Dean Koontz - False Memory

Move, move, move.

She left the back door standing open and parked the wheeled trash can on the porch, at the threshold, where it was near enough to be convenient. She removed the lid and put it aside on the porch floor.

In the kitchen once more, she pulled open a cabinet drawer and scanned the gleaming contents: flatware. Salad forks. Dinner forks. Dinner knives. Butter knives. Also ten steak knives with wooden handles.

She didn’t touch the dangerous items. Instead, she carefully removed the safer pieces — tablespoons, teaspoons, coffee spoons — and placed them on the counter. Then she removed the drawer from the cabinet, carried it to the open door, and upended it.

Along with a set of plastic drawer dividers, a steely cascade of forks and knives clinked and jingled into the trash can. The marrow in Martie’s bones rang in sympathy with the icy sound.

She put the drawer on the kitchen floor, in a corner, out of her way. She didn’t have time to return the salvaged spoons to it and slide it back into the cabinet.

The false twilight was bleeding into true twilight. Through the open door, she could hear the first rough songs of the little winter toads that ventured forth only at night.

Another drawer. Miscellaneous culinary tools and gadgets. A bottle opener. A potato peeler. A lemon-peel shaver. A wicked-looking spikelike meat thermometer. A small meat-tenderizing hammer. A corkscrew. Miniature yellow-plastic ears of corn with two sharp pins protruding from one end, which could be jammed into a cob to make fresh corn easier to eat.

She was astonished by the number and variety of common household items that could also serve as weapons. On his way to an inquisition, any torturer would feel well prepared if his kit contained nothing more than the items now before Martie’s eyes.

The drawer also contained large plastic clips for bags of potato chips, measuring spoons, measuring cups, a melon scoop, a few rubber spatulas, wire whisks, and other items that didn’t look as if they would be lethal even in the possession of the cleverest of homicidal sociopaths.

Hesitantly, she reached into the drawer, intending to sort the dangerous items from the harmless things, but at once she snatched her hand back. She wasn’t willing to trust herself with the task.

“This is crazy, this is totally nuts,” she said, and her voice was so torqued by fear and by despair that she barely recognized it as her own.

She dumped the entire collection of gadgets into the trash can. She put the second empty drawer atop the first, in the corner.

Dusty, where the hell are you? I need you. I need you. Come home, please, come home.

Because she had to keep moving to avoid being paralyzed by fear, she found the courage to open a third drawer. Several big serving forks. Meat forks. An electric carving knife.

Outside, the shrill singing of toads in the wet twilight.

Martie Rhodes, struggling to stave off total panic, pushed by obsession, pulled by compulsion, moved through a kitchen that now seemed no less filled with mortal threats than a battlefield torn by clashing armies.

She found a rolling pin in a drawer near the ovens. You could bash in someone’s face with a rolling pin, smash his nose, split his lips, club and club and club him until you fractured his skull, until you left him on the floor, gazing sightlessly at you, with starburst hemorrhages in both his eyes.

Although no potential victim was present, and although she knew she was incapable of bludgeoning anyone, Martie nonetheless had to talk herself into plucking the rolling pin from the drawer. “Get it, come on, for God’s sake, get it, get it out of here, get rid of it.”

Halfway to the trash can, she dropped the pin. It made a hard, sickening sound when it struck the floor.

She couldn’t immediately summon the nerve to pick up the pin again. She kicked it, and it rolled all the way to the threshold of the open door.

With the rain, the last of the wind had drained out of the day, but the twilight exhaled a cold draft across the porch and through the kitchen door. Hoping the chilly air would clear her head, she took deep breaths, shuddering with each.

She gazed down at the rolling pin, which lay at her feet. All she had to do was snatch up the damn thing and drop it into the can beyond the threshold. It wouldn’t be in her hand more than a second or two.

Alone, she couldn’t harm anyone. And even if she was seized by a self-destructive impulse, a rolling pin wasn’t the ideal weapon with which to commit harakiri, although it was better than a rubber spatula.

With that little joke, she humiliated herself into plucking the rolling pin off the floor and dropping it in the can.

When she searched the next drawer, she found an array of tools and devices that for the most part didn’t alarm her. A flour sifter. An egg timer. A garlic press. A basting brush. A colander. A juice strainer. A lettuce dryer.

Mortar and pestle. No good. The mortar was about the size of a baseball, carved out of a chunk of solid granite. You could brain someone with it. Step up behind him and swing it down hard, in a savage arc, cave in his skull.

The mortar had to go, right away, now, before Dusty came home or before some unwary neighbor rang the doorbell.

The pestle seemed harmless, but the two items composed a set, so she took both to the trash can. The granite mortar was cold in her cupped hand. Even after she threw it away, the memory of its coolness and satisfying heft tantalized her, and she knew that she had been right to dispose of it.

As she was pulling open another drawer, the telephone rang. She answered it hopefully: “Dusty?”

“It’s me,” Susan Jagger said.

“Oh.” Her heart withered with disappointment. She tried not to let her distress color her voice. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Are you all right, Martie?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You sound funny.”

“I’m okay.”

“You sound out of breath.”

“I was just doing some heavy lifting.”

“Something is wrong.”

“Nothing is wrong. Don’t grind me, Sooz. I’ve got a mother for that. What’s up?”

Martie wanted to get off the phone. She had so much to do. So many kitchen drawers and cupboards had not yet been searched. And dangerous items, potential weapons, were in other rooms, as well. Instruments of death were scattered throughout the house, and she needed to find them all, dispose of every last one.

“This is a little embarrassing,” Susan said.

“What is?”

“I’m not paranoid, Martie.”

“I know you’re not.”

“He does come here sometimes, you know, sometimes at night when I’m sleeping.”

“Eric.”

“It must be him. All right, I know, he doesn’t have a key, and the doors and windows are all locked, there’s no way in, but it’s got to be him.”

Martie opened one of the drawers near the telephone. Among other things, it contained the pair of scissors that she had not been able to touch earlier, when she had wanted to cut the strapping tape.

Susan said, “You asked me how I know when he’s been here, were things out of order, the smell of his cologne on the air, anything like that.”

The handles of the scissors were coated in black rubber to provide a sure grip.

“But it’s a lot worse than cologne, Martie, it’s creepy. and embarrassing.”

The steel blades were as polished as mirrors on the outside, with a dull brushed finish on the inner cutting surfaces.

“Martie?”

“Yeah, I heard.” She was pressing the phone so tightly to her head that her ear hurt. “So tell me the creepy thing.”

“How I know he’s been here, he leaves his… his stuff.”