Never Fear Read online

  When Greg reached the plant for work on Monday, he was running on empty. His mind was foggy. His body ached. Once again, he avoided his office and took the long way around the plant that allowed him to avoid the cafeteria.

  He decided to spend his time on the floor with the workers he was supposed to be supervising. It had been uneventful there, so far, and he really didn’t want a return visit from the Cuban Killers, stalking him in the locations they’d already visited.

  Greg stopped near Stan Sanchez’s workstation, pulling his monogrammed handkerchief out of his back pocket to wipe his brow. Greg was old-fashioned in that he used a cloth handkerchief instead of Kleenex. It was a habit he attributed to his father, who had been a plant engineer running time studies in the old days, when a slide rule was the name of the game. In fact, some of Greg’s monogrammed handkerchiefs (GKC, Gregory Kevin Chandler) had been his late father’s (George Kevin Chandler).

  “Hey, Greg!” Stan Sanchez called out.

  Greg walked over closer to the burly man, so he could hear him over the din of production in the huge plant.

  “Remember when I told you the cage was acting up?”

  “Right. The safety cage for the jackhammer. You said it was erratic in its response time…right?”

  Greg was mentally patting himself on the back that he had remembered anything at all from the Friday last week when he and Stan had spoken. He found himself having more and more difficulty with simple tasks of daily life. His nerves were frayed. Even something as elementary as knowing how he had cut his ear in the night eluded his failing memory. Lack of sleep was taking its toll.

  “Let me take a look at it, Stan,” Greg said, climbing up to Stan’s perch, where Stan operated the gigantic jackhammer from a raised operator’s platform.

  Stan stepped aside. Greg climbed up three steps to join him at the controls of the huge machine, a jackhammer large enough and strong enough to smash molten metal into combine parts.

  Greg examined the controls. He hadn’t touched one of these things for at least fifteen years, back when he worked on the line, before he worked his way up to floor Supervisor.

  He pushed the button with his right forefinger. Nothing.

  “You have to push each one separately, Boss,” Stan reminded him, “One with each hand.” Stan was surprised that his superior did not seem to have much of a grasp of how to operate the machine. Everyone knew that Greg had worked at the plant all through high school and had gone to work there full-time as soon as he graduated from college at twenty-one. Gregory Chandler was widely viewed as knowledgeable and likeable, a second-generation engineer of the “Nothing runs like a Deere” culture.

  “Oh. Right…First one button. Then the other…right?”

  “Right,” said Stan, relieved that Greg now seemed to know what he was doing.

  Stan knew nothing of the fog of fatigue plaguing Greg for over a week now.

  This was not a machine to fool around with. If it came down on you, it would definitely kill you. That was the purpose of the security cage: to prevent such deaths. It was also the purpose of the two buttons that had to be pushed individually with each separate hand in a pre-programmed sequence.

  “So, what’s it been doing?” Greg asked.

  “Like I told you last Friday: it comes down slow or fast. Off-tempo. And now it isn’t coming down at all.” Exasperation was evident in Stan’s voice.

  Greg made a move to step onto the platform, the spot where the jackhammer would come down when it was operating properly.

  “I don’t think I’d do that, Boss,” Stan said, uneasily.

  Greg just looked at him blandly. Dully. Exhaustion showed on his face. He said, “Why not?”

  At that precise moment, the recalcitrant machine crashed downwards to the exact spot where Gregory Chandler stood, crushing him instantly in a messy and horrifying display of brute machine power. It shocked everyone. The accident brought production on the line in the plant to a standstill (a Major No-No) as everyone on the floor rushed to the accident site.

  Greg’s bloody handkerchief, now stained red, lay relatively unscathed in the midst of the carnage, atop what had once been a human body…a small square of cloth, soaked red but still neatly folded atop a horrifying red mound of humanity.

  All hell broke loose.

  ***

  Hours later, when Stan Sanchez was, once again, explaining to the authorities how this floor death during work hours had occurred (a Huge No-No), voice cracking with emotion, tension running high, Stan said, “The rhythm was off. If you are on that spot when the jackhammer comes down, God help you! It’ll kill you instantly. I feel so bad. Greg was a great guy.” Stan paused, took a deep breath and added, “I thought he knew what he was doing; it just happened so fast. I tried to warn him. If the tempo of the jackhammer is off and you get into the stamping zone while the cage is up…if the safety cage is off-rhythm, it’s going to get you.” Stan was very upset. His Cuban accent…diminished after years of living in the United States…crept in as he relived the horror of the moment, saying, over and over again, “ I feel like I should have done something more. It just happened so fast. It was over so quick!” His voice had a plaintive quality. He was obviously traumatized, as was everyone who had witnessed the accident and come running to the scene. (There, but for the grace of God, go I…)

  Everyone, except OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), agreed that Gregory Chandler’s death was a damned shame, but it wasn’t anyone’s fault but his own.

  Deere was fined half a million dollars for the faulty cage apparatus by OSHA, a large portion of which went to Cynthia Chandler and her twin sons. The three were inconsolable at the funeral. The teen-aged boys had to literally hold Cynthia up at Greg’s grave site. Rumors flew that Cynthia couldn’t sleep…kept having a recurring nightmare. She was a basket case. The high school hired a temporary substitute teacher to take over her English classes; she wasn’t capable of taking care of herself, let alone teaching.

  Seemingly still in shock from the news of her husband’s tragic death, Cynthia half-muttered something puzzling to Stan Sanchez after the funeral, back at the Chandler house after the burial. Stan was, once again, expressing his tremendous regret and remorse for not being able to stop Greg…not being able to save him. This had been an ongoing refrain from Stan since the day of the accident.

  “I’m never going to be able to listen to that song again,” Cynthia interrupted. She punctuated the curt remark by downing a pill, washed down with a big gulp of Chardonnay. Swaying slightly, she slowly crossed the room, walking away from Stan mid-sentence.

  Stan…puzzled…didn’t ask, “What song?” Curious, he wanted to ask, but Cynthia wasn’t herself. Plus, she was gone as soon as she articulated the thought. Cynthia wasn’t really making sense. She wasn’t sleeping. Doped up with tranquilizers, leaning heavily, physically and emotionally, on her teen-aged sons, she seemed helpless and, strangely enough, guilt-stricken.

  Stan Sanchez also felt tremendous guilt that Greg had died at his workstation. Stan had worked the hammer for two decades without incident. To tell the truth, Stan kept thinking, that jackhammer’s rhythm was ‘off’ for at least two weeks before Greg took a look at it. That could have been ME!

  The lingering vision of what remained of Greg Chandler after the jackhammer crushed his body kept Stan up that night.

  And the next night.

  And the night after that.

  Stan just kept thinking of the consequences of human failure when operating dangerous machinery. Pilot error. With every nightmare, Stan lost more sleep. He experienced bad dreams, a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder.

  At night he kept thinking: The rhythm---if it’s off---it’s going to get you.

  ***

  Stan Sanchez’ retirement party is next week, six months to the day the line shut down to scrape what was left of Gregory Chandler into a receptacle for his grieving widow.

  Cynthia Chandler, his wife, now instit
utionalized for treatment, won’t be attending.

  5

  coulrophobia

  fear of clowns

  michael koogler

  A Quarter To Five

  It was coming for him again. It was coming and he was powerless to stop it. Like before, he wanted to run, but he was never able to, and this time would be no different. Lying helplessly on the filthy and blood-stained mattress, he was bound with duct tape, his hands and feet wrapped tightly, as if enfolded in the sticky web of some monstrous spider that meant to feed on him. It would come to him with its teeth. And its claws. And the knife.

  Always the knife.

  And he could never escape it.

  As before, he heard the plodding footsteps in the hall and his blood froze in his veins. It was almost here, and the end was always the same. The footsteps. The creaking of the door as it opened. The appearance of the monster. And his siren scream as the nightmare began to use the knife.

  Another sound caught his attention and he turned his eyes toward the bathroom doorway, frightened beyond belief. Even as the door to the hall began to creak open to reveal the creature, another monster was already there, stepping into the room from the darkness of the toilet. It looked at him, its black fathomless eyes drinking in his terror. It lifted the long, gleaming knife and began to shuffle toward him.

  The doorway to the hall opened wide and the monster stepped into the room, focusing its eyes on him just as the other one did. He wanted to scream, but nothing came out. Something had changed. Countless times before, it had come at him from the hall. Only the hall.

  Now there were two.

  And they both had knives.

  As the abominations slowly approached him, the dirty window across from the bed slowly lifted, scraping upward on the rotted wooden frame. As his growing horror plunged him deeper into madness, he could see another creature’s ghoulish face leering at him from outside. The knife, held in a clawed hand, pushed into the room first, the creature slowly following it in.

  Three.

  He heard a hard scrabbling sound beneath him and a ghoulish hand slithered out from under the bed. It reached up, clawing at the bed, slowly pulling itself out from underneath the mattress, desperate to bleed him like the others. The other hand emerged, its hideous fingers wrapped tightly around the handle of a knife.

  Four.

  The closet door, covered by a large tattered poster of a circus tent with happy, juggling clowns and soaring acrobats, slowly slid open, revealing the hideousness of the monster within. It stepped out, the knife held before it, its horrible teeth dripping red.

  Five.

  ***

  Devon Marler suddenly awoke, his silent scream of terror dying on his lips, the memory of the approaching horrors tattooed on the inside of his eyelids. They were there for him to see forever, no matter how tightly he shut his eyes.

  Taking deep gulping breaths, he fought to slow his pulse, to regain his sanity, to embrace reality. He called up the mental checklist he had started using to combat the growing nightmares, something his psychiatrist, Dr. Staum, had taught him. He was back in his own bed, his wife sleeping beside him. Check. The clock showed a quarter to five. Check. He was awake. Check. He was safe from the nightmare. Check. The monster was gone. Check…er, no. Not just a monster. Monsters. Plural.

  What did that mean?

  It took him longer to calm himself this time, but who could blame him? All the other times he had the nightmare, there had been only one. This time?

  There had been five.

  He lay in bed for another hour before finally forcing himself to get up. He probably should have risen earlier. There was never any chance of him getting back to sleep after the nightmare. He always awoke at a quarter to five. Even if he set his alarm earlier, he would always fall back asleep and wake at a quarter to five. It was always the same.

  A quarter to five was when he died.

  Three hours later, Devon was in the kitchen, his thoughts scattered as he drank down the last of his orange juice. He stood up from the breakfast table, his hand shaking at the prospect of what the day intended for him, as well as the lingering terror of last night’s dream. He was trembling so badly, the glass slipped from his hand as he was about to set it in the sink. It clinked loudly against the metal side, but thankfully didn’t break.

  “You know, you don’t have to do this, babe,” Michelle Marler said, as she struggled to get the little squirming animal that was strapped into her high chair, to eat her oatmeal. The feisty seven-month-old only shook her head back and forth, squealing with laughter, oblivious to her father’s consuming dread.

  “I need to do something, ‘Chelle,” he said helplessly, swallowing his nervousness and forcing a half smile. He bent and kissed his wife, then leaned over to plant one on his daughter’s forehead. The baby immediately reached for him with oatmeal-covered hands, but Devon slipped away from her grasp. The baby chattered happily, thinking it a wonderful game.

  “I still say we should’ve gotten a dog,” he said with a better grin this time, pushing his fear to the back of his mind, where it lay quietly festering. Seeing his wife’s look of disdain, he added, “Just kidding, babe. You know that.” He leaned in and kissed her again and then turned away.

  “What if it doesn’t work?” she called out to him, voicing her own fears. Chelle Marler knew why her husband was agreeing to the radical new treatment. She just didn’t agree with it at all. Had she known what he was truly getting ready to do today, she would have zip-tied him down and started her own therapy on him.

  “Look, it’ll work,” Devon said shortly, but he was no longer certain of anything. “It has to,” he added quietly. His wife didn’t know exactly what today’s phase of the treatment was going to be and he was fairly certain that if she did, she would blow a gasket. But he needed the treatment; needed relief from the constant nightmarish reliving of what happened to him in the past. He needed to sleep past a quarter to five.

  And of course, they could use the money. Being a test subject for a radically new and potentially dangerous psychiatric treatment had its monetary advantages that would amount to five digits on the left side of the decimal point. “And it’s just for a day. I’ll be home tomorrow, noon at the latest. I swear.”

  Chelle handed the baby the oatmeal spoon and stood up to face him. As Bree immediately began smacking her new toy into the bowl, splashing oatmeal everywhere, Chelle put her arms around her husband and pulled him close. “You know that I want nothing more than for these dreams to go away and for the past to stay in the past,” she said softly. “But virtual reality? Forcing you to face your fears in what amounts to a real world setting? Babe, your dreams have been worse than ever these past four weeks, ever since you started this treatment.”

  “Dr. Staum says that’s normal,” he argued half-heartedly, trying to back down her concern. “The treatment has brought everything to the surface, ready to be faced and purged one final time.” But even as he defended it, he knew she was right.

  Since he had started on the VR treatment, which put him in a virtual world with his terror, his nightmares had increased in intensity, and even his waking hours now had him sensing the monster lurking somewhere nearby. That had never happened before. And what was up with last night’s fright-fest and multiple copies of the creature?

  Yet, even though she was right, he still couldn’t agree with her. Not yet anyway. Not when today’s treatment had the potential to completely banish the demon once and for all; when a quarter to five would come and go and he would sleep blissfully beyond it. If today’s treatment worked, according to Dr. Staum, he would finally be free of the thing that had plagued him since childhood. He would finally be able to exist without the ever-present specter of his nightmare looming over him.

  He would finally be able to sleep past a quarter to five.

  “This is it,” he added. “Last treatment. They said that today’s the breakthrough day. If it works, I’m cured. If it doesn’t, then
I’ll find another way to deal with it.”

  She kissed him and pulled him close. “Promise me.”

  “Last one, Scout’s honor,” he agreed, kissing her back. Then he nodded toward Bree, who was happily offering her oatmeal-covered hands to Granger, their golden retriever. The big dog was licking as fast as she could dip her hands back in the oatmeal bowl. “Good luck, babe,” he smiled and then turned away. “Kiss the munchkin for me!”

  The last thing he heard as he slipped out the door was Chelle telling Granger to go outside and play.

  ***

  Devon tried to stretch out in the patient chair, but he was too keyed up to get comfortable. Instead, he sighed for what had to be the hundredth time and looked back to the ceiling above him. The room he was in was not like the VR room he had been in during his past sessions. That room had been full of video monitors, surround-sound speakers, and a wide array of technical equipment, most of which he had never seen or heard of before. The VR room was designed to immerse him completely in his phobia and fuel his terror enough to push him to the brink of madness.

  But this room was different…different in that it was almost empty. Except for the chair he was seated in and a padded doctor’s stool nearby, the room was starkly bare. White metal walls and floor, marred only by small cameras mounted on the ceiling at each corner of the room, were the extent of the room’s décor.

  He’d been alone for almost an hour now, reclining in the chair, an IV bag hanging on a hook above him, administering the solution contained within. As he looked at the milky gray liquid in the bag, now nearly three quarters empty, he shook his head, wondering not for the first time, why he had finally agreed to do this. Including his time in the chair, he’d been at the clinic now for upwards of three hours, having run through a battery of tests to make certain he was prepped accordingly. But all during that time, he had yet to see Dr. Staum, and the doctor’s absence had fueled his questions and his lack of understanding about what was going to happen today.