Dean Koontz: False Memory

Abruptly weak, she bent forward, hunching her shoulders, feeling as if a great weight of stones had been stacked on her back. Gripping the pedestal sink with both hands, she gazed down at the empty bowl. She was so bowed by irrational fear that she was physically unable to look up.

A loose black hair, one of her own, lay on the curve of white porcelain, one end curling under the open brass drain plug, and even this filament seemed ominous. Not daring to raise her eyes, she fumbled for a faucet, turned on the hot water, and washed the hair away.

Letting the water run, she inhaled the rising steam, but it did not dispel the chill that had returned to her. Gradually the edges of the sink became warmer in her white-knuckled grip, though her hands remained cold.

The mirror waited. Martie could no longer think of it as a mere inanimate object, as a harmless sheet of glass with silvered backing. It waited.

Or, rather, something within the mirror waited to make eye contact with her. An entity. A presence.

Without lifting her head, she glanced to her right and saw Valet standing in the doorway. Ordinarily, the dog’s puzzled expression would have made her laugh; now, laughter would require a conscious effort, and it wouldn’t sound like laughter when it grated from her.

Although she was afraid of the mirror, she was also — and more intensely — frightened of her own bizarre behavior, of her utterly uncharacteristic loss of control.

The steam condensed on her face. It felt thick in her throat, suffocating. And the rushing, gurgling water began to sound like malevolent voices, wicked chuckling.

Martie shut off the faucet. In the comparative quiet, her breathing was alarmingly rapid and ragged with an unmistakable note of desperation.

Earlier, in the street, deep breathing had cleared her head, flushing away the fear, and her distorted shadow had then ceased to be threatening. This time, however, each inhalation seemed to fuel her terror, as oxygen feeds a fire.

She would have fled the room, but all her strength had drained out of her. Her legs were rubbery, and she worried that she would fall and strike her head against something. She needed the sink for support.

She tried to reason with herself, hoping to make her way back to stability with simple steps of logic. The mirror couldn’t harm her. It was not a presence. Just a thing. An inanimate object. Mere glass, for God’s sake.

Nothing she would see in it could be a threat to her. It was not a window at which some madman might be standing, peering in with a lunatic grin, eyes burning with homicidal intent, as in some cheesy screamfest movie. The mirror could not possibly reveal anything but a reflection of the half bath — and of Martie herself.

Logic wasn’t working. In a dark territory of her mind that she’d never traveled before, she found a twisted landscape of superstition.

She became convinced that an entity in the mirror was gaining substance and power because of her efforts to reason herself out of this terror, and she shut her eyes lest she glimpse that hostile spirit even peripherally. Every child knows that the boogeyman under the bed grows stronger and more murderous with each denial of its existence, that the best thing to do is not to think of the hungry beast down there with the dust bunnies under the box springs, with the blood of other children on its fetid breath. Just don’t think of it at all, with its mad-yellow eyes and thorny black tongue. Don’t think of it, where upon it will fade entirely away, and blessed sleep will come at last, followed by morning, and you will wake in your cozy bed, snug under warm blankets, instead of inside some demon’s stomach.

Valet brushed against Martie, and she almost screamed.

When she opened her eyes, she saw the dog peering up with one of those simultaneously imploring and concerned expressions that golden retrievers have polished to near perfection.

Although she was leaning into the pedestal sink, certain that she couldn’t stand without its support, she let go of it with one hand. Trembling, she reached down to touch Valet.

As if the dog were a lightning rod, contact with him seemed to ground Martie, and like a crackling current of electricity, a portion of the paralyzing anxiety flowed out of her. High terror subsided to mere fear.

Although affectionate and sweet-tempered and beautiful, Valet was a timid creature. If nothing in this small room had frightened him, then no danger existed here. He licked her hand.

Taking courage from the dog, Martie finally raised her head. Slowly. Shaking with dire expectations.

The mirror revealed no monstrous countenance, no otherworldly landscape, no ghost: only her own face, drained of color, and the familiar half bath behind her.

When she looked into the reflection of her blue eyes, her heart raced anew, for in a fundamental sense, she had become a stranger to herself. This shaky woman who was spooked by her own shadow, who was stricken by panic at the prospect of confronting a mirror… this was not Martine Rhodes, Smilin’ Bob’s daughter, who had always gripped the reins of life and ridden with enthusiasm and poise.

“What’s happening to me?” she asked the woman in the mirror, but her reflection couldn’t explain, and neither could the dog.

The phone rang. She went into the kitchen to answer it.

Valet followed. He stared at her, puzzled, tail wagging at first, then not wagging.

“Sorry, wrong number,” she said eventually, and she hung up. She noticed the dog’s peculiar attitude. “What’s wrong with you?”

Valet stared at her, hackles slightly raised.

“I swear, it wasn’t the girl poodle next door, calling for you.”

When she returned to the half bath, to the mirror, she still did not like what she saw, but now she knew what to do about it.

Dusty walked under the softly rustling fronds of a wind-stirred phoenix palm and along the side of the house. Here he found Foster “Fig” Newton, the third member of the crew.

Hooked to Fig’s belt was a radio — his ever present electronic IV bottle. A pair of headphones dripped talk radio into his ears.

He didn’t listen to programs concerned with political issues or with the problems of modern life. Any hour, day or night, Fig knew where on the dial to tune in a show dealing with UFOs, alien abductions, telephone messages from the dead, fourth-dimensional beings, and Big Foot.

“Hey, Fig.”

“Hey.”

Fig was diligently sanding a window casing. His callused fingers were white with powdered paint.

“You know about Skeet?” Dusty asked as he followed the slate walkway past Fig.

Nodding, Fig said, “Roof.”

“Pretending he’s gonna jump.”

“Probably will.”

Dusty stopped and turned, surprised. “You really think so?”

Newton was usually so taciturn that Dusty didn’t expect more than a shrug of the shoulders byway of reply. Instead Fig said, “Skeet doesn’t believe in anything.”

“Anything what?” Dusty asked. “Anything period.”

“He isn’t a bad kid, really.”

Fig’s reply was, for him, the equivalent of an after-dinner speech:

“Problem is, he isn’t much of anything.”

Foster Newton’s pie-round face, plum of a chin, full mouth, cherry-red nose with cherry-round tip, and flushed cheeks ought to have made him look like a debauched hedonist; however, he was saved from caricature by clear gray eyes which, magnified by his thick eyeglasses, were full of sorrow. This was not a conditional sorrow, related to Skeet’s suicidal impulse, but a perpetual sorrow with which Fig appeared to regard everyone and everything.

“Hollow,” Fig added.

“Skeet?”