Jeff Gelb - Seeds of Fear

He came to his feet and felt his way through the door to the living room, kicked trash out of his way, gaze skittering to the windows, and the front door that stood open to the night. He felt along the wall, the wallpaper peeling, the grit of old dried glue beneath his fingertips. He found the hallway and crept toward the bathroom.

His father hauled the tub from a junkyard and they filled it with water heated on the stove when they bathed, then he had the job of carrying out the dirty water bucketful by bucketful. His father made the bath by sealing off one end of the hall and installing a door. It was a stupid thing to do, but now it might afford Bastine sanctuary. It must.

He turned his back, slid into the tub, lowered himself the way he might have had it been full of warm water. He felt the hard crusts of someone's feces under his hips and grimaced. He slid farther down, knees up and to the side, hands crossed on his chest. The cold porcelain cooled his skin through his clothes and then seeped into his muscles. He bit down on his tongue until he drew blood to keep from whispering that he didn't mean it, he didn't mean it, wasn't anyone, goddamnit, listening to him?

He stared across the rolled white rim of the tub at the door. He willed it to stay closed.

He heard the creaking boards of the front steps first. His heart trip-hammered him half to death. He shut his eyes so tight, tears were squeezed from the edges. His fingers clutched at one another, nails tearing at the skin of his knuckles.

If he were on the road, the cities flying past, the miles rolling behind him, he'd be safe. If he hadn't been dispatched to Tallulah where Shaw waited for him, he would never be here after all these years. If he weren't so goddamned fucked-up, he'd never have left the truck stop.

Oh God, oh God, let it be Shaw, he prayed. Let her find me and take me away from here, please God. She is by far the cruelest of the two of us. Punish her.

The doorknob slowly rotated. Bastine's eyes stretched wide open. His breath caught in his throat where he swallowed it.

I didn't mean it.

The door opened without a sound, swinging back by increments.

Don't hurt me. I don't like being hurt. Daddy, please.

He could see her now in the doorway, but who was she? Mama? Shaw? Dory? He tried to find his voice, failed.

Her dark shape came toward him, arms hanging at her sides.

I'm hiding, she can't see me, no one can see me.

His legs twitched, his fingers tightened, his teeth closed harder on his tongue until they touched and blood filled his mouth. He must breathe. He must cry out for mercy as he had always been forced to do.

The right arm of the shape came up and he saw something in it. The barrel of the gun pointed at his chest. His vision narrowed into a tunnel that drew him into the cylinder. It was death he faced, that one true monster he had always feared and managed to outrun. He gagged on his own blood, jerked forward, hands coming up to stop the inevitable.

"Shaw!"

The gun blast lit the room and Bastine fell back against the tub as if a sledgehammer had been swung by a giant arm, slamming him in the chest.

"I'm no fuckith thaw." Dory wiped the back of her hand across her split lips and broken teeth.

Bastine tried to rise again, to push away from the cold porcelain of the tub, but his arms would not obey him, and now he felt it. The zone of pain began in his right side and spread out a carpet of fire forward to encompass all the ribs on that side and to the back. It felt like someone with a burning razor ran through his lungs, hacking, hacking.

"What have you done?" he murmured. "Why have you done this?"

"You busth my teef! You and your girfren tried to kill me!"

But no, he wanted to say and couldn't, thought he said and didn't. But no, it wasn't me, it was Shaw, it was her, and she's crazy as hell, don't you see, couldn't you tell, couldn't you just help me now because I'm dying here, I'm dying now, this is no game, girl, that gun's no toy, this was the worst idea, the all-time worst thing ever happened that shouldn't have, but if you'll take my hand, I'll..

His thoughts ran down like a weak truck battery without enough juice to start the engine, and he knew finally that she hadn't heard his pleas. She was gone, the doorway empty, the door swinging lazily on its hinges, quietly now shutting by itself, sealing him in the little old room in the little old house that had never once afforded a proper sanctuary for victims who meant to hide away.

She wasn't necessarily the tallest woman in the world, Andy Chalminski told himself, gaping at the lady in question with scarcely concealed fascination, but it would definitely take someone special to top her —

Which was exactly what Andy meant to be and intended to do: the first man to climb the human alp named Donna Callaghan and plant his flagpole at the top of the mountain. Or more specifically, wherever his personal survey indicated Ms. Callaghan would prefer the flagstaff to be planted.

For an ambitious guy to get ahead, Chalminski thought as he studied the enormous woman at her solitary table across the restaurant, sometimes he has to get a little behind. The crude observation was not original to him but a rule of thumb in the dog-eat-dog business in which the slum-born Andy had struggled for the dozen years of his manhood. Hell, there was absolutely nothing personal about his plan for bed ding the current object of his attention.

Truth was, the midwestern giantess quietly eating soup and minding her own business had no more appeal to Chalminski than the zucchini his waitress brought along with his small steak. Her face was probably not as homely as the dictionary definition of zucchini ("a squash shaped like a cucumber") — he couldn't see much of it with that straight brown hair drooping over her ears and temples — but Andy had seen a picture of her in the newspaper before flying to Columbus, and her glasses were as thick and heavy as World War I flyers' goggles.

That photo had lured him to Ohio, or, more exactly, a caption beneath it reading: 6' 10" WOMAN REFUSES DATE WITH NBA STAR. Eddie Burgess, who'd appeared in a few of Chalminski's ultra-low-budget porn flicks be fore losing his ability to get it up on cue and retiring to the Midwest, had spotted the picture and sent the clipping to Andy. The local story with it — very short because Donna Callaghan was said to be excruciating ly shy — made it clear that six ten was just an estimate of her height, and she might clear seven feet. "I feel awkward enough around people without letting any one measure me," Donna was quoted as admitting. "Besides, I don't much care for tall men." All that in response to the local press's smart PR move of trying to arrange a date between her and one of the Cleve land Cavaliers.

The second thought crossing Andy Chalminski's mind had been I'm only five six when I really stand up straight!

And his first reaction had been the instant aware ness that a thirty-two-year-old virgin who had to stoop to enter a room — assuming she didn't look too damn awful with her clothes off — was possibly the only person alive who might save his sagging career as a movie producer!

It had started going bad when schmucks with their own cameras began making "home video" porn and marketing them with the notion that these were "real people in action," maybe the neighbors down the block. So a lot of potential customers of Andy's had decided to watch ol' Bob and Suzy get it on. Well, fuck, did they think actors in a professional flick were androids?

Worse, it had gotten harder and harder to create gimmicks that made some jack-off at an adult vid store grab a box and run to the register to take it home. Every combination of gender, position, and racial mix was already on film! Even Eddie Burgess had said, before Andy hung up and came to Columbus, "Unless you can talk some aliens from another planet into screwing our girls on camera, Andrew, skin-flick folks are going to be the blacksmiths of the twenty-first century."