Fear and Trembling by Robert Bloch

Author:Robert Bloch [Bloch, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0812515854
Publisher: TOR BOOKS
Published: 1989-03-13T07:00:00+00:00

In the light of the morning sun Ross wasn’t sure. The mind plays tricks.

So does the body.

By midafternoon he was back in bed, shivering in the sudden onslaught of chills and fever. Dreams can herald illness, he told himself. But as darkness deepened, the fever flamed, bringing visions—Death, with his fleshless face and soundless voice, his scythe and hourglass. How soon would the sand run out? When it did, the scythe would swing, and he feared that scythe. Isn’t there someone you know who has forfeited the right to live?

Ross tried to think. The mind is a computer, and in delirium the computer was down. Those rich writers with their fancy word-processors—did their expensive equipment ever go down too? His mind was blank, blank as a computer screen, but now something flickered into view.

A face was forming. He’d seen it many times before, in close-up on television talk-shows, peering out at him from newspaper pages, smiling smugly on the backs of book-jackets.

Kevin Colfax. He knew the name. Thanks to the media, everyone knew Kevin Colfax. Famous author. Owner of a villa on the Riviera, a fleet of classic cars, a sixth wife and a dozen mistresses.

Romans à clef, that’s what they called his books. He cannibalized from the pages of the National Enquirer and People magazine, took the lives of celebrities and turned them into pornography—grossly-explicit sex and vulgar violence to feed the fantasies of mindless millions bent on mental masturbation. His steamy sleaze boosted him to best-seller lists and the A-lists of parties where lines of coke were snorted by upwardly-mobile arrivistes who no longer had any place to go except where tripping might take them. But now he was where he really belonged—on Ross’s hit-list.

The face faded in the flush of fever and Ross murmured through dry, cracked lips. “Kill Kevin Colfax.” Perspiration bathed his body as he sank into slumber.

When he awoke the following morning the fever was gone but resolution remained. Kevin Colfax deserved to die.

The only question was how—there must be a way that left no clue.

Poison?

Over the years Ross had researched toxicology and amassed an imposing number of reference-works. Amazing how many lethal compounds existed that were easy to procure, or concoct from simple substances found in almost every household. Fast-acting, fatal, and almost undetectable if proper precautions were taken.

Once he knew what to look for, Ross lost no time in finding it. The insecticide had been outlawed years ago but he’d never bothered to throw it away and still had half the contents in a spray-can. A bit of boiling on the stove and the stuff condensed, leaving a deadly distillate that would kill on contact.

But how to make that contact?

He didn’t know Kevin Colfax or anyone in the privileged circles which he orbited. There was no way of introducing a pinch of the poisonous substance into his food or drink or the powder he inhaled through his nasal passages. Colfax was surrounded by personal security designed to protect him from friends, foes and fans alike.

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