Night Chills Read Free

wrist. He left hand could not hold the blade. It slipped from his fingers.
    He plucked it out of the darkening water, held it in his right hand once more, and cut across the bridge of his left foot.
    Then he leaned back and closed his eyes.
    Slowly, he drifted down a lightless tunnel of the mind, into ever deepening darkness, getting dizzy and weak, feeling surprisingly little pain. In thirty minutes he was comatose. In forty minutes he was dead.

Sunday, August 7, 1977
    After working all week on the midnight shift, Buddy Pellineri was unable to change his sleeping habits for the weekend. At four o’clock Sunday morning, he was in the kitchen of his tiny, two-room apartment. The radio, his most prized possession, was turned down low: music from an all-night Canadian station. He was sitting at the table, next to the window, staring fixedly at the shadows on the far side of the street. He had seen a cat running along the walk over there, and the hairs had stood up on the back of his neck.
    There were two things that Buddy Pellineri hated and feared more than all else in life: cats and ridicule.
    For twenty-five years he had lived with his mother, and for twenty years she had kept a cat in the house, first Caesar and then Caesar the Second. She had never realized that the cats were quicker and far more cunning than her son and, therefore, a bane to him. Caesar—first or second; it made no difference—liked to lie quietly atop bookshelves and cupboards and highboys, until Buddy walked past. Then he leaped on Buddy’s back. The cat never scratched him badly; for the most part it was concerned with getting a good grip on his shirt so that he could not shake it loose. Every time, as if following a script, Buddy would panic and run in circles or dart from from to room in search of his mother, with Caesar spitting in his ear. He never suffered much pain from the game; it was the suddenness of the attack, the surprise of it that terrified him. His mother said Caesar was only being playful. At times he confronted the cat to prove he was unafraid. He approached it as it sunned on a window sill and tried to stare it down. But he was always the first to look away. He couldn’t understand people all that well, and the alien gaze of the cat made him feel especially stupid and inferior.
    He was able to deal with ridicule more easily than he could deal with cats, if only because it never came as a surprise. When he was a boy, other children had teased him mercilessly. He had learned to be prepared for it, learned how to endure it. Buddy was bright enough to know that he was different from others. If his intelligence quotient had been several points lower, he wouldn’t have known enough to be ashamed of himself, which was what people expected of him. If his I.Q. had been a few points higher, he would have been able to cope, at least to some extent, with both cats and cruel people. Because he fell in between, his life was lived as an apology for his stunted intellect—a curse he bore as a result of a malfunctioning hospital incubator where he had been placed after being born five weeks prematurely.
    His father had died in a mill accident when Buddy was five, and the first Caesar had entered the house two weeks later. If his father hadn’t died, perhaps there would have been no cats. And Buddy liked to think that, with his father alive, no one would dare ridicule him.
    Ever since his mother had succumbed to cancer ten years ago, when he was twenty-five, Buddy had worked as an assistant night watchman at the Big Union Supply Company mill. If he suspected that certain people at Big Union felt responsible for him and that his job was make-work, he had never admitted it, not even to himself. He was on duty from midnight to eight, five nights a week, patrolling the storage yards, looking for smoke, sparks, and flames. He was proud of his position. In the last ten years he had come to enjoy a measure of self-respect that would have been