Dean Koontz - False Memory

“Maybe it was a gift,” he suggested.

“From whom?”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

“No. If it was a gift, I’d remember.”

“When you examined the book just now, why didn’t you open it?”

“Open it? There’s nothing in it that’ll tell me where I bought it. “She held out the half-depleted roll of candy. “Here. You’re a little irritable. Maybe you’re hypoglycemic. Pump in some sugar.”

“Pass. Martie, do you know what this novel is about?”

“Sure. It’s a thriller.”

“But a thriller about what?”

“Entertaining plot, colorful characters. I’m enjoying it.”

“And what’s it about?”

She stared at the paperback, chewing the candy more slowly. “Well, you know thrillers. Run, jump, chase, shoot, run some more.”

In Dusty’s hands, the book seemed to grow cold. Heavier. Its texture began to change, too: The colorful cover seemed slicker than before. As if it weren’t just a book. More than a book. A talisman, too, that might at any moment work its witchery and send him plunging through a magical doorway into a dragon-infested alternate reality of the type Skeet liked to read about. Or maybe the talisman already had performed that trick, without him realizing that he’d stepped out of one world and into another. Here there be dragons.

“Martie, I don’t think you’ve read a sentence of this book. Or even opened it.”

Holding a chocolate between thumb and forefinger, poised to pop it into her mouth, she said, “I told you, it’s a real thriller. The writing’s good. The plot is entertaining, and the characters are colorful. I’m… enjoying… it.”

Dusty saw that she recognized the singsong quality in her voice. Her mouth was open, but the chocolate morsel remained unpopped. Her eyes widened as if with surprise.

Holding the book up, back cover turned to her, he said, “It’s about brainwashing, Martie. Even the sales copy makes that clear.”

Her expression, better than any words she could have spoken, revealed that the subject of the novel was news to her.

“It takes place during and a few years after the Korean War,” he told her.

The circlet of chocolate was beginning to get tacky between her fingers, so she slipped it into her mouth.

“It’s about this guy,” Dusty said, “this soldier, Raymond Shaw, who has —”

“I’m listening,” she said.

Dusty’s attention was on the book when Martie interrupted him, and when he looked up, he saw that a placid, detached expression had claimed her face. Her mouth hung open. He saw the chocolate lozenge on her tongue.

“Martie?”

“Yeah,” she said thickly, not bothering to close her mouth, the candy quivering on her tongue.

Here was the episode with Skeet at New Life Clinic, repeating with Martie.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

She blinked, closed her mouth, tongued the candy into her left cheek, and said, “What’s wrong?”

She was back with him, no longer detached, eyes clear.

“Where did you go?” he asked.

“Me? When?”

“Here. Just now.”

She cocked her head. “I really think you need a hit of sugar.”

“Why did you say ‘I’m listening’?”

“I didn’t say it.”

Dusty looked through the windshield and saw no obsidian castle with red-eyed fiends manning its saw-toothed battlements, no dragons devouring knights. Just the breeze-swept parking lot, the world as he knew it, though it was less knowable than it had once seemed.

“I was telling you about the book,” he reminded her. “Do you remember the last thing I said about it?”

“Dusty, what on earth —”

“Humor me.”

She sighed. “Well, you said it’s about this guy, this soldier —”

“And?”

“And then you said, ‘Oh, shit.’ That’s all.”

He was getting creeped out just holding the book. He put it on the dashboard. “You don’t remember the name of the soldier?”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Yes, I did. And then… you were gone. Last night you told me you feel like you’re missing bits of time. Well, you’ve got a few seconds missing right here.”

She looked disbelieving. “I don’t feel it.”

“Raymond Shaw,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

Detached again. Eyes out of focus. But not as profoundly in a trance as Skeet had been.

Suppose the name activates the subject. Suppose the haiku then makes the subconscious accessible for instruction.

“Clear cascades,” Dusty said, because it was the only haiku with which he was familiar.

Her eyes were glazed, but they didn’t jiggle like Skeet’s.

She hadn’t responded to these lines last night, when she’d been falling asleep; and she wasn’t going to respond to them now. Her trigger was Raymond Shaw, not Dr. Yen Lo, and her haiku was different from Skeet’s.

Nevertheless, he said, “Into the waves scatter.”

She blinked. “Scatter what?”

“You were gone again.”

Regarding him dubiously, she said, “Then who kept my seat warm?”

“I’m serious. You were gone. Like Skeet but different. Just the name, just Dr. Yen Lo, and he got loosey-goosey, babbling about the rules, upset with me because I wasn’t operating him correctly. But you’re tighter, you just wait for the right thing to be said, and then if I don’t have the verse to open you for instruction, you snap right out of it.”

She looked at him as though he were addled.

“I’m not addled,” he insisted.

“You’re definitely weirder than when I married you. What’s this stuff about Skeet?”

“Something bizarre happened at New Life yesterday. I haven’t had a chance to tell you about it.”

“Here’s your chance.”

He shook his head. “Later. Let’s settle this first, prove to you what’s happening. Do you have any candy in your mouth?”

“In my mouth?”

“Yeah. Did you finish that last piece you took, or is some of it still in your mouth?”

She slipped the half-dissolved chocolate morsel out of the pocket of her cheek, showed it to him on the tip of her tongue, and then tucked it away again. Holding the half-finished roll of candy toward him, she said, “But wouldn’t you prefer an unused piece?”

Taking the roll from her, he said, “Swallow the candy.”

“Sometimes I like to let it melt.”

“You can let the next one melt,” he said impatiently. “Come on, come on, swallow it.”

“Definitely hypoglycemic.”

“No, I’m irritable by nature,” he said, peeling a chocolate from the roll. “Have you swallowed?”

She swallowed theatrically.

“No candy in your mouth?” he pressed. “It’s gone? All of it?”

“Yeah, yeah. But what does this have to do with —”

“Raymond Shaw,” Dusty said.

“I’m listening.”

Eyes drifting out of focus, a subtle slackness pulling down on her face, mouth open expectantly, she waited for the haiku that he didn’t know.

Instead of poetry, Dusty gave her candy, slipping the chocolate lozenge between her open lips, past her teeth, onto her tongue, which didn’t even twitch when the treat touched it.

Even as Dusty leaned away from her, Martie blinked, started to finish the sentence that Dusty had interrupted with the name Raymond Shaw — and became aware of the candy in her mouth.

For her, this moment was equivalent to Dusty’s finding the book in his hand again, magically, the instant after dropping it on the waiting-room floor. He had almost thrown the paperback across the room, in shock, before he’d checked himself. Martie wasn’t able to check herself: She gasped with surprise, choked, coughed, and ejected the candy with immeasurably more force than a Pez dispenser, scoring a direct hit on his forehead.