Dean Koontz - False Memory

“Susan, please pick up the razor blade.”

For a moment, the steel blade stuck to the wet rim of the tub. Then she got it between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.

The doctor preferred flamboyant destruction. Easily bored, he saw no thrill in a poisoned cup of tea, in a simple hangman’s noose — or, in this case, in the severance of a radial artery or two. The real fun was in shotguns, large-caliber handguns, axes, chain saws, and explosives.

Her pistol had interested him. But a gunshot would wake the retirees downstairs, even if they had gone to bed martini-sotted, as usual.

Disappointed but determined not to surrender to his taste for the theatrical, Ahriman told Susan how to grip the blade, precisely where to cut on her left wrist, and how hard to press. Before the mortal slice, she scored her flesh lightly, and then lightly again, producing the hesitation marks that the police were accustomed to seeing in more than half of such suicides. Then, with no expression on her face and with only pure green beauty in her eyes, she made a third cut, much deeper than the first two.

Because some tendon damage was unavoidably sustained in addition to the severing of the radial artery, she couldn’t hold the blade as firmly in her left hand as she had held it in her right. The wound in her right wrist was comparatively shallow and bled less heartily than the wound in her left; but that, too, would be consistent with police expectations.

She dropped the blade. Lowered her arms into the water.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

The doctor waited with her for the end. He could have walked out, confident that in this obedient state, even unchaperoned, she would sit calmly in the tub until she died. Already in this game, however, fate had thrown him a couple of change-up pitches, and he was going to remain alert for another.

Far less steam arose from the water now, and attar of roses was not the only scent it carried anymore.

Yearning for greater drama, Ahriman considered bringing Susan out of the mind chapel and up a flight or two of stairs, nearer to full consciousness, where she could better appreciate her plight. Although he could control her at higher levels of awareness, there was a slim but real chance that an involuntary cry of terror or despair would escape her, just loud enough to wake pensioners and parakeets downstairs.

He waited.

The bathwater grew darker as it cooled, though the color that Susan lent to it was hot.

She sat in silence, no more touched by emotion than the tub that contained her, and the doctor was, therefore, shocked to see a single tear track down her face.

He leaned forward, disbelieving, certain that it must be mere water or perspiration.

When the drop had descended the length of her face, another-larger than the first, enormous — welled from the same eye, and there could be no question that this was the genuine article.

Here was more entertainment than he had expected. Fascinated, he monitored the descent of the tear over the elegant swell of her high cheekbone, into the pocket of her cheek, to the corner of her ripe mouth, and then toward the line of her jaw, where it arrived diminished but large enough to quiver like a pendulous jewel.

This second tear was not followed by a third. The dry lips of Death had kissed away the excess moisture in her eyes.

When Susan’s mouth sagged open, as though with awe, the second — and last — tear trembled and fell from her delicate jaw into the bathwater, with the faintest detectable plink like a note struck from the highest octave on a piano keyboard rooms and rooms away.

Green eyes growing gray. Rosy skin borrows color… from the razor blade.

He rather liked that one.

Leaving the lights on, of course, Ahriman picked up her soiled underwear from the hamper lid and stepped out of the bathroom, into the bedroom, where he retrieved the videotape.

In the living room, he paused to enjoy the subtle scent of citrus potpourri seeping from the ceramic jars. He had always meant to ask Susan where she’d purchased this particular melange, so that he could acquire some for his own home. Too late.

At the kitchen door, fingers safely wrapped in Kleenex, he twisted the thumb turn on the only lock that she had engaged following his arrival. Outside, after quietly pulling the door shut, he used the spare key from the secretaire to engage both dead bolts.

He could do nothing about the security chain. This one detail should not make the authorities unduly suspicious.

The night and the fog, his conspirators, still waited for him, and the surf had grown louder since last he’d heard it, masking what little noise his shoes made on the rubber treads of the stairs.

Again, he reached his Mercedes without encountering anyone, and on the pleasant drive home, he found the streets only slightly busier than they had been forty-five minutes earlier.

His hilltop house stood on two acres in a gated community: a sprawling, futuristic, artful stack of square and rectangular forms, some in polished poured-in-place concrete and others clad in black granite, with floating decks, deep cantilevered roofs, bronze doors, and floor-to-ceiling windows so massive that birds were knocked unconscious against them not just one at a time but in flocks.

The place had been built by a young entrepreneur who had been made improbably rich from the IPO of his Internet retailing company. By the time it was completed, he had become enamored of Southwest architecture and had begun building a forty thousand-square-foot faux adobe pile in the pueblo style, somewhere in Arizona. He’d offered this residence for sale without moving into it.

The doctor parked in the eighteen-car subterranean garage and took the elevator up to the ground floor.

The rooms and hallways were of grand proportions, with polished black granite floors. The antique Persian rugs — in lustrous shades of teal, peach, jade, ruby — were exquisitely patinaed by lifetimes of wear; they seemed to float upon the black granite as if they were magic carpets in flight, the blackness beneath them not stone, but the deep abyss of night.

In corridors and major chambers, lights came on to preset scenes as he entered, triggered by motion sensors managed by thousand-year universal clocks. In smaller rooms, lamps answered to vocal commands.

The young internet billionaire had computerized all the house systems in obsessive detail. When he had seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, no doubt he had been under the impression that Hal was the hero.

In his lacewood-paneled study, the doctor phoned his office and left a voice-mail message for his secretary, asking her to cancel and reschedule his ten- and eleven-o’clock appointments to next week. He would be in after lunch.

There were no patient sessions filled on the second half of his Wednesday calendar. He had left his afternoon open for Dustin and Martine Rhodes, who would call in the morning, desperate for help.

Eighteen months ago, the doctor had realized that Martie could be one of his key toy soldiers in a marvelous game more elaborate than any he had played heretofore. Eight months ago, he served his witches’ brew of drugs to her in coffee, with a chocolate biscotto on the side, and programmed her during three of Susan’s office visits, as Susan herself had long previously come under his thrall.

Since then, Martie had awaited use, unaware that she’d been added to Ahriman’s collection.

Tuesday morning, eighteen hours ago, when Martie came to the office with Susan, the doctor at last put her into play, escorting her down into her mind chapel, where he implanted the suggestion that she could not trust herself, that she was a grave danger to herself and others, a monster capable of extreme violence and unspeakable atrocities.