Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

After dinner Linda went into the living room and logged on to the Gees’ computer, set up a phony Netscape user profile for an alter ego, then accessed phobia.com, the PWSPD Association web site, and signed into the chat room, selecting a user name of Skairdykat and a password of boo. The chat room counter went from 0 to 1-Linda was alone. She clicked onto the archives, read back a few weeks until she had the feel of the lingo, then began typing her first entry into the dialogue box:

Hi everybody. Skairdykat here. Pleez dont flame me if I screw up, I’ve never done this before. Mostly cuz I never saw a chat room I wanted to join before. But reading you guys stories is like reading about my own life. It feels like coming home. Anyway, heres my story: I am…

(No need to narrow the age or sex down yet; if he bites, we can set up a meeting and have our choice of decoys in place.)

single, and I have been deathly afraid of…

(Might as well use the snakes-it’ll sound more believable than if you make something up.)

snakes since as long as I can remember. Thats ophidiophobia, as most of you probably know. The worst part is, I live…

(Keep it vague-if you get any nibbles, you can improvise something later.)

by myself, and sometimes I get so obsessed there might be a snake outside I cant even bring myself to leave the house. I am eager to chat with and maybe someday meet someone who knows how I feel. So if anybody…

(How to put this? Don’t want to be too obvious, but if the killer is using the PWSPD web site for trolling, he’s going to want to take it private as soon as possible.)

wants to contact me directly, my e-mail address is skairdykat@netscape.com….

(Anything else? Not yet. After all, you’re trolling, too. Graceful exit.)

Anyway, thanks for being there, all of you brave PWSPDs. Hope to hear from somebody soon. TT4N, Skairdy

After reading her entry over and making a few minor corrections, Linda positioned the cursor on the SUBMIT box, took a deep breath, then with a single click of her mouse turned poor Skairdy into a piece of bait dangling from a hook somewhere in cyberspace.

Dorie opened her eyes and took stock. Her forehead hurt, and there was a little knot-she must have hit the floor with her head, or the corner of the table on her way down-but there was no blood and no egg, just a tender spot above the hairline. At least you didn’t break your nose again, she told herself-it’s already got all the character it can stand.

Shaken, she sat up slowly, careful to keep her back to the window. Dorie had been dreaming about masks, avoiding them, and fainting at the sight of them for as long as she could remember. But having hallucinations, fainting over masks that aren’t even there-that would be a new and disturbing development.

Unless of course there really was a mask in the window. But the only way to tell for sure would be to turn around, and she wasn’t ready for that, not with her head still pounding and her heart racing and the room spinning and her stomach…

Whoops, here it comes. Dorie turned her head to the side just in time to save her clothes. When she finished vomiting, she crawled a few feet away and collapsed full length onto her side, one arm extended like Adam’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Then she remembered reading someplace that headache, nausea, and dizziness were all symptoms of concussion, and that the last thing you should do was give in to the urge to sleep. She tried to raise herself up onto her hands and knees, but it felt as if she were fighting gravity on Jupiter-somehow the planet itself had grown impossibly heavy under her and was pulling her down toward that dreamless darkness.

Fight it, she told herself as she sank back down to the kitchen floor, her head pillowed on her folded arms. Got to fight it. But by then she could no longer remember what she was supposed to be fighting against, or why. Still, she felt vaguely guilty.

“Later, Mom,” she murmured as the darkness closed around her again. “I promise I’ll clean it up later.”

Later.

Still on the floor, but on her back now, with her head pillowed on someone’s lap. Cool damp cloth on her forehead, the rim of a glass touching her lips. She smelled the musty-sharp, cough-medicine smell of brandy, sipped, swallowed, coughed feebly. Then her eyes fluttered open, a man’s hand came over her mouth to stifle her scream, and although the shock to her system was so profound it jarred her down to her soul, Dorie was not terribly surprised to see that the face leaning over her, hovering upside down only inches above her own, was wearing a leering Kabuki mask. Somehow, in fact, it seemed almost inevitable.

Missy opened her eyes early Thursday morning and found herself lying in a strange room, in a bed not her own. Frightened and disoriented, she started to call out for Simon, then remembered that she was on the fold-out sofa in Ganny Wilson’s living room, and that Ganny had promised her pancakes for breakfast. Only Ganny called them hoecakes-sometimes different people had different words for the same thing.

But as soon as she started thinking about food, Missy became aware of trouble inside her tummy and realized that that was what had awakened her in the first place. All that good Ganny cooking: pan-fried smothered chicken, corn fritters, southern-fried okra (Missy only ate the southern-fried part, not the okra itself), sweet potato pie, and after supper, all the little sesame seed cookies she could eat. Benni cakes, Ganny called them. And now it all wanted out all at once.

“Uh-oh,” Missy told Tweety, who was rustling around in her little square cage on top of the TV. “This is gonna be a stinky.” Then another uh-oh occurred to her as she sat up and swung her legs over the side of the sofa bed: she couldn’t remember where the potty was.

“Ganny! Ganny, I hafta make!” No answer. The cramps were getting worse. She pressed her palms tightly against the sides of her temple to make herself remember. Think, you silly-you went potty last night. Only Ganny calls it the toe-lit. Different people, different-

Then it came to her: you had to go through Ganny’s bedroom. Missy shuffled across the room, doubled over from the cramps, clutching the waistband of her pajama bottoms to keep them from falling down. Please don’t lemme make in my jammies, she begged Jesus. In her own house you couldn’t ask Jesus for things, because Simon said he didn’t exist there, but in Ganny’s house it was okay to ask him for help because he existed all over the place here: there were pictures and statues of him in every room-baby Jesus in the cradle, grown-up Jesus on the cross, and lying asleep in his mommy’s lap. Missy mostly didn’t remember their mommy, but Simon did.

Missy’s prayer was answered. She tiptoed through Ganny’s room without waking her up, did her stinky, and felt much better. When she came out of the bathroom, Ganny was still asleep under the covers, lying on her side with her face to the wall.

“Spoons?” asked Missy. Taking Ganny’s silence for assent, she crawled into Ganny’s bed and snuggled up against her back. But something was wrong-Ganny was so stiff it felt like cuddling up against a wooden chair.

“Are you sick?” Missy asked her, reaching around to feel Ganny’s forehead, the way Ganny used to feel hers when she was sick. “Nope, cool as a coocummer. C’mon, Ganny, wake up.”

But Ganny would not wake up. Gently, Missy tugged the neck of her nightgown. “Ganny, I’m hungry.” No response. Missy pulled the covers back, saw that a watery coffee-colored stain had spread across the seat of Ganny’s long white nightgown. “Uh-oh.” Now she understood-it was Ganny who had made in her bed and was so embarrassed she was pretending to be asleep. Missy had done that once herself, when she was little, and Ganny had gone along with it, stripped her jammies off, carried her into the bathroom, cleaned her up, changed the bedding, tucked her back in, never said another word about it.