Free Shiver by Michael Prescott Page B

the key, the key to everything. The origins of any adult’s secret terrors and painful inadequacies could be traced back to those few precious years when a young life was molded and shaped like clay on a potter’s wheel.
    That serial killer must have had a horrible childhood; people like him always did.
    But not just people like him.
    Wendy could point to no physical mistreatment that had scarred her as a child. No whippings, no molestations, no incarcerations in locked closets. But there were other forms of abuse.
    For her entire adult life, she’d found it painfully difficult to think about her childhood or even to remember it. Those years were masked by a fog of amnesia. She hated that fog. Pieces of herself lay concealed behind it, hidden from her—stolen from her—erased from memory as if they’d never existed. But when she tried to poke holes in the fog bank, when she tried to see the truths veiled by smoke and darkness, her mind usually would make a sharp detour, and all of a sudden she would find herself thinking about what to make for dinner or what to wear at work. Oh, the mind was a wonderful thing, all right, and what it was most wonderful at was protecting itself. It put up walls and smokescreens and No Trespassing signs to keep you away from dangerous, forbidden, hurtful memories.
    But sometimes she forced her mind to stay on track, to bring up the past and relive it, no matter how frantically some small scared part of herself tugged like a dog on a leash, fighting to pull free of such thoughts. Then, for a little while, she became a girl again, the timid, frightened girl who’d grown into the woman she was.
    That girl’s father, Stanley Marshall Alden, had been the products inventory supervisor for the Cincinnati office of a nationwide manufacturer of metal containers. Wendy had never quite known what a products inventory supervisor was; she’d been afraid to ask. Stan Alden did not take kindly to any question that could be taken as a derogation of his responsibilities, his attainments, his earning power, or his manhood; all these concepts, she’d understood in the wordless way of a child, were intimately bound together in his mind.
    Her mother, Audrey, had been a housewife and a Red Cross volunteer. Her duties at the Red Cross, which were never clearly specified, conveniently required her to be out of the house during most evenings and many weekends. Wendy was ten years old before she realized that Audrey Alden used her charity work as an excuse to avoid contact with her husband. She was fifteen before she permitted herself to know that her parents hated each other.
    Why they’d stayed married, Wendy had no idea. That was another of those things she’d never dared to ask. She knew they were unhappy, though they tried desperately not to show it. She remembered her mother’s smile, a smile made of gritted teeth, and her father’s medicine cabinet, the shelves lined with antacids and headache pills. The internal pressure of all that unvoiced, unadmitted anger must have been considerable. To survive, her parents had needed a safety valve. They found one; it was named Wendy.
    Their common misery, the one thing they shared and nurtured together, had been taken out on their only child. Her parents had been her constant critics, their appraising eyes and chilly voices the ceaseless barometers of her own worthlessness.
    Whatever she did was wrong. If she got good grades she was called a perfectionist, a know-it-all, a smarty-pants; if she let her schoolwork slide, she was accused of being lazy, stupid, undisciplined. When she was quiet, she was told to stop acting so damn sullen; but if she forced a smile and fumbled her way through a joke, she was ordered to pipe down. She tried to please her parents by anticipating their criticism and using it on herself, remarking humbly on her clumsiness and obstinacy. “Show some self-confidence, for God’s sake,” her father would growl. Desperately she complied,