Fear Nothing

woman.

----

    25
        
        The electric and electrifying radiance passed through Chief Stevenson's eyes so fleetingly, as he turned to face me, that on any night before this one, I might have dismissed the phenomenon as merely a queer reflection of the instrument-panel lights. But since sundown, I had seen monkeys that were not merely monkeys, a cat that was somehow more than a cat, and I had waded through mysteries that flowed like rivers along the streets of Moonlight Bay, and I had learned to expect significance in the seemingly insignificant.
        His eyes were inky again, glimmerless. The anger in his voice was now an undertow, while the surface current was gray despair and grief. “It's all changed now, all changed, and no going back.”
        “What's changed?”
        “I'm not who I used to be. I can hardly remember what I used to be like, the kind of man I was. It's lost.”
        I felt he was talking as much to himself as to me, grieving aloud for this loss of self that he imagined.
        “I don't have anything to lose. Everything that matters has been taken from me. I'm a dead man walking, Snow. That's all I am. Can you imagine how that feels?”
        “No.”
        “Because even you, with your shitty life, hiding from the day, coming out only at night like some slug crawling out from under a rock - even you have reasons to live.”
        Although the chief of police was an elected official in our town, Lewis Stevenson didn't seem to be concerned about winning my vote.
        I wanted to tell him to go copulate with himself. But there is a difference between showing no fear and begging for a bullet in the head.
        As he turned his face away from me to gaze at the white sludge of fog sliding thickly across the windshield, that cold fire throbbed in his eyes again, a briefer and fainter flicker than before yet more disturbing because it could no longer be dismissed as imaginary.
        Lowering his voice as though afraid of being overheard, he said, “I have terrible nightmares, terrible, full of sex and blood.”
        I had not known exactly what to expect from this conversation; but revelations of personal torment would not have been high on my list of probable subjects.
        “They started well over a year ago,” he continued. “At first they came only once a week, but then with increasing frequency. And at the start, for a while, the women in the nightmares were no one I'd ever seen in life, just pure fantasy figures. They were like those dreams you have during puberty, silken girls so ripe and eager to surrender… except that in these dreams, I didn't just have sex with them.
        His thoughts seemed to drift with the bilious fog into darker territory.
        Only his profile was presented to me, dimly lit and glistening with sour sweat, yet I glimpsed a savagery that made me hope that he would not favor me with a full-face view.
        Lowering his voice further still, he said, “In these dreams, I beat them, too, punch them in the face, punch and punch and punch them until there's nothing left of their faces, choke them until their tongues swell out of their mouths…”
        As he had begun to describe his nightmares, his voice had been marked by dread. Now, in addition to this fear, an unmistakable perverse excitement rose in him, evident not only in his husky voice but also in the new tension that gripped his body.
        '… and when they cry out in pain, I love their screams, the agony on their faces, the sight of their blood. So delicious. So exciting. I wake shivering with pleasure, swollen with need. And sometimes… though I'm fifty-two, for God's sake, I climax in my sleep or just as I'm waking.'
        Orson dropped away from the security grille and retreated to the back seat.
        I wished that I, too, could put more distance between myself and Lewis Stevenson. The cramped patrol car seemed to close around us, as though it were being squashed in one of those salvage-yard hydraulic crushers.
        “Then Louisa, my wife, began to appear in the dreams… and my two… my two daughters. Janine. Kyra. They are afraid of me in these dreams, and I give them every reason to be, because their terror excites me. I'm disgusted but… but also thrilled at what I'm doing with them, to them…'
        The anger, the despair, and the perverse excitement were still to be detected in his voice, in his slow heavy breathing, in the hunch