Dean Koontz - False Memory

He is assured, perhaps by the invisible visitor, that he need not be afraid, hut when he opens his eyes, he sees a fearsome thing hanging over him. The bird has been impossibly condensed, crushed — twisted — squeezed, until it now fits inside the bulging glucose bag. In spite of this compression, the heron remains recognizable — though it resembles a bird painted by some half-baked Picasso wanna-be with a taste for the macabre. Worse, it is somehow still alive and shrieking, a/though its shrill cries are muted by the clear walls of its plastic prison. It tries to squirm inside the bag, tries to break free with sharp beak and talons, cannot, and rolls one bleak black eye, glaring down at Dusty with demonic intensity.

He feels trapped, too, lying here helpless under the pendant bird: he with the weakness of one crucified, it with the dark energy of an ornament fashioned for a Satanist's mock Christmas tree. Then the heron dissolves into a bloody brown slush, and the clear fluid in the intravenous line begins to cloud as the substance of the bird seeps out of the bag and downward, downward. Watching this filthy murk contaminate the tube inch by inch, Dusty screams, but he makes no sound. Paralyzed, drawing great draughts of air but as silently as one struggling to breathe in a vacuum, he tries to lift his right hand and tear out the IV, tries to cast himself’ off the bed, cannot, and he rolls his eyes, straining to see the last inch of the tube as the toxin reaches the needle.

A terrible flash of inner heat, as though lightning arcs through his veins and arteries, is followed by a shriek when the bird enters his blood. He feels it surging up his median basilic vein, through biceps and into torso, and almost at once an intolerable fluttering arises within his heart, the busy twitching-pecking-fluffing of something making a nest.

Still in the lotus position on Valet’s sheepskin pillow, Martie opens her eyes. They are not blue, as before, but as black as her hair No whites at all:

Each socket is filled with a single, smooth, wet, convex blackness. Avian eyes are generally round, and these are almond-shaped like those of a human being, but they are the eyes of the heron nonetheless.

“Welcome,” she says.

Dusty snapped awake, so clearheaded the instant he opened his eyes that he didn’t cry out or sit up in bed to orient himself. He lay very still, on his back, staring at the ceiling.

His nightstand lamp was aglow, as he had left it. The floor lamp was beside the reading chair, where it belonged; it had not been pressed into service as an IV stand.

His heart didn’t flutter. It pounded. As far as he could tell, his heart was still his private domain, where nothing roosted except his own hopes, anxieties, loves, and prejudices.

Valet snored softly.

Beside Dusty, Martie enjoyed the deep slumber of a good woman — albeit goodness was in this case assisted by three doses of sleep-inducing antihistamines.

While the dream remained fresh, he walked around it in his mind, considering it from a variety of perspectives. He tried to apply the lesson he had long ago learned from the pencil drawing of a forest primeval that morphed into an image of a Gothic metropolis when it was approached without preconceptions.

Ordinarily, he didn’t analyze his dreams.

Freud, however, had been convinced that fishy expressions of the subconscious could be seined from dreams to provide a banquet for a psychoanalyst. Dr. Derek Lampton, Dusty’s stepfather, fourth of Claudette’s four husbands, also cast his lines into that same sea and regularly reeled in strange, squishy hypotheses that he force-fed to his patients without regard for the possibility that they might be poisonous.

Because Freud and Lizard Lampton had faith in dreams, Dusty had never taken them seriously. Now he was loath to admit there might be meaning in this one, and yet he sensed a morsel of truth in it. Finding one scrap of clean fact in that heap of trash, however, was going to be a Herculean task.

if his exceptional eidetic and audile memory preserved all the details of dreams as well as it stored away real experiences, then at least he could be sure that if he sorted through the refuse of this nightmare carefully enough, he would eventually find any shiny truth that might await discovery like a piece of heirloom silverware accidentally thrown out with the dinner garbage.

“The video,” Susan repeated, in response to Ahriman’s inquiry, and once more she looked away from him, toward the ming tree.

Surprised, the doctor smiled. “You’re still such a modest girl, considering the things you’ve done. Relax, dear. I’ve made only one tape of you — a ninety-minute astonishment, I will admit — and there’ll be just one more, next time we meet. Nobody but me gets to see my little home movies. They will never be broadcast on CNN or NBC, I assure you. Although the Nielson ratings would be through the roof, don’t you think?”

Susan continued to stare at the potted ming tree, but now the doctor understood why she was able to look away from him even though he had commanded her to stand eye-to-eye. Shame was a powerful force, from which she drew the strength for this one small rebellion. We all commit acts that shame us, and with varying degrees of difficulty, we reach accommodation with ourselves, forming pearls of guilt around each offending bit of moral grit. Guilt, unlike shame, can be nearly as soothing as virtue, because the jagged edges of the thing that it encapsulates can no longer be felt, and the guilt itself becomes the object of our interest. Susan could have made a necklace from all the moments of shame to which Ahriman had subjected her but because she was aware of the videotape record, she was not able to form her little pearls of guilt and thus smooth the shame away.

The doctor commanded her to look at him, and after a hesitation, she once more shifted her attention from the ming tree to his eyes.

He instructed her to descend the steps of her subconscious, until she returned to the mind chapel, from which he had previously allowed her to ascend a short distance in order to enhance their play session.

When she was once more in that deep redoubt, her eyes jiggled briefly. Her personality had been filtered from her and set aside, as a chef would strain the solids out of beef broth to make bouillon, and now her mind was a pellucid liquid, waiting to be flavored according to Ahriman’s recipe.

He said, “You will forget your father was here tonight. Memories of his face where you should have seen mine, memories of his voice when you should have heard mine, are now dust, and less than dust, all blown away. I am your doctor, not your father. Tell me who I am, Susan.”

Her whispery voice seemed to echo from a subterranean room:

“Dr. Ahriman.”

“As always, of course, you will have absolutely no accessible memory of what happened between us, absolutely no accessible memory of my presence here tonight.”

In spite of his best efforts, somewhere memory survived, perhaps in an unknowable realm below the subconscious. Otherwise, she would not suffer shame at all, because no recollection of these depravities or those of other nights would remain. Her lingering shame was, in the doctor’s view, proof of a sub-subconscious — a level even beneath the id — where experience left an indelible mark. This deepest of all memory was, Ahriman believed, virtually inaccessible and of no danger to him; he needed only to wipe clean the slates of her conscious and subconscious to be safe.

Some would have wondered if this sub-subconscious might be the soul. The doctor was not one of them.

“If nevertheless you have any reason to feel that you have been sexually assaulted, any soreness or other clue, you will suspect no one other than your estranged husband, Eric. Tell me now whether or not you fully understand what I’ve just said.”