Dean Koontz - False Memory

“All this for a cat?” Dusty wondered.

“Mrs. Jingles was a nice cat. Plus she was my mom’s.”

Martie said, “I feel Valet’s in good hands.”

Smiling, nodding, Ned said, “I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to your puppy.”

On the peninsula, on Balboa Boulevard, a few blocks from Susan’s place, Martie was paging through a haiku collection when she gasped, dropped the book, and huddled forward in the seat, her body clenched as though in pain. “Pull over. Pull over now, hurry, pull over.”

Not pain, fear. That she would seize the wheel. Swing the car into oncoming traffic. The by now familiar the-monster-lurks-in-me blues.

In summer, with the beach crowds, Dusty would probably have had to cruise through an hour-long panic attack to find a parking place. January allowed a quick move to the curb.

On the sidewalk, a few kids whistled past on in-line skates, looking for senior citizens to knock into nursing homes. Bicyclists pumped past on the left, on a quest for death by traffic.

No one showed any interest in Dusty and Martie. That might change if she started screaming again.

He considered how best to restrain her if she began to bash her head against the dashboard. There was no low-risk way to do it. In her panic, she would strenuously resist, try to wrench free, and he would inadvertently hurt her.

“I love you,” he said helplessly.

Then he began to talk to her, just talk quietly, as she rocked in her seat, gasped for breath, and groaned like a woman coping with early labor pains, her panic struggling to be born. He didn’t try to reason with her or coddle her with words, because she already knew how irrational this was. Instead, he talked about their first date.

It had been a fine disaster. He had raved about the restaurant, but in the six weeks since he’d last been there, the ownership had changed. The new chef evidently received his training at the Culinary Institute of Rural Iceland, because the food was cold and every dish had an under taste of volcanic ash. The busboy spilled a glass of water on Dusty, and Dusty spilled a glass of water on Martie, and their waiter spilled a boat of cream sauce on himself. The fire in the kitchen, during dessert, was minor enough to be doused without the fire department, but major enough to require one busboy, one waiter, the maître d’, and the sous-chef (a large Samoan gentleman) to battle it with four extinguishers — though perhaps they required such an ocean of suppressant foam because they got more of it on one another than on the flames. After leaving the restaurant, starving, over a desperate make-good dinner at a coffee shop, Dusty and Martie had laughed so hard that they were bonded forever.

Neither of them was laughing now, but the bond was stronger than ever. Whether it was Dusty’s quiet talk, the lingering effects of Valium, or Dr. Ahriman’s influence, Martie didn’t descend into a full-fledged panic attack. Within two or three minutes, her fear diminished, and she sat up straight in her seat again.

“Better,” she said. “But I still feel like shit.”

“Birdshit,” he reminded her.

“Yeah.”

Although nearly an hour of daylight remained, more than half the passing cars, whether going up or down the peninsula, traveled behind headlights. The sludge moving slowly west to east across the sky was ushering in an early and protracted twilight.

Dusty switched on the lights and pulled into a gap in traffic.

“Thanks for that,” Martie said.

“I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Next time, just talk again. Your voice. It grounds me.”

He wondered how long it would be until he could hold her close, without her stiffening in fear, without that glitter of incipient panic in her eyes. How long, if ever?

The grumbling sea tried to shoulder its way out of the deeps and claim the continent, while the wind-coaxed beach spread sandy fingers across the promenade, stealing the pavement.

Three gulls clung to angled perches along the stair railing, sentinels on a sea watch, trying to decide whether to abandon the blustery shore for more-sheltered roosts inland.

As Martie and Dusty climbed the steep stairs to the third-floor landing, the birds took flight, one at a time, each of them surfing eastward on tumbling waves of air. Though gulls are never taciturn, not one of these let out a cry as it departed.

Martie knocked on the door, waited, and knocked again, but Susan didn’t answer.

She used her key to unlock the two dead bolts. She opened the door and called Susan’s name, twice, but received no response.

They scrubbed their shoes on the coarse mat and went inside, closing the door behind them and calling her name again, louder.

Gloom filled the kitchen, but lights were on in the dining room.

“Susan?” Martie repeated, but again she went unanswered.

The apartment was full of conversation, but all the voices were those of the wind talking to itself. Chattering against the cedar-shingled roof. Hooting and jubilant in the eaves. Whistling at any chink and whispering at every window.

Darkness in the living room, all the shades down, drapes drawn. Darkness in the hall, too, but light spilling out of the bedroom, where the door stood wide. A hard fluorescent glow in the bath, the door only half open.

Hesitant, calling for Susan again, Martie went into the bedroom.

Hand on the bathroom door, even before he began to push it open, Dusty knew. The fragrance of rose water unsuccessfully masked an odor that vast trellises of roses could not have defeated.

She was not Susan anymore. Facial swelling from bacterial gas, greening of the skin, eyes goggling from the pressure in the skull, purge fluid draining from nostrils and mouth, that grotesque lolling of the tongue that makes each of us a dog in death: Thanks to the accelerant factor of the hot water in which she had died, she was already reduced by nature’s tiniest civilizations to the stuff of nightmares.

He saw the notepad on the vanity by the sink, the neat lines of handwriting, and suddenly his leaping heart was pumping as much terror as blood, not a terror of the poor dead woman in the tub, not a cheap horror-movie scare, but icy fear of what this meant for him and Martie and Skeet. He saw through this tableau at once, intuited had imagined, vulnerable to one another, vulnerable each to himself, in a way and to a degree that almost justified Martie’s autophobia.

Before he had read more than a few words of the note, he heard Martie call his name, heard her coming out of the bedroom into the hail. He turned at once and moved forward, blocking her. “No.”

As though she saw everything in his eyes that he had seen in the bathroom, she said, “Oh, God. Oh, tell me no, tell me not her.”

She tried to push past him, but he held her and forced her back toward the living room. “You don’t want a good-bye like this.”

Something tore in her, which he had seen torn only once before, at the deathbed in the hospital, on the night her father had conceded victory to the cancer, rending her into limp rags of emotion, so that she could walk no more easily than a rag doll could walk, could stand no more erectly than the straw-stuffed rags of a scarecrow could ever stand without its props.

Half carried to the living-room sofa, Martie dropped there, in tears. She clawed a needlepoint pillow from an arrangement of them, and hugged it against her chest, hugged it fiercely, as though with the pillow she were trying to staunch her hemorrhaging heart.

While the wind pretended to mourn, Dusty called 911, though the emergency here had ended long hours ago.

With the blustery afternoon huffing at their backs, preceded by the fumes of wintergreen breath mints masking the reek of a garlic-rich lunch, two uniformed officers arrived first.