Michael Koryta - Last Words

“So what did I remember?” Mark said.

“It’s all recorded on your phone, as you requested. But your descriptions of what happened on the road were... vivid. You talked about the way the men spoke, looked, and breathed. The way the wind felt. You said that you’d tried to make a trail of blood so that the police would have better clues than they’d had with your wife’s case. You didn’t want to make it hard on the police if you were killed.”

Mark turned away from her and looked out the window. The trees were weaving and at the top of the driveway the dog was patrolling, nose up, sniffing the wind.

“That’s right,” he said, and his voice was thick. He hadn’t remembered the attempt to leave a blood trail behind until now, and that seemed impossible. It had been so calculated; how could he have forgotten?

“After they put you in the van, they took you to another place,” Julianne continued. “A field. Your head was covered by some sort of a hood that you said smelled like horse feed.”

He nodded.

“At that point, you thought there was only one of them left. He was the one who cut you, the one who put a needle in your arm.” She paused and then said, “Maybe that blood test you keep talking about wouldn’t be a bad idea after all.”

“Did I remember going into the cave?”

“No. You said that this one man, the only one left, took you somewhere to ask more questions. You said that it was probably a house, you weren’t sure about that, but you knew that it was someplace where you couldn’t feel the wind, though it was still cold even without the wind. Your memory of getting inside involved walking a plank.”

“Walking a plank? They took me to a pirate ship? That ought to be easy to find.”

Julianne continued without pause at his sarcasm. “You didn’t remember much about the house except for a wall of boards that you said didn’t look right. At times you thought they were melting.”

This meant less to him. A vague sense of recollection, but not as clear as the blood trail.

“The questions this man asked you were mostly related to Ridley Barnes and the cave. He was very interested in the cave.”

Listening to a recap of his own words when he didn’t remember the words or the source of them was surreal.

“You don’t seem to have any memory at all of how you arrived in the cave. There’s a gap, which suggests that you were truly unconscious when you went from this place with the wall of boards to the darkness in the cave.” She paused, gazing at him with interest. “The recollections of the cave troubled you. That was the only time you displayed any real resistance to trance. You said you encountered people in the cave who did not belong there. You would not identify them to me because you said they were not real.”

“Sarah Martin,” he said. “I was imagining things. Hallucinating.”

“Interesting. Here you are willing to tell me that, but in trance you were not.”

“Which means what?”

“That your subconscious has a greater difficulty dismissing the things that you saw.”

“My subconscious can believe in ghosts, but I can’t? That’s what you mean?”

“Possibly? I’m trying to facilitate access. I’m not trying to interpret for you. You can consider the meaning of all this on your own. Before we ended the trance, I asked whether there was anything you could or should do to further help yourself understand what had happened in the cave. You said you should have looked at the maps by now.”

“That’s what I was going to do next. I want to look at a cave map with Ridley.”

“That’s not the way you put it during trance. You said repeatedly that you were looking at the wrong maps, and that was a problem. You were very insistent that you needed to look at different maps. At this point, you laughed a little and told me that your mother wouldn’t have made the same mistake.”

Mark felt a ripple of distaste, the first sense of regret over letting her probe around in his unconscious mind. It was easier to accept the notion that his subconscious believed in ghosts than it was to think he would give his mother any credit for logic.

“The creek name,” he said, waving a hand. “That’s all that was.”

“The creek name?”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “My mother had a bullshit persona that connected to the creek name, which would be on maps. I get it. Don’t worry about it. You just said yourself that you’re not trying to interpret for me.”

She gave a slow nod, but he felt like a specimen under a microscope.

“What was the deal with my hand?” He made the circle with his thumb and index finger again.

“That was done while we asked your subconscious mind to close the link between past and present.”

Exactly what he’d understood, even though he hadn’t remembered the moment.

“Well, I’m impressed, I’ll admit that,” he said finally. “Sadly, it didn’t turn up much of value.”

“I don’t know if that’s true. Many times the value of memory — of the unconscious in general — isn’t readily apparent.”

“Melting boards aren’t going to get me far with the sheriff or going forward with Ridley. That seems readily apparent.”

“I asked about going forward.”

“Oh? Did I crack the case?” Mark was smiling until she answered.

“You seemed to take a macro view of the question. You told me that you would have to go to a place called Cassadaga, and then to the mountains.”

She watched his smile fade into something hard and cold and said, “Cassadaga has meaning to you, I take it?”

“A little. But I won’t be going there.”

“What about the mountains?”

“I don’t care for the mountains. If I can avoid them, I will.”

“Why is that?”

“I’ve seen enough of them.” He got to his feet and picked up his phone from where it rested, still recording, on the coffee table beside him. He stopped the recording, put the phone in his pocket, and looked outside. The sky was cloudless today and the sun was gorgeous on the snow.

“You’re willing to go into that cave with Ridley if it can be arranged?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“And you honestly believe that he will say something of value?”

“He wants to show me the place. He’s made that clear.”

“It’s a hell of a risk for you,” Mark said.

“I understand that. Do you think you can get us access?”

He thought of Danielle MacAlister, crying in her basement chair surrounded by Ridley’s hand-drawn maps.

“I think it’s possible.”

The sweat didn’t start until he was back in the rental car, and he was out of the driveway before he allowed himself to use his shirtsleeve to mop his face. He had wanted the hypnosis to work, had wanted to see Julianne Grossman provide something that allowed him to believe in her, but a part of him — larger maybe than he’d expected at first — was terrified at the idea that she’d been able to take him to a place in which he’d communicated without awareness or memory of it. Mark had no conscious ranking of his personal values, but one had floated to the surface during his time in Garrison: control. He didn’t just want it, he craved it. Self-control, he would have called it once, but that was a lie. The word was control , pure and simple, and though he’d sacrificed it willingly with Julianne this time, it still hadn’t settled comfortably.

He was still sweating and so he put down the window and let the chill in. When his phone rang and it was Jeff London, he stared at the display with surprise. Only yesterday he would have picked it up eagerly. Now it seemed to confuse his purpose.