Read Online Escape the Night by Richard North Patterson - Free Book Online

most.”
    He made no further answer.
    Phillip’s attempts to gain his father’s favor redoubled until he grew exhausted; his tiredness resulted in a heedlessness in things outside John Carey’s reach. He drank too much, spent more money than he had, slept with hat-check girls and actresses until he forgot their names. He liked to dominate them, using his money as leverage to make them do as he wished, sometimes in pairs or to each other. As they performed, eyes blank and joyless, Phillip would fantasize the hurt faces of abandoned boyfriends—hicks from Kansas or Ohio who had begged their favors in the dark and hoped for marriage—witnessing their debasement at his hands. Afterwards he would shower and leave, trembling at his needs and the memory of his mother, rising in porcelain perfection from the grave of his subconscious.
    He began imagining Alicia Carey.
    He had mounted a stringy modeling student on a mattress in a dingy four-story walk-up in the East Village, face averted from his own act. As she moaned he could not recall her features, felt his erection die of guilt inside her, cold fear crawl across his stomach. His mind could stir no images, no act or woman which could save him. Then he thought of Allie Fairvoort.
    He swelled inside the thin woman as she became his brother’s wife, her arrogant disdain turning to desire, the imagined boyfriend of his fantasies now Charles, staring in stunned humiliation as Alicia Carey cried for Phillip to take her and his rhythm became a mindless pounding and he came, screaming. As the woman dressed he saw she had green eyes.
    He paid her to rinse her hair ash-blonde.
    She would dress in heels and black stockings, begging Phillip to do anything he wished. She banked the money he gave her. He paid her more for sodomy. When she took her savings and went back to marry her boyfriend in Texas, he wept.
    He felt utterly alone.
    In this despairing void, Phillip grew superstitious, until he felt the absent Charles in the silence of his father. Peter was the symbol of Charles’s succession.
    Slowly, against his will, Phillip Carey began to fantasize his brother’s death.
    It would be an accident; Phillip would be sad. Twinned with his surviving son by mourning, his father would reach out to him …
    Phillip recoiled from himself in horror.
    He went to a psychiatrist.
    Repeating his fantasies aloud, he heard the man’s pencil scratch across his notepad: in his mind the daydreams, written, became the forecast of his brother’s death. The pencil kept on scratching …
    Phillip Carey bolted from the office.
    His mind festered with apologies he could not speak: to Charles for the deathly images dancing in his brain, to Peter for the heartache they would bring. Remembering Englehardt, he tried hoping that the clicking sounds he still heard on his telephone issued not from men, but from the reprimand of conscience against his fevered imaginings. In his guilt, from a feeling of unworthiness too deep to express, loneliness became a self-protection.
    No person could be allowed too close, for the evil he might see.
    Caught between self-loathing and the perfect image of his mother, he could not unmask himself to women who were peers, or reach for one to marry. Ruth Levy, in bed with Charles shortly after his return to work, called it “Phillip’s prostitute-madonna complex.”
    Charles Carey had found sweeter consolation.
    When Charles first met Ruth Levy, shortly before he left Van Dreelen & Carey, he would have laughed at the idea of sleeping with her: he did not then know that John Carey would use her to lure him closer to the forsaken conflict with his brother.
    Hostage to his love for Peter, he had been discreet in finding women, worrying about Phillip or the men who followed him, and the poison they might plant with Allie. He was fearful of divorce: perhaps when Peter was older, less victim to his mother’s moods. And he found that