocket, dropped it on the floor, then crushed it under his heel. 'He doesn't want money. He's as straight as his brother. He just wanted you to talk, which you did beautifully.'

Still keeping the gun trained on my head, Boise knelt and fired the scattered tape with his lighter. The room was suddenly filled with an acrid odor that made my eyes water.

'You're burning a hole in my carpet,' Mueller said weakly, staring down at the small pyre of burning plastic.

'Get this, Mueller,' Boise said, backing up so that both the scientist and myself fell into his range of fire, 'I want that hundred thousand dollars you owe me, and I want to be free to spend it. If you don't start wising up, I'm going to burn a hole in your brain.'

The tape was destroyed. Boise snuffed out the last glowing embers with the toe of his shoe. I tried to think of some maneuver that would get me closer to Boise, but you don't mess with a man who practices three times a week on a firing range. The gun in Boise's hand was a tight drawstring on any bag of tricks that I might have been tempted to explore.

Boise wasn't taking any chances either. Slowly he came up behind me. I anticipated the blow and managed to move my head enough to avoid having my skull crushed. Still, it was a long way to the bottom of the rainbow- colored well into which he crudely pushed me.

It was also a long way up.

The sides of the well were dotted with faces of my brother. His lips were curled back like an animal's, baring froth-specked teeth. There were large red holes where his eyes should have been. His hands were studded with hundreds of snakelike fingers, and I wept helplessly as they reached for me, curling around my throat, tearing at my eyes.

I floated up and out of the hole and down onto what felt like a hardwood floor. Finally conscious, my body was a raft cast adrift on a vast, eerie sea of total darkness.

I was still crying, not as a man cries when touched by some deep emotion, but as a child cries in the grip of some nameless nighttime terror. I sobbed and wailed, my hiccuping moans swallowed up by the dark. In one part of me I was profoundly embarrassed; in another part of me, weeping seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to be doing.

Gradually I muffled my cries and wiped my tears with the back of my hand. At the same time my muscles seemed to go rigid. I couldn't move or, rather, I dared not move. In the surrounding night I could hear the dry rustle of snakes, large snakes moving toward me, large snakes of the variety that lie in wait along the banks of tropical rivers to crush and eat things that are small and warm.

There were other things out there too, and they all crushed and squeezed and bit and hurt. I began to cry again, and pray to the God I had known as a child.

Another part of my mind, a tiny area where the fear had not yet penetrated, began to stir. I listened to it whisper of snakes and other things that crush, big things, a world of giants that laughed and mocked; things that would hurt a dwarf, things that would eat a dwarf.

It suddenly occurred to me that these fears were somehow familiar, like a scarred rocking horse uncovered in a dusty corner of some attic, an attic of the mind. In this case they were old monsters from the mental storage bin of childhood.

Then I understood. I remembered Garth and Mueller and Boise, and I knew what they had done. The terrors were from childhood; all those special horrors that had plagued me when I had first learned I was small, so different from other children, had come back to visit. Something had dredged them all up from my subconscious and scattered them in the darkness around me. .

Something like a drug, something like phobetarsin; that was what the fear-producing drug had been called in the research papers I had read.

At least the drug Mueller had given me had a name.

The terrible dread was still there, but now I knew its source. That made all the difference in the world; I had labeled the fear-or at least its cause-and that made it, if no less real, at least easier to deal with it. I was sure I had been given a drug, probably phobetarsin. The question remained as to why they had bothered. Perhaps it was an attempt to make me more manageable, or perhaps it was merely gratuitous sadism. Whatever the reason, I knew I needed some defense.

I closed my eyes against the fear and slowly moved out across the room, crawling inch by inch on my belly. I finally bumped up against a wall and paused, cradling my head in my arms. My clothes were drenched with sweat and, once again, I was crying.

Still, I had my single psychological weapon; I knew what had unleashed the demons around me. Garth had had no such advantage. Whatever they had given him had somehow had the effect of stripping the scabs off his psyche, simultaneously releasing the thousand and one irritations and frustrations that plague a man every day, bringing them all up in one lump to fester in his conscious mind until a flash point was reached.

Somewhere in every man's mind are the fetid odors of rotted dreams, mercifully flushed into the sewers of the subconscious. Mueller had discovered chemicals that somehow interfered with the mechanism of suppression. He'd been playing games with my brother's sanity, not to mention my own. I owed him.

I curled my legs up close to my body and waited in the dark.

Several eternities later the lights came on, harsh and white-hot on the dilated pupils of my eyes. Now I could see the door, lined with rubber flaps to exclude any light, on the other side of the bare room, to my right. It opened. Immediately I cringed, curling my body up into a tight ball. I covered my face with my hands, leaving just enough space between my fingers to see through.

Boise's gun was the first thing into the room, followed by Boise himself, then Mueller. Boise stopped inside the door, nudged Mueller and pointed at me. He was grinning.

'Boo!' Boise said. That was almost funny enough to make me forget the other, real fears that were still buzzing around inside my head.

I moaned and shrunk even closer to the wall. At the same time I dropped my right forearm and planted it in the angle between the wall and the floor. I would get only one shot at Boise and I wanted all the leverage I could get.

'Hey, dwarf!' Boise barked, still grinning. 'You want to die, dwarf?' He was enjoying himself, and that was a mistake.

My sick terror was rapidly being displaced by red-cheeked, eminently healthy anger. I moaned a little bit, prompting Mueller to enter the conversation.

'Boise, I don't see why you have to needle him like that.'

'You were the one who suggested doping him up.'

'Just to make him easier to handle, Boise. I don't see how we can just-'

'I've already figured out what to do with him,' Boise said, coming closer and looking for my eyes. His gun was still steady on me.

'Please let me go home,' I said in my best whine, at the same time trying not to ham it up too much. 'I promise I won't bother you anymore. Please don't hurt me.' I considered my next words, then figured, what the hell. The coup de grace : 'Please let me call my mother.'

That broke Boise up-mentally. The room echoed with his loud, hoarse laughter. He reached out with the toe of his shoe to nudge me in the ribs, and that was what I had been waiting for. I broke him up again-physically.