Fear itself: a novel Read Online Free PDF

crossed the bedroom, and stuck her head into Simon’s little office. He was at the computer.
    “Who called?” A stranger would have heard Hoo-haw, but as always, Simon had no trouble understanding Missy.
    “Dorie. She said to say hi to you.”
    Missy decided to tease him a little. “Talking to your girl friend. Si mon’s got a girl friend.”
    “Missy, I’m in no mood for your nonsense. Now, go back to bed before I get serious.”
    Uh-oh. When Simon said “serious,” he meant “mad.” When Simon was mad, sometimes he did things he was sorry for later. But the sorry didn’t help much if you were the one he did the things to. “I love you?” she whispered cautiously.
    “I love you, too,” said Simon, turning his back to the door. It wasn’t as though he’d had that great a day, either. That’s what comes from trying to do too much too fast, he told himself. The total darkness, then that stunt with the liver—greedy, Simon, greedy. And now, what with Dorie Bell stirring things up, it would have to end sooner than he had planned. For Wayne and Dorie both.
    Still, spilt milk and all that. And perhaps when Wayne knew the end was coming…
    Simon could feel his pulse quickening at the thought. Yes, that’s it, he told himself, that’s what we’re in this for. Then he realized Missy was still standing forlornly in the doorway. He spun his chair around again. “Hey, sis, what do you say, how ’bout pancakes for breakfast?”
    “Peachy keen,” replied Missy, picturing the Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle, which always made her giggle. “I love pancakes.”
    “I know you do. Now, go to bed—I have to go back down to the basement.”
    “I don’t like the basement. It’s scary.”
    “I know,” he said. “That’s why you mustn’t go down there, not ever.”
    “You do,” she said intelligibly. She could manage her oo sounds pretty well. And as Simon knew, her speech difficulties stemmed from the way the congenital Down’s flattening of the palate forced Missy’s tongue to protrude, and were not indicative of her level of comprehension.
    “I have to,” he said.
    “Ha hunh,” she replied, waving a chubby hand.
    Have fun. Simon found himself wondering, as he slipped on his new D-303, single-tube, dual-eye, night-vision goggles with built-in two-stage infrared illuminator, whether somehow Missy didn’t understand a lot more than even he gave her credit for.

8

    Something was wrong.
    Since regaining consciousness, pain, thirst, and hunger permitting, Wayne had spent the last few hours working his way through the Bach suites numerically, and doing rather well, too, until he got stuck on number five, the one Casals called the tempestuous suite. The problem wasn’t that he didn’t have the music with him—he knew the score by heart. But he just couldn’t seem to get number five going.
    Then, in his mind’s ear, he heard old Brotsky: the tuning, Mr. Summers, the tuning. He’d forgotten to drop the A string down to G—a little trick Bach had employed to enhance the cello’s sonority. After that, the piece went relatively smoothly, although it was interesting to note that even on an imaginary instrument he still sometimes stumbled over the same difficult intervals that had always given him trouble.
    He played with his remaining eye firmly closed. Funny how total darkness made you want to shut your eyes, he thought. Otherwise it was too vast, like the blackness of space—you felt as though if you let go, you’d tumble through it forever.
    But even with his eye closed, he was so sensitive to light that he knew when the door at the top of the stairs had been opened, however brief and faint the glow. He did his best to ignore it, concentrating all the harder on the Bach.
    As for the birds, a curious thing had happened. It might have been the result of such an extreme application of Dr. Taylor’s desensitization therapy. Flooding, the technical term for overwhelming a phobic with the object of his fear,