Fear itself

4

Conventional wisdom would argue that Simon Childs’s use of powerful pharmaceuticals, on top of all the other stress he was under, could only have served to accelerate the inevitable deterioration of an already unstable personality.

Simon would have disagreed-and a case could well be made that the serotonin-reuptake-inhibiting effects of 3,4-methylene-dioxy-N-methylamphetamine, also known as MDMA, Adam, or Ecstasy, in addition to the weed and the Percodan, were indeed having a pacifying effect on him.

But Simon was no pharmacologist. All he knew was that he’d stepped into the little stall shower in the guest bathroom half a jump ahead of the blind rat, and emerged feeling as giddy as a schoolboy and so full of fellow-feeling that on his way upstairs, he took the time to rearrange the body on the chrome and leather couch into as comfortable a position as rigor mortis would allow and cover it with a striped Hudson’s Bay blanket from the spare bedroom.

Simon was feeling so mellow, in fact, that upon his return to the bedroom, before sitting down at the vanity to roll another doob, he removed the sheet he’d draped over the mirror earlier, and played a quick round of Senor Wences-”S’awright? S’awright! S’okay? S’okay!”-with Grandfather Childs.

That was pushing it, though: once the joint-a better effort than the last one-was rolled, tempting as it would have been to watch his grandfather toke up, Simon turned his back on the old man. He took a deep drag-his glance fell upon the canvas travel bag on the floor next to him. He unzipped it a few inches to peek in on the king and the coral, sleeping peacefully in the bottom, entwined in each other’s arms like an old married couple.

“Except you don’t have any arms, do you?” giggled Simon, zipping the bag, then unzipping it again. “S’awright…?” “S’awright!” he called in two different voices.

But why this sudden obsession with Senor Wences? he asked himself. Hadn’t thought of the old ventriloquist from the Ed Sullivan Show in years, and now he was practically channeling him. Eventually it came to him: he missed his sister. Missy had been so taken with Senor Wences that she’d spent most of 1959 with a little face painted on the thumb side of her fist. “Eassy for you, deefeecul’ for meee,” she used to croon to her hand. Not that anybody but me ever understood her, Simon thought sadly.

But it was a good sadness, a sweet, loving sadness welling up inside him, filling the emptiness like a big warm golden marshmallow. Then he caught a blur of movement in his lower peripheral vision and looked down in time to see a banded snake slithering out of the canvas bag-God bless it, he’d left it slightly open. A second serpentine head emerged from the bag, testing the air with its tongue. This second snout was black, thank goodness-Simon snatched up a hairbrush and forced the coral back into the bag.

“No big deal,” he muttered to himself, zipping up the bag again-the scarlet king snake was only an enhancement. He’d planned to use it to deliver a few practice bites first-something that was not, of course, feasible with the coral-so he could watch Skairdykat’s panic slowly build as she waited for the venom to take effect. And as soon as it began to dawn on her that the king snake was harmless, it would be time to bring out the real deal.

That had been the plan, anyway. But as long as he still had the coral, he reminded himself, Skairdykat’s game would not be seriously compromised. And after Skairdykat, Pender: the plans for that game had been hatching ever since La Farge, as the eyeless corpse on the living room couch mutely attested.

And yet, under the enforced calm of the Ecstasy, Simon was vaguely aware of a budding anxiety. Somehow it seemed that the closer he got to Pender’s game, the less anxious he was to have it over with. That was probably why he’d driven east after La Farge, instead of south to Maryland, he was beginning to understand, why he’d detoured through Allenwood and Georgetown, risking life and liberty for a game with Skairdykat. It had been Pender’s game that had been driving him ever since Missy died, but thinking about what came after Pender was like speculating on what came after infinity, what lay beyond the borders of the universe.

A fellow could hurt himself, trying to wrap his mind around a paradox like that-especially a fellow as stoned and as constitutionally unable to contemplate the possibility of his impending nonexistence as Simon Childs. So what Simon asked himself instead was whether he had any unfinished business here in the east. And when the answer came up yes, he knew what his next move had to be.