Dean Koontz - False Memory

Martie cracked open the door, and the militant wind at once attacked. Barrages of chilly air blasted through the gap, and her hair tossed like a flag.

“Raymond Shaw,” Dusty said.

Because the wind’s artillery keened across the edges of the door with a whistle like incoming mortar, boomed and boomed unrelentingly, and because her own fearful cries were loud, Martie didn’t hear the name. She pushed the door open wider.

“Raymond Shaw!” Dusty shouted.

She was half turned away from him in her seat, and he couldn’t hear her say I’m listening, but he knew she must have spoken those words, because she froze and fell silent, waiting for haiku.

Quickly reaching across her, he pulled the door shut.

In the comparative quiet, before Martie could blink and shake off this reverie and plunge back into her panic attack, Dusty put a hand under her chin, turned her face toward him, and said, “Blown from the west —”

“You are the west and the western wind.”

“— fallen leaves gather —”

“The leaves are your instructions.”

“— in the east.”

“I am the east.”

Fully accessed, waiting to be operated, Martie stared through Dusty, as though be were the invisible presence now, not Ahriman.

Shaken by Martie’s placid, dull-eyed expression and the total obedience that it implied, Dusty turned away from her. His heart was pumping like a hard-driven piston, mind spinning like a flywheel.

She was unthinkably vulnerable now. If he gave her the wrong instruction, phrased it in such words that an entirely unintended second meaning could be derived from it, she might respond in ways he couldn’t anticipate. The potential to do great psychological damage, inadvertently, seemed fearfully real.

When he had told Skeet to go to sleep, Dusty hadn’t specified what length of time the nap should occupy. Skeet had been unwakable for more than an hour; however, there seemed to be no reason why he might not have slept for days, weeks, months, or for the rest of his life, kept alive by machines in the expectation of an awakening that would never occur.

Before Dusty gave even the simplest instruction to Martie, he needed to think it through carefully. The wording must be as unambiguous as possible.

In addition to being concerned about causing unintended harm, he was troubled by the degree of control he had over Martie, as she sat patiently awaiting his direction. He loved this woman more than he loved life, but no one should be able to exercise absolute power over another human being, regardless of how pure his intentions might be. Anger was less poisonous to the soul than was greed, greed less toxic than envy, and envy only a fraction as corrupting as power.

Dead pine needles, like I Ching sticks, scattered across the windshield, forming continuously changing patterns, but if they were foretelling the future, Dusty wasn’t able to read their predictions.

He gazed into his wife’s eyes, which jiggled briefly, as Skeet’s eyes had done. “Martie, I want you to listen carefully to me.”

“I’m listening.”

“I want you to tell me where you are now.”

“In our car.”

“Physically, yes. That’s exactly where you are. But it seems to me that mentally you are somewhere else. I would like to know where that other place is.”

“I’m in the mind chapel,” she said.

Dusty had no idea what she meant by this, but he didn’t have the time or presence of mind to explore her statement further just now. He was going to have to risk proceeding with nothing more than that term, mind chapel.

“When I hold my fingers in front of your face and snap them, you will fall into a deep and peaceful sleep. When I snap them a second time, you will wake from that sleep and you will also return from the mind chapel where you are now. You will be fully conscious again… and your panic attack will be over. Do you understand?”

“Do I understand?”

A fine sweat prickled along his hairline. He wiped his brow with one hand. “Tell me whether or not you understand.”

“I understand.”

He raised his right hand, thumb and middle finger pressed tightly together, but then he hesitated, restrained by doubt. “Repeat my instructions.”

She repeated them word for word.

Doubt still hobbled him, but he couldn’t sit here through the night, fingers poised to snap, hoping for confidence. He searched his deep troves of memory for all that he had learned about these control techniques from observing Skeet and from all the apparently correct deductions he had made based on so many little clues. He could find no fault with his plan — except that it was based more on ignorance than on understanding. In case he screwed up and put Martie in a coma forever, he left her with three whispered words to carry into that darkness and hold there with her — “I love you” — and then he snapped his fingers.

Martie slumped in her seat, instantly asleep, the back of her skull bouncing once against the headrest, and then her head tipped forward, chin to chest, raven wings of hair spreading to shield her face from him.

His lungs seemed to cinch shut like drawstring purses, so he had to make an effort to pay out his breath, and with the exhalation, he snapped his fingers again.

She sat up in her seat, awake, alert, that faraway gaze no longer in her eyes, and looked around in surprise. “What the hell?”

One instant she was gasping in blind panic, clawing-pushing her way out of the Saturn — and the next instant she was calm, and the car door was closed. The carnival of death that had pitched its tents inside her head, with all its spiked priests and decomposing corpses, was abruptly gone, as though blown away on the night wind.

She looked at him, and he saw that she understood. “You.”

“I didn’t think I had a choice. That was going to be one mean mother of an attack.”

“I feel… clean.”

From the back, Valet leaned forward between the front seats, rolling his eyes fearfully and seeking reassurance.

Petting the dog, Martie said, “Clean. Can it be over?”

“Not that easily,” Dusty guessed. “Maybe with some thought and care… maybe we can undo what’s been done to us. But first —”

“First,” she said, buckling into her safety harness, “let’s get Skeet out of that place.”

The rat-stalking cat, as black as soot, moving as sinuously as smoke, looked up into the Saturn headlights, eyes flaring hot orange, and then vanished into burnt-out corners of the night.

Dusty parked next to a Dumpster, close to the building, leaving the alleyway unobstructed.

The dog watched them, nose pressed to a car window, his breath clouding one pane, as they walked quickly to the service entrance of New Life.

Although visiting hours had ended twenty minutes ago, they would most likely be permitted upstairs to see Skeet if they used the front door, especially if they announced that they had come to remove him from the clinic. That bold approach, however, would lead to a lot of discussion with the head shift nurse and with a physician if one were on duty, as well as to delays with paperwork.

Worse, Ahriman might have Skeet’s file flagged with a directive requiring his notification if the patient or the patient’s family requested a discharge. Dusty didn’t want to risk a face-to-face encounter with the psychiatrist, at least not yet.

Fortunately, the service door was unlocked. Beyond lay a small, dimly lighted, empty receiving room with a drain in the center of the concrete floor. The astringent scent of pine disinfectant masked but didn’t entirely conceal a sour odor, which was probably milk that had dripped from a punctured carton on delivery and then soaked into the porous concrete, but which smelled to Dusty like curdled blood or old puke, evidence of cruelty or crime. In this new millennium, when reality was so plastic, he could look at even this mundane space and imagine a secret abattoir where ritual sacrifices were practiced at the first midnight of each full moon.